“Library!” Terah ejaculated as Calum showed him in. “I’ve never seen so many books in a private collection. And I was once invited to a book review editor’s house.”
“Wait’ll you get a look at the titles,” Lindsey said. “I think you’ll begin to see how it all fits.”
Calum added, “You’re free to read anything while you’re here. I wouldn’t presume to teach someone with a Ph.D. in religious studies, but you’re welcome to join Lindsey is the continuation of her training. Now that she’s here, it’s time to advance her tutorials. Especially since all my other seminars are on hiatus.”
Terah was still in shock from the euphoria that books standing together brings, but he’d always been suspicious of those who didn’t hold advanced degrees who’d set themselves up as teachers. He had known more than his share of inadequate professors too, however. The process of earning a doctorate changed forever the way you thought, if it was done right. Was it possible for an individual to do that to him or herself through intensive reading? The university experience pitted sharp minds against one another and taught humility and critical thinking. Terah had been publicly dressed down more than once by scholars more advanced than himself. Yet, Lindsey had proven herself more adept at handling demons.
“She told you she was struck by lightning yesterday, didn’t she? I’m not sure if she needs to see a doctor or not.”
“With hospitals in the middle of a pandemic crisis, I suspect if she feels fine she’s safer here.”
“You remember,” she said to Calum, “when it happened before.”
Terah pulled his attention from the books. Calum nodded. “This may sound strange, Dr. Economy, coming from someone who’s largely self-taught in these subjects, but when Lindsey first studied here she’d been struck by lightning. That’s how I found her, in fact. I rushed her to what is now St. Luke’s in Easton, but they found nothing wrong with her, apart from prior injuries. They released her and she decided to stay on and study here. If she’s feeling okay, I see no need to take her to a place risking infection.”
Terah teetered between trust and suspicion. A deep-seated prejudice toward formal education clung to him. He recalled scoffing, back in his days of full employment, at a book where someone was described as having read enough books to be a professor. Reading books wasn’t enough. There came a point, and Terah couldn’t pinpoint when, that doctoral training changed your actual thinking process. It didn’t come through reading alone. It happened when intelligent mentors who’d themselves been through the process interacted with you on a daily basis. They challenged your ideas and tore your arguments apart. Then, at some point you could construct something they couldn’t assail. You’d done enough research and reasoning that you were more certain than they were. Scholars would never all agree on anything, but you were now one of them. You’d earned the right to be called an expert. That didn’t mean that a scholar couldn’t learn from the self-taught, but it did mean they were skeptical about doing so.
“Calum,—and please call me Terah—did you have any mentors in this?” He spread his hands and swept them about the library. “Who taught you all this?”
“You’re asking the question of authority. No, don’t blush. It’s a reasonable question. Critical thinking requires it—how does someone know something? If you didn’t learn it from an expert, how did you? I’m sure you know the three-legged stool?”
“Sure. The classical source of knowledge, at least among Episcopalians, were the three legs of scripture, tradition, and reason.”
“Quite right,” Calum nodded. “Then John Wesley added a fourth leg, experience. I think we can agree that we’ve lived long enough to safely remove the supernatural element of scripture, right?”
Terah nodded. “People assume because you teach religion that you’re religious. Most of us start out that way. When you study the Bible long enough you start to get another view. The religious would want to include some form of special revelation, which is what Scripture represents.”
“But in the academy were you ever presented with arguments based on divine revelation?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Then we’re left with three legs again: tradition, reason, and experience. Tradition has a supernatural element, but it doesn’t insist on it. I have come to believe, through reason and experience, that we shouldn’t dismiss it completely.”
Terah had to think about this. “You mean you still admit the supernatural into the equation?”
“Has everything you’ve experienced in your life fit into the rational category? Has anything inexplicable ever happened to you?”
“Well, yeah, but they’re just those things you file away as weird, but that science will eventually explain.”
“And does it?”
“Does science explain them? I guess it hasn’t so far, but I don’t think about them every day.”
“Neither do you forget them. You see, when something uncanny happens your brain focuses in the same way as when danger threatens, or a beautiful woman captures your fancy. You go into deep attention mode, imprinting the event indelibly in your psyche. Thousands of days of your life are gone, completely forgotten. Still, those numinous moments are there, and the mere mention of them recalls them in startling clarity, doesn’t it? That tells us they’re important.”
“Or that we think they’re important. Our brains can be fooled.” Terah couldn’t let down his guard of decades of learning.
Calum merely nodded. “Reason and experience support it as well. Most of my students still have some resistance when they start. I don’t try to convince anyone. I just try to help them open their eyes.”
Terah was beginning to see why Lindsey thought the way she did. He had, however, seen Wednesday. Or he thought he had. The weariness of being on their own, sleeping in unheated buildings, and wandering through the woods with no home fell upon him suddenly. The thought that an actual bed awaited him upstairs seemed foreign, almost erotic.
“Go to bed,” Calum smiled. “You need some sleep. And please don’t be alarmed at anything you might see in the night.”
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