I still can't let go of spirituality. . .

When I think that I am perfectly settled in my agnostic way of being, something comes along to remind me that the mystical and supernatural still reverberate bizarrely within me. When I read this essay that a friend of mine had written, it was saying what I didn't know that I needed to say:

Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm confronted and freed me. I had come to a place in my mind where I did not know if I could call myself a Christian any longer. The language in the air of my evangelical college with which I heard people speak of God had become empty in my ears. I thought that Christianity meant mercy and justice and service, but around me I witnessed vanity and materialism and a general apathy for world issues. The disconnection was more than I could reconcile on my own. When I repeatedly heard language about morality and then watched people shrug away the marginalized, I assumed that in order to have passion for the latter, I had to relinquish the former.

Then, Dillard gave me reality, and illuminated the threads that join all of life’s experiences, both the comfortable and the harsh. She juxtaposed the times that life fits like a puzzle with the times that the brokenness of the world makes you want to scream at God. In doing so, she proposed the meeting of the imminent with the transcendent, in all its beauty and terror. Her book left me awestruck, but more so, urgent to follow the passions that I knew I possessed and felt were true regardless of my confession of faith.

Dillard painted the motif of a nun who is a flame for God. Whether the nun was a moth stuck in the wax of a burning candle, or a young girl whose face was burned off in an accident, or a writer providing a lit path through words, she challenged: what else can we do but become flames? I listened to her say that it is high time that we meet eternity and live where the known and the unknown intersect. This is both a frightening prospect and the most blessed task imaginable. Through her writing, I understood faith as mysterious yet livable. The pain of the world is unreasonable, but we must fulfill a duty to ease the grief. After all, “there is no one but us. There never has been” (57). In Holy the Firm I found that my old passions and a new language of faith were both possible.

Tragedy within our own nation

President Bush speaks so often of evil tyrants and those who abuse and destroy, but what about when those kind of people are right among our own ranks? Do we, as the United States, have that much arrogance that there could not be evil men and women right among us, completely capable of committing such atrocities.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0213-01.htm

I don't know what to think about this. . . .

When will it end?

Yesterday, I lost my job. That sucks.

Today, I found out that went 150 minutes over on my cell phone bill for the second month in a row, and it's going to cost me a TON. Great. Especially when I have no job.

When will this end? Can I get some luck in life for once? Life after graduation isn't all a bed of roses. It kind of sucks sometimes. This is the real world. Getting your car stolen. Huge phone bills. Health insurance. Getting fired for the second time in a year. Great. I'm kind of pissed about all of it, and I just want to sit around the house and mope. I know that I should get out and do something, but I feel like a lump. A big blonde lump who is going to be pretty poor soon. Crap.

Anyone have any encouragement for a depressed mopey chick like me?

Name calling goes too far. . .

I have been following the relations between left-wing Venezuelan president and the U.S. government for a while now, and I have mostly been in support of Hugo Chavez and his policies and critique of the U.S. But now, both the U.S. and Chavez are going too far, trying to "one up" each other, with name-calling and retaliation at each other:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4679266.stm

I naively and vainly hope for some kind of redemptive politics that will come along, but everyone is simply looking out for themselves. Selfless political relations are unheard of. What is our world coming to?