Notes of the week

This past week has seemed pretty unproductive on the surface. My sorting project has slowed down, and I didn't do much studying. I'm also beginning to feel the pressure of what I'd like to get done before I leave for Holden Village. It's already been three weeks since I left my job.

On Monday, my friends and I took their goats on a bike ride and walk. The goats are just so cute and fun.

On Tuesday, I rented a car and drove out to see my former pastor who was visiting in Ventura County. We went for a hike in the Rancho Sierra Vista/Satwiwa area of the Santa Monica Mountains. We walked to a waterfall (with only a tiny trickle of water). It was a beautiful day with spectacular views of Boney Mountain and marvelous oaks along the creek.

The rest of the week has been a lot of mulling, reading, and knitting. Here are few of the random paths my mind/reading has wandered.

Pondering friendship. Seasons Of Friendship: Naomi And Ruth As A Model For Relationship by Marjory Zoet Bankson. I found an older edition—much less "prettified"—in the used bookstore. "Ruth listened / heard call / but did not see the path."

Then, wanting to learn more about the author, I found a 1999 interview with Bankson on the Evangelical & Ecumenical Women's Caucus Web site.

This is a site I've read in the past, and, as I looked around again, I found an autobiographical article by David Scholer of Fuller Seminary. Prof. Scholer arrived at Fuller after I left [Edit: We were at Fuller at the same time, but I didn't take classes from him], but I got to know him through one of my friends and spent Christmas with his family and my friend a few years ago.

I also was shocked to learn via a book review that the author of Writing a Woman's Life, Carolyn Heilbrun, committed suicide a few years ago. When I first read Writing in the early nineties, I had bought the book and begun reading it in the town where my parents live and then started to drive back to my house, about an hour away. However, I was so drawn in by the book, I pulled over at a rest stop and kept reading.

Heilbrun on Dorothy Sayers:

[T]he failure to lead the conventional life, to find the conventional way early, may signify more than having been dealt a poor hand of cards. It may well be the forming of a life in the service of a talent felt, but unrecognized and unnamed. This condition is marked by a profound sense of vocation, with no idea of what that vocation is, and by a strong sense of inadequacy and deprivation. (pp. 52-53)

The EECW site and an earlier conversation got me thinking again about the issue of women in the church and home, an issue that has been stored on the high shelves of my mind's bookcases for quite a while. So I took it down from the shelf again and blew the dust off the top edge by reading through the relevant chapter in Willard Swartley's Slavery, Sabbath, War, and Women: Case Issues in Biblical Interpretation (another redone book cover).

Now, onto the weekend.