Confidence.

Reading List [embarrassing]

1. Franny and Zooey, Salinger [f]
2. Gilead, Robinson [q]
3. To the Lighthouse, Woolf [h]
4. I and Thou, Buber [1st q 2nd j]
5. The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn [s garber, the fabric of faithfulness]
6. An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis [b edwards, professor]

despite this list, i am currently reading Olinger Stories by Updike, mostly because of Dr. Fleming’s anecdote about Updike versus Boethius. “Oh, you haven’t read The Consolation of Philosophy? It’s been out fifteen hundred years.”

Love is the longing for absolute beauty, Plato says.

That’s where John Mark Reynolds got his line, “Beauty makes you fall in love,” I presume.

My paper explains why Plato is wrong about our longing only for absolute beauty, but at least I can appreciate how he reasons that love is seeking something it lacks, and that what people long for is the beautiful and good, believing it will bring us happiness. This makes sense to me.

I had considered titling this, “It’s so easy to love you,” but the Christian notion of love requires more than just wanting the beauty that people have.

It’s terribly pleasant to adore people, to begin almost to worship them. FEAR GOD AND KEEP HIS COMMANDMENTS. I want to ask, how do you rightly delight and wonder in people but give the honor to God? How do you love the Creation, if the right relation is to serve and worship the Creator? But sometimes, talking/writing to people spits the wrong questions from me, because they aren’t questions anymore when put to God.

Courage.

Virtue.

Brave the wind.

The best days are those with hard choices made well.

Be ready to sacrifice, become accustomed to dying. 

—

Ever get distraught by extravagant things that might be lost, that you know don’t have the funding to survive? The “unnecessary” precious beauties.

—

I feel like I ought to continue to polish my Symposium paper, because it expresses some solid (at least I think so) analysis of a subject very important to me, and I was in a rush when I worked on the introduction.

—

There’s a tension between wanting to make things really beautiful and being lazy or being “practical” in not throwing away time on artwork. BAH. Time’s not wasted if it’s spent on creating faithfully (not addictedly or aimlessly, as if activity fills gaps in your self, but trustingly. commit to the art knowing that it is valuable).

wait on the wind,

catch a scent of salt,

call it our life.

[philip levine]

Anonymous asked: I love reading this. Man, college years are so formative. Hard and formative, and awesome in every way. ah I love this. Yep. Glad for it.

Wow, thanks for reading! Any chance you’ll become un-anonymous?

Every Friday, I have a three-hour long Old Testament class. I treasure these hours, because I’m challenged to engage in real learning. I spend the class scouring the corners of what I’ve read, attending to what needs to be said, and internally processing the implications these words have on my life.

I apologize to my classmates or professor almost every week for speaking out of turn, insulting an idea, or being far too intense.

“I’m sorry for the outburst,” I said today.

“We’re used to it,” Kyle (the professor) responded cordially.

Conversation is a creative thing. It’s not about reviewing soundbytes you have already spoken: at its best, it allows you to continually redirect, thinking about how to get to the points of tension and the inconsistencies and the pains in your own and in your interlocutor’s life.

My Friday Old Testament class is such a conversation, or at least it tries to be. There is something lost when I say what I haven’t judged to be quite fitting - because the whole class then focuses on what may not be an honest question. I mean that, just as in individual conversations, both people should be committed to meeting one another authentically. To the extent that they brag or complain or speak when they should be silent, the quality of the exchange suffers.

It may be a wholly separate subject of why it is that I feel the need to apologize. Because I think it may be relevant, I’ll explain: my worry is that in taking advantage of this opportunity for a discussion that digs up and examines the way I live and assume, I may be hindering my classmates in that same pursuit. My eagerness may be selfishly making them nervous, discounting what they would say.

Here is how what I’m learning in OT Lit is reaching into my life, the personal searching questions I am asking: (I trust God - even in choosing to acknowledge this I grow - and I open my heart in gratefulness for his ability to change it.)

* I’m encouraged to take my paper about Photoshop seriously. Not because I am scared about my grade (though I might have cause to be ;)  I hope that I am mature enough to accept a B if that is how it ends), but because as long as my work is not preventing me from participating in a healthy way within my community, my time is well-spent doing research and expressing ideas about a complex issue

* How do I face friendships with the same courage as I bare myself to truth? To cease wailing about my fears to instead begin to express in little ways that I do care about my classmates’ growth, which I show by taking them seriously - according to them dignity.

I’m still sitting right outside of Providence, and will be for the next two hours. The last twenty-five minutes of waiting will be spend outside in the cold, having bitterly swallowed the lesson of not sitting around waiting for someone to tell me the bus has left. Today is adding a new meaning to the phrase “I missed the bus.” Yeap, I did.

I want to cry.

And yet I’m so happy after this weekend, I’m still happy even with a ridiculous foolish transit mistake. I regret waiting three more hours to see my family, but I’m already kind of used to messed up travel times, what with synchronizing my college commute with my family’s schedule, or knowing what it’s like to wait in an airport terminal for hours to make a connection. After the initial shock of seeing my bus drive off without me,  and after running down the street begging it to stop, I’m okay. 

I even have internet, hallelujiah! Of course, this wait is the easy part. The connections later on today will probably be a little bit miserable.

Who is this person that lives in my head and in my flesh, if that’s where Rebecca exists at all?

I’ve been having a hard time blogging or writing recently, but I’ve also been blown away by my Old Testament class at school and my love for my God has been deepening. There’s much I have in my heart, mysteries more elusive than the names we try to give them.

It’s not easy to stand up straight.