Okay, so that may be hyperbole. Technically, the trip has already begun. Last Sunday, I bid goodbye to my family and flew to Chicago, where my wonderful boyfriend picked me up and drove me to Wheaton's campus. I met up with the rest of our fortysome team members for an intensive week of classes. In 5 days, we surveyed Old Testament, New Testament, Christian Thought/Theology, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy - 6.5 hours of class in a day, and all kinds of homework and reading. This morning, we had four exams to see what we had managed to absorb from our thunderstorm of a week.
Having refrained from my Bible gen eds until now, this week was certainly memorable. Getting slammed with everything from trinitarian theology, the filioque and the Magnificat, redemptive movement hermeneutics, and Dr. K's infamous theology-as-politics talk (not to mention Dr. Walton's treatise on Genesis One) has been a dousing bucket of water to my otherwise lazy doctrinal studies. It's been wonderful, and wonderfully difficult to understand. I decided to go on this trip I wanted to experience the heat of these places in ways that the frigid Chicago winter would not permit - at our raging pace, it's all I can do to keep my breath.
Despite the rapidity, I have still felt strangely in limbo here on campus. Jerusalem is imminent, yet still only a distant mirage as I type under the fluorescent lights on Crescent St. Packed? Mostly. Excited? ... For what? I have no association with the places I'm going to, except a packet of maps, scrawled notes, my Bible, and my imagination. At the moment, the most I can manage to anticipate is the plane, with its familiar rubber smell. I'd like to create all kinds of images and stories in my head to fill the blank spots, but I have since learned sharply the consequences of dreaming up a destination before you get there. I'm waiting, but I don't know what for.
Dr. Kalantzis read one of my favorite poems in class to kick off our week here. I leave it now with you, as we start our journey. Thanks for stopping by - please remember us in your prayers! Next Post in Jerusalem!
Ithaka
| As you set out for Ithaka hope the voyage is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them: you’ll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul, unless your soul sets them up in front of you. Hope the voyage is a long one. May there be many a summer morning when, with what pleasure, what joy, you come into harbors seen for the first time; may you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things, mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfume of every kind— as many sensual perfumes as you can; and may you visit many Egyptian cities to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars. Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you are destined for. But do not hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you are old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you have gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich. Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you would not have set out. She has nothing left to give you now. And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. |
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| By Constantine Cavafy Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard |
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