Sneaking a blog in a snow storm

So much has happened since my last blog, far too much to include in a biographical entry. It's a shame really, I know how important these years are. I have certainly had much to write about in my typical fields of interest, but graduate school at Harvard has a way of keeping one busy. I write now because it is early enough in the semester to not be aware of how swamped I am, classes are canceled tomorrow due to a snow storm, and my mood is just somber enough for me to pen my thoughts with the genuine recklessness of candor I think makes the energy worthwhile and memorably for me.

My spiritual life has largely been disconnected from my coursework. I no longer feel like any kind of aspiring theologian, rather I feel simply like a historian of religion, the kind of scholarliness purged of the motivational bias that generated the love of the field to begin with. It's not bad, but the questions I began with have been long obscured by the esoteric stratigraphy of academia. Spirituality is something I encounter listening to the five minute childrens' sermon on Sunday, or on my staircase. Staircases make good altars. They go someplace familiar; steps too, in good Wesleyan fashion, offer a vehicle to represent struggling for holiness. Crawling up stairs is a symbolic gesture with no parallel in church furnishings that I'm aware of. Even more an intimate gesture than falling to one's knees, if only slightly more embarrassing. I do see an apologetic aspect to my research this semester, hopefully peeling away some of the falsely perceived distinction between modern Jews and Christians through some insights concerning their relation in Antiquity. Apart from this and the physical realm outside my basement lair, my piety remains expressed by and large through the guilt, feelings of desperation and outcastness, and paranoia of starvation and homelessness that I have come to equate in a twisted way as a sign of intimacy with God. I say "twist" not because I believe it any less, I cannot help that, but because of how bad it sounds when I say it. I have changed so so much in these last few years and I wish there was someone that could remind where I've gone. More than this derelict blog anyway.