Three 20-something women trying to figure out what it means to be lay, Catholic, and modern all at once.


September 26, 2009

A Little Bit Random.....

I apologize for a little randomness in my post today. But I had an insight that I wanted to share. Yesterday, I went for a run around my campus, and I was getting frustrated at my so very out of shape body. There was a perfectly in shape girl right in front of me. My thoughts: "I hate this....why do I have be sweating it out, huffing and puffing, while that girl with the perfect body struts confidently right in front of me....ugh!" Then I was listening to Agatha's musical suggestion: Ingrid Michaelson's 'Are We There Yet? Probably not the best kind of song to listen to as I was trying to get motivated to run.

But as I was listening to this song, and remembering Agatha's words about how this song spoke to the sentiments of homelessness so many of us have in out twenties -- it hit me. Homelessness. Is it a single person's dilemma? Maybe to some degree. But aren't we all in a state of homelessness? At the risk of sounding like a post modernist or Heideggerian, let me explain. St. Augustine speaks of this life as a 'peregrinatio' or pilgrimage -- we are never at home in the world, because our home truly is life with God. We are pilgrims going to Rome or to the Holy Land - visiting holy places in an attempt to know God more and more and to seek His face, because it is Him that we seek. Sometimes, we even try to fill our lives with hopeless distractions and things that we think can take the place of we truly seek, and we desperately hope that these will make us happy. So maybe the twenties are time in life when experience this homelessness in a unique way, but I think our homelessness is a perpetual human state - well, at least as long as we are living in this world.

2 comments:

Julian said...

Um, hello, you CANNOT work out to Ingrid's slower songs. Your heart rate will drop and you'll lose your breath! Go back to the Beyonce cd I suggested awhile back :)

I like the image and theology of the pilgrim much better than someone who is "homeless." We are all trying to get home. Life seems like a very arduous process of spiritual detachment, doesn't it? Even if we come from the most wonderful home as children, it still isn't the home we're trying to get back to. What awaits us will be more perfect because of it's permanence (among other things).

Carry on, pilgrim!

Agatha Magdalene said...

i didn't recommend the song...julian did! :)

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