how yall durrin?

it's sunday night here at the OP. all is well, and quieted down since the guests have all been gone for a little bit. dawn, our super intense chef at the lodge gave me two A's for my shifts on Friday, so i'm pretty much on cloud nine. i was convinced she hated me, at least professionally. but now things are looking up.

i'm feeling now more and more like i'm doing a poor job at keeping up with everyone, and i feel bad about it. but i don't feel bad about it in a way that assumes that people need to hear from me in order to be ok or something like that; i know that's not true. i feel bad about in a way that feels like ingratitude and cutting myself out of a community that i need. because it's true, i do need you and i am thankful for you, and to you.

anyway, here's my journal for the week if anybody still stops by here. i love ya

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The Answer to Everything in the Universe (or something)

After class the other day (as most days), I was thinking about how ridiculous it might seem for someone who was just sitting in. It might look like we just talk and talk for an hour and a half and end with bigger questions than when we began, because I don’t know if I’ve ever left class with an “answer” to the day’s topic, a new sentence or phrase to use as a response in the “real world.” But that’s ok: Gilead to the rescue again. At the end of a discussion similar to those in class (though this one on a topic perhaps even more convoluted: predestination (aaahh!!)), the wise (Presbyterian) minister Boughton, crooked with arthritis and bent with the weight of old pain is asked for his conclusions on the issue: “[No conclusions] that I can remember,” he says. “To conclude is not in the nature of the enterprise.”

I think he’s right. We can’t come to the table in class, or anywhere really, and expect to leave with a tidy position on things. In fact, after having my presuppositions unsettled in discussion, I often leave class feeling frustrated and exhausted from trying to wrap my arms around nothing more than a dense fog. But it’s not just fog; there’s something irresistibly More there. I think it’s Spirit, which is even more elusive than the fog and a thousand times more real.

The reality and singularity of this Spirit doesn’t make him any easier to pin down. I’m reminded of Augustine’s string of God-exalting paradoxes: “most merciful and most just, deeply hidden yet most intimately present…immutable and yet changing all things, never new, never old…always active, always in repose, gathering to yourself but not in need…you cancel debts and incur no loss” (5). God really is all of these things, but he is not only any one. As soon as I’ve labeled him “just,” I’m reminded of the mercy of sunshine and friendship and, above all, the canceling of my debt, none of which I deserve. As soon as I try to enclose him in “mercy,” he’s tearing my ears open to the whole creation, “subjected to futility…groaning together in the pains of childbirth” as he floods my city or my friend’s biopsy comes back with terrible news.

So you can’t cage a Spirit, but you can’t ignore him either. All of this round-table grappling, this searching for that Person in the middle of the paradoxes, might never get us closer to an “answer,” but that’s “not in the nature of the enterprise.” We aren’t merely resigning ourselves to some vain pursuit of articulating the inexplicable; we’re being enthralled by the one great Question into a life of losing ourselves in that Mystery. We’re not trying to catch a butterfly in a net; we’re moths trying to break into the light bulb.