This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Facing the New Year

Two thousand four will be a transitional year for me. I will, Lord willing, have completed my course work for my doctoral program at Loyola, and will have gotten my dissertation proposal approved and have begun writing. I will be free to relocate, if I can find a suitable teaching job, and will begin submitting resumes. I'll need to beef up said cv with conference papers and journal articles--which I should already have paid much more attention to--but my immediate responsibilities and obligations will have drastically altered. Indeed, this coming semester, with two directed readings, will be something of a transition itself. I won't have formal class meetings to sit in each week. I'll be reading and writing and meeting one on one with my respective professors. Pretty much what I'll eventually be doing for my dissertation.

Anna will soon be transitioning to full-time motherhood (as though she weren't already doing that, but you get the point). Goodbye to the regular salaried workweek. Hello to not missing out on the smallest joys and "firsts" of Sofie's growth and development. Hello to more time to give to our local parish, connecting with the young mothers group.

I'm not sure what sort of transitions we're in for as a family with regard to the Orthodox Church. We've already begun small steps in a direction toward, if nothing else, an embrace of a local Orthodox parish. Will this turn into a joint pilgrimage toward Orthodoxy itself? I dare not guess. But I would never have thought we'd have come to this point, so I'm open to further surprises. Patience and prayer are the order of the day.

Those are the philosophical, professional, and familial faith transitions. But there remains my own personal faith transition.

A recent comment by a dear friend (who, actually, was defending me) struck home: "I will admit that his detail-oriented, philospohical style of argument, quite frankly, sometimes just gets on my last nerve." Jane, thank you, I know you meant the best, but . . . ouch.

Readers of my blog will know that for a year now, I have really struggled, when it comes to the Faith, between exercising my intellectual gifts in understanding and defending it, and shutting up and living it. I tend more toward speaking when I feel I should focus more on living. Previously I have made all sorts of promises to myself: total blogging and "dialoguing" silence, only arguing certain topics on certain days--only to fail to keep those promises. And I haven't developed the concomitant focus on Faith-full living.

While the other transitions taking place this year are somewhat out of my control, this is the one intentional transition I need to really fight to make: Live, live, live this Faith I hold. There are all sorts of things I could recommend to myself: less reading (except for school obligations), more praying, seeking more opportunities to serve at our local parish, etc. But I've made all these, and many more, resolutions before. And here I am.

This is a fight with the old nature. This is askesis. And if I could program change more effectively, I would. But mine is a selective discipline. Many of the more important areas of life are under control of the passions--like "impulse buying" I have "impulse areas" in which passion leads to act without much thought.

So, in facing this new year, I know areas where transition will occur. I know where it should occur. But I have no programs or formulas to "guarantee sucess." Three hundred Jesus prayers every hour may have helped the Russian pilgrim, but my starts almost never finish. I guess I just need to look forward to messy struggle, gaining and losing ground everyday.

But that itself, if done more consistently on my part, will have been a great step forward.

Posted by Clifton at December 30, 2003 08:24 AM | TrackBack