..identity

It has been quite a while since I have written on this blog, and I have been wondering about the role it will play in my life looking outwards.  I don't think I need to decide its fate preemptively, but allow it to be what it will become.

Since I last wrote, I have become different things: an employee, a commuter, a long-distance girlfriend, a grocery shopper.  And in all of these shifts and transitions, the role of identity and identity politics have been slowly consuming me, both in thought and in behavior.

Transition is usually difficult for people, and I feel like I fall in the normal distribution in my reaction to it.  It's exciting, terrifying, unsettling, and slightly disorienting.  Each shift dislodges a part of my identity, allows me to examine it more closely and from a different angle, and then provides me with the opportunity to retire it or reactive the identity particle in a different location.  This process brings layers into my life and gives me rosy cheeks, but it can be an exhausting endeavor to undertake.

In some ways, the transition process is a microscope into my presentation and understanding of self.  Who am I?  What elements of my self are unmovable, and what parts should be moved due to a shift in context or condition.  And how are these elements determined?  On what grounds do they stand?  Genetics, social conditioning, context, education, privilege, access to resources, values, relationships, philosophical paradigms, religious beliefs, stereotypes, positive social sanctioning, metatheories, 'unfounded' & unexplainable preference sets?  Most likely it is a yes to all of these (I have no idea about the link between genetics and preference formation), which means that a lot of who I am is determined by where I am, and who I am surrounded by.  I don't find this to be a 'bad' thing, but a condition of being a human in relationship with the world and other humans.

But I do think there is danger in allowing any of those categories (again, discounting genetics) to become hard and unmovable.  This might be seen in a person who has settled into their life, perhaps with a partner and a stable job, where the future could be remarkably orchestrated to reflect their static preferences.  Perhaps the shear fact that preferences are a plastic set of characteristics allows people to be infinitely complex, without threatening their humanity or connection to others and society.

I think that this complexity is what drives people to become concrete as they age, and it also drives people to categorize and summarize other people.  As people begin to more fully embody their definition of self, the game of identity politic becomes more straight forward and streamlined, both for the individual and the other people who are trying to 'figure them out'.

If I have learned one thing interesting in working with memory studies, it is that there is a good likelihood that people who do not actively learn and entertain abstract ideas have a more difficult time retaining their memory in their old age.  The ability of your brain to create new pathways and connections diminishes over time, until you reach a point where no new connects are made and established connections are lost.  Maybe the way our memories work is similar to the ways our identities work, as soon as you stop changing and allowing yourself to be complex and abstract, you begin to die.

I wrote this in February and I can't remember why, but I think that some of it is still true in my life today.

reality and myth

possibility and hope

want and disgust

prohibited and dangerous

fraught with bad timing, bad location, bad motivation.

always wrong, always watched, always calculated.

but what beyond all of this exists? is there anything true in the fabric of the mystery, 

or will the mystery complete itself and never be realized?

come and find peace, in the unknown and unexplored.

come to terms with change and end and lingering metal on mouth and the sense that tomorrow has no promises, 

for good and sad

amen.

Lately I have been thinking of the necessity of leaving and returning, as a natural pattern in life that facilitates growth and maturity.  Leaving is often good and expanding and returning reminds us of our elements that are more secure and lasting, and it is good to remember what we are made of.  Leaving and returning also shine a different glow on to the dailiness of life, on the little bits of mildew that form in our Wednesday afternoons that are both meaningless and profound.  Perhaps all of life is a dance of leaving and returning to ourselves and others.

Every time our cats pee on another object (like my bed, our couch, raincoats, rugs, and Carissa's computer) they look more and more rodent-like to me.

I can feel my skin shedding and I feel slightly naked in the world.

following...

This sums it up for me (or the nutshell of all of my theology):

For me being a follower of Christ means that I am an active participant in the story of God’s people and God’s love and healing of the world. I am learning how to recognize, embrace, and confront the ways in which I am broken and hurt other people, while gaining the ability to trust in God’s vision of a future where everything is whole and healed. The challenge of being a follower of Jesus is learning from his life, death, and resurrection and then translating those principles and paradigms into the small, seemingly inconsequential activities of my life. This requires me to be honest with my inabilities and shortcomings while developing in my faith of a loving and grace-filled God, who desires to be in working relationship with me. Learning from the example of Jesus, my love for other broken people is paramount in my life of faith and without these interactions my belief would lack a medium of expression. Following Jesus distinctly also shapes the way I view the future of the world and people’s lives, allowing me to imagine the Kingdom of God as a coming reality, which in turn marks my outlook with practical, redemptive hope. Ultimately, being a follower of Jesus means that I am devoted to a God that is healing my brokenness through grace and love, and through my personal resurrection I am able to turn and embrace the world in a way that models God’s grace and love to other people and systems, participating with God in the current and coming Kingdom.

..pain/hope

"Faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but, but is itself this unquiet heart in man.  Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contract it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.  Does this hope cheat man of the happiness of the present?   How could it do so!  For it is itself the happiness of the present.  It pronounce poor blessed, receive the weary and heavy laden the humbled  and wronged, the hungry and the dying, because it perceives the parousia of the kingdom for them.  Expectation makes life good, for in expectation man can accept his whole present and find joy not only in its joy but also in its sorrow, happiness not only in its happiness but also in its pain.  Thus hope goes on its way through the midst of happiness  and pain, because in the promised of God it can see a future also for the transient, the dying and the dead.  That is why it can be said that living without hope is like no longer living.  Hell is hopelessness, and it is not for nothing at the entrance to Dante's hell there stand the words: 'Abandon hope, all you who enter here.'"

-Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope

..reality

Two thoughts:

1. There has been an increasing frequency of 'real world' 'real job' talk.  This dichotomy of 'real'ness/fakeness is annoying and splices up life into different sectors that probably shouldn't exist.  This morning I was thinking about what makes a world real or a job real and I think it has something to do with capitalism.  Being in school is somehow a different experience of reality, working at a coffee stand is somehow not a 'real job', but maybe its because these experiences are not within the capitalistic hierarchy.  Perhaps there is a need for money making, advancement opportunities, and pencil skirts for parts of life to be considered 'real'.  I reject this.

2. Father's Day/Mother's Day...  In some of the places fathers were being congratulated there was also recognition for single mothers and their particularly difficult parenting situation.  Reading these recognitions made me wonder a lot about the gendered nature of parenting.  I am starting to think that there is nothing inherently unique/needed in the parenting contributions of a father or mother.  The most important element of this might be that someone is willing to parent, which is a skill that transcends gender and biology.  Instead of thinking about the essential nature of a mother/father in the development of a child, I would rather think about the unique contributions two different people make to the lives of children.  This also means that a child can easily have more than two parents without it being a competition for the two highest positions.  And it means that two dads or two moms is really a non-issue too.

Apparently, I'm anti-category today.

..subtle

Like all other graduating bloggers, I graduated!  Yippy!  I have felt the 'normal' emotions of graduation- pride, success, completion, love, regret, sadness, possibility... I have cried a few times for various reason, both good and bad, and on the other side of the festivities I can say that I am glad that they happened and happy that they are over.  Now for the thank-you notes.

These were the highlights of my graduation experience:

• Listening to my dad tell three different people about his fantasy of me gorging myself on Dick's hamburgers behind a dumpster.
• Riding bicycles to graduation with 20 of my friends. It was quite celebratory and appropriate.
• My graduation dress.  Vintage Goodwill makes my heart flutter.
• Watching John Perkins receive an honorary doctorate.  I think it was the happiest moment of my whole weekend.
• Watching women get their Ph.D's.  I cried a little bit.
• Feeling so proud and honored to watch my friends graduate. They are quality people and my college experience was so rich because of them.
• Walking across the stage knowing that I have been changed in many ways, and that receiving a diploma is not going to be the pinnacle of my existence.
• Watching Cory drink beer during our commencement. 
• My parents meeting Nikki.
• Taking small group photos to a very large audience of onlookers. This moment was very intense after having lived four years together and realizing that our lives will forever be ebbing and flowing in relationship. I feel so grounded and full when I am with them.
• Stellar Pizza, our awesome waitress who was so on top of things. Amazing pizza, good beer, sitting next to my liberal aunt and laughing at my family. Photobooths and a really funny graduation poem.  Being in Seattle and walking around Georgetown, trespassing on a restaurant my mother had discovered.  It was surprisingly relaxed, civil, and fun.
• My grandma announcing that she had 'ARRIVEN!'.
• Watching pizza fall of my parents car, my uncle stop in the middle of the road, right after a blind corner, to pick it up.
• How much of a champion Alex was with my family/endless events.  Good, mild-manner social skills can be so hott sometimes.
• Feeling entirely unstressed about finances, college loans, getting a job, or my future.

The surprising feeling this weekend was how subtle it was.  Perhaps the reverberations of this huge life change will come later when I realize that people are actually gone, that I am actually graduated, and that I have actually begun a new chapter in my life.  But right now things don't feel so epic, I don't feel blinded by joy or paralyzed by fear.  I feel happy and content, excited and curious for what will happen next.  Maybe it's because many of my friends have graduated and 'survived the real world' for several years now, which makes it seem like less of a cliff to me.  I think that this is part of it, but I also think that my current state of being reflects many of the ways that I have changed over the last few years.

I don't feel like I have stopped learning now that I am a graduate (that might be because I have an essay to write still, shit).  If anything, college graduation felt very similar to high school graduation- much more of a comma than a period.  I don't feel like I have necessarily arrived at anything triumphant, but I do feel accomplished and ready for the next part of my life.  I am most excited for a few weeks of pause, to get glasses, go to the dentist, have lazy afternoons in my backyard, and to laugh freely with people I really like.

I have also been thinking about reflection and if its a meaningful practice.  It is in many ways, but I also think it's a good way to over emphasize normal maturity and make trite accomplishments the end all, be all of human existence.  The 'reflection' that makes me most excited is that I have been radically changed in profoundly subtle ways and have become a better human being.  These changes are things that I never want to fully know, I just want them to be true in my life.   

..abandoned

The last few nights (I think) I have had a reoccuring dream about an abandoned warehouse.  Mostly the extent of it is me walking around with various people I know looking at all of the cool stuff people created like the toy train track and the rope swing.  Before I woke up today I was giving an 'outsider' a tour of the building, showing them all of the cool rooms and features.  As sweet and  delapitated as the building was I remember the part that made me the happiest was that there were a bunch of people hanging out everywhere, laughing and usually eating food from bowls. And then, last night I had a dream that I was at a convenience store.  While I was there the store owner stepped into the back and a fellow customer leaded over to me  to let me know that he was going to set the building on fire.   So he took a little purse of money and lit it on fire, threw it in the corner, and ran.  I ran too but finally ended up back at the warehouse where I was safe.

I don't know what this dream means/I don't know if this dream means anything. I think I am just feeling a wee bit stifled with the 'OMG THE REST OF YOUR LIFE', 'WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO!', 'GRAD SCHOOOOOL!'.  I just want a looseness in my life that allows things to flow and makes eating food from bowls a priority. 

Oh and this is a cool website: Abandoned

..frustrated

I'm realizing that I am frustrated with school right now.  I am in two capstones and a seminar and  a 2000-level class and am bored.  I am also exhausted by the meandering nature of most of my  classes and the amount of time I spend listening to my classmates. Honestly, I get frustrated listening to poor logic and anecdotal stories and I just want to be engaged by the course material.

I realize that this post is a little bitchy, for more than one reason, and I also realize that I probably just need to get over things.  I am just angsty for more meaningful engagement with subjects that I love and am getting tired of listening to intellectual lumps mumble.

So ready for grad school.

..ethos

This whole year I have been reluctantly thinking about enrolling in Business Ethics this quarter.  I'm not particularly interested in business at all.  But I am interested in ethics and ethical theory and hearing my fellow students discussing ethical theory has excited(incited) me.

I think that it has been a good capstone (pun intended) to my year, thinking about the larger story of my faith and what that looks like in my life.  Simplicity has been extremely attractive to me this year. Simple theology and orthopraxy, not that eliminates variation within a complex world, but that remembers purpose and posture in confusing situations.

For me that 'ethos' or simple theology is love, particularly love for God and love for others. As a Christian the conversations about right living, just ethical theory, and social perspective should be based in a simple understanding of love.  Love is a foundation that I can build every thought upon.  It's radically simplifying and freeing.

Also, I think the other component of love is listening.  Realizing that people deserve to be respected and heard, regardless of what they say.

I feel like, really, this is all I have learned at SPU.

..limits

Today I was supposed to write a paper about Jack in the Box but I didn't.  Instead I thought about a  lot of other things:

I thought about the curse of limitlessness.  Sometime in your childhood you were likely told that you could be whatever you wanted to be when you grew up.  Astronaut, veterinarian, lawyer, dentist?  Just believe in  yourself and you could do it.  Well, I think that's bad thinking and very false.  I could never & will never be a long list of things due to the limits of my interests and natural abilities.  Instead of being a force of suppression, I think that there is freedom within those boundaries.  A sense of infinite possibility is paralyzing and fear inducing - if I can do everything will I ever be good at anything?  And it creates a world where my ultimate purpose is to pursue my inherent potential for everything, for the fulfillment of every desire.  People, money, time all become tools that are put to work, helping to fulfill my potential.  But just like the economy, environment, and tolerance for US foreign policy have limits (even if they are still looming), so do humans.  To recognize my limits is to embrace my humanity; it obliterates the possibility of me becoming God, and that is relieving.  I will not be successful at everything I attempt, I was not created for that.  I think that that is one of the parts of life that I am learning about right now.  I was designed to kick serious ass at certain things and it is my responsibility to be faithful to discovering and pursuing those things.  Most other things can be done by other people who are better at them.  

I don't know, I have little to show for my day but I feel like I have learned, so whatever that's worth...

..bathrooms

They are my phobia.  My anxiety raises whenever I go in them.  I feel like they are places where potential disaster is brooding- lots of strangers, intimate quarters, faulty equipment, wet countertops, etc.  My anxiety increases when the toilet is directly behind the door.  The possible embarrassment of  a wide door and a shocked audience is too high.  And then there is the danger of going into the wrong bathroom.  Most of my nightmares involve me walking out of a stall, washing my hands, and then seeing a urinal behind me in the mirror.  Even if no one was there to witness it I would want to die.  LOCKS!  The little hook lock that goes into the sketchy little loop does not offer very much security and causes me to only go half-time because I just want to get out while I still can. Or the punk rock lock that is made out of a bent paper clip. Really, really? Or what about the sketchy doorknob locks where you twist the dial in the middle so that the line is vertical.  Do they all have to be vertical?  Recently an evil person locked the open door to a bathroom before they left it, so I went in, placed the dial in the opposite direct, started my business and then the door opens.  The poor woman on the other side probably wet herself out of fear.  And the worst part is you can't escape- there is only one door out of the bathroom and there is a good likelihood that the victim/perpetrator is waiting on the other side.  I don't feel awkward about it but the whole situation is awkward and intrusive and falsely intimate.  I also recently had an experience where there was no lock on the bathroom door.  It was in an old house but that still not justified, people in 1920's probably needed  privacy too.  There is nothing quite as vulnerable as using the bathroom without it locked, especially in the house of a person who may one day write you a reference.  And what about bathroom stalls that have doors with bad hinges/bad locks.  You just have to slam them closed and hope with all your might that another person doesn't enter with their shoulder and that you don't have to crawl out from under the stubborn door.  I have 18 more things that terrify me about bathrooms (holding up skirts, asking strangers for toilet paper, stall-to-stall conversations, being introduced to new people in bathrooms, seeing professional/respected people you know, and others that are more private).  

The bathroom I loathe the most:  Weter. It's awful and if anything ever went wrong all of campus would be there to see.  The risk is too great.

I hate bathrooms.  If I could have one wish I would wish that I would never have to use them again.

..margin

I could spend time listing out the sources and reasons for my current stress, but it's boring to recant and usually causes me further stress.  So I'm not.

But my life has been stressful as of late.  Is the stress legitimate?  I don't know, but it exists and I have a wide range of responses to it, some constructive and many that aren't. Despite the stress I have been learning things...

I have been learning  about margin.  Often I think of margin as the wiggle room in my life.  The 10 minute buffer I give myself between an activity and the next one.  For me it's usually about time management, occasionally about money.  Recently I have had to reconsider my understanding of margin and now it strongly includes people.  I am terribly afraid of inconveniencing people.  I like following directions and being independent because it doesn't place additional burdens on people in my life.  But with that desire to not be a burden, giving myself grace when I need help is often difficult.  I find myself feeling guilty when I receive help or thinking about ways that I can repay the favor later.

Part of this thinking is rooted in a misperception of who I am - I need to learn that its okay if I'm not 100% put together and on top of my shit.  Another part of it is that I have misperceptions about the people I am in relationship with.  Somewhere I assume that people will feel obligated and guilted to help if I ask, or they are reluctant to help if I don't.  This is simply not true and believing it cheapens the love that other people have for me.  I can never fully enjoy it because I am always busy managing it.  I want to learn how to be a gracious receiver, and I want to make some improvement in my life management skills so that I am being responsible about the burdens that fall on others.

On Sunday, I went to Grace and the pastor stated that grumbling was the cause of spiritual decay. He described it as an unwillingness to give God the credit for things that are provided in our lives, a situation that quickly causes us to question God's goodness and faithfulness.  So instead of grumbling about stress,  I want to choose to see the way that God seeps out of the people in my life.

This is what I'm thankful for... bus slips, dinners prepared by my housemates, help on my math homework, sly glances that turn into laughter, people repairing my back tire (4 times...), quick conversations at the corner of the dinner table, borrowed cars, grant money, a ride to Olympia at midnight, baked goods for lunch, facebook messages, tests that get turned in for me, hugs, a friend who listens to my endless confusion about life, a day in a hotel room by myself, Al's, housemates who rock at grocery shopping, switching chores, monies from my Grandma, an awesome advisor, and a few other things...

..mercy

I think the worst thing in the world is poverty.

God, have mercy on us for what we have done.

..fixed

For a set of reasons, my theological language has shifted a lot over the last yearish (also, my conceptualization of time, that's basically non-existent now).  I don't really talk about 'sin' very much anymore and I am much more interested in life than righteousness, health instead of holiness.  When I talk about who I am I say that I am a person who is broken, rather than totally & utterly depraved.  Sweet, change...

But I think that I want to be fixed and that is posing a problem.  'In my brokenness' I want to transcend and find wholeness, health, completion, community, authenticity, and so on and so on.  But I don't know how this all works.  I think part of my current journey is learning how to live in the paradox of brokenness.  

Like when Jesus healed people- they were once blind for their entire life, get some mud rubbed on them, and then they are healed.  They were profoundly healed, their sickness was replaced with health and their lives were profoundly changed.  But the thing that always got me was that at the end of so many of the healing parables so many of the people screwed up.  Jesus would tell them not to tell anyone who had healed them and then they would do it anyways.  Maybe that's the part of the parable that I have never taken the time to imagine; what happened in the lives of the healed post healing?  I'm pretty sure they screwed up a lot of shit.

And I think that is what I want my experience with God to be so much of the time- a healing without an ending, where I will be fixed and the story will complete itself in abstracted bliss.  (Maybe this is part of the trouble with an obsession with the New Testament, it doesn't seem to show the struggle of people perpetually ruining everything like the Old  Testament does.)

Recently, I have felt the need to be fixed more strongly.  I feel like I am walking around with a pet grey cloud over my head and unintelligent, sad comment on the tip of my tongue.  And so my sociology brain starts to turn, thinking about the plausible 5,000 causes for my state (many of them are likely true) and what that means for my life, social networks, life opportunities...  In this vein, I have received wise, sagely advice from a wise, sagely friend- cause and effect relationships in peoples' lives are complex and it's foolish to assume that they aren't.

And so I sit in the intersection between plausible causes and desired solutions, wanting something else, wanting to be understood and then fixed.  But... I don't think that's God's plan.  Maybe my whole life is not about becoming more and more fixed/healed/authenticated/communal/whole.  Maybe it's one f-ing long process of becoming okay with my brokenness and choosing to hope in God regardless of it.  For some reason, I feel dumb writing this (mostly because I am blogging instead of doing my homework) but also because I think it sounds like a whole lot of the Christianese I grew up with (self-hating Baptists and the journey to moralistic humility with a God that was always a little dissatisfied with everything).  I could care less if it's a cool new theological thought, because it's one that I am learning.

The point where it all seems to crystalize for me is when I think about what life's purpose seems to be... is it always me becoming a better/more fixed person? or is it about learning how to live while being shattered and sick?  For which of these projections is God necessary, not simply employed for efficiency?  And honestly, even though there are hundreds of things in my life that I could look back on and remember marked change in, none of the areas have been fixed so what's the point in pretending like I am somehow beyond them.

I want to learn for the rest of my life how to be okay with not being okay.

..egalitarianism

[Insert snappy intro about me being a 'feminist', 'liberal', 22 year-old Christian talking about submission...]

Equality in a relationship is becoming less and less about opinion and liberation for me and more of an necessity in my understanding of God and the kingdom. The submission conversation has become more frequent and ordinarily pretty contrived due to my social location as young woman in Christian circles.  For a while I pushed back wholly on the topic but recently have wanted a logical and holistic understanding of what it means to me and how I want to live into it.

Equality, in light of the stratified world we live in, is one of the most compelling and important markers of the coming kingdom, and thus one of the central tenants of my faith.  Reading the Bible as a woman puts me in an interesting location within these ideals, finding myself placed somewhere between socially constructed gender roles, controversial biblical passages, and a slue of strong opinions on all 'sides'. 

1. I am told that I need to live in the world but not be of it.  For me this isn't a statement about morality.  It doesn't conjure images of bearing existence in a fallen reality without defiling my spiritual purity, it seems like a calling to imagination.  Live does not mean grin and bear it, it is far more robust and a primary reason why Jesus came to earth, to show us a new way of living in abundance.  For me it means remaining in the broken social structures of society with an informed imagination/knowledge of something better.  This also impacts the way I interpret my Bible.  Rather than trying to spiritualize failing systems (through the scriptures) it shows me ways of living into a new reality of life and equality.

2.  An understanding of equality seems to be founded upon humanity.  I have different characteristics that make me distinct from other people, but primarily I am human and this is the way that I try to think about myself and others.  Rather than trying to understand myself as a woman/white/middle class/Christian in relationship, equality is much more tangible when I am a human in relationship with another human.  I am in process, trying to figure out life like  everyone else and focusing on that dimension of interaction eliminates hierarchy, replacing it with mutuality through journey.

3.  So, as a woman who is in process, it seems like a sinful contradiction for me to try to live into relationship as a submissive, passive partner. It also seems to make me a lazy reader of Bible, choosing to follow small, isolated texts rather than thinking about its broader themes and the purpose of the Bible as whole. 

Christian imagination is critical to my faith and life and to not exercise it is sin. So, living prescriptively on very few sections of scripture does not make any sense to me.  I am to submit and love in relationship because everyone is to submit and love in relationship.  The conversation about female submission seems to be a limiting, narrow distraction from larger kingdom mandates.  It just seems silly at this point and a failure of imagination.  The equality of the kingdom isn't to be an abstract set of  ideals that I will embody in the future, they are the motivations of my current life and my current relationships.  To live into inequality of any form is laziness on my part (or a unwillingness to challenge contemporary social roles) and the best way to neutralize my existence as a person who is to incarnate the world as it will be.

Whatever.

..hope

Over this last break I had a chance to read Bob Zurinsky's dissertation. Mucho Moltmann. Reading it I felt like many of the ideas would be easy to adopt since they were articulations of underdeveloped thoughts that I have had recently.  Adding theological concepts because they are convenient/attractive seems dangerous to me, and intellectually lazy.  But it made me think more specifically about the role of hope and what it actually is.

These are my current thoughts:

Hope is often thought as wishing but this definition makes it a very weak/useless concept.  It also makes it unreliable (or completely dependent upon the outcome of the wish) and not a very confident way to interact with an all-powerful God.  It also makes it unnecessary to my theological framework, like I can just sprinkle it in here or there when I want to sound optimistic in my faith.  But I think that it's a little bit more than that.  Hope is one of the (few) things that makes Christianity distinct from other religions/belief systems. 

Hope is a form of knowledge.  If part of Christianity is that we know what certain aspects of the Kingdom will be, we can say that we know parts of  the future.  Granted, we might know exactly what the Kingdom will be like in detail, we do know that specific aspects of it will be true (equality/no hierarchy among people, for example).  Knowledge has power whereas wishing, which is passive, does not.  So if hope is a form of knowledge about the future then it should have the power to influence my thoughts about what the future looks like, how I think about it, and how I live in the present.  Hope as knowledge gets me excited and it makes an abstract, weak concept compelling for me to believe in.  Also, out of all of the books in the Bible, hope is most commonly referenced in Job.  This makes me excited too because I think that it makes hope more powerful than an emotion or an emotional response to the world.

So if hope is knowledge, perhaps there is also a system of thinking that can be marked by hope.  Over the last three years most of my theological exploration has depended primarily on my personal experience in the world and with God.  Mostly this is in response to the first 19 years of my life where my experience was always in tension with my religion and that meant my experience was wrong.  While this has been very liberating and important in my development, I feel ready to add other ways of thinking to my theology.  I think hope will be that.

Hope is the thing with feathers 
That perches in the soul, 
And sings the tune--without the words, 
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard; 
And sore must be the storm 
That could abash the little bird 
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land, 
And on the strangest sea; 
Yet, never, in extremity, 
It asked a crumb of me.

-Emily Dickinson

..resolutions

New year, new resolutions.  Here are mine:

1. Think more about fear. 

1.5. Do more things that scare me.

2. Drink more water.

3. Get my tattoo.

Words that describe my break (in alphabetical order): 

Angsty, artichoke, cider, contemplative, crafting, escape, family, gender roles, imagination, McCauley family, Moltmann, not using my computer, puzzles, quiet, questioning, Raising Victor Vargas, Scum, sewing, smoked salmon, snowing, stenciling, zoo lights.

Right now:

I want to be asking the right questions.  When I think about the future I want to be asking the right questions of myself, God, and the world.  I don't really know what that means but I feel like it's the ambiguous task that I need to be in at the moment.  Overall I feel peace-filled about life and the future.  Hope is a very confusing concept to me right now but I like not understanding it and feel a exciting sense of discovery when I  think about it.  What am I allowed to hope for?  I am thinking about Christian imagination too.  More specifically the connection between imagination and complete faith.  Also, limits - God's limits, my limits, the merits of limits, are they beneficial or a condition to overcome?  Right now I am interested in cacti, Rilo Kiley, swimming, the nature of preferences, and riding my bike again.  I want to go to Georgetown and the coffee shop in the alley.