Heather Rick, MDiv ’19

“I think Divinity School is the best place to be as a writer because this is where you really learn how to ask the questions that are at the heart of the human experience and the human-divine relationship.”

Living in Two Different Worlds

I grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, which is about an hour west of Boston. It’s a medium-sized, working-class city. I have a working-class background, so growing up I never thought that I would end up at Harvard. Neither of my parents went to college, so it was always, for my mom especially, important that her kids go to college.

That’s the weird thing about coming from a working-class background—there’s an expectation that your parents want you to do better than they did, but they don’t want you to do so much better that you completely transcend your background.

That’s sort of a rift I’m feeling between myself and my family now that I’m at HDS. There’s this idea that people like us don’t go to Harvard, and therefore I’m going to think I’m better than my family because I go to Harvard or I’m using all these big words that aren’t part of their vocabulary. So, part of what I’m struggling with is figuring out how to hold on to the family values that they taught me while being embedded in a rigorous academic setting like HDS. It’s kind of like living in two different worlds, and I feel like the generation that’s in transit between classes.

The Road to Divinity School

Initially, I went to an art school in Chicago for creative writing. I’ve always been a reader and a writer, and I knew I wanted to get out of New England. But being a working-class student, it was really hard being in a school that had very little support for people from working-class backgrounds.

Even socially, people didn’t understand why my parents couldn’t pay my rent or tuition. I did three semesters there and then I had to drop out. I think that was when I realized that although I had been taught that education was my key out of poverty, education is still very much a class privilege.

After I had to drop out and I came back to Massachusetts after being on my own far away, I became really disillusioned and very depressed. I felt like I would never become a writer because I believed in the gatekeeping function of the institute and that I needed a BFA and eventually an MFA to be a writer.

Eventually, I went back to community college in Central Massachusetts, and, of all places, that was where I really started writing again. Some of the best professors I’ve ever had I met there—professors who really understood the background I was coming from, who really understood what it meant to try to be a working-class artist and the struggles I was facing. After being in community college I ended up getting a scholarship to Smith College to finish my bachelor’s degree.

I had initially thought I was going to finish my degree in writing or English, but I ended up switching to religion. At that point I had realized that the questions and issues I was asking in my writing were fundamentally issues of being, and I ended up coming back to God. I felt I already had the tools to write, but what I needed was the ability to ask the kinds of questions that my writing was getting at and the time and the space to do soul searching, as corny as that sounds—that’s really what being a writer is about.

I like to write from my own life, and I often find myself in this weird place between fiction and nonfiction. Emotional truth is what I try to get at in my writing, regardless of the facts. Sometimes friends will read something I wrote and be like, “It didn’t happen exactly like this.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but this is how it felt. This is the truth of how this felt.”

So, I like to write on this margin of playing with facts and reality and to get to emotional truths. I think Divinity School is the best place to be as a writer because this is where you really learn how to ask the questions that are at the heart of the human experience and the human-divine relationship.

Writing in the Election Aftermath

In the Boston area, we tend to think about Trump country as being in the Midwest or the South, but that’s not the case. The town where I went to community college, Gardner, Massachusetts, is the kind of place where people feel they have been left behind.

I hated it when I lived there, but one of the last things I remember saying to my creative writing professor at community college before I left was: “I think I’m beginning to owe a debt of compassion to this place.” When I was in Gardner, a very small, depressed, conservative area, I felt like I was in exile, but I now feel that’s the kind of place that gave birth to me.

In the election aftermath, a lot of what I’m hearing is “How could those people have voted against their own economic interests?” What people don’t understand is that a lot of these working-class white people don’t see themselves as being poor, because there’s such a stigma of shame around being poor. There’s a stigma that that if you are wealthy, it means you are good and that you did the right things. Therefore, to them Trump isn’t just a billionaire who’s going to screw them over. To them, it’s: “He’s a rich person, so he did things right.”

The urge is to blame others because you don’t want to accept that there’s something wrong with you morally that prevented you from attaining success. That’s when the classism and the racism gets all blurred up together. It’s so easy to prey on the racism of those people who refuse to see themselves as victims of a classist system. Instead someone tells them, “You are poor because these immigrants are taking your jobs.”

In a lot of analyses, I’m not seeing an awareness of how these people actually view themselves. There seems to be quite a willingness to just write off that demographic altogether, which I can understand, but at the same time that’s where I come from. I feel like I can’t do that. There’s so much talk about regarding the role of the white working class in getting Trump elected, and I feel like it’s important for people like me, who came from that background, to be able to describe how those people really see themselves and to say what it’s like being in those towns.

How do I have the conversations that we have so easily and so openly at HDS with people who don’t talk about things like classism, who don’t recognize their own racism, who don’t recognize themselves as victims of a classist system? I think for people like me who are here in academia coming from those sorts of backgrounds, we need to figure out how to bring these conversations that we’re having here back to those communities.

The big question here is, “What’s my role as a writer?” Writing is what I’m good at. That’s what I know how to do, and I know whatever I’m going to do, I have to use that.

Storytelling is a political act, and it is really important to tell the stories of these places that we’re from, especially the places that are misunderstood, forgotten, or left behind. Post-election, the urge many of us have is to get out there in the world and start doing things, but I think the first step is introspection, to connect with ourselves and ask, “What resources do I have within myself? What is my connection with the divine right now, and how am I going to use that connection as my strength, as my way to move forward with this work?”

It’s draining to try to be so active in this climate, but I think storytelling is something that gives me strength and that will allow me to bring these conversations out into the world.

From Catholicism to Riot Grrrl, Feminist Punk Rock to Islam

I didn’t grow up with any kind of religious education. I had a lot of antagonism towards Christianity and rejected it at a very young age, mostly because my mother’s family is indigenous, from the Ojibwe Nation, in what’s now Canada. After a certain point I realized that the only reason her family was Catholic was because it was imposed on them when that area was colonized by French Catholic immigrants.

Growing up, I had this idea of a profound lack of compassion on the part of the Catholic Church. Not only was this a religion that was forced on my mother’s people, but it eventually led to a spiritual trauma because people like my grandfather were just cast-offs. So, I turned away from religion altogether for a long time.

Punk rock was the closest thing that I had to any kind of system or ethical community. That was really where I learned about radical politics, and I learned how to assert my voice and find self-esteem and self-confidence, especially through riot grrrl feminist punk rock.

That was what I had for a long time, and it was through punk rock that I got interested in taqwacore, which is Muslim punk rock, specifically Michael Muhammad Knight. He wrote this book imagining what a Muslim punk community would look like. Then people started picking up this book and actually doing it. Reading his book was really the first time I saw people like myself reflected in religion—kids with tattoos and funny hair who came from broken families and who felt like they were on the outskirts of multiple communities, not just a religious community. That was the first time I felt like Islam was big enough for all the weird, broken people like me and my family, and the first time I felt a sense of compassion that was just not there in the Catholicism that I knew growing up. So that really attracted me to Islam; it felt like coming home.

I feel like I’ve been writing my way through this whole journey. Writing has been a form of prayer for me and a form of self-discovery. Even if I’m bad about doing my five daily prayers, as long as I’m writing, I’m still praying and I’m still in communication.

I want people to think about Islams, not Islam. I think one of the reasons Muslims are feared and misunderstood is because people assume that Islam is somehow this monolithic entity—that all Muslims do this, all Muslims are this, all Muslims are from a certain place.

I think it’s really important to remember that Islam, like any other religious tradition, has constantly been in flux since its inception and is hugely diverse in terms of where Muslims are coming from, who’s converting to Islam, the cultural practices that we bring with us, the things we believe, and the things we do.

There is no one average Muslim. It always strikes me as funny when people are surprised when they find out that I’m Muslim. They’re surprised that I have tattoos or that I’m queer. I’m like “No. Muslims are just like everybody else. We bring so much to our religion. We’re not just this one, monolithic entity.”

I think it’s really important to remember and to embrace that openness. That was really what drew me to Islam first. I was like, “This is something that’s big enough and dynamic enough to have room for somebody like me.” And that’s why one of my big academic interests is Muslim youth subculture, like hip-hop and punk rock, because I think that brings a side of American Islam that your average non-Muslim does not know about, and it shows the kind of the dynamism of the American Muslim community.