David Waters, MDiv ’18

“What is it to be not only spiritual but also religious? What does the religion part of that give you? For me, the religion part has given me the tools by which to understand the world. To practice tradition, to practice sacrament. To have all these signs and symbols. Nobody’s more in love with signs and symbols than we are in the Catholic Church.”

David Waters is a first-year master of divinity degree candidate who served in the U.S. Navy before finishing his BA in English and applying to divinity school to study literature and theology. Although he’s originally from Manhattan, his heart belongs in Seattle. 

From College to the Navy to College

After high school I had an ill-fated first semester at the University of Illinois. It did not go so hot, and I came back on academic probation. My mom and dad weren’t all about that. They were like, “Well, clearly you are not into the whole college thing, so we’re not gonna throw good money after bad.” So I joined the Navy, saw the world, came back to the University of Illinois, thinking, “Alright, now I’m going to really make good, and do the ROTC program and become a Navy officer.”

That did not quite happen. I got my associate’s degree at Parkland College, the community college near U of I. And I came back into the Navy on active duty on the enlisted side. I went back to Japan for three years. I went to Seattle for three years, and absolutely fell in love with it, because it is, in fact, the best place on Earth. I discovered St. James Cathedral, my beloved cathedral, on First Hill in Seattle, which is the best thing that American Catholicism has to offer the world. It’s all the richness of our liturgical heritage and tradition combined with an incredible passion for social justice.

Then I was exiled to southern Maryland. The Navy was like, “You like Seattle? You like big city life? How about rural farmland in middle-of-nowhere Maryland?” And that is where I went. Naval Air Station Patuxent River. It’s the home of Naval aviation.

Should you drive an hour-and-a-half south of DC, you will find southern Maryland—and my alma mater, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, which is nestled in the bend of the St. Mary’s River, and is actually quite beautiful. I finally discovered this beautiful Maryland that everybody was talking about. It took me two years to find it, but I finally found it. So, after two years in Maryland, I left the Navy and went back to St. Mary’s College to finally finish a BA that took me 17 to 19 years.

From Summer School to Divinity School

And in the middle of that, I came to Harvard for summer school, and I met HDS Professor Stephanie Paulsell. She was teaching “Literature of Journey and Quest.” In week three, she said, “I think you should come study with us at the Div School.” So I looked into it, and I talked to some people, and I came to DivEx, and I applied to HDS, and here I am. I am studying literature, religion, and culture, and I’m exploring teaching and scholarship as ministry. I’m having a grand time, meeting great people, and studying my little heart out.

My Parish Home

My parish home is St. Cecilia, and it is a beautiful church, built by working-class Irish immigrants in Boston over 100 years ago, in the shadow of the Prudential Center. It is quite lovely, but also very vibrant. I told Father John it’s the St. James of Boston, which is the highest praise I could give to any church anywhere. I usually go to daily mass during the week.

Teaching the First Graders

I got this email from a friend at St. Cecilia: “Hey, they need a CCD teacher for the first grade class, and I think you’d be great for it. It’s going to be a lot easier than Harvard.” And I’m like, “All right.” First graders—not really my jam. Everybody’s like, “That’s going to be so great for you! You’re going to be so good at that, and you’re just going to love it!” and, “They’re so cute,” and blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, “Really? I don’t know. I’m not sure.” I mean, children are great, theoretically, as a concept. In my experience there are individual ones that really resonate with me, but as a group, like, as a type or a genus? I’m not so sure.

But I didn’t want to just go to mass Sunday after Sunday, and week after week, and just soak up the awesomeness and leave. So, I was like, “Alright. Well, I guess this is how I’m going to give back. Let’s teach some first graders!” And it has been really cool.

In the middle of the 9:30 a.m. mass on Sunday we gather right before the homily, and I take them down, and we read these stories from the children’s bible. Last week we read Noah and the ark and the flood. And it really is an interesting dynamic, it’s an interesting exercise.

Navigating Theology with the First Graders

The summer that I came to Harvard for school, we started with Gilgamesh. We started before the Hebrew Bible. But the Hebrew Bible was one of the things that we read in our exploration of journeys and quests. And I wanted to grapple with this idea of the God of the Old Testament. Like, “Who is this God?” Because I think you go to church on Sundays and you get, “Here’s Christ, and God loves us,” and it’s all welcoming and accepting. But then there’s the desert, and then there’s Pharaoh and his hard heart. Except God’s the one that’s hardening his heart. And then the chariots and the charioteers are thrown into the sea.

There are things that we need to tease out. It’s not just this simple, all-loving, all-compassionate God. Who is he? One of the things that I did was take the stories of Noah, Abraham, and Moses, and tried to figure out if there’s something in these stories that gets us closer to this God. Is there something in these stories that can help us untangle this business of God as the hardener of Pharaoh’s heart, and the sender of plagues because Pharaoh has a hard heart? How does that all work?

So, you’re thinking about this, right? But then you go and teach these first graders. And it’s like, “Let’s read the story of Moses, and the story of the ark,” and “Here’s the rainbow!” There’s a way in which it reminds you that once upon a time this was the resonance that the story had for you. You look up in the sky and you see the rainbow, and you’re reminded of God’s love for you.

And then you get older and you think these deep, theological thoughts, and you try to untangle these puzzles and all the rest of it, but there’s a continuity there. It’s not a linear progression from the God of Sunday school to this sort of high, theological concept of God. There’s that, but then, eventually, you circle back around. You circle back around, and you sit with the first graders, and you realize there’s something underneath that. There’s a God underneath all of that who is—in some real, profound way—constant.

How do I put these first graders in touch with that constant, loving God—and, in a way, provide a foundation for them such that maybe when they get older they can feel secure enough in that foundation to explore a more complex theological, multilayered, unsettled God?

That’s high minded, but it’s fun. There’s graham crackers; there’s orange juice.

On Literature and Religion, Signs, and Symbols

I walk around, and I’m a little star struck, because it’s Harvard, and I never imagined being here. It was never some place I dreamed about. These kids who dream about Harvard from second grade—I’m not one of those. And I’m thinking, “This is pretty cool!” Random people come out of the local Starbucks and I’m like, “Which part of the world are you running?”

I’m walking down the street where Brattle turns into Mass Ave., and there’s the CVS where homeless people congregate. It just stopped me in my tracks. Part of this is magical Harvard, Cambridge fairyland, but then, there’s also reality: this problem of privilege and privation right next to each other. And here’s the thing, I really do believe that it’s my 37 years of Catholicism—and slightly less years of reading, studying literature, and exploring metaphor, symbol, and meaning in a literary context—that give me the tools for when metaphor slams into reality and I’m looking at it in the world. A group of people who are homeless, literally and figuratively in the shadow of the gates. When you go to that spot in Harvard Square, and stand there, here are the homeless people on their bench. And here’s the gate leading into Harvard.

That is what reading does for us, and I think for me that is what faith and religion do. There’s this concept of the religious nones—the idea of spirituality without religion. Which is fine. You don’t have to profess a particular faith or practice a particular religious tradition. But what is it to be not only spiritual but also religious? What does the religion part of that give you? For me, the religion part of that has given me the tools by which to understand the world—to practice tradition, to practice sacrament, to have all these signs and symbols. Nobody’s more in love with signs and symbols than we are in the Catholic Church.

I think that primes you, in a way, so that when you see certain things play out in the world—when you’re confronted with poverty and grief and injustice—you get it. It resonates with you on a different kind of level, because to gather around the table for Eucharist, or to have adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, or to say these prayers in community, we don’t just do them to do them. We do them so that we understand the world in a different way.

And so, when we’re confronted with the challenges of the world, they work on us, and we say, “Oh, okay. Here is how I’m supposed to understand this. And now I’m spurred to a kind of action that I maybe wouldn’t have been before.” There’s a way of taking these ordinary things of the world and making them sacred. And imbuing them with a sacred quality means that when you come upon some other ordinary things in the world, you are able to recognize the sacred in them. That’s at the heart of what it is to participate in a kind of sacramental imagination and a sacramental tradition.