Oh my, it’s been too long. Not quite sure where autumn went,
or how I went from sleeping with my windows wide open on Monday night to
slip-sloshing my way home through a snow-muffled world this evening. This fall
has been lovely, full of new experiences and friendships and road trips and an
overall array of good things. It’s just gone very, very fast.
I can always tell it’s nearing the end of the fall semester
when…
1. Somehow everything seems to blur together. I’m still not
sure how this always happens. Within the past three or four weeks, my psych,
philosophy, and 20th century women’s lit courses (three VERY
different classes with very different professors) have touched on so many of
the same themes and concepts that in my mind they've almost become the same
class. (This is both a pro and con – being a big-picture kind of person, I love
discovering commonalities between my classes, but sometimes I end up forgetting
details like, ahem, which professor goes with which class and emailing the
wrong ones… awkward. Lack of sleep may or may not have played a part in this
confusion.) Speaking of sleep…
2. Hibernation starts to sound really nice. (Seriously, why
can’t people do this?) There’s a reason why I eat more food in the winter. It’s
also why I take more naps. Maybe my body’s trying to tell me that I’m secretly
a bear?
3. Homework and other
class-related bits of knowledge begin creeping over into strictly non-college
areas of life. Last week in psych class, we studied personality theories, which
I LOVE because I love thinking about people and wondering what makes them tick
and analyzing everything. Sometimes probably too much. Case in point: in the
middle of church this past Sunday, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out
Jesus’s Myers-Briggs type. And then wondered how Jesus would feel about being
typed…
Besides trying to keep my classes straight, wrangling
various family members into taking too many personality tests in the name of
psychology, and lamenting the fact that I can’t hibernate through this winter,
I've somehow found time to read a few wonderful books, the very best of them
titled My Bright Abyss by Christian
Wiman. This book is absolutely the best thing I've read all semester (possibly
all year, with the exception of an equally lovely and profound book of poems by
Madeleine L’Engle). Anyway, I have been meaning to write some of my thoughts
about it here for quite a while.
All jokes about end-of-semester-struggles aside, I've been wrestling with a lot and processing a lot this semester. Especially things
concerning faith. I came home at the end of the summer with a mind full of
questions and a heart longing not necessarily for answers but to be at peace
with doubt and not knowing. The question became, “How can I learn to know God
and love Jesus while still harboring doubts about my own beliefs?” And
this hasn't been easy to figure out. I confess, a lot of the time I feel like
I’m doing a bad job of it and just want to give up.
Sometimes the timing of things is really funny. Who would
have thought I’d be taking a philosophy class this semester of all semesters?
Philosophy studies over the past three months have unearthed such a mine of
ideas and questions in me that some evenings all I can do is rest my head on my
desk and feel completely overwhelmed. But oddly enough, I think it’s a needed
thing. Feeling small is unpleasant and sometimes frightening, but not
unhealthy. Maybe it’s a good thing to recognize how little I actually know.
Victor Frankl, a philosopher and psychologist I read about just last week,
wrote, “We need to learn to endure our inability to fully comprehend ultimate
meaningfulness.” I almost cried when I read that, more out of relief than
anything else.
So I started reading My
Bright Abyss late last month and couldn't stop. Christian Wiman writes
about Christ and that tension between faith and doubt in a way that’s raw and
beautiful and honest. It was both comforting and unsettling, and there’s so
much that could be said about this book but I’d rather just quote you my favorite
parts and then beg you to go read it yourself. Please do. But here, some bits
and pieces taken from my now very much underlined and doodled-in copy, starting
with the paragraph that struck me the most (and still does every time I read
it):
“Be careful. Be
certain that your expressions of regret about your inability to rest in God do
not have a tinge of self-satisfaction, even self-exaltation to them, that your
complaints about your anxieties are not merely a manifestation of your
dependence on them. There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties
that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never
quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind
of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a
shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never
feeling at home in the world.”
“It is a strange thing
how sometimes merely to talk honestly of God, even if it is only to articulate
our feelings of separation and confusion, can bring peace to our spirits. You
thought you were unhappy because this or that was off in your relationship,
this or that was wrong in your job, but the reality is that your sadness
stemmed from your aversion to, your stalwart avoidance of, God. The other
problems may very well be true, and you will have to address them, but what you
feel when releasing yourself to speak of the deepest needs of your spirit is
the fact that no other needs could be spoken of outside of that context. You
cannot work on the structure of your life if the ground of your being is
unsure.”
“Even when
Christianity is the default mode of a society, Christ is not. There is always
some leap into what looks like absurdity, and there is always, for the one who
makes that leap, some cost.”
“Christ speaks in
stories as a way of preparing his followers to stake their lives on a story,
because existence is not a puzzle to be solved, but a narrative to be inherited
and undergone and transformed person by person. He uses metaphors because something essential about the nature
of reality – its mercurial solidity, its mathematical mystery and sacred
plainness – is disclosed within them. He speaks the language of reality –
speaks in terms of the physical world – because he is reality’s culmination and
key (one of them, at any rate), and because ‘this people’s mind has become
dull; they have stopped their ears and shut their eyes. Otherwise, their eyes
might see, their ears hear, and their mind understand, and then they might turn
to me, and I would heal them.’”
Needless to say, I am still absorbing a lot of this. It’s
probably fair to say that I’m still absorbing ALL of it. The best books usually
take a long time to sift through. I would venture to say more, but it’s getting
late and I still have quite a mound of homework to plow through (Thanksgiving
break, you say? What’s that?). Anyway… hopefully I have given you something to absorb as well (and a possible addition to your reading list). Here’s to those last three weeks of classes before
the real break. Deep breath. Here we go!
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