a good pleasant evening, spent reading at charles' house. i read some of benson's "graven ideologies" for my contemporary philosophy class. good, challenging reading, of the sort i need to be doing a lot more often. listened to interpol, talked with charles, and after he left, enjoyed being alone for a couple of hours. read a little more of solzhenitsyn's "cancer ward," the chapter called "bad luck all around." i was touched by the ending, the scene between dyomka and asya. they're so sad, so misguided. such gratuitous pain, and yet its very very real and i can empathize. all the senseless pain in the world, all the people who are so wrong, who've brought it on themselves usually, but i can understand them and i can pity them. sometimes it feels like there's no one i couldn't love in an instant, out of deep pity and reciprocity; reciprocity flowing from the very fact that i can no more know their pain than they can know mine. then there are other days when i judge everyone i see angrily, dispassionately. and so i reciprocate.
going to watch a movie with jenni, and maybe practice later on with the fellas. it's a terrific semester. it really is.
1:39am.This semester has been treating me fairly well so far. Fifteen hours feels awfully light compared to the eighteen or more I've been floating for the past couple of years. I actually don't have homework due every single day. The downside is that I've been enjoying my free time just a little bit too much - leaving projects till the last minute, putting off reading. But it doesn't bother me. I just have to pass five classes and I'll graduate, in only three months. Crazy.
I should probably be asleep right now. It's after one and I still need to run over my notes for Sunday School tomorrow morning. But I like staying up, and I drank a coffee and a Coke at work tonight. I remember David Bloomer telling me that he had started going to sleep at ten and waking up at 5:30. "I'm not a kid anymore," he said. "I can't be always staying up late and sleeping in. I've got to grow up." I respect that; a great deal, actually. But the pleasure of staying up in the quiet small hours still outweighs the dragging tiredness I'll feel tomorrow in church. What's a little discomfort, right?
Thinking a lot today about the next year or so. Today, laying sod with my Grandpa out at his property, I tried to plan out how the next six months are going to pan out financially. I had thought about selling my car; had actually decided to, but now it looks like it won't be necessary. I guess I'm relieved. I do like my car, although I was warming up to the idea of having about three grand in the bank and no more insurance payments creeping up on me, no more gas to buy. It's growing up. David Bloomer is right: we're not kids anymore. And it's that thought, more than anything else, which I've been facing over the past several weeks. I'm full of doubts about myself: my own ability to deal with bills, with seminary, with all of it. And it’s so close, just around the corner.
I finished my book last night, Wendell Berry's "A Place on Earth"; all 550-odd pages. It's satisfying to finish any novel of that length, but for me the satisfaction was tempered a good deal by a growing frustration with Berry in that novel. For one thing, the whole book felt very much like an early attempt. For literary quality, I prefer "Old Jack" by a long ways. And I'm ok with that; it's to be expected. What bothered me most was his tone in the novel, and the way he developed characters. I felt that all of his characters were cast in his own image. He likes his characters because they're all him; they all fit, either positively or negatively, into his mold of how the world should be. When they write letters, or talk, they all sound the same, down to the way they form sentences. Anything which strays outside of that mold (like his pathetic caricature of the Church) he is surprisingly vindictive of. Don't mistake me; he's got many, many good things to say. And maybe he did straighten some things out later in his career; reconsider them, or at least flesh them out a little more. My parents got me a book of his essays for Christmas and I've been working my way through them now and again. They, too, seem not so much wrong as incomplete. For him the Church, and economics, environmentalism, etc., are primarily concerned with the earth in a very temporal sense. I have to wonder how he takes such verses as I John 2:15, "The world is passing away, and the lust of it." Pastor Monty has often frustrated me by seeming to make the Kingdom of God out to be something predominantly future: our hope as believers, our great reward. To me the parables of Christ seem to be emphasizing something far more immediate and imminent than that: "The Kingdom of God is at hand." But Wendell Berry makes the opposite mistake. His faith is so much concerned with the immediate as to despise the eternal. "A Place on Earth" is by no means a Christian novel. It is actually fairly hostile to Christianity; or at least to the distortion of Christianity which it portrays. I'm talking more about his essays here, with the novels I've read to help inform and illustrate them. It's a beautiful picture he paints, but it is an inconsistent and unrealistic one. The novel ended on a hopeful note, but I had to wonder where the hope was coming from given the philosophy leading up to it. The Kingdom of God must be concerned with the eternal to be of any value at all. It is this transcendence which gives meaning to the every day struggle of life on the earth. But (and Wendell Berry is right here), we still live on the earth, and if our actions do not engage and address the plane on which our lives are lived out, we have missed the entire point. It is the very eternality of the Kingdom of God which makes it so concerned with the every day; for our lives are, in spite of their appearance of mundanity, filled with the eternal.
Or something.
Musical Rediscoveries:
Low: Things we lost in the fire
Interpol: Turn on the bright lights
