Friday, August 05, 2005

The Need for Resolution

The seminary campus – having been torn up most of the summer in the name of architectural progress – is probably at its worst right now. The place looks like an upper middle class war zone, with students cutting across grass (a pet peeve of Learner’s) as the normal sidewalks are all torn up and other optional paved paths are a whole ten seconds out of the way to use. Yesterday, a dump truck hit a power pole and electricity for just about the entire campus – including the student apartments – was out most of the day.

The property’s condition makes for an accurate metaphor of Learner’s frame of mind right now. With just ten days to go before the summer semester is over, he’s very much a wreck emotionally, worn down by ten solid weeks of Greek and two overlapping weeks of spending mornings with his four children in what has seemed an ever-shrinking apartment. He just feels unresolved, much like the wretched state of the campus he sees everyday.

Resolution - that state of being in which conflict yields to contentment - is becoming more and more a commodity Learner wonders if he’ll ever know or have. Worse, he says, he has lost hope that anyone else in the world is experiencing true resolution as well. For once, he'd like to meet somebody who truly has it all together...and isn't afraid to say so and live accordingly.

Learner says he remembers from an early age putting people - whether baseball players or ministers - on pedestals and admiring them, as this gave him a feeling of security and hope for his future that he might one day be like them. After all, that's what can happen when you grow up and get good at something.

Unfortunately, he has grown up to understand the sad reality that, indeed, no one can ever be perfect, and alas, no one is. This fact makes looking to someone as an example all the more difficult, he says, as so much of his current depression stems from the fact that everyone he meets and gets to know has as many issues as he does.

This, Learner says, is part of the problem with the current publishing and music industries (as well as the whole blogging phenomenon): it used to be that only "great" people wrote books and recorded music; now anybody (including him) can do it, and that just doesn't seem right when you look back across history and consider the great works of literature and song. (I assured him it was the same to some degree during my day, but I'm not sure he believes me.)

This is what I’ve heard Learner say. I hardly agree with all of it, but I do know it's affecting him and his family. He said that today at lunch, his three-year-old offered a blessing for the food, and then prayed that "Daddy wouldn't be too mad at us. Amen."

He didn't show it outwardly, but Learner said his heart broke inside.

Amen indeed.