The Brain of the Blogger
I guess I have a problem with not using resources, goods, things in my possession. My house is so cluttered with stuff—books, journals, photographs, art supplies, inherited items—that I find myself asking, quite often: Why are you keeping this?
In 2009, I purchased ruffedgedesign.com from Bluehost, and I’ve held onto it since. The site has been up and down, showcasing this, that, and the other. I have no plans to relinquish it, but I think it can be put to better use.
I like that this site is almost private, but it being accessible to someone other than me is crucial.
So, here and now, I start expanding the scope of Ruff Edge Design. I am hoping to make it a daily journal where I post whatever it is that I want to keep a record of, and that might mean that I post many times a day. I think that’d be cool, in fact.
So, I’m starting things off with the notes I wrote in one of the many journals that are in the process of being filled. It turns out that I’m not nearly as organized as I imagined myself to be, and I’m okay with that. (My legacy will consist of words and images with little rhyme or reason to where they will be found.) Sometimes, though, my disorganized ways work against me. I turn back to the same old journal entries, thinking: This time, I will definitively deal with this stuff. I’ll re-read it, let it lead me where I need to go, and maybe even get a new post out of it (perhaps something even more significant).
Well, I seldom get a post out of it (or anything else) and weeks or months later, I turn back to the same entry and try again. I had been hoping that doing everything in Evernote would be the answer, but it’s not. There’s an accountability and finality to posting words to a blog/website and hitting that publish button that I am unable to hold onto with any other medium (the tags I add are quite helpful, too). Hence, what follows.
Chapter IV, “The Energy Revealed in Creation” in The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers is absolutely brilliant. The entire book, thus far, is brilliant. Sayers is a careful, methodical writer. She is very good at leading her reader along the path of an argument/thesis. Not only is The Mind of the Maker a book I need to re-read and interact with after this first go-round, but it is also a book I may very well assign to Jack for lessons and one that I want to actively share with him. I imagine us both reading the same chapter, discussing it in depth, then moving on to the next chapter and doing the same.
I don’t want to spend a lot of time now on Sayers’s book. I’ll just say that chapter four makes real a conception of God that makes sense. It does this by explaining how a writer practices her craft, what her works reveal about the writer, and how readers are then to think of the writer.
So, I’ve taken this notebook from my basket and am dealing with it today. Time to look back at where I’ve been in this slim, little volume that was designated for a rather specific purpose.
When I look back at entry one, I note a few things:
- I wrote that I found daily journaling very helpful. This is interesting, since, just today, I was expressing gratitude to myself for deciding to skip the write-first-thing-in-the-morning habit. The reality is that it didn’t work for me. It became a chore to get through and was much less beneficial than spending the start of my day in prayer—no matter how rote my prayers have become in general. The fact is that praying gets me thinking about God, and I need that.
- I am grateful that Bridget wrote her thesis on Graham Greene’s novels and that doing so got me to read/re-read his books, along with Faith Hope Love by Joseph Pieper. In fact, I have a feeling that Sayers and Pieper will have some interesting things to say to one another.
- I started this notebook so I could journey along with Bridget while doing my own thing. In that way, I hoped to be able to help her if she needed it and to, perhaps, end up with a re-write of my own thesis. Bridget has finished her thesis (brilliantly), but I’ve not really begun on mine—or have I?
The questions I have about where this assignment might take me are interesting and are still open to being answered. That right there is marvelous. It shows that lives are always filled with more hope than we give them credit for.
In that first entry, I noted that Bridget may want nothing to do with me and my thoughts. That was not the case (apparently), but I ended up learning more from her and her thesis than she could possibly have learned from me.
I responded briefly to Pieper in chapter 3 of Faith Hope Love, copying down a passage from page 39:
Toward what does the believer direct his will when he believes? Answer: Toward the warrantor and witness whom he affirms, loves, “wills”—insofar as he accepts the truthfulness of what that witness says, accepts it on his mere word. This wholly free, entirely uncoercible act of affirmation, which is enforced neither by the power of self-evident truth nor by the weight of argumentation; this confiding, acknowledging, communion-seeking submission of the believer to the witness whom he believes—this, precisely, is the “element of volition” in belief itself.
The initial entry was written on January 23rd, and I re-read it on April 23rd, when I added this note after that excerpt from Pieper: “It always comes back to communion.”
Another aspect of chapter three in Pieper’s book that I found compelling enough to copy down was a statement by André Gide that Pieper shared: “There is more light in Christ’s words than in any other human word. This is not enough, it seems, to be a Christian: in addition, one must believe. Well, I do not believe.”
That leads me to ask (not for the first time): Is belief only a matter of the will or is it a gift from God? Is it both? Further, what makes someone reject a gift?
It seems to me that these questions are very important, not only in my life, but as far as many of Greene’s characters are concerned and in relation to Gabriel in “The Dead” by James Joyce, the subject of my senior thesis.