The Shower and Humility

This, my friends, is what you get when you break one of two showers meant to service twelve guys on the third floor. You can imagine my dismay when I woke up one morning to find the thing lying limp in the tub with broken shards of plastic scattered around like shrapnel. But one trip to the fabric store and half a metre of industrial strength Velcro later (complemented nicely with just a touch of duct tape for aesthetic appeal) left us two functional showers once more. It’s nice to know one can survive in such a cruel, cruel world with just the bare necessities.

This week has been a decent one. I’m currently wading my way through T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land for my American Literature tutorial. I have a presentation to give on it Monday afternoon, but in order to give the presentation I have to understand the material which is proving to be difficult. Eliot’s a hard one to understand. He definitely took the road less traveled by in his poetic style. I get the feeling that I’d really like what he was saying if I could understand it… But I still have a few days to make sense of it all. Maybe enlightenment will come over the weekend. Modernist Lit is pretty rough on my brain. It has so many layers of meaning, but you can’t peel them like an onion. It’s more like a big plate of spaghetti with all the meanings intertwined to the point that to understand one part, you have to understand them all.

Elsewhere in my life, the term proper here is quickly drawing to an end. I have one more week of lectures and two tutorials before I get a week long break. Oxford is on a trimester system, so the regular term is just a bit shorter, but when I get back from the break, I’ll have 4 weeks worth of a British history course that will take up every weekday morning until April 13th. I’m planning on spending the break knocking around Wales with some very distant relatives that live there, and then April 13th-2oth I’m planning to visit Ireland and see what there is to see. Hopefully J and Kendra will be able to meet me for that part of the trip.

Also, Caleb and my parents are coming over for the week after my break and I am eagerly awaiting their arrival. We are planning to spend some time in London and take a weekend trip up to Manchester to catch a premiere league soccer match that Caleb and I are both drooling over. It will be such a treat to hug their necks and see a piece of my family in the flesh again.

Finally, here is this week’s food for thought. As this term has gone by in such a blur and so much information has passed before me, I think I drew a connection between scholarship and religion. It seems to me that the more I learn, the less I feel I know. It’s like all of education is just one big introductory course into the vast amounts of knowledge that exists to be learned about God and His creation. It’s really been quite humbling for me to come to this realization. Instead of going to school to get pat answers to questions that seem so black and white when we are young, our field of vision is merely widened to grasp a bit more of the complexity of our world and existence. And this widened field of vision is something you can’t experience without truly seeking the answers.

As I was mulling this over during the week, I thought about how those I see as the Heroes of the Faith have showed such humility about themselves and their accomplishments, Paul’s referring to himself as “the chief of sinners” being a good example. I wonder if the more we seek to know God, instead of “figuring Him out” we just find Him more awesome and, in contrast, ourselves even smaller than we thought. After all, His power is made perfect in our weakness.

All this to say, maybe humility is more a mark of a certain type of maturity than anything else. It’s totally contradictory to how we think things are supposed to be, but that hasn’t stopped God before ;0). He’s bigger than that. Maybe the ultimate end of all our human pursuits is to leave us humbly bowing before our Creator in all His Greatness, be they secular pursuits or otherwise. Let me know what you think.