This and that

I miss my blog. I've been so sidetracked over the last few weeks that I've barely had time to think of it. But here I am grading again on another lovely Sunday afternoon, and I really can't think of better way to procrastinate...

My reading habits have been pretty erratic recently. Maybe sporadic is the better word. I've set The Kite Runner down for a brief hiatus because I'm pretty sure the main character Amir is about to get beaten to a pulp or starved to death. Not for the faint of heart, this book. So instead I turned to Eliza Minot's The Brambles. Lovely writing. I also picked up The Memory Keeper's Daughter. Whoa mama. That is all I can say about the first few pages. I'm kind of in the market for a less disturbing book - any suggestions?

So in the meantime back to Patchett, because I promised my favorite passage. Here are the thoughts of an old priest now living in a nursing home. Fitting for Sunday, I think:

"It would be incorrect in every sense to say that so near the end of his life he had lost his faith, when in fact God seemed more abundant to him in the Regina Cleri home than any place he had been before. God was in the folds of his bathrobe, the ache of his knees. God was in the hallways in the form of pale electrical light. But now that his heart had become so shiftless and unreliable, now that he should be sensing the afterlife like a sweet scent drifting in from the garden, he had started to wonder if there was in fact no afterlife at all. Look at all these true believers who wanted only to live, look at himself, clinging onto his life like a squirrel scrambling up the icy pitch of a roof. In suggesting that there may be nothing ahead of them, he in no way meant to diminish the future; instead, Father Sullivan hoped to elevate the present to a state of the divine. It seemed from this moment of repose that God may well have been life itself. God may have been the baseball games, the beautiful cigarette he smoked alone after checking to see that all the bats had been put back behind the closet door. God could have been the masses in which he told people how best to prepare for the glorious life everlasting, the one they couldn't see as opposed to the one they were living at that exact moment in the pews of the church hall, washed over in the stained glass light. How wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath were just a stepping stone to something greater. What could be greater than the armchair, the window, the snow? Life itself had been holy...This was not the workings of disbelief. It was instead a final, joyful realization of all he had been given. It would be possible to overlook just about anything if you were trained to constantly strain forward to see the power and the glory that was waiting up ahead. What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for Him" (131-132).