october wedding

yesterday was daniel and jen's wedding, and i hate to say this, but i really enjoyed it. the wedding ceremony itself was really great, and i definitely enjoyed that the minister gave a real perception of marriage. the reception was amazing...it was on the 33rd floor of this building downtown, and the view was spectacular. not to mention the food. :)

i had fun at a wedding. this is hard for me to comprehend, considering my current view of marriage. since i am fairly convinced no one reads this blog anyway, maybe i'll share that view sometime. or maybe i should keep working on it, since i know my feelings toward marriage are largely based on several lies that float around in my head that i choose to believe. they are comforting lies, really, and i'm not ready to give them up yet.

so i'm really happy for jen and daniel...they are so wonderful together and apart, but are individually better by being with one another. and i think that if marriage should be anything, it should definitely be that.

so other things to mention...i've been working on learning some hebrew again, which i am loving. i've also been doing a lot of reading, enjoying that a lot too. the art and wonder of reading pretty much got shelved for me starting in high school, and of course, college gave no free time for that luxury as well. i'm reading Don Miller's second book right now, along with The Holy Longing by Ronald Rolheiser. Rolheiser's book is an assignment from tim, and at first i approached it as such, but now i'm really into it...it paints a good picture of our culture's struggle with spirituality in our post-modernism, and that is something i want to deeply understand. the core of the book is his explanation of God and the Church to a world that largely doubts both. he addresses several divorces that have occurred within spirituality, one being the divorce between religion and eros ("the fire inside of us; our soul"):
"Like all divorces it was painful, and as in all divorces, the property got divided up: Religion got to keep God and the secular got to keep sex. The secular got passion and the God got chastity. We, the children of that divorce, like all children in a broken home, find ourselves torn between the two, unconsciously longing for them to come back together again. But, for now, we live in a broken situation. Religion, especially as it is lived out in the churches, is perceived as being antierotic, antisex, anticreative, antienjoyment, and anti-this-world. The God who underwrites the churches is then perceived as stoic, celibate, dull, cold, otherworldly, and threatened by sex and by human creativity. The secular world is seen as the champion of eros, sex, creativity, and enjoyment, but is seen as anti-God and antichurch. And we are torn; how does one pick between the two?"

this is the underlying nature of American culture, most demonstrated on the Coasts or the City. very much the story in the city i now call home. so again, the question that's always in my mind and in my prayers: how do we start a campus ministry and a church here?