A Sunday afternoon with Madeleine L'Engle

Yesterday, I read Madeleine L'Engle's memoir, Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage. I've had this book in my collection for nearly ten years, but this is the first time I've read it, and now I know what I've been missing. It's a thoughtful, spiritual book that explores some of the more difficult questions about suffering in this life--the kind of questions I wished we talked about more often in Sunday school. L'Engle's contemplation of marriage in this book reminded me of Stegner's in Crossing to Safety (another great book). My copy of the L'Engle book is now littered with post-it notes marking insights that struck me, like this one:

"As a human parent I have had to allow my children to make their own mistakes, to become free adults. I cannot rush in and correct every error in judgment, fix everything that goes wrong. Parents who attempt to do that usually end up with children who grow into emotional cripples. If we accept that we have at least an iota of free will, we cannot throw it back the moment things go wrong. Like a human parent, God will help us when we ask for help, but in a way that will make us more mature, more real, not in a way that will diminish us" (99).

I love this idea that even in the moments when God comes in to rescue or help us, He does so with His eternal purposes in mind. He won't deviate from what is best from us, and the reason for that is so that we can become more mature and more real. Perhaps this is why we sometimes feel like we're not being rescued--that we're being allowed to flounder--because God's goal is not to save us from pain, but to allow the pain to purify us until we're changed, inside and out--until we're more expansive as human beings, and not less so.

We're live!

This is what I have to show for my summer: new.lds.org

It's not a prospectus, but hey.

Potential

"We see ourselves in terms of yesterday and today. Our Heavenly Father sees us in terms of forever. Although we might settle for less, Heavenly Father won’t, for He sees us as the glorious beings we are capable of becoming."

--Joseph B. Wirthlin, "The Great Commandment"

Thinking

Today, I read this:

"Thinking, which is a method of reconstructing experience, treats observation of facts, on the other hand, as the indispensable step of defining the problem, of locating the trouble, of forcing home a definite, instead of a merely vague emotional, sense of what the difficulty is and where it lies. It is not aimless, random, miscellaneous, but purposeful, specific and limited by the character of the trouble undergone. The purpose is so to clarify the disturbed and confused situation that reasonable ways of dealing with it may be suggested."

--John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, pg. 141

Yes, I've been reading for my thesis. Yes, I'm enjoying pragmatism.

AND, next time someone tells me I'm over analyzing, I'm just going to say that I'm simply trying to "clarify the disturbed and confused situation that reasonable ways of dealing with it may be suggested."

Just sayin'.

Thank you, John Dewey.

Speaking of Facebook . . .

My sister just showed this to me. Hilarious. And so true.