the gift half understood

As I'm frantically perusing "critical" sources to add to my T.S. Eliot paper, it's hard not to get tangled and lost in this rather metaphysical labyrinth...my mind feels like it did in Writing Theory, but worse (or better...I like this feeling)--because it's hard to discuss what I'm thinking about with anyone else--no one else I know is immersing themselves into the black hole of the natures of time and eternity...sigh.

But I am being blown away by these ideas...by their relevance to things I'm processing and wondering in my life and faith. I've written a lot about questions and not having answers, and I've wondered how to continue in a faith that, as it metamorphizes my heart, only seems to multiply the questions because the answers are becoming less and less simple and easy. Then five minutes ago I read this from Eliot's "Dry Salvages":

"These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation."

Ahh! I think I understand! Or at least I have a movement toward understanding. Sometimes (most times) the best we can manage is the "hints followed by guesses," and that's frustrating to me because above all I long to know. But this is comforting somehow, to see that this is how we continue in a faith that becomes ever more complex and deep and multifaceted...we learn to see the hint half guessed and the gift half understood, and we go on what we know at this moment, for "the rest / Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action." And then the thought I always come to is that I would never be satisfied anyway, with a faith that I could completely understand.

pushing around the clutter

I've been wanting to blog lately--mostly because this medium is a good place to think clearly--unlike real journaling, it's expedient (though not required, of course) that this actually make some sense to someone living outside of my head. Or at least that's what I tell myself. So I rarely write here unless I feel I have something relatively coherent to say. And sometimes it helps: laying out the ideas in neater file folders than the messy desk-top inside will ever compile. But the clutter feels like it's spilled over; the folders are buried under two weeks of back-log, and I can't seem to find them. So this time it's the clutter.

Maybe that's the problem--lately it's been mostly questions, mostly circling back to the same, same-looking pile of stones. I know I've been here before, but I can't break out of the lost-circles that always lead me back. I tell myself there really are no instant answers to any of these questions--not ones that mean anything. But it doesn't always help.

And I'm writing in riddles. I know, but my real thoughts feel too private or too befuddled to voice to anyone but a few close friends. Still others remain altogether removed from it all--at the mercy of only my internal dialogue: an iffy place to put them at times. Which is why I'm learning to leave less of them there--learning slowly that is--because openness isn't natural to me. Mostly I've waited until someone prodded it out, but the problem there is that you can end up waiting a long time. Radical thought isn't it? That you might have to ask for help to get it.

It's interesting to write about this--I'm wrestling over the same sort of issue for my Capstone essay. The piece is about fear--and I'm wondering how deep I want to go into some of mine. I know I need to go deeper. I knew what my advisor would say about the first draft before she said it. I even said it myself while writing it. But it's hard to voice for others the things you've buried when you don't want to look at them yourself. There are boundaries, of course, healthy boundaries that need to exist. Yet the boundaries I set in the past are too small--they don't let me see reality. It's hard to do though, stepping over these old boundaries. However much I'd like to think of them as gone, there are times when they still throb like an amputee's ghost limb.

21 Reasons

I'm frustrated. At what? Well, a lot of things really, but right now... There are some new posters up at school--21 examples of "White Privilege," some on-campus, some off. I read all 21, which were under the disclaimer that these were posted not to blame but to raise awareness. All the same, when I finished, I didn't feel anything but guilt: guilt for what was on it, guilt for feeling offended, guilt for feeling frustrated because I am sick of being made aware over and over of this fact by multi-cultural groups on campus. I'm hesitant to even write about my frustration here--I don't want to be taken the wrong way or give the impression that I think racial issues are not important and significant. I think they are--and I know that just because I don't see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist--that it isn't real.

I understood this more than ever during the recent "Leadership Week." After listening to male speaker after male speaker (including an all-male "worldview" panel), I felt, well...a bit over-looked. And I know it wasn't intential--someone just didn't think about it.

So, I don't want to do the same thing--I want to be sensitive, open and not closed...but I don't know how to respond. I disagree with the method of the posters--even if I recognize some of the reasons behind it. But I'm still left with the same questions: What should change? What do I do? What's next after being made "aware"? And I know my questions (as pointed out by one person I vented them to) are of the "I want to fix the problem" variety. But sometimes I don't know how else to react. I told someone that I was ok with being frustrated...but I think that was pretty much a lie. Don't I wish.

Another Sob Story

This week is missions week at school, which means the halls at Naz are lined with tables and pamphlets, and chapel is heartwrenching with stories of Uganda and Africa and world hunger. Now, like most people, I hate being manipulated and suckered with a sob story--heaven forbid I feel guilty or like I need to do something, anything to help these people...But it's hard to ignore this article that Becky linked to in her blog about the atrocities of the LRA in Uganda. Children raping and mutilating and killing...being raped and mutilated and killed. It's hard to protest that I'm being manipulated and made to feel guilty in light of that.

The speaker today in chapel talked about the last generation's fear of the gospel being reduced to merely a social gospel, which perhaps is a valid fear...I'm not sure at this point. But it's hard to talk about "witnessing" (in the sense it has taken on these days in evangelicalism...a sort of "4 spiritual laws hit and run") when I see this suffering, and it's even harder not to recall the meaning of "true religion." I feel helpless...and shamefully unaware of any of it. And I'd write more in this post, but thinking about this again makes words seem inadequate.