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This is going to get a little faith-y at points, so scroll on if that's not your thing.
The Intermediate Fiction class I signed up for that was supposed to kick off June 1st didn't have enough participants enrolled and got moved to an August start date. The guy who runs the workshops offered to let me swap to a class with a sooner start date or take a refund if I didn't want to wait that long and after a great deal of consideration I took him up on a swap. I had waffled between Intermediate Fiction and a workshop on Spiritual Nonfiction, so I jumped into that one instead and will start it on June 22nd.
I'm very excited about it. Faith and that sort of whole greater spiritual meaning existentialism thing are two topics which occupy my mind pretty steadily, and I think it'll be great not only to read a selection of essays on the topic of spirituality from a variety of authors with different faith backgrounds, but it will be cool to figure out how to write about that stuff since it does take up so much of my brainspace at any given time.
I'm doing a little preparatory reading, through some of the spiritual nonfiction I own that I either haven't read in a while or meant to pick up but never did and through some of the works by Johnathon Malesic, the guy who'll be teaching the class. This article about the nature of work-based culture in America ("When Work and Meaning Part Ways") is very good, if anyone is interested.
Likewise I'm revisiting some of the Thomas Merton books I purchased a couple of years back and have flipped through but not sat down to really engage with. This passage in particular really spoke to me when I came across it this morning, and I figure there are some of you out there who might enjoy it:
The Intermediate Fiction class I signed up for that was supposed to kick off June 1st didn't have enough participants enrolled and got moved to an August start date. The guy who runs the workshops offered to let me swap to a class with a sooner start date or take a refund if I didn't want to wait that long and after a great deal of consideration I took him up on a swap. I had waffled between Intermediate Fiction and a workshop on Spiritual Nonfiction, so I jumped into that one instead and will start it on June 22nd.
I'm very excited about it. Faith and that sort of whole greater spiritual meaning existentialism thing are two topics which occupy my mind pretty steadily, and I think it'll be great not only to read a selection of essays on the topic of spirituality from a variety of authors with different faith backgrounds, but it will be cool to figure out how to write about that stuff since it does take up so much of my brainspace at any given time.
I'm doing a little preparatory reading, through some of the spiritual nonfiction I own that I either haven't read in a while or meant to pick up but never did and through some of the works by Johnathon Malesic, the guy who'll be teaching the class. This article about the nature of work-based culture in America ("When Work and Meaning Part Ways") is very good, if anyone is interested.
Likewise I'm revisiting some of the Thomas Merton books I purchased a couple of years back and have flipped through but not sat down to really engage with. This passage in particular really spoke to me when I came across it this morning, and I figure there are some of you out there who might enjoy it:
"We have to remember the principle that certain desires and certain pleasures are willed for us by God. We cannot live in the truth if we automatically suspect all desires and all pleasures. It is humility to accept our humanity, pride to reject it.
Von Hügel, in one of his letters, writes of W.G. Ward ("Ideal Ward") as an "eager, one-sided, great, unintentionally unjust soul" who on his deathbed saw the mischief of his life—he had consistently demanded that all others be like himself!
This is the root of inhumanity!
It is often more perfect to do what is simply normal and human than to try to act like an angel when God does not will it. That is, when there is no need for it, except in the stubborn passion of our own impatience within ourselves.
It is not practical, it is not honest, it is not Christian to fly from "every desire" and "every pleasure" that is not explicitly pious.
For others who are human enough to be ascetics without losing any of their humanity, it is all right to risk things that seem inhuman. For one as deficient and self-conscious as I am, the ordinary ways are safer. Thay are not just an evasion to be tolerated; they are a more perfect way."
- Thomas Merton, from 'Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander'