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| So many stories! |
And just like that, another (!) two weeks of school vacation
have come and gone, and the last trimester of my class started last week. On the tram to class I tried to
recall the feeling of riding to the very first class, and found I couldn’t. It felt
like there had been some fundamental shift over the past few months. But I
couldn’t put my finger on it exactly.
My dearest
6-year old is big into fantasy, but not exactly in the usual geeky way that
involves memorizing lots of facts about another world. His way involves
grasping a few tidbits and then expounding on them. At length. The resulting “stories”
are pretty much incomprehensible to everyone else, but telling and drawing them
is his favorite pastime these days.
Periodically
he’ll stop the stream-of-consciousness narration long enough to check whether
I’ve been listening. “Mommy, will he overlive?” Luckily for me, “oh I don’t know,
what do you think?” generally gets me out of this. Also, the character in
question almost always overlives. ‘Overlive’ being my son’s understandable but
incorrect translation of the German word überleben.
I’ve gently informed him on several occasions that the English world is ‘survive,’
and sometimes he remembers, but 'overlive' seems destined to become a permanent
part of our vocabulary.
Relatively
early in my Zurich life I was talking to my very wise friend Kate about the
all-consuming life of a stay-at-home-mom and she said, “well, you’re exhausted
by housework and the only time you have for yourself is at night. To feed your soul,
you’ll just have to find the thing you’re willing to forgo sleep for.” My brain
said ha! That thing does not exist! And
in the intervening few years, independent projects came and went. It's been so cool to see the kids develop their own passions. And I've wondered more and more whether I'd ever find my own. I think the shift that's happened recently is that...well, I almost feel like writing this will jinx the whole thing. But this project…thinking and writing about spirituality…it seems like it
just might stick. Not because I’ve succeeded wildly, but because I’m still willing
to lose sleep over it. It’s overlived. (And yes, Kate, if you ever read this: you
told me long ago that my thing would be writing. I just had to come around to it in
my own stubborn time.)
This
trimester we’ll be talking about ethics, and the title of the term’s reading
material is “act Christian, be humane.” Shouldn’t being Christian automatically
include being humane? But of course history, not to mention today’s news, is
full of Christians acting inhumanely. The author of the course material
writes that she is very proud of her title. “Act
Christian,” she says, has an almost aggressive element to it – “as apparent in
the ethics of Jesus himself.” (?) By pairing this with “be humane,” she says, she
meant to call this aggressive element into question, remind us that “acting
Christian” and “being humane” are not one in the same thing, and compel us to
think about the idea of nonviolent power. I’m looking forward to this!
Our new
instructor is a pastoral
counselor at a psychiatric hospital. Introducing herself, she said that she finds
that the “toolbox” she brings to patients is significantly different from that
of the psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers she works alongside –
and that for very sick patients, the tools of faith can be a critical lifeline.
This struck a chord with me because it gets to something fundamental about the
way I approach faith. There are all sorts of problems within and around the
Church. But there are things here that
are hard to find in other places. What tools are in the spiritual toolbox? Another
good meaty question to start the term with.
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