on being unoriginal

hello, my friends.

one does not easily undo the tenuous ties that bind two people together during a journey fraught with hardship. i lived the proof of it, bringing back to life past scenes, past conversations. our common habits sprang up at their usual times. i missed our bursts of refreshing or understanding laughter. like opium, i missed our daily consultations. i pitted myself against shadows.

these lines are from "so long a letter"--a short novel by miriama ba. i reread them while going through a powerpoint composed of quotations that i like (which i do every so often), and they capture my feelings from the last couple days (read: i miss you). ive been going through all the pictures again and putting together a presentation that ill give at church on sunday, and ive been doing nothing but smile as i click from picture to picture. im going to be talking about the trip during the sunday school hour to anyone who wants to come--i really have no idea how many people to expect, or what kinds of questions ill get at the end, but i think it will be fun no matter what.

interim was a really good time for me. i took a fantastic class on eastern orthodoxy that really gave me some new perspectives on my faith. orthodoxy challenges me on so many fronts. i realize that ive taken a lot of things that i believe for granted, and that while some of the things i believe might not be wrong (though some of them certainly are), most things arent as straightforward as i had assumed. orthodoxy has a pretty different concept of original sin from what we tend to have in the western church, they talk about the atonement and the cross using different language and imagery than ive always used, and then they have of course the iconography and the saints and all sorts of other things that make them seem weird to me. to make a thus-far short and unfinished story shorter, in just this brief intro to orthodoxy ive warmed up considerably to veneration of the saints and of icons, and im really interested to read about the early fathers and the lives of the saints. (im pretty hazy on the time between paul and augustine, and then on the millenium between augustine and martin luther......im pretty hazy on augustine, too, come to that.) anyway, this class opened up a whole new world for me that seems pretty exciting.

i hope you're all doing well and am really looking forward to february 1-3.

love,
phil