Knowing.Loving.Living

We long for community. We hunger for love. We ache for authentic conversation -- the kind that draws its participants to experience change in the depths of their being as they commune with one another. During my undergraduate years at Roberts Wesleyan College, I sought knowledge. I entered the community with electric excitement. I was thrilled to join a bubble where my imagination could be stroked and my questions could be answered. Yet as I journeyed, I met ugly demons and grotesque gargoyles. Reality bore the name of Brokenness, and its shards screamed of irony. Answers weren't handed to me. Isolation forced me to seek relationship. I was challenged to truly listen, to embrace silence, and to love.

I found solace with Parker Palmer. The Senior Advisor to the Fetzer Institute writes:
The goal of a knowledge arising from love is the reunification and reconstruction of broken selves and worlds. A knowledge born of compassion aims not at exploiting and manipulating creation but at reconciling the world to itself. The mind motivated by compassion reaches out to know as the heart reaches out to love. Here, the act of knowing is an act of love, the act of entering and embracing the reality of the other, of allowing the other to enter and embrace our own. In such knowing we know and are known as members of one community, and our knowing becomes a way of reweaving that community's bonds. (To Know As We Are Known, p.8)

Imagining possibilities and gaining understanding of the world is only conceivable through authentic relationship -- embracing the Other with spontaneity and selflessness. I yearn to know and be known. There is much to converse about...and there are so many to converse with. As I anticipate coming conversation, I look forward to meeting new friends at Duke Divinity School this fall. And as I gear up for beginning the Masters of Divinity program, I'll be posting biblical, theological, philosophical, logological, sociological, ethical, and (...!) reflections in the coming days. I welcome your questions, reflection, and critique. Please enter the conversation!

Oh, and ps: As a little squirt at Roberts, I quickly learned that it (this phenomenon we call "life") is "more complicated than that." Now a college grad, I'm still a little squirt. And -- I assume -- it (all, everything, our constructed realities) will always be "more complicated than that."