Choosy

I haven’t been blogging much of late. I am still unsure what events in my life are interesting enough to be shared, but impersonal enough to be on the internet.

I have been accepted into two graduate programs and should hear from two others in the coming weeks. I am already starting to dread the decision-making process. I only applied to schools I would like to attend. Part of me hopes that the financial aid packages will be divergent enough to make my decision for me.

Another part of me wants to go to whichever school will turn me into Chris Hedges. My admiration of Chris Hedges is nothing new, but with the improved access to libraries and bookstore brought about by my return to the states, I have read more of his work. With this prolonged exposure, his is no longer my imaginary boyfriend; I want to be him when I grow up.

I could quote pages and pages of his writing to cite my case, but I will limit myself to two passages.

I read the following passage on a plane. When I landed, I immediately called a friend who has been struggling with feeling like a failure to read it aloud to her:

All lives, at their deepest level, are failures. We fail to be the person we want to be; this is inevitable for we are human. We will fail to achieve all we want to achieve. We fail those we love in small and large ways. We are failed by them. We suffer betrayal and feel unappreciated. We are never as good as our expectations. We never overcome all our faults. We act in ways that are foolish, inconsistent, mean or thoughtless. This is part of our ordinariness, part of the failures inherent in human life. We live, however, in an unforgiving culture, one that tells us constantly that what we have, along with what we have achieved, is inadequate.
But only if we can accept our failures and our ordinariness, only if we can have the courage to face this wounding pain, can we find sustaining joy and happiness.

Losing Moses on the Freeway, page 164

I read the following passage this afternoon in my neighborhood coffee place. It made me tear up. This was the second time in just over a week I have had Hedges-induced tears in that café. I need to stop reading his work in public. In describing his own religious beliefs, Hedges writes:

God is inscrutable, mysterious and unknowable. We do not understand what life is about, what it means, why we are hear and what will happen to us after our brief sojourn on the planet ends. We are saved, in the end, by faith—faith that life is not meaningless and random, that there is a purpose to human existence, and that in the midst of this morally neutral universe the tiny, seemingly insignificant acts of compassion and blind human kindness, especially to those labeled our enemies and strangers, sustain the divine spark, which is love. We are not fully human if we live alone. These small acts of compassion—for they can never be organized and institutionalized as can hate—have a power that lives after us…These acts recognize and affirm the humanity of others…Those who sacrifice for others, especially at great cost, who place compassion and tolerance above ideology and creeds, and who reject absolutes, especially moral absolutes, stand as constant witnesses in our lives to this love, even long after they are gone. In the gospels this is called resurrection.

American Fascists, pages 8-9.

This might be the best articulation of the faith of a religious liberal that I have ever read. I’m adopting it as my credo, at least for now.