Time to grow up?

Well once again, I've faced the supervisor gauntlet and come through the other side, relatively unscathed...

It turns out however that the chapter I've been working on would have been better crafted had a silver-back gorilla been given the task and told to write about the first thing that came into its head. So I'm back to the drawing-board and preparing to work like a mad-person (or like Si at least) for another 4-6 weeks at which point I'll have to get ready to leave the country again in a little over a month - as soon after New Year as possible.

The reason I have to leave so promptly is that I've been told I may have to spend 8 months rather than 6 months gathering my data as 6 is just not enough. This would be fine (ish) if it weren't for the fact that one of my oldest friends is getting married August 2nd and I was planning to be there. I may not be able to be there now.

Yesterday as I reflected on the interesting turn my life seems to be taking (i.e. I'm having to put work before my friends and make choices based on prioritising work rather than my relationships) I realised that actually this is something a lot of people have to do and it's a little bit about growing up. I'm not saying I want to always put work ahead of my friends - in fact it's something I want to avoid doing as much as possible. But it's good to learn a little bit about working really hard and what that actually involves. It's a fairly new concept for me I have to say.

I'm not sure what God thinks about working hard. I think it can be a valuable and a dangerous thing and maybe God sees it both ways. For me, right now, I think it's part of a steep learning curve that seems to have characterised the last 11 months of my life. It's a good curve but a slightly daunting one at times.

Thursday

Well it's Thursday again... I forgot it was Thursday last Thursday so I did not blog. However I've remembered this week...

I was recounting the story of Esther to some friends today. Kind of to explain why I was called Esther and why it was a bit of a churchy thing (what with my parents being fundies - ho ho ho). So anyway, I was telling the story to them and emphasising just how misogynist it is: how the king is a bit of a woman-hater what with him divorcing Vashti for standing up to him and then treating the local virgins like cattle etc. And so of course they were saying 'oh how awful - what a terrible book'. And I was momentarily sad. But at the time I didn't think about why. Until now...

Now I realise I'd quite like to tell them about some of the good bits in the Bible. I'd like them to know about how ground-breaking it is - I'd like them to hear some of the best bits: Isaiah and his fasting, Song of Solomon and his passion, Paul and his grace, Jesus and his "the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed"...

I suppose that's why we still do stuff like the Advent thing. So that we can remember the bits of the story that we love and celebrate them in art and music and words.

So I was thinking about that. And it made me feel glad that I am part of a something that enables me still - after all my doubt and all my cynicism - to enjoy the story of God and Jesus and the Church, at least when I'm not denigrating it that is!

PS - updates

If you log in to blogger, you can set one of the settings so that it will email you whenever there's a new blog post - that way you never miss any - I'd recommend it! ;)

Learning

Just a quick one to say thanks to my fellow monks for being there - you are providing an incubator for a new and improved James (I believe!). I have been reflecting today on what we learn, and what we do with what we've learnt. It seems to be that God is using monks as a tool to work changes in me (slowly but surely!).

An example being that through monks I have become aware of my own chatter (spiritual, emotional and psychological noise) which I believe makes sense, but is in the main useless, and generally quite harmful to mine and other's well-being too. This manifests primarily in what I say, and I am increasingly open to noticing this, and being challenged on words and their underlying attitudes.

So thanks monks. Looking forward to seeing you soon (Monday?) and wish that it were still school holidays so Eddie and Joe could come and play on Wednesdays!

Love to all,

James

ps...

...have look at this if you have a few spare minutes.

ghostshrimp are a sort of loose collective of creatives with a truly beautiful website and although there's no particular christian or faith perspective there, i love the call to be radical and to live counter-culturally. reminds me of the message of david dark's 'everyday apocalypse' book.

anyhow, i love the final lines of the manifesto post linked above - that's where i want to be.

si

rambling late night post...

[...for this post i was going to pose the question 'will god do?' - heh heh - but then i decided that was a bit flippant so i won't...]

anyhow, amen from me to james' response to your post esther - i like what he had to say about the dance. i guess i'd want to say that god's will for us is maybe more about who we are becoming rather than the specific things that we choose to do... [as the old song goes, 'it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it...'?] i know that i'm always banging on about 'being' over 'doing', but i do think that it really applies here...

meanwhile, i was talking with sue earlier today about how we might be able to involve the eddie and joe a bit more in our monkstuff - and about how as a group we could indulge our creative sides a bit more with liturgy and stuff... maybe that's a conversation that we can share when we next meet'n'eat...?

si

Does God will?

I've avoided thinking too much about what or how or whether God wills certain things for us in recent years - it just seems to be unlikely that God would have a detailed specific plan for every human being that ever existed... And I've never been keen on the inevitable follow-on thought that once the plan was missed - one would have lost one's way irrevocably.

Of course a sensible conception of God's will probably doesn't entail such a precise determination of destiny anyway but it remains a concept that occasionally troubles me - does God will things for me?

Today I was despairing about my work - feeling like I just can't do what I've got to do and wondering how I ever got myself into it in the first place.

There have been moments - one of them during a Catholic mass on Easter Saturday in a small village in Bali - when I've felt transcendentally sure about the 'rightness' of what I'm doing at the moment, but generally I assume I was lucky to get the funding and happened to be in the right place at the right time. However, while I am currently questioning my ability to do what I am doing - there is some comfort to be derived by imagining that somehow it is 'meant to be'... because if it is 'meant to be' then surely I'll be able to do it...

Of course now that I write that down I realise how silly it sounds. Why should I be doing something that's 'meant to be' anyway... life is mostly about learning from whatever circumstances we find ourselves in - most of the world's population don't have the chance to wonder if what they're doing is 'meant to be'. They just have to get on with it!

Maybe that is just what I should be doing - learning from this experience however hard it is because if God does 'will' anything for me then learning is probably in there somewhere, right? Hmmm... I could do with some divine intervention though - anyone? Anyone? Anyone?

'sbeen a long time...

feels like a long time since i last posted here - i guess that pre-greenbelt everything got a bit lost in the deluge of stuff that i was trying to get ready for the festival weekend... wish i could say that post-greenbelt i was living out a much better work-life balance, but there's still a load of stuff to do on the desk and the pressure won't be off for another week or so... sigh.

anyhow, here are a couple of thoughts that are occupying my mind coming back from greenbelt.

the first is a quote from a service by a group called the garden - "prayer is god on his knees longing for us to do something"

the second is a general wondering whether christ'd be happy with what st paul did with the message, whether the religion that's grown up around jesus' teaching and the institutions that claim his name are even remotely what he had in mind during his ministry.

i know that's kind of heretical, but i'm enjoying kicking those ideas around a bit...
see you all tonite, monk-y chums!

si