“Don’t let them in, don’t
let them see / Be the good girl you always have to be. // Conceal, don’t feel,
put on a show / Make one wrong move and everyone will know.” So sings Queen Elsa, hiding behind her locked
bedroom door out of fear, early on in Disney’s Frozen. Scared of opening
the door, of ungloving a hand; scared of loving. And she’s already virtuous enough that she’s
not scared of getting hurt, but she’s scared of hurting others, so she maintains
her voluntary imprisonment as long as she can.
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Jesus renews our love – John 121:31-35, Rev 21:1-5a
5th Sunday of Easter, Yr C; St. Mary's Convent / ND (Farley).
Sunday, April 10, 2016
Jesus gives us the gift of being givers – John 21:1-14, Rev 5:11-14
Easter, Week 3 (Year C); Notre Dame (Keenan / Howard)
When I was in my first semester of the MDiv degree here at Notre Dame, I was rather surprised to get an email from one of our professors asking, “Can I keep a copy of this paper?” It was a class in which we had to write a bunch of short papers over the semester, and after turning in about half of them, she would contact me to ask if she could keep a copy. At first I thought it was a little strange, mainly because I didn’t really see why she felt the need to ask, but also because these weren’t papers that had really contained a lot of original research on my part, I’m sure I hadn’t told her something she didn’t already know in them, they were really just processing and reflecting on the readings that she had already given us. But, then I remembered she was a scholar and a teacher. She had chosen to dedicate her life to theological scholarship because she loved to read good theological writing, and apparently, I was producing something at least approaching that. And, as a teacher, she needed to teach me that I was doing that, and asking permission to keep a copy of something she had a right to anyway, something that I could only have produced with her help and at her command; that was how she went about that. In her deigning to receive my work as a gift, she nourished my scholarly zeal. In deigning to receive my work as a gift, she gave me a gift in addition to the teaching she had already given; she gave me the gift of being a giver.
When I was in my first semester of the MDiv degree here at Notre Dame, I was rather surprised to get an email from one of our professors asking, “Can I keep a copy of this paper?” It was a class in which we had to write a bunch of short papers over the semester, and after turning in about half of them, she would contact me to ask if she could keep a copy. At first I thought it was a little strange, mainly because I didn’t really see why she felt the need to ask, but also because these weren’t papers that had really contained a lot of original research on my part, I’m sure I hadn’t told her something she didn’t already know in them, they were really just processing and reflecting on the readings that she had already given us. But, then I remembered she was a scholar and a teacher. She had chosen to dedicate her life to theological scholarship because she loved to read good theological writing, and apparently, I was producing something at least approaching that. And, as a teacher, she needed to teach me that I was doing that, and asking permission to keep a copy of something she had a right to anyway, something that I could only have produced with her help and at her command; that was how she went about that. In her deigning to receive my work as a gift, she nourished my scholarly zeal. In deigning to receive my work as a gift, she gave me a gift in addition to the teaching she had already given; she gave me the gift of being a giver.
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