They keep asking, "Well, how do you feel? Different?" It's weird, but there's nothing that actually feels different. In fact, it all feels much too normal. End of semester, packing up, going home, saying goodbye -- it's all a repetitive great vent at the end of a reoccurring build-up. Summer, job, unpacking, organizing room, reorganizing room, sitting on bedroom floor for hours at a time, going through papers and files and snatches of songs and memories keep slipping in ... it's all happened before. Presumably, it will happen again. The difference is that it won't be happening this fall. And I think that will be the greatest difference. We shall see then ...

After the Great Hiatus ...

Apologies to the world. It's been a while. With only a one-word excuse, "graduation," I hang my head in shame.

No honors, no honoraries, no ring, no sorority, no offices, no positions, no awards, no medals, and yet ...

I DID IT! College. Done. And for only one reason:

I am never alone.

My friends, I thank you.

A Prayer by St. Theresa of Avila

Let nothing disturb thee,
Nothing affright thee,
All things are passing,
God never changeth.
Patient endurance attaineth to all things.
He who has God is wanting in nothing;
God alone sufficeth.

Wacky Word (Friday!): Hylomorphism

Hylomorphism, n.

The doctrine that primordial matter is the First Cause of the universe.

GKC "Orthodoxy" -- All the world's a stage

"According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free.

God has written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it."

GKC: "Orthodoxy" -- the Universe

"According to these people the cosmos was one thing since it had one unbroken rule. Only (they would say) while it is one thing, it is also the only there is. Why, then, should one worry particularly to call it large? There is nothing to compare it with.

It would be just as sensible to call it small. A man may say, 'I like this vast cosmos, with its throng of stars and its crowd of varied creatures.' But if it comes to that why should not a man say, 'I like this cosy little cosmos, with its decent number of stars and as neat a provision of live stock as I wish to see'? One is as good as the other; they are both mere sentiments."

Artes et Scientiae Liberales

What is a liberal arts education?

It was a question for a class I took last spring, "Artes Liberales." I practically drowned in that class. So much heady, philosophical, spiritual, intellectual, ontological stuff that I could hardly keep my head above water -- let alone keep up with the reading.

Yesterday, we had convocation (no worries; graduation is yet to come, but however it works, convocation comes early here). In we trooped, a long-expected flash mob of silly caps and gowns, the graduating class of 2012 (or whatever percentage of that population that decided to show up) to present ourselves to the world as an educated group of adults. We grouped together, smirking at our smartness, like the inside joke that it is. We took our places and waited to nod over the never-failing, annual praise and laud of the humanities.

It never came.

The speaker, a bombastically-snow-white-haired physics professor, stood up at the podium and asked the question:

What would the liberal arts be without the sciences?

Now, in no possible parallel world of any dimension could you accuse me of being a science-y kind of gal. I still can't understand binary beyond the "ten kinds of people" joke (and I've tried so many times!); the noble gasses are as much a mystery as gasoline; and the only pyrotechnics I perform are in the kitchen. I prefer paper to plastic, letters to numbers, and every time I talk about the sky being blue, or polar bear's fur being white, or light being yellow, my dad carefully and concisely corrects me.

But I do appreciate the professor's point, and, what is more, I defend it.

In this world of the MRI and the GPS and the WWW, how can any liberally-educated individual dismiss the importance and necessity, the very wonder and fascination of science? A number of humanities majors, shrugging their shoulders after the speech, laughed and said, "sure, I can imagine the arts without the sciences. What a fine life! No worries about having to flunk out of boring biology labs." They dismissed the question with an artistic shudder. They, you see, had chosen a better life, and were above and beyond that common sort of nonsense.

Without someone to ace that very lab, though, we would have no antibiotics. No fireworks. No frozen pizzas. No air conditioning. For goodness's sake, people, no air conditioning! Consider that.

Even worse, no marshmallows. What horrors.

The professor showed us a fabulous slideshow of photos of the universe. We saw the earth from the close side of the moon. We saw the Milky Way from above, lying before us like a great oozy swirl of blood and glitter in a glass of, well, milk. We saw the furthest point in the universe ever to be photographed. These photos filled me with wonder and fascination. I've seen such photos before; every third grader has. But here, I saw them with a liberally-educated point of view. Before my eyes, I saw the truth, the beauty, and the goodness of the world. What marvel is this! What Aristotelian nonsense have they been pouring into my head: to think that there is goodness and beauty and truth in the physical world, and in the study of the material?

My dear humanity fellows, beyond the practical, pragmatic application of the sciences to life, you should also see the greatness and the splendor and the magic of it all. There is something alive and breathing and wriggling in an earthworm, that even the most marvelous book cannot ever hope to imitate. There is more color and power in the darkest corner of the blackest hole than in all the ink of every newspaper ever printed. When you stand in the bright morning sun beneath a well-boughed, leafy tree, you should see what Newton saw, just as well as what van Gogh saw. Light is bursts of zinc yellow just as much as it is both waves and particles.

So I tip my hat to the scientists.

On the flip side of the argument, though (you didn't think I'd let you off that easy, did you?), scientists likewise need to learn to appreciate the arts. How many physicists scoff at Dickens! How many chemists turn up their noses at Monet! How many times have I been asked, "So, what exactly do you do as an English major? Sit around and read books all day? How is that going to get you a real job in the real world? How are you going to be able to live?"

Please God, I hope to live well. I hope to apply the wisdom and knowledge (such as it may be) that I have picked up piece by piece these past four years, and I hope to put them together in new and colorful connections to form a world of understanding.

We often speak of the two branches of a religious life: the active and the contemplative. While some religious orders adhere more to one lifestyle than the other, all orders incorporate some aspects of both. For the layman, I wonder if the arts and sciences are not similarly applicable. A liberal arts education is one in which these two aspects of life are brought together in harmony. A liberal arts education means making connections between seemingly disparate parts, and understanding how all together they form the multi-faceted, multi-dimensional, infinitely-complex structure of life.

Like bread and butter, Holmes and Watson, hobbits and holes, cups and saucers, the arts and the sciences belong together.