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She was convinced I was incapable of relaxing—lifted my wrist shoulder height and released, the arm hanging an inch lower than where she let it drop. We repeated the exercise. “This time,” I boasted, but my plasticine muscles never gave to gravity. I’d pull down, late, and she caught me. “SEE?” she exclaimed. “Again,” I said, and again, and again, many times before the point was made in both our minds and I set out making a project of correcting the fault, trying and trying long after she’d gotten up from the table.

Discipline never has been a problem. On the other hand, slowing my life’s pace, lowering expectations of others to a reasonable, which is to say minimal, level, and living with gratitude for the most basic elements of existence (I have Plato’s four in mind) proved an overwhelming chore.

In high school I should have given my fists the release they ached for. Instead, I left my hometown peeved and boorish, a burgeoning misanthrope who won far fewer friends than I had opportunity to enjoy in college. The few who stood by through that passive agressive and domineering streak were truly a remarkable lot, a fact that by itself should have served to convince me of the warmth and benevolence creeping about. To the friends who weathered my moods I apologized long ago, but were contrition equal with letting down my guard, I’d have aced my ex-girlfriend’s relaxation test.

When I came to Chicago, fresh off three solid years of loss and loneliness like I’d never known—and I’d known severe loneliness, raised a mile from town by two-lane highway—it was with the explicit goal of rebuilding my life. Bit by bit it came together: friends who act their age, who read books; a comfortable apartment in an interesting neighborhood; steady work in a field I don’t abhor with people I respect; enough distance from my parents to really appreciate our times together. Forget for a moment the absurdity of self-realization; there’s value to gaining a modicum of control over one’s life. No piece of this new life came without my having determined to have it, and by the grace of God I did. Which perhaps defeats the case for will.

Anyway, discernment is a fantastic thing. Late this February I cancelled a vacation the logistics of which brought on more stress than three nights in Tampa could have solved. I stayed in Chicago with everyone I know and everything I enjoy, and kept the days off, and scheduled the first massage of my young life, still three years since any hands but my own worked my shoulders towards loosening. The fingers plowed so deep I ached for a couple days after. When that eased it left just a really nice feeling, and then the laughter. Hours of it, silly, seemingly unprovoked. I surmised, half serious, that the massage loosed joy stowed fifteen years deep. To think it would be buried today had I flown south.

And still the story gets better.

Within two weeks, the papers my sweat-damp fingers pried from an envelope “too large,” said my roommate, “to be a rejection letter,” gave notice of my admittance to the University of Chicago Divinity School, where I will pursue the sole course of study that’s made sense since my last bout with academic life. Upon completing the program I will have certain and incontestable claim to the title that eclipses all other academic titles, that title being the Master of Divinity. What spirits I might summon to my bidding and by what faculties are matters properly left to the distant end of attaining the degree.

For the moment my expectations take the more modest form of a stronger apprehension of Christian history and theology, in particular as these inform contemporary American belief and practice. My sensitivity to just how contentious the topic of religion is in American culture only provokes my desire to undertake its study. Like my namesake saint, whose other title I hope to avoid, I approach religion intellectually and regard its civic aspects with significant interest. There is something deeply fascinating about a nation that would grant its highest office to someone, in part, on the basis of his being “a good Christian man.” What drives this country, what fostered its birth and sustains and plagues it to this day, is as theological as it is rationalistic. I expect three years at the Div School will provide a fair start towards sussing out the nature of the American church/state relationship, Plymouth Colony to Trinity UCC. If I might help moderate the pitch of this discourse, I think that would be a fine thing.

All best left to the future. Five months forward I take up residence in a new apartment in a neglected segment of the city I love. Meanwhile this place slowly wakes from the wettest, most drawn-out season in my memory of Chicago winters. These mornings I open my eyes to sunlight warming the bricks an arm’s length from my bedroom window, me bouncing to the tune of my circulatory system on the box spring. There are long avenues to bike, beautiful women to admire, beaches to exploit, full meals to prep from farmer’s market produce, with good friends, on patios, pilseners within reach. At 27 years I am happy. And relaxed.

Thank God. It’s about fucking time.