Sunday, September 13, 2009

School begins again...

I always feel like September is a time for new birth. New life. It is the real New Year in the student calendar. It is a time to recommit to devoting oneself to study. You make promises about how much you'll accomplish, and hope that you'll last just a little longer than last year before breaking them.
Everyone comes back from the summer, rested, renewed, and excited. New people come, and you always know that there will be new friends and old friends, and joyful meetings and boring repetitions of answers to the same three questions over and over and over again.
New paper, new books, and sharp pencils. Everything is made new.

Did I mention that I love September and the start of school?

This year, I am looking forward to a couple of things in particular. I am in a seminar that will be amazing. On political thought. I've spent the last couple weeks immersed in Aristotle's Politics and it was been amazing.

I am also looking forward to Anglican communion and mid-day prayers at the college. I think the loss of my daily communal prayer time has been one of the greatest losses of my summer. The structure of prayer is vital for my undisciplined self, and those daily refocussings help me to get out of myself. Especially the communion liturgy.
I always thought that liturgy would be boring, but I find that coming to the same words when you can be in such different places is a great gift. Some weeks I am bored, others I am distraught and stressed, others I am joyful. But the words remain the same, and so each week is like seeing it from a different perspective. Then, after, we go for lunch and talk about theology, politics, personal lives, the Anglican church, and whatever else.

I'm glad that school is starting again. Please, remind me of this in early November.

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