Marissa Compton, MTS ’20

“Every day after class I went into the bathroom and cried just because there was so much emotion. It was amazing. It encapsulates a lot of my experience at HDS, where I think I know what it is, but then I realize that I do not understand things like justice and faith and power. Repeatedly my experience at HDS is realizing that I don’t know what words mean.”

Marissa is a second-year master of theological studies candidate studying literature and women in the contemporary United States.

Pursuing a Second Master’s Degree

You don’t just end up at a divinity school. When I was having the worst year of my life, I watched a TV show called Grantchester, which is about an Anglican priest who solves crime. I thought, oh my gosh, being an Anglican priest is my dream job. You get to read and write and talk to people and build community with them. So that was great, except that I’m Mormon, so I don’t get to be an Anglican priest. But it was a thing that I started thinking about.

I was getting a master’s degree in postcolonial literature, which was really fun and I took a class on political theology, which I largely did not understand at all. My job in that class was to raise my hand and say “Professor, I don’t get it, could you repeat it three times and say it a different way every time?” But it pretty much changed the life of every person in that class. We all started incorporating those things into our thesis and have gone in different directions with that.

My thesis, which was on a Nigerian novel called The Famished Road, led me to think a lot about the religious and ritualistic elements and why they were important. But also my other papers did this too. I started writing on Madonna a lot and other religious figures, especially women.

I always had planned on getting a PhD in English, but I suddenly didn’t want to. So I took a year off and taught writing, and I caught wind of Harvard Divinity School. I started reading about it and realized that it was much more interdisciplinary than I thought and that I’d get to talk about God in ways I hadn’t been able to when studying English, and the people who go to Divinity School are deeply weird and so cool. I started reading about the students and teachers here and these were people I wanted to know. So I applied. I came to the open house for admitted students, and Jarred Hamilton, one of the students on the panel, said that what he loved about HDS was that his faith had been reaffirmed over and over again by people who were not of his faith. So if I couldn’t be an Anglican priest, I thought this would be a good option.

A Gratitude for Education

One of my favorite classes was “Black Women in Divinity,” which was taught by Todne Thomas and Marla Frederick. It was such a pleasure and an honor to be in that class because I’ve been around a lot of communities of people of color—but because I grew up in Hawaii, but then I moved to Utah, there haven’t been a lot of black people in my immediate experience. So to sit in on that class that was predominantly black and hear about the experience and listen the ways that they had been talking about holy women and what that meant—We had an entire day where we were talking about forgiveness and why it can be harmful. Every day after class I went into the bathroom and cried just because there was so much emotion. It was amazing. It encapsulates a lot of my experience at HDS, where I think I know what it is, but then I realize that I do not understand things like justice and faith and power. Repeatedly my experience at HDS is realizing that I don’t know what words mean.

Passions About Bodies, Religion, Holy Women, and Literature

I’ve become much more interested in conversations around embodiment since coming here. What it means to be in a body and how that affects our interactions with each other and our interactions with our theologies, especially in the experiences of women and how that’s evolved over time. I think what I didn’t know when I got here, that I have become more aware of, is that the way in which we live in a body has very much affected the way we have theorized about it. So I’m in “Early Christian Bodies,” which is amazing and we’re talking about different ways of thinking about the connection between body and spirit, but also what it means to be in a body. It’s so interesting.

I’m still really interested in holy women and the stories that we tell about them and why we call some women holy, the narrative arcs that we can trace between them, the details we can pick out. One of my favorite papers I wrote was on founders of religion in the United States and how women founders are treated differently than men founders because when the women are criticized, they’re criticized for things that happen in their personal life, while men are criticized for things that happen in their public life, even if both lives mirror each other. It’s been really fun to sit with all of that.

I’m curious about the interaction between religion and literature and how that changes in times, places, and religions. I took a class on religion and literature by Stephanie Paulsell and Anne Monius, which was amazing because we traced Christianity and Hinduism in similar ways. Hinduism doesn’t differentiate between their literature and their religion and Christianity seems to see those things as working against each other.

A Drive to do More

I have not been very ambitious. There’s never been a more Hufflepuff human than me. One of the things I’m thinking through now is, is that okay given the opportunities that I’ve had to just want to grow fruit trees and teach, not even at a big college? That sounds great. But do I have responsibilities to my communities that are larger than that, or are those things also inherently spaces that I can choose to bring my ministry and my opportunities to anyway? I’m still wrestling with that one.

I’ve never before thought maybe I have to actually go do something, not just grow fruit trees and get bees. If I could do anything in the world just to make me happy, I’d teach English and theology and I would make a lot of good food and feed it to a lot of different people.

Building Off Past Roads

My mom got a PhD in history and taught and had fruit trees and started a community garden. She did guerrilla gardening, where she would plant trees where she wasn’t supposed to. She was always taking people in and feeding them and making room for people in her life.

In the novel I wrote my thesis on, there’s a bit where the main character is being led on a spiritual journey by a spiritual guide and they come across these people who are building a road. So far the road is very short. The spiritual guide in The Famished Road explains that every generation tears down the road, and builds it new, and the point that they know what has become before them and they can make bigger and better mistakes, but they will never finish the road.

I think I would really like to live my mom’s life, but I also get to go work on my road and it can’t be the road my mom built, even if I can incorporate parts of that. I don’t know what that will look like. I’m working how to be flexible and also dream big. I can call my mom and tell her that I’m going to build this part of the road differently than her. I’m going to go road-building and it’s going to be rough.

Interview and photos by Kaitlin Wheeler