stream of consciousness, as per the usual.

I don’t know what I have to say. I know I have something to say, but I just cannot pintpoint what it is. Maybe that’s the point, I don’t know: so here I write. Writing is more exploration than it is explanation; I’ve come to hold to this ardently. I’ve been living in my parent’s home for a few weeks and although love having the freedom to do said writing-exploration at all hours, wander around town, catch up with old friends, place art on my own walls, go to the gym, drive to the park at midnight, sit by the watertower overlooking the river… There is a drive in me that will not still.

Surprisingly, it is academic (or is it?). I’ve been swallowing books and articles and interviews in an attempt to understand where this direction towards Christ is taking me. I know I will never understand, but the pull is strong and I will not back down in searching. I miss my friends at school because I don’t particularly have anyone to discourse with about the Wonderland I have found down the rabbit trails of words I’ve been chasing. Earlier last semester and into January I dabbled in Calvinist theology, which I believe has oriented me towards God’s supreme magnificence and worthiness of praise, but it still left me wanting more. I have more questions than I know what to do with, but I don’t know what any of them are. So I’m reading, I’m reading a lot, because what else are you supposed to do when you are a question in beg of an Answerer?

I spent four hours up by the watertower yesterday to finish Hannah’s Child, bathed in sunlight and peeking at the hawks flying above the river from over my sunglasses as I would take a moment to digest something I had just read. I got a little sunburnt, and I cried some (not because of the sunburn). Hauerwas’ life lived with a woman who did not love him, a woman plagued by mental illness, was a far cry from the point of the book, but the reality of what he lived with day in and day out wrapped around me like a blanket. Having lived with and cared for an Alzheimer’s patient has profoundly set the stage for the narrative of my own life, and here a theologian whose quest for truth was not deterred by a relationship defined by unlove. I don’t know, it just struck me.

He says towards the end of the book in regards to a friend, “Alzheimer’s is a cruel disease. We live by memory. The central act of the church is memory. That act makes possible our being memory for those who can no longer remember” (257). I sat on the hood of my car tonight, drinking in the moonlight and remembering this quote as well as a plethora of other things running around in my brainheart. I am a part of story more expansive than any breadth I am capable of fathoming, and I am only on the cusp of understanding what that story is. I am only on the cusp of understanding why that same story it is worth being ingrained into our memory to be espoused to all of humanity so that humanity may remember together. We must remember Christ, but even further than that, we must remember together in a way that senses his continuing, present, and alive inauguration of a new Kingdom. God, I love the Kingdom of Christ.

I have been questing my entire adult life for a “home,” as Hauerwas puts it, within some theological category within Christianity, and yet this same Christianity is so massive that I could not be so confined if I were to really want to walk in the way of Christ. The Christ I have begun to glimpse, the Christ worth presently remembering by actively participating in his Kingdom, is not so confined. He breaks the limits of our understanding. His person, the embodiment of Truth, is far beyond human grasp, and yet his own humanness and Godness all at once establishes a new, Kingdom-sized way for us to live and love Truthfully in the world. I am lost in 2000+ years of traditions that have all been scrambling to understand what happened in 33 A.D. and what that means for us. All of human history points to Jesus Christ of Nazareth - so what does that mean for a world so bent we cannot see him clearly? Thank God for the Spirit of God, who works beautifully through our subjectivity and misunderstandings to still strongly show us what the person of Christ is, means, and does through us. 

What a God.

May our eyes continuously be opened to the facets of Christ, before whom I tremulously lay at the feet all the whole of me. 

Pretty soon, a long post will be written. I can feel it in my bones.

craplos:

ladies. be careful when u wear spaghetti straps. it might distract the boys. they’ll start thinking of spaghetti. they will get hungry. they will stop at nothing to get their spaghetti.

probably the best worst thing I’ve seen on the internet today.