Yeah, About That ...

Fourteen years ago ...

Isaiah 61: [I apparently didn't mark the passage!]                                                     March 10
Charlie's sitting up and eating! Raymond at Shands                                                  10103.10

The Spirit of the LORD God is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound. 1

I'd like to go on with this, I really would. The "day of vengeance of our God", "beauty for ashes", and "my soul shall be joyful in my God" would be what I'd like to live to see. There's enough suffering in the world and in our lives that we need this comfort, this good news that we can have a Savior and live with him too!

I want to have the super-energy I should have, the power to outwork, outperform, and outearn anybody who I can name. I don't like the excuse that I'm only flesh and blood, that I have to rest (which I've been doing a lot lately) because it makes me seem weak. I remember when I had the confidence of Sara [Walters, a Northeastern University graduate pictured on that page who's searching for a job with confidence -- though her face doesn't show it], the 22-year-old marketing major here, to get a good job in my field and not waste away in -- wait a minute. I don't like hearing that ANY job is bad, you hear that from people who think they're too good for the job, and they turn out to not be very good anyway.

[I continue with another paragraph on the last page of this journal, and other prayer requests are at the bottom of the three pages.]

Now, about that ...

I said I would not purchase a book during Lent. I did not say I would not read one.

Apart from not reading at all is somewhat impossible if you're out in traffic (you have to read signs) or studying (you have to read the text) or want to program a microwave or cell phone (it helps), I have picked up some of those cover to cover things and I have developed opinions, what the coastal world calls reviews, on at least a few. Last week I was in Main Street Books and figuratively smacked my head -- March is their Customer Appreciation Month where you get a free proof copy of a book with any purchase. BUT I had a few dollars in store credit, so I used it to pick up two books, therefore in my best Pharisaic thought buying them and got a book from the free book table that caught my eye. And there's several, so I'm likely to be back before the end of the month ...

Whenever I hear "philosopher" I flash to the Bankrupt space in the game of LIFE where you are told you "Retire to the country and become a philosopher." Some of the lovers of knowledge (what philosopher literally means, translated from Greek) whose love, lack of love, or unconventional love lives get three to four page blurbs in Andrew Shaffer's great philosophers who failed at love (ISBN 9780061969812) perhaps should have stayed there. But if they had, how would we ever hear about Peter Abelard whose uncle-in-law had him ... cut off, Louis Althusser who accidentally -- that's how it reads, not in quotes -- strangled his wife to death, Ayn Rand who with a fan of hers proposed to their respective spouses that they see each other, which became about what you'd expect ...

Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe. And that's just the title of the fifth volume (ISBN 0385495552) of Thomas Cahill's Hinges of History series, which is a good read and the most colorful so far -- lots of artistic reproductions -- but long. And it probably should be the other way around, I opine as I finished it yesterday, just to explain why he called them mysteries; not in the sense of a Sherlock Holmes story, but mystery corresponding to our word sacrament today. In fact, trying to decipher what happened in the sacrament -- how the bread and wine in Holy Communion become the body and blood of Christ -- was a stepping-stone for science. Fun learning, but it sputters in places. Good art though ...

I liked the story of the graphic novel Henni (ISBN 9781940878027) where you find, in the author Miss [Melissa] Lasko-Gross' own words, "cute animals and religious fundamentalism in a horrible, twisted marriage". The title character is the one questioning things, as she's been taught to do by her dad who gets mutilated for it and ... well, we don't find out what happens to him. But Henni quickly finds out how to get out of town before the "templemen" marry her off and finds the next place she encounters fundamentalist in a different way; try and imagine Karl Marx writing fairy tales and you get the impression of how this can be a jolt. Whether you believe in a higher power or whether you don't and how, it has the oomph of a parable which catches your self-protectiveness off guard.

Which all the best stories do, David