Monday, February 14, 2011

Week 4

This week, all three readings talked about the different roles of God in the world. The three authors shed light about how they feel God affects both man and nature. In all three stories, God is thought to play a very prominent part in the world.

The poem “God’s Grandeur” is a poem that reflects the importance of God in the world. Gerard Manley Hopkins writes about how the signs of God’s work are clearly shown through mankind, but for some reason, man tries to deny it. Hopkins compares God to oil and to the sun. He says how the marks of God are everywhere and man shuts in out.

Jane Hirshfield explains God’s role through nature in her poem”Happiness.” She references stories about St. Francis to show how God uses wildlife to teach us. Hirshfield shows the reader how a deeper happiness can be found naturally in the world around us. She defines happiness as living in harmony with nature.

It was slightly harder to figure out the message that Flannery O’Conner was trying to get across in his story “A Good Man is Hard To Find.” The grandmother was not strong in her convictions until her life was threatened. Only when she feared death did she truly show her faith. The Misfit says that if people feared for their lives every second they would make better Christians. I feel that the point that Flannery O’Conner is trying to make is that we need to be good Christians our whole lives, and to live every day like it is our last. If we wait till the end to repent, we will not lead as good lives.

This week I met with the service coordinator at Higher Learning. I am very excited to begin my sessions. The program is very hands on, and it seems like I will be able to make a great impact on the children that I will be working with. This service reminds me of the readings because it is a natural passing of knowledge. As a student, I feel that I will be able to reach out to the children and form deeper bonds then they would have with a teacher. They will feel more comfortable talking to me because I am more or a peer than their teachers. Also, a lot of the children in the program dream of being able to go to a college, so they may look up to me and ask me advice and steps necessary to get there. While at service, I will spend a great deal of time with my three scholars. Over the course of the semester, I hope that they learn to trust me and think of me as a friend so that I can do everything in my power to help them with their academics.

The readings this made me think a great deal about the role of God in my daily life. I tend not to think about how there is a higher power clearly showing itself through nature. I would not go so far as to say that I deny the existence of a God, but I do look to science with all of my questions. I feel like the things that we have not yet answered will eventually be answered. The legends about St. Francis do not teach us about happiness nearly as well as a doctor could explain chemical imbalances that cause depression.

No comments:

Post a Comment