And Away She Goes

Marguerite Eloise graduated yesterday. The ceremony was lovely, and we were all so proud of our kids. Mea was a Senior Scholar which means she graduated with highest honors. She plans on studying neuroscience at the University of Michigan. Watching her congratulate all of her friends and carry out all the rituals and traditions was encouraging because I know she will carry forward the energy into this next more demanding phase of life. 

Congratulations, Mea! I always knew you could do it and I knew you could do it well.

Baby Blue

We took Mea on her last college visit to her most likely school, The University of Michigan.  We enjoyed the talk and tour, as they stirred up many memories for Kurt who is a loyal alum.  I wished, again, that I'd defied parental guidance and joined Kurt there, but then the loss of my scholarship would have been expensive.  College these days is too expensive.  Minds need to be fed, no matter their income.  I guess with that problem you start with preschool and work your way up.  

In any case I was proud of our girl.  The Wolverines will be very lucky to have her.

Fan

The University of Michigan's Fan Day has a way of restoring my faith in humanity.  To see so many people taking such great pleasure in things like meeting football players and talking to cheerleaders; throwing your own touchdown or kicking field goals; or in my case taking off my sandals so I could feel the soft, bouncy astro-turf between my toes.  Michigan's stadium is the third largest in the world and you see that on TV, but you don't really feel it until you're there.  Likewise Michigan is one of the world's great universities, but you don't see it until you are there.  The campus is beautiful, even the North Campus where my engineering husband's, favorite memories are.  He looks at a parking lot, remembering picking up a car and relocating it with his friends.  I look at the quaint houses and think, someday, when the kids are gone...

Step Nine

Books and stories have always been my bread and butter. My early goal was to be an elementary teacher, but when the coursework ended up being more about bulletin boards and laminating I bailed in favor of Secondary English. It was a good choice, even if I really didn't get everything out of it I could have. Student teaching though was a nightmare. My university supervisor said I did quite well actually, but my supervising teacher tried to fail me. When I came home for the summer, I disliked everything having to do with the experience. I spent the next three years teaching preschool and kindergarten.
My supervising teacher was quite a fan of female Southern authors, and the one week she taught while I was there she lectured on Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find. It was the weirdest story I'd ever heard. I'd spent most of my credits immersed in literature from the ancients to the 17th century. The most modern class I'd taken was a survey course of the second half of English literature. I don't remember much after we left the Romantic period. Modern literature was too much of a wilderness for my taste, so those lectures were just strange. Wandering the aisles at my local library the summer after graduation, I came across, The Violent Bear It Away. I picked it up mostly to comfort myself that my supervising teacher had been a moron, and ended up being completely blown away. The book was the most accurate picture of redemption I had ever read.
Growing up Baptist, any contemporary literature I read on the theme of redemption was largely a waste of time--another reason I didn't spend many credit hours on modern lit--and completely focused on the moment of conversion. The whole of the book was about getting someone, anyone, down the aisle to that magic moment when redemption took place, and the rest was unimportant. Flannery's view was raw, honest and awful. She tore open that moment where grace becomes visible and displayed it in all its horror. It was like seeing the difference between a sitcom birth and a real one. No one in my community wrote like this. No one in my community saw like this. If I was ever going to write, I was going to write like that. I began to feel the need for a different community, one that would nurture such honest vision. I began to wonder if Flannery's home wasn't as evil as I had been lead to believe.
This series begins Here. This series continues Here.

Woman without a country

I've been studying Catholicism in an effort to decide if I want to convert or not. In the course of my studies I was given a Catholic study Bible. It has an enormous reader's guide in the front, almost the half the size of the book. I've been working my way through it. Today I get to JEPD, and to Catholics, literary analysis is a perfectly acceptable approach to Scripture for students and theologians, and I find myself really angry.
I went to a fairly prominent if not terribly academic evangelical university. As part of everyone's course work we were required to take either introductory or advanced classes on the Old Testament, the New Testament and Theology. I was put in the advanced group, and my professor for Old Testament was the then president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He was the best Evangelicalism had to offer. Every day we came in after reading our assignments from Cragie's Old Testament, and we'd shred the higher critical approach. We'd be shocked and amazed that such people could in any way consider themselves people of faith. I did very well in the class. A pre-med student and I set the curve and we set it high.
Two years later I took Literary Criticism, and suddenly the tools and ideas we'd roundly condemned and censured as destructive to the faith were now to be embraced and put into practice with vigor. While no one else seemed to find a problem with subjecting Mrs. Dalloway to critiques we wouldn't even consider applying to Scripture problematic, I couldn't do it. The underlying tension between don't think at all here, think intensely there was too much, and I had to withdraw from the class. No one recognized it as a crisis of conscience. The closest they came was considering if the professor was teaching heresy.
Now here I am again facing ye olde JEPD problem and I don't know where to take it. I don't know how to feel, and I don't know who to ask to explain this one to me. What do you do with a thinking Evangelical?