Originally uploaded by godonlyknows
Month: March 2010
Spring – a time for new growth
Spring is in the air. Spring, as we all know, is a time for new growth after a long time of dormancy.
Speaking of growth, I came across this wonderful statement from Helen Keller on personal growth which is a reminder that while the external fruitfulness of growth is often beautiful, the internal change process is better because it is so very brutal. It is often, well, quite like I imagine hell might be like (I define a hell as a sense of separation from God, and this is only known by its opposite, of course, which is a sense of an immediate closeness to God).
She said,
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only in experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
I like to garden because it is hard work. It’s not something that I like to do out of anything but spite, really. It’s proving it to myself and those stinking plants that in the end, I am going to win in this battle of wills and they 1)will not die and 2)they will yield something pretty, come heck or high water. When at the end of the season there is something to show for it it’s a sweet sweet feeling, but the results only last at most for a few days. It’s fleeting. It is hard-won, but not everlasting. Change, though – real change – that’s something even sweeter.
I hate to see you go so soon.
Originally uploaded by godonlyknows
The book drop at the Cary, NC public library and I meet quite often.
I had the happy occasion to check out some books “for fun” to read over the weekend this week as we are on “reading break” for this upcoming week – named this instead of “spring break” since we will be busily working on papers and projects and not, as we had the luxury to do in undergraduate school, on a beach or a cruise ship somewhere without a care in the world.
I am not complaining – this is something I signed on for, and I enjoy my calling – to the degree that I discern it at this point. To the degree that I still do not, I trust that I will at some point.
Simone over Sallie (this time)
I’m taking a wonderful seminar this semester about Women in Christian Leadership and we are to explore someone who has had an impact on our own thinking in and about Christian leadership. I decided it was time I set Sallie McFague, my forever scholastic soul-sister, aside and have a new squeeze for a bit. I thought I might further investigate one of the two women who in the recent year or so have always given me cause to make an exclamation point in the margin wherever they have come up in the theological conversation on the sometimes dense and very often hard to parse theological pages with which I spend my time.
Dorothy Day and Simone Weil have come up again and again in my reading and in my mind, as they were exemplars of social justice and of Servant Leaders as women. I’m leaning more toward Weil simply because there is less information immediately available on her, and because she was more a philosopher than was Day, which to me makes her a bit more intriguing.
She was obstinate as well. She refused many things on the the grounds that not everyone could have them and so she would refuse them as well. When she was for all intents and purposes a Catholic she refused baptism (to me, not a big deal – to a Catholic, a huge deal) because there were those who were unable to receive their sacraments, and she was questioning the authority of them as well as the classicism amongst the “haves” and the “have nots” of the recipients who received such sacraments. I like her gall. The more I read written by and about her, I find I have to close my moth, for it falls agape in nothing short of wonder. Consider, for example, what the writer Gustave Thibon, who took manuscripts of Weil’s following her death and wove them into the masterpiece Gravity and Grace said of her:
She was passionate even about her disdain for passions, she sought for a sign even in her refusal of all signs. This being, who wanted to be flexible to all the movements of divine will, would not allow the course of events or the benevolence of her friends to move by one inch the limits of her self-imposed immolation. Detached to the core from her tastes and needs, she was not detached from her own detachment. And the way she would guard her own emptiness revealed a tremendous self-concern. In the great book of the universe she put before her eyes, her self was a word that she perhaps succeeded in erasing*, but it remained underlined.
Anyone of whom that was said, I think, is someone worth spending a good deal of time with.
I have read that statement no less than twenty times and I am still struck by it to the point that I am almost moved to tears with every reading. Perhaps it’s because I have a soft spot for stubborn women who seem to encapsulate an oxymoron due to their devotion only to the Divine; one could say that the only will I have ever been able to soften my own to is God’s so Weil and I share a great deal in small strokes and in our character traits, autobiographically.
Very often when I look into the lives of someone at depth I become underwhelmed, be they a real, living person, or a theologian, a politician, or an author. That has not been my experience with Weil. She wrestled with her failures and wore them openly and it seems that she had as difficult a time grasping many things about her sitz in lieben and the way they affected her writing as I am having. She was remarkable, and the only question is whether my remarks will do her justice.
*In her solidarity with the poor (Weil left a teaching position in France at one of the Universities, where she had ascertained a post teaching philosophy in order to work in the factories) Weil towards the end of her very brief life began to refuse food, wanting no more than those around her. Knowing this context, this last statement perhaps makes more sense. There is debate on whether Weil committed suicide or died, which to me is odd – I never heard any such debate on the death of Lottie Moon, but she died the same way and for the same reasons. I am uncertain if the reason is that Moon was a protestant and we do not think suicide an unforgivable sin (though certainly we do not encourage it, either) but still, we do not have contemporary martyrs, so I still think the parallel here is so striking that for there to be a “scandal” in one case and not in another is beyond absurd.
Book Review: Everything I Need to Know about Being A Girl I Learned from Judy Blume
Everything I Needed to Know about Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume by Jennifer O’Connell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In films, they typically show people doing one of two things when in the home of someone for the first time, be they a potential friend or foe:
1)snooping in their medicine cabinets or
2)scanning the titles on their bookshelves.
While I’ve never done the first I do the second regularly. If a potential friend still has some of the best young adult fiction alongside the most dense non-fiction titles proudly and to balance them out, then it’s a pretty safe bet we are going to be good friends. The Velveteen Rabbit? Charlotte’s Web? All good signs. However, if I am at the house of a recently-made girlfriend and if I spy upon her shelves a Judy Blume book, or better yet should I zero in on a copy of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret that looks as battle-weary from the wars of life laid away in books as my own copy now is, then I have a very strong and particular sense wash over me that this is most likely the start of a beautiful friendship indeed. That is the sense of fictive kinship you get reading some of the better essays in this anthology – the shared, hysterical and hard-fought highs and lows that we all went through and keep hidden most of the time but should perhaps consider laying bare to one another more often.
sheologian 