Today my adorable just-freshly-one-year-old godson Elijah went to the beach for the first time.
Thirroul was golden, warm and windy, and I just don’t think he can get any cuter than when he was splashing around in the shallows.
Oh how I love this child!
I took a little trip this afternoon to Bulli beach with Hannah and Linds.
First we had lunch.
Then saw some friends running kids’ programs for SUFM.
Then had some icecream.
All in all, a good afternoon.
Only one of many!
But today I was thinking about starting full time study again in 2012 and I realized: I will be required to write a lot more than I have had to in the last 2 years.
Write things that other people are meant to read!
I am both terribly nervous, and strangely convinced this will be good for me (like eating the vegetables you don’t enjoy, or something).
Yikes.
Inspired by Meredith, I’m reflecting on the territory covered this year over the pages of books. I wish I could remember their chronology, as a reflection on the unfolding of the year, but it’s really a bit too fuzzy for that.
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gifted to Lead by Nancy Beach
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Axiom by Bill Hybels
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness by Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Dirt Music by Tim Winton
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Home by Marilynne Robinson
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Utopia by Thomas Moore
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Soul Survivor by Philip Yancey
Real Sex by Lauren Winner
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Breath by Tim Winton
An Imaginary Life by David Malouf
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
.. and then a few which still remain half-done. It would be nice to beat that this year 
Recently I have been thinking a bit about how violence, conflict and war are a part of our human existence; now and throughout the history of humanity. A few different things have spurred on this prolonged train of thought, I think beginning with my study of Lamentations last year (not really directly as part of my thesis work, but sort of a later, side-tangent, personal reflection), as well as watching some television and movies centred around this theme of violent and devastating conflict within humanity, and some books I’ve read over the past year. I feel like I keep being shown that the amount of people who have lived their life on this earth without being seriously affected by the evil of war, or life-threatening circumstances, is proportionately small.
As I was working through Lamentations, and would tell people I was studying it for my thesis, I was often asked what I thought of, or if I had come up with ‘an answer to’ the terrible violence and destruction and desolation within some of its passages – a question, I guess, based somewhat on the assumption that such a portrayal is so ‘extreme’; not at all what we want to find in God’s word, where we seek hope and peace.
However, after some of the accounts about people’s experiences of life in our world I have recently read, heard and seen, I can’t get away from the fact that this ‘extreme’ portrayal is actually what our world is like for so so many people. I find myself reflecting that for me, living a very comfortable life in Sydney, it is so so easy to be blind to, or in complete denial of, the reality of suffering or the threat of imminent death that so many people face around the world today, and have throughout history. Life is so far from peace and health and goodness, and instead everything is unstable, untrustworthy, dangerous. It forces me to ask what on earth could possibly answer this problem. ‘Problem’ hardly even seems like an adequate word to use – so detached, impersonal, trivial…
I found this passage in Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, which just makes my stomach churn.
“Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.
I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows and inquired, ‘Is it an anti-war book?’
‘Yes,” I said. ‘I guess.’
‘You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?’
‘No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?’
‘I say, “Why don’t you write and anti-glacier book instead?”‘
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.
And, even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.”
It is so devastating. The idea that the brokeness, the powerlessness, violence found in humanity was as much as part of a life as the inanimate objects of nature. And that we were inadequate to do a thing about it.
I give thanks to the one who made glaciers that he has given a decisive answer to “plain old death”, as well as wars, and the violence in humanity that brings them about. I am so hanging out for the time when they are completely eradicated and we live life without suffering, hate and fear. True life, thanks to Jesus. I pray that he will help me, while we wait for that, to be a servant to those in need and especially to point them to that hope. I, on my own, am helpless.
“Truth must be stalwart, Loyalty absolute, Generosity unstinting, while Appearance and Convention were children of the giant Hypocrisy and must be put to flight.”
Marilynne Robinson, Home, p. 16.
Today I handed in my thesis.
Now I might actually get some blogging done.
(Also, I accordingly changed my blog header pic – out with the Hebrew! I have had enough for a while. Instead, a sunset captured from my back verandah marks the drawing to an end of this epoch.)
So, as the thesis monster and I continue in our battle to slay one another, I must admit there are moments (days, weeks even) of despondancy and wishing I had never even taken it on!
But, every now and then, some sort of joy creeps in and reminds why it is so wonderful to study what I study, and I am able to persevere.
I have been writing a lot the last couple of days about literary form and technique in the Book of Lamentations and it has renewed my passion for the subject, truly it is a magnificant piece of work and I can think of nothing like it in English or Classical Hebrew poetry (not that I claim to have a firm grasp upon the whole canon of either!).
If you want to take me out for coffee sometime I will happily talk with you about this for ages, but here is a quote by Paul House from his recent work on Lamentations in the Word Biblical Commentary series, and I do concur:
“This book is a masterful combining of related literary material. When one considers that this book meshes qinah meter and overall structure, combines individual and community lament, combines the basic syntax of narrative and poetry, uses the structure of acrostic without making all the acrostics the same, and provides thematic continuity from first poem to last, then one has to be impressed with the book’s artistry even if one cannot put a specific name to the book’s genre.” (WBC, p. 316.)
Sadly, so much of this is lost in English translations, and so the text just seems dully repetitious and hard to come at. But the Hebrew is amazing, and I kind of wish I had written it (apart from the tremendous suffering endured, of course).
So some dear friends of mine have been commenting…
(Note – the dear friends are not my computer – it is merely an analogy)
Says Mr G. K. Chesterton, on the matter of doubt/angst/lament:
“There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is the unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realised this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to inifinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that underneath all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude… This is something much more mystical and absolute than any modern thing that is called optimism, for it is only rarely that we realise, like a vision of the heavens filled with a chorus of giants, the primeval duty of praise.” (Chaucer, 1932).
What do you reckon?
