Filling what is empty

I've been volunteering at a local shelter one morning a week. It's a sort of floating church emergency shelter, at a different church every night of the week. Sunday nights/Monday mornings it's at a United Free church down the road from where I live. I'm on mornings because I work too many evenings to do those and frankly, I think my health probably isn't up to the overnights.

The guests are referred from a day centre; the shelter is given a list of people to let in. People not on the list are turned away unless there is space after a certain time. There are rules (no drugs, no alcohol, no weapons), there are boxes to tick. I don't know how I feel about this; I can see the point of trying to make it safe, but how do we help those who, through no fault of their own, cannot tick the right boxes? Lord, have mercy. And yet, the other week I heard another volunteer explaining to one of the guests how to get to the day centre, which boxes to tick. Clearly if there is space we take anyone we can.

The day centre offers hot meals and so we don't do a cooked breakfast; rather it's cereal, toast with jam, tea and coffee, occasionally some leftover dessert from the night before. I spend the morning filling milk jugs, sugar bowls, coffee machines, insulated flasks, the dishwasher, the cupboards. Things spill and I wipe up as I go along, almost unconsciously, a reflex when there is nothing left to fill. I don't talk to people much, and I hope that doesn't make me seem aloof.

There are rules about physical contact, about agreeing to meet guests outside of shelter hours. I'm not sure how I feel about this; I do think loving and kind relationships are important, and that physical contact can be part of that. How horrible must it be to have nobody to hug you? But I'll freely admit I'm also relieved not to have to make the decision, relieved that what I might be willing to give has been put into a nice, safe box. Lord, have mercy.

This past Monday someone asked me if I'd marry him. I declined as politely as I could, aware that I am culturally way out of my depth. Another volunteer said that's fairly normal and is a sign that I'm being accepted. I'm not sure about that, but the conventional dating scene must really suck if you're homeless.

The shelter runs until March.

I don't have anything profound to write about it, not yet.

Maybe there isn't anything profound to say. People are homeless and I've decided to try and help meet some of their immediate needs for food and shelter during a difficult time of year -- in a very safe and cautious and organised and cowardly way -- and that's all there is to it. I don't particularly enjoy or dislike the work itself; I don't come back feeling all aglow with lovingkindness. I come away wishing I could do more, and wondering why the shelter is so warm compared to our house (which is a bit nippy in the mornings), and whether the pregnant woman will get some more stable support once her child is born (does she know the father? is he homeless, too? Is he kind to her?) or whether we're going to be dealing with a baby come January, and reminding myself to bring some jam along next week.

Shareholders in humanity -- ethical banking options?

Yes, I know, I know, it's another response to Nick Baines' blog. This time the post was on finances, and the incongruity of the Tory party defending bankers' big bonuses at the same time as proposing a squeeze on the nation's poorest in order to get supposed benefits scammers back to work.

I wrote in comments there:
It may be that there is some kind of scam but I do not perceive it as widespread; even if that perception is in error I suspect that such scamming may be a symptom of a more systemic problem. I think the bankers who are being allowed such astronomical bonuses are the bigger scammers. They’re also much easier to catch, but for the fact that as a society we have allowed ourselves to place so much value and worth in money that our elected politicians are cowed by the threat of these people throwing their toys out of the pram if someone asks them to behave responsibly toward humanity rather than just shareholders.

Of course if I look at it as a systemic problem with the way we assign value and worth, I’m every bit as culpable as the bankers or any real or imagined benefits scammers. Ouch. And so my question for myself, as always, concerns what I can do to mend that, what I must do to re-align my own values and develop integrity so that my thoughts, words and deeds reflect the innate worth of every human being. I don’t have all the answers to that (sorry Kevin!) but I’ll keep trying to learn.

We are all shareholders in humanity.

How, you might ask, am I culpable?

One of the big ways is that I bank at a high street bank. I don't have much in the way of savings, but millions of others who also don't have much are still enabling the bank to lend out our money... probably not all that ethically. I think we've seen well enough in the last two years how unsustainable some lending policies are.

I don't know if there is ever a good ethical case for charging interest on loans; the usury discussion is something for another time. Meanwhile, I'll be having a good look around this website which is provided by EiRIS, and seeing if I can find a better bank.

I'm also interested in your recommendations, if you're in the UK and have banked with an "ethical" bank or credit union.

Once I have any spare money I'll be looking at things like Kiva, Zopa and MyC4.

Generosity

Term has started so I've been busier than during the summer.

I'm settling into the house alright. The excess furniture has been moved around enough that we can live with it. Sharing my home with Sweetie and with Intrepid Anthropologist is a joy. We have our wobbles, and our disagreements, and so far we have managed to negotiate them with warmth, respect and generosity.

My finances are very poor at present. The plan is to get some teaching work locally, which will eventually enable me to abandon my time-hungry commute to the Wilds of North London where I currently teach two evenings per week; once that happens I can get even more teaching locally. At the rates I charge it should be possible to live on relatively few hours of "work" in terms of contact time, but building up a class of students is likely to take a few years. Everything is word-of-mouth in this business.

In the meantime I am trying to keep my spending low. That's hard when my biggest expense is rent and my current income doesn't cover it! I am very thankful that Sweetie is supportive and generous; he has been making up the gaps. That isn't always comfortable but it is a better alternative than trying to do office work (which would destroy my mental health in about two months), assuming I could even get such a job in the current economic climate.

Something I have thought about before and want to explore again in more depth is the idea of creating a sort of artificial stipendiary situation. I would like to live with more security and a higher standard of living than I did as a student, but I'm well aware of lifestyle creep, the ease with which one can spend more and more and more and then end up needing a higher and higher salary to support that spending. I don't want to be on that treadmill. I know I tend to be a bit of a spendthrift, impulsive about buying things for myself or others if I have the money to hand, and so it seems that perhaps the best way to do this would be to limit the portion of my income that I can access easily. The rest could be donated to charity, or perhaps held in an interest-bearing account and the interest donated (I have ethical concerns about usury and need to research this more), or simply spent on others when I see they are in need.

There are some obvious benefits of attempting to live this way, of un-hitching my spending from my work. One would be that as long as I was earning enough to cover my stipend I could do my work without having to worry about whether it would be efficient financially. I could participate in voluntary collaborative projects more freely, without worrying about whether it would impact my paid teaching work. I could take on students who otherwise could not have lessons. I could choose one-off projects based on whether I like them, rather than constantly needing to assess whether they pay enough.

Another major benefit of this type of working pattern would be a certain amount of financial simplicity. I don't mean just the fact that I wouldn't have a lot of spending money and so wouldn't be able to buy too many shiny things... though that is definitely a factor. But as a freelance musician, my actual earned income is always going to be scattered, hit-and-miss. If you've always had a regular salary (at least while you've had regular outgoings) you might not realise how difficult this can be: I can't predict from one month to the next how much money I will have. This is not comfortable. I think it does contribute somewhat to my tendency to spendthriftiness, actually: if there is something I need or want and I do have the cash to get it, I tend to purchase right away because I know I may not have the funds later. Knowing how much I have to spend, even if it's only a little, seems pretty attractive. Even if I were not inclined to give away my spare money, I would need to do some sort of income-leveling exercise anyway.

But I think the real benefit to imposing a structure like this will be that when I find that someone else really needs money I won't be thinking "darn, I could have done without that book I bought last week if I'd known so-and-so didn't have the money for such-and-such" but should be able to be more generous. Maybe that would also be achievable by much more mindful spending on my part, and of course there will still be conflicts (easy example: Person A needs some educational material and Person B needs shoes that fit but I've already spent it all on train tickets for Person C to go visit an ill family member), but the hard thinking about what I actually need vs what I want, and how to balance that against the needs of others, will already have been done.

For now this is all pie in the sky, and it will remain so until I am earning more sustainable amounts on a regular basis. In the meantime I am trying to keep spending low and also to keep track of what I do spend so that I have some sort of guideline as to what is reasonable. I'm also thinking about the logistics, about how much I sensibly need to save before I can just give the rest away, about how much I might try to donate even now. I'm thinking about whether it would make more sense to allocate funds as I usually spend them -- impulsively, based on what comes to my attention -- or whether it would be better to make a commitment to a cause over the long term (something like short-term, interest-free loans for local families having trouble). Perhaps a little of both is the obvious answer there.

If you could choose your own stipend, how would you do it? How would it change your working life if you could be paid enough to live on (but not much more) and be told "Now go do whatever work you think needs doing"? Do you think you'd work more, or less? How would you decide what "enough to live on" actually is? Does this strategy sound at all manageable on an individual level, or does it require big bureaucratic structures? (Remember that I'd have to do most of the paperwork myself anyway!)

If you are already on a stipend, what is the best thing about it? What is the worst? Am I completely bonkers? Oh wait, we all know the answer to that last one.

Help? and Five Miscellaneous Items

Can you help me do my coursework?

I want to get my hands on as many different translations (into English) of the Psalms as I can. I'm setting one of them for some of my academic work, and I want to find just the right words. I don't know enough Hebrew to be able to work directly from the original text so I'm thinking if I look at lots of different translations I can either choose one if it speaks to me particularly strongly, or somehow blend them together. So please tell me your favourite Psalter, and for bonus points, where I can find the text online.

Miscellaneous Item the First:

The Archbishop of Canterbury says in his Easter Sermon:

When all's said and done, the call is to every one of us. We need to hear what is so often the question that's really being asked when people say, 'How do you know?' And perhaps the only response that is fully adequate, fully in tune with the biblical witness to the resurrection is to say simply, 'Are you hungry? Here is food.'

I think this is another way of saying that the way to communicate the existence and indeed love of God to the world is to act as if God exists and loves us, take responsibility for acting for God in the world, teach ourselves to act with lovingkindness. Maybe I am reading too much of my own bias into it. I don't know how I managed to miss this when I was growing up.

I do tend to get caught up in the small details at times. It feels like I need a certain amount of structure and ritual to stay focused on the bigger goal of acting with lovingkindness.

Earlier in the sermon the Archbishop discusses two common responses to the "How do you know God exists?" question. One is to make it so personal, so much a matter of opinion, as to be irrelevant. The other is to try to depersonalize it through a sort of real-world prooftexting. I have often said, when asked about my belief in God, that it is the surest thing I know and yet I will concede on an intellectual level that I could, theoretically, logically, be wrong.

I think I need to qualify that. I know, theoretically, logically, that it's entirely possible that the sun might not rise tomorrow (or that the Earth might stop spinning if you want to be accurate). I know, theoretically, logically, that I could wake up and find that all my life so far has been a dream. Both of those are so unlikely that we simply discount them in everyday life. And yet both of them to me are more likely than God not existing. I know that God lives! I know this through a lived experience, a perceived sense of God that is more reliable than any of my physical senses (after all, sometimes I don't hear things clearly the first time, my sense of smell is quite patchy, and my eyes aren't trustworthy at all until I put my spectacles on in the morning). I've tried to explain this before. But I can't really explain it to anyone who hasn't also experienced it, and everyone's experience may well be slightly different. All I can do is try to show it. I don't think I'll ever get that quite right but it's worth it to keep trying. And somehow I'm paraphrasing the sermon again. Repetitive blog is repetitive.

Hat tip to nearly everyone who linked to the Easter Sermon, but particularly to a certain restless bishop who pointed it out specifically in comments on one of his posts.

Miscellaneous Item the Second:

This is a very beautiful poem.

Miscellaneous Item the Third:

I was up too late last night but still got some academic work done today. Go me! Am determined that tomorrow will be still more productive. It's a little over two months until Big Final Exam. This gives me the Fear. I hope that by then I'll find the love, which is stronger. I almost don't care whether I pass or fail as long as I give an honest and loving performance. But passing would be good, too. Failure would be inconvenient and impractical on a number of levels.

Miscellaneous Item the Fourth:

I had a wonderful conversation with an online friend yesterday about trying to change the world from the current competitive system to a more cooperative one, trying to be an agent for good in the world, trying to show people that they can love and trust, while still acknowledging and mostly avoiding the dangers of the world as it currently exists. I wish now that I'd kept a log of it, because it was the sort of conversation where we were typing nearly on top of one another, nearly identical sentences. And I've had some good online exchanges here and there on other topics (not least in comments on some posts here), and some good, life-and-love-affirming conversations in person about teaching and living. Having friends who agree with me doesn't mean I'm right, of course, it's just the peer selection effect, but it does make me feel quite a bit more hopeful at times. Given how contagious grace can be, it seems to me that maybe together we can make a difference, each in our own little way.

Miscellaneous Item the Fifth:

If I don't go to bed now I'm going to have another painful and unproductive day tomorrow. Can't be having with that.

Goodnight, friends.

Who do you say that I am?

What is a Christian?

It really depends who you ask. Some say that being Christian means following Jesus. Some say it means worshiping Jesus as Lord and King. Some say it means acting with love in the world.

Am I a Christian? Again, it depends who you ask. I don't suppose God minds much either way what I call myself.

There are people who would classify me as Christian based on my spiritual practice: I pray daily using Christian prayers and I attend church most weeks, though not on Sunday mornings as is traditional. But I don't think that going to church makes me a Christian (where did I read that line about going to the garage not making you a car?), and I don't think that using Christian prayers or prayer structures makes me a Christian. I do think that such prayer can be transformative and over time it may transform me into being Christian (or more Christian, if you think I already am). That's a risk I'm willing to take, if it also makes me more loving, more compassionate.

There are people who would classify me as Christian because on some level I am trying to engage with God, to discern God in the world, in a Christian context. There's a lot of Christian doctrine that I don't believe or can't relate to, a lot of detail that I am trying to understand and really failing to grasp most of the time. But I don't propose that one has to understand all the doctrine to be Christian. Wanting to understand it may be a considerable step.

But... I am not trying to understand God in a Christian context because I think that is the only true or valid context, but rather for more pragmatic reasons. I tried elsewhere. I got so pissed off with Christian doctrine and the hypocrisy I saw in the Christian church that I up and left for ten years, and looked elsewhere. It didn't work very well. I learned that all religions have doctrine with which I will struggle, all faiths have a motley assortment of adherents, some of whom are perhaps more spiritually astute than others. So I'm trying to understand Christianity because it's more convenient than trying to understand another faith. It or some variation of it is the dominant faith in the culture where I grew up, it is the established religion in the country where I live, and though I will need to learn a lot to get close to understanding it I have a head start as much of the worship and study materials are already in English and easily accessible. I need to consciously acknowledge and discern God in my life, but every lens I can look through is speckled or tinted or just plain cracked. I may as well use the lens that is closest to hand. I need to talk to God, to worship God, but I'm not very good at finding the right words. I may as well use the same imperfect words as the established church in this country, and hope God will, in mercy, know what I mean.

Some would use creeds as the ultimate earthly test of whether someone is Christian. If Christianity were a faith only of belief and not of practice then I might agree with that. But I don't fully agree with any of the Christian creeds as I currently understand them. And I've always been of the opinion that what you do or attempt to do is more important than dogmatic adherence to a set of rules about what you may or may not believe to be true.

There is a song, most of which I can't remember the words for, but the chorus ends "...and they'll know we are Christians by our love." By our love.

I fall short there, too. I'd love to love the world more. I am growing in that, every day, every hour even; as time passes my awareness of God's love mostly increases and my love for the world seems to increase in parallel with that. But my actions don't reflect that as they could. I try, and fail. If being a shining example of God's love in the world is what it is to be Christian, then I desperately want to be Christian... and I know I'll never get there, I'll never reach a standard high enough that I don't feel I have a lifetime of work ahead of me. But it's worth trying anyway.

If wanting to be a shining example of God's love in the world, if trying to do that and failing most of the time but trying anyway, is what makes someone Christian, then I already am.

I still don't know where that leaves me with taking Eucharist! People like their labels and rituals. But with all due respect, that seems like a small doctrinal detail if I've the potential, the opportunity, to act for and with God in all of life. Maybe I'll change my opinion on that if my understanding of sacrament changes, but if loving action isn't an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace then I don't know what is. As it's a small doctrinal detail that some people take very seriously, though, I'll abstain until I have a better understanding.

Praxis

Last night I posted a sort of snapshot of my current beliefs.

Today I am going to look at a more practical side of things.

I would say that the major change in my spiritual practice over the last few months has been that I am regularly engaging in structured prayer in a way that I have not before.

When I was young, one of the problems I had with Christianity as I encountered it then was that it seemed to be something we did on Sundays, and very fleetingly with grace before meals, and that was it. When I was very small I was taught to say bedtime prayers but it was obvious as I grew older that nobody else in the family did this. Somehow I stopped, too. I did try to pray in church, but my experience of church wasn't something that supported my private prayer. It didn't help that we moved every few years and so our little family was the only continuous community we had.

When I was observing Judaism I took on a lot. I took on habits of dress that were fairly restrictive. I took on dietary changes that make giving up chocolate for Lent look like a walk in the park. I took on making Shabbat, complete with timers for the lights and not cooking after sundown on Friday and not carrying--and there was no eruv in North London then. And all of these felt like prayer, in their way. But they were also very much things I did to fit in with the community. The bar is set pretty high for conversion to Orthodox Judaism and much of the time I found myself concerned with 'passing'. The community was warm and welcoming, and I wanted to be part of that.

Communal prayer in Judaism was strange and mysterious to me at first, then grew more comfortable and beautiful as I learned more of the language. Last spring I found, visiting a friend, that I could still get through much of the Grace After Meals, despite not having prayed it for years. But... again, my communal prayer did not support my private prayer. As a woman I would only be expected to pray once per day but I did not even manage that, most days. I did not even manage grace after meals when I was alone. I think this is partly because it was too hard for me in Hebrew, and partly because I was already doing so much and worrying so much about how I looked to others. When I moved to a geographical location where the community was less accessible, eventually all my practices faded away. My prayer had been so community-based that without the trappings of community it couldn't sustain itself.

I suddenly feel nervous about telling teh entire internets about my prayer life. A bit silly really. But I don't want to start writing about this just for the comments, I don't want to present myself one way and then find that actually, I'm another way, I don't want to walk into a trap of saying I do something adn then feeling a sham on days I don't manage to do it. So please, friends, take this, like yesterday's post, as a snapshot of where I am now, not a commitment to stay there.

Sometime in January I started praying Morning Prayer, first from the Oremus website and then the Common Worship version from the Church of England site. I think it was very soon after I read Jane R's book, When in Doubt, Sing... somehow I stopped worrying about doing it wrong, stopped worrying about agreeing with every single word and decided it would be better to pray, if that's what I want to do, than not pray. I've missed a few mornings here and there, usually due to internet outage. When I am home or alone I sing most of this, and read the readings aloud. When I am staying with Sweetie or when I'm so disorganised that I end up praying on the bus I pray silently, but that often means singing in my head. An interesting recent development has been finding myself imagining the psalmody in parallel fourths and fifths; I didn't make a conscious decision to try it, just noticed I was doing it.

I found myself wanting to pray by mid-afternoon most days. So I did, but sometimes the words wouldn't come, or more often I'd get distracted. I have a very wandery mind. It's easy to slide from praying to the sort of fidgety worrying that just wears me down.

I bought a book, Work and Prayer, which has Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, Midday Prayer and an order for Compline in it, for Monday to Saturday. I started using the Midday Prayer and Compline many days. The midday prayer has most often been silent and I might get to it anywhere between about 10.30am and 5pm. It's hard to control my schedule in the middle of the day so I end up praying in breaks from rehearsals, praying in lunch break, praying on the train or the bus. Compline, I usually sing, though quietly so as not to wake my flatmates. I've been doing both of these most days since I bought that book, which the magic of the internets tells me was at the end of February. I'm not as consistent with these as with Morning Prayer.

Work and Prayer lacks much in the way of seasonal variation. Singing Morning Prayer from the C of E website and finding that oh, the text changes for Passiontide, I decided to look at other resources. I poked around the website. I considered printing off the bits I was going to use. I realised that by the time I've finished deciding what I want and printing it I may as well just go and buy a book, so on Friday I did that. I took myself off to the Church House bookshop to see what I could find. I ended up with Daily Prayer, which I will use at home when there is no internet or when I am brave enough to read the scripture from a Bible rather than nicely tucked into a website (this could be a good thing, giving me extra context. Or it could lead to entire mornings spent reading the Bible when I ought to be doing other things. Having a wandery mind is hazardous). But it's a bit big to carry around so I've also got a copy of Time to Pray, which has an order for Prayer During The Day and an order for Compline but more seasonal variation in it than the resource I had been using.

I still want more of the Summary of Law. To me this seems like the most important thing and yet it doesn't seem obviously prominent in any of these structured prayers.

I've also been going to church. I teach on Sunday mornings so the main service is out of the question. In fact I usually teach Sunday afternoons, as well. But my usually-in-the-evening students have cottoned on to the fact that early afternoon is easier for them, and my late-afternoon student can often do earlier in the day. When there is Evensong at Leafy Suburb Church, where Deacon Friend is spending her curacy, I go there if I can juggle my schedule appropriately. I don't know now whether I'm going to see her or for the worship. I've been made to feel very welcome there, despite my coming from so far away. When there is not Evensong at Leafy Suburb Church I go to Church on Hill for Evensong instead, which is in the area where I teach. I have to say, I don't feel as warmly welcomed, I find the music more polished but less heartfelt, and there have been some sermons which left me more confused than anything else. But week after week it's there, and I finish teaching, and I may as well drop by really. So I do.

My teaching schedule has changed a bit; I've lost some students. My first thought, after the teacherly regret, was that I might get to sleep a bit longer on Sundays. My second was that I might find an early service to go to. I'm not sure about that; the transport logistics don't work out very well at all.

I'll be moving house this summer, moving to a different area of London. I'm choosing the area based on many of my friends living there already and the possibilities for teaching from home, among other things. But recently I've also been thinking, "must check out churches in that area, see which are places I might feel comfortable, see where I might get involved even if I still can't make Sunday morning services." I can imagine myself getting to a weeknight Parish Eucharist. I can imagine myself getting to Morning Prayer at 8am somewhere.

I wrote, in an earlier post, of how others have influenced my own spiritual searching. I want to make clear again that none of them have put any pressure on me to change what I am doing or to encourage me to do as they do. In fact, all of them would be saddened, I think, if they thought I were doing this out of some desire to please them. But on days when I feel a bit sluggish, knowing that Deacon Friend will be saying Morning Prayer makes me want to get out of bed and do so too. On days when saying Compline seems like a silly, childish, goody-two-shoes empty ritual, knowing that Catholic Friend prays and takes it seriously helps me to take it seriously, too. And when I read prayer requests, great long lists of them on some of the blogs I read, I offer up my silent or spoken prayers then and there but I am also reminded, invited, to take time to pray at another point in the day. So while I'm not attached to any one community very strongly right now, I do feel supported, generally, by a community of prayer. I think that helps. And I think that maybe part of what I'm looking for in a church is a geographically convenient group of people to pray together with, something that will be able to carry me along when I'm less able to pray on my own than I am right now.

I don't know where I'm going with any of this. It feels like something I am doing out of need and curiosity, not something I am doing out of obligation or trying to impress others. So I am trying to take a wait-and-see approach, trying not to get too attached to this sort of structured prayer as any kind of hard rule but rather trying to remain faithful to the curiosity, trying to see where I end up next.

I've been doing all of this in a Christian context. This is partly because after trying to learn even the slightly familiar but new to me faith of Judaism, I don't underestimate how hard it is to learn something that isn't the mainstream culture. It's partly because the resources for Christian prayer are so accessible online, which is a by-product of some form of Christianity being the mainstream culture again. It's partly because people I love very much happen to be Christian and I want to understand them better. And it's because I think what I perceive as the underlying message of Christianity is true, and I'm willing to put up with some cognitive dissonance on issues like the Trinity if using Christian prayer structures is going to help me love the world better.

I don't think that makes me Christian. More on that in another post, though. This one is too long already.

Itch-a-Sketch

I'm meant to be working on an essay today, it's due tomorrow. Organ improvisation and DuPré's Vespers Op. 18, and how he communicates the text (bits of Song of Solomon, Ave Maris Stella, and Magnificat) in the music, in case you're wondering, but most of you aren't! The potential to get sidetracked into Gregorian chant is very high in this essay but I've got most of an outline done, just need to keep fleshing it out with more detail until I get to my required number of words.

So, since I'm meant to be working on an essay, I've actually been thinking profoundly deep theological thoughts pissing about on teh internets.

Things I've been thinking:

A post at Questioning Christian has made me think that maybe we humans go about this whole "repent and be saved" thing the wrong way around. A strong sense of the existence of God and an acute sense of my own imperfection don't seem to be enough for me to actually improve: perfectionism takes over, and I get stuck. A sense that God loves me, a sense that God's love is abundant and freely given and absolutely unconditional, has the opposite effect. I worry less about getting things 'right' or 'perfect' and just try to love the world as much as I can, with God's help. The perception of God's love in my life right now is fairly embryonic, I'd say. My conscious awareness of it can be fleeting and I am most unaccustomed to feeling this way. But it's there sometimes, and it seems to be growing. And I think that is good. And I think, maybe, that is making it easier to improve.

I read a lovely webcomic called xkcd. This comic has been stuck in my head since it was posted last week. I keep thinking, "Hey, there's a cross in the etch-a-sketch, what does that mean?" and I know it's just how the thing works, nothing deliberate, and I'm pretty sure the author didn't mean any reference to Christianity. But...it itches. There's a cross in the etch-a-sketch. I feel that way about Christianity in general, I think: I know it fits somewhere in my life, but I'm really not sure about the how and where of it. Perhaps could fit somewhere is more accurate: I'm still not convinced it has any truth to offer that other major religions do not touch on in some way, and many of the reasons I feel drawn to Christianity now could very well be social and personal rather than based on any profound spiritual uniqueness. But the etch-a-sketch could have had a triangular mechanism, and the reasons it doesn't are pragmatic, not aesthetic. Maybe it's okay for some of my approach to spirituality to be pragmatic, too.

I'm not sure how those two things relate to one another, but it does feel like there's some connection.

Pragmatism says it is well past time for me to eat lunch.