Miscellaneous Musings on a Sunday...

This is going to be a looooonnnng posting. Word to the wise: mostly heavy musings today.

Since Easter, I've started going to church again. At first it was because I liked the routine, and now I find that I look forward to hearing Father Van's message. I also find that the days I need it most, he speaks to whatever I'm struggling with.

I realize that I don't always live the life that God probably wants me to be living, but I'm pretty sure that's what forgiveness is about. We try, and fail, and try again. I liken Christianity to learning how to ride a bike. The second I think I'm good with God, I fall---the second we thought I'd be good without training wheels, I'd manage to end up sprawled out on the curb.

This morning Father Van quoted two authors---C.S. Lewis, and Rainer Maria Rilke. I was familiar with Lewis, but hadn't really ever read anything by Rilke. I have totally been missing out for the last 28 years of my life. The second he started to read the quotation by Rilke, I started crying. The last two years of my life haven't been easy, to put it lightly. Anyone who knows me well, knows that I've struggled with a lot of different things, and it hasn't been until the last nine months or so that I've finally started figuring it all out. I guess part of this posting is an apology to the people that I hurt during this time, and they may not even read this. I'm confident, though, that the two people I most want to know how sorry I am already know. Thank God for second chances. :)

I hate doubt and uncertainty, and that's a lot of what I'm dealing with right now. I find comfort in continuity and daily routine, which is why training for these shows has been so good for me during the last year. It seems like an overstatement, but it saved my life last year. Well....that and a few really important people.

I'm going to end this blog with a passage I just read about love by Rilke....I can't wait to start reading more of his poetry and love letters.

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is--solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate--?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.