Winter's back. Finally. The high today should reach only 25 degrees, there are 2 inches of snow on the ground, the sun came out. David revels in this type of weather. He likes it so cold it takes your breath away, with white icy snow crunching beneath his hiking boots. I don't particularly like being cold, but I have to admit this is much better than a 40 degree, overcast, drizzly days we've been getting most of this winter. If I wanted drizzle and clouds, I'd live in Seattle. Give us snow, sub-zero temps, crystal clear days, a fire in the fireplace, long underwear. At least for a month or two. So when spring finally rolls around, we'll actually appreciate it.
I'm sitting in a warm, charming coffee shop listening to fellow coffee shop patrons buzzing about Barak Obama. Yep, he's taken the first step to running for president in 2008. Read about it on the front page of today's NY Times. Go, Barak!
And after I get a bit of work done, I'm going to crack open Alice McDermott's new novel "After This." I heard her speak/read at the Festival of Faith and Writing last April at Calvin College and was blown away by her reading from "After This". So I shelled out $24 for the hard cover and am on page 89. Reading great writing is a spiritual experience for me. I feel a bit guilty about this...being the former Fundamentalist Christian that I am....but I find God more often in the pages of great literature than I do in church. Why am I more drawn to reading novels than Scripture?
Apparently, I'm not alone. There's an interview with McDermott in the current issue of Image Journal. She left the Catholic church for a while, and then returned. Here's an excerpt:
"...for me, the transition away from the church was accompanied by a discovery of literature. The questions that the church taught me to ask and, it seemed, was refusing to answer, or was giving answers that did not satisfy -- I discovered that these same questions were being asked in more complex ways in literature. And not necessarily faith-based literature. There was a time in my life when I would have run for the hills if anyone had asked me to read faith-based literature. But the great writers were talking about death, suffering, the meaning of life, and how we get through and live. They were also reiterating the sacredness of the individual, and the individual mind. Great literature allows you to forget your own mind and enter into the life of another human being, to recognize our common humanity and hear their inner voice, to glimpse their soul. It wasn't that I rejected one and found the other. The church only took me so far, and literature itself was addressing all these same things."
1 comment:
Catholic FLANNERY O'CONNOR was my neighbor in '59 in Milledgeville. She wrote MANNERS, but she was snobby, ugly and rude to me, just because my boy Freddy peed in her cabbage. She went to Sacred Heart Catholic, where some women called me "hussy."
www.ruthieblacknaked.blogspot.com
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