It’s registration season here in Berkeley, and I have registered for 5 courses this fall. My originally intended courses were unavailable to me, since I have left Monday available for work, so some rearrangement was in order. I still feel as if there are so many things left undone and neglected everyday, most so being my Jesus. The arts of contemplation and reflection are two things I have not indulged in much lately… my most sincere worship has been in the context of sporadic running, which tells you more about conversational life with Jesus at the moment. Bad habits are hard to lose, from eating unhealthy food to merely glancing at, not even in, the Bible every morning on my way out to school, work or some other necessary occupation.
From remarks lately, and noticing things about myself, I am probably becoming very liberal at the moment…I am rarely honest with my feels to my Jesus, but choose to live in the fast track of life, moving from one event and activity to the next or finding something filling in time and attention that should be otherwise devoted. I suppose this part of life is about learning focus and discipline, how to love and live and engage with people, then pull away to exercise my body, mind, and heart. So many communications to be passed back and forth every day, so many minute details to be worked out every day, especially at the beginning of the semester. I am working on getting back into a rhythm, established and set by goals for even the moments when things aren’t schedules and no so quickly transitioning, being pulled along by all sorts of things. When that happens, no reading gets done, no thoughts expanded.
Conversations are all well and good, but when there is nothing to say, one can feel a bit foolish. All in all, though, life has been terribly fun and exciting, I simply cannot wait for classes to begin again. Most everything I am studying the semester has a theological, historical, or ethical emphases… as I seek to work towards my Thesis goal of women in theology… how the woman is made just as much in the image of God as man, how that is evidenced differently in the gender roles God assigned, and looking more at the roles of a woman. As I fill out yet another application for a small tutoring position, I am considering how in the world I will ever discipline myself again to focus enough to get things done, my topic specified… and how I will figure out what God wants from me. The gender roles of the Bible are to be my starting point, as I work on daily readings. So that is one of my aims for myself today, beyond all the shopping I need to do and running around.
I am very excited for this opportunity I have to study in the Dominican tradition—the style of conversational learning that involves mentoring, and one-on-one relationships, and student-driven/motivated academic goals. From the little I have picked up about the Dominicans, they are very philosophical, very academic, but enjoy life as well. My conversations with the Franciscans led me to want to explore their life philosophy in conjunction with my Dominicans, since, as he was dying, St. Francis was in great pain, but welcomed Sister Death as he called her as another dimension of living. So much to wonder about, I am going to have to really schedule myself. Maybe if my Heidegger class has some flex to it, I can study death as an aspect of time… another dimension both confining and freeing human existence.
This sounds about as scattered as I really am; to organize and go to my Vocation and Calling Seminar, “The Called and the Gifted!”
