1. I spent quite a bit of time today pondering how my religious life (often referred to as one's faith) and my professional work intersected. One point of contact between the two was that either explicitly or implicitly the courses I created focused on what endures, what persists, what seems to be always with us in life. I don't remember, as an instructor, ever referring to this emphasis as exploring "eternity", but I do think my secular concern with what endures paralleled the concern in my spiritual life with living a finite life in the presence of the infinite -- or a temporal life in the presence of the eternal.
To me, the bedrock of a liberal arts education was to persistently examine what it means, in Socrates' words, not to live, but to live well. What is a well-lived life? Alongside this, I'd say the content of my courses was guided by another maxim of Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living.
Working with these enduring questions, examining topics like happiness, reconciliation, vitality, justice, the nature of knowledge and how we arrive at it, the nature of reality, ethics, and a host of others over the years animated me.
In my spiritual life, structured largely by being an Episcopalian, I am not animated. I'm quiet. The fervor that many express in their religious practice, I expressed in my life as an instructor.
I'm all for ecstatic experience. It's the human spirit that invigorates me. Reading books, listening to music, watching athletic competition, spending time with friends, enjoying well-brewed beer, watching movies, enjoying hiking trails, writing in this blog, the old days of teaching -- these are all experiences growing out of the human spirit that fire me up.
The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, calms me. Worship in the Episcopal church is mostly sedate, rarely boisterous. I loved leading Compline services at Whitworth over forty years ago and reserving generous spaces of time in those Wednesday night services for silence, contemplation, unspoken prayer.
It's all connected, the holy and the human. I go back to what I quoted yesterday. As Brandan Robertson said: "We're all finite beings trying to comprehend the infinite." The infinite can be as human as Socrates or Rumi and as sacred as one's experience with the Divine.
2. On occasion, back in my teaching days, I would focus the research writing course (WR 123) on the relationship between human beings and nature. One of the books I assigned was John Krakauer's Into the Wild, a story that explores how the world of nature, for the book's protagonist, Chris McCandless, is both a source of spiritual union with the life forces of creation and the source of his death at a young age.
The questions we explored in that course are all before me again as I read Rebecca Giggs' book, Fathoms.
One the one hand, whales have been a mythological source of awe for different cultures for ages. They still are. Whale watching tours are popular. Activists working to stop the industrial hunting of whales have always drawn upon the mystique of the whale to inspire support for their efforts -- and it's worked. The movement known as "Save the Whales" has achieved international success.
On the other hand, the human impact upon nature, the atmosphere, the soil, and the ocean, for example, devastates whales. While whale hunting has, by international agreement, diminished (but not disappeared), whales are endangered by pesticides that get washed into rivers and make their way to the ocean; by changes in atmospheric temperatures as the global climate gets warmer; by all matter of plastic trash in the ocean. Much of this plastic is granular, barely visible or not visible to the human eye. Much of the plastic is very visible. Whales, as a result, ingest plastic netting used in fishing, broken DVD cases, plastic shopping bags, balloons, cords, packaging tape, rope, plastic drinking cups, food wrappers, and many other items ranging from pieces of plastic buckets to styrofoam items.
Ecology is the study of interconnectedness. Humans feel connected to whales in any number of spiritual ways, including drawing inspiration from recordings of whales singing, recordings that can be purchased.
The human connection to whales is also material, not only in the way warming waters and atmosphere affect whales, not only in the way whales' lives are endangered by hunting and human pollution, but by the noise generated by the huge vessels that cross the ocean with many of the goods that help shape the way we live our material lives.
It's overwhelming to read. I'm nearing the end of this astonishing book. I find it very hard to believe that as Rebecca Giggs draws this book to a close that she will have anything hopeful to say in her conclusion.
3. The cheese sauce I made this evening to pour over the broccoli and cauliflower I steamed and brown rice I heated up was a little bit lumpy, but I enjoyed how this dinner tasted and enjoyed traveling back in time to the tiny apartment I rented in in the basement of a building at 361 W. Broadway and how I gave so much effort to preparing nutritious, vegetarian meals for myself while living on the stipend I earned as a Graduate Teaching Fellow. My kitchen was tiny. My income was modest. But, I prepared a lot of delicious food and learned a lot about how to cook in that little place.
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