Walking on Water-October 15 2009

I have decided to try to write this blog as a substitute for my journal writing. Over the last thirty years, I have kept journals, writing the pedestrian comings and goings of my life. My friend Coyle and I had dinner last night, and he told me about the movie Julie/Julia, and how it was based upon a blog that became a book that became the movie. Coyle knows that I use Merton as a kind of spiritual sponsor/advisor, and he suggested that I use a blog to write about my reflections on Merton's writing. He seemed to think that it might attract some attention.
I've never really used my journal to write anything that anyone might read other than myself. I've never really known what to do with the writing there, other than to mark pages with a couple of signs that I use when I have some creative project that I think that I might like to go back to one day...so far that day hasn't happened. But, as I thought about Coyle's suggestion, a couple of things happened. My ego was excited...an audience! And my fear followed right after with ...an audience! However, a couple of years ago, after I received my doctorate from the University in Texas, I had an awakening about the nature of the obligation imposed upon me from accepting the support of the university in achieving the status and rank of a doctor-that is, I had really accepted the responsibility of a public intellectual. That goal had never been my intention...I had hoped to find a small private college (and here I am) where my public duties would be relegated to the university community. But, I am now recognizing that in the requirements of publication and research, that I am called upon to voice my opinion and subject it to professional and public scrutiny. So, I have decided that maybe I could kill two birds with one stone...use this space to do my regular journaling...perhaps I'll forget about the "public" aspect from time to time and become less self conscious of my writing...and then if I accumulate a reader or two...then perhaps I am about to begin a new lesson in my life....so here goes...

Merton's entry for Oct 22, 1952 begins with "Whether we live or die, we are the Lord's." This passage comes from Romans 14, a reading that I selected for my mother's funeral on September 12th of this year. I chose the reading because it reminded me especially of my father's faith and how he demonstrated it within the communities that he lived and worked. I am still working through my own grief, and a sense that my life now without my parents has been utterly transformed in ways that I can't quite imagine. Because I'm an academic, of course, I've found some books on the subject to guide my thinking, but there is something about the nature of life and growing up that resists the intellectual framework that I rely upon for security. I feel somehow as if I am being pressured along the lines Merton describes to become more like the "image of God" in me...however, I am not sure that I conceive of this image in Merton's terms. I have held a kind of fanciful notion of an act of creation that somehow held an image of me in a potential form (the me in the mind of God from the beginning of time) that is resonant in my own cellular makeup that it is up to me to reconstruct, like chipping away at the stone of my socializations, to get back to an original, unique form that is at my core. I don't imagine this original form to be "christ-like," rather I imagine it to be me-like. Perhaps, if there is some direct connection to the Creator through his creation, the idea that I have in mind for this essential self would at least have a quality like the monad of Leibniz, reflecting in some small way the original act of creation.
See what I mean about "intellectualizing" the problems of my life!