Veni Creator Spiritus
Mentes tuorum visita.
Come mid-November, I struggle to find traction in my spiritual life. The church year leaves me high and dry, with the great festivals either tantalizingly close but not yet present or too far in the past to provide me any vitality. When we haven't reached thanksgiving yet I can't wade into Advent and prepare for Christmas... and Pentecost and Easter seem to have vanished long ago. It's been a perpetually dry season for me. Dryness is so necessary for a healthy life cycle it comes out good, in the end, but that doesn't make it any easier.
Because I'm so terribly vain, I think I could succeed in lots of different PhD programs. Probably one of my few ideas worth any merit, however, would be to do one in a field I have no real training in: ethics. I think that a book on "The Ethics of the Fruits of the Spirit" would be entirely fascinating, challenging, and wholly appealing to a broad swath of Christian traditions, if properly packaged.
"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law." I suppose I really should say goodness; but I've long felt that the fruit most lacking in my life is self-control.
In this season of Pentecost (and I'm trying to think of it as the season of Pentecost, not the season after Pentecost and certainly not Ordinary Time; no wonder I'm so burnt out by the end of it. No wonder high liturgical churches suffer, in Pentecostal eyes, from a lack of the freedom of the Spirit.) my BHAG (that's big, hairy audacious goal) is this: to write every day.
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