Notes from a Tuesday morning

Theology Tuesdays and Thursdays, as I now think of them, wind up being more reflective than the other five days in the week, as a rule. Between my Early Christianity class and Liberation Theology, I look for a place sit, read, write, reflect. Today, it is in a café down the street. Law students at the table behind me review for an exam on property laws, legislators from the capital discuss a bill being introduced by a party who “needs a lot of help,” and a WU employee eats breakfast with students from her office.

My notes on an Edward P. Jones story I am writing about grow; in a few days, I’m going to hear him read in person. Pulitzer prize winner. Macarthur “genius” grant. Reading his fiction, I am struck by the broad sweep of social issues that a few pages can encompass, his analysis more penetrating and “real” than a dozen volumes of non-fiction. That is why English appealed so much to me as a major; we are all studying the same thing, all of us who are interested in culture and society and politics and race and gender and poverty and oppression and beauty and art and what it means to be human. We simply look at it from different perspectives. Jones’s perspective happens to be particularly congenial for me.

A few moments outside, walking from café to library. The sounds of a flute float out the open window of a studio in the music building, filtering through the leaves of a cherry tree which only lately has started to show leaves under the blooms, bouncing off of rhododendrons and whispering joy to my spirit, whatever that may be.

I learn we have a new pope. Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger, has been virulently against liberation theology in the past and participated in church crackdowns on some of its great theologians…Boff, Gutierrez, etc.

The music of the flute is silenced and for a while, I grieve.