Still Busy... and Grace

I would love to be writing daily (or nearly daily) thoughts in this blog, but the last ten days of so have been so busy and involved with many activities that are not usual for our home life and school life. And at present I'm preparing for a poetry reading at our small town's library on Tuesday evening. My dear partner-in-poetic-crime, Kitty, has been looking over my poems and will be giving me some feedback so I can do some revisions before my reading. (And not sound like an idiot -- I sincerely hope, anyway....)

I think that I want to talk about more than my own work at the reading, however. I'm not sure which direction to pursue: a workshop where perhaps we all try to write? To drag out some of my early work (which involves locating my old literary magazines)? To discuss the value of literature as a whole to the human spirit? (I wrote a paper about that in college that I can summarize; I think I know where it's stowed.) I'm not sure whether to take a biographical or more of a workshop experience angle. Or whether to stick with poetry or expand into literature and teaching/education. I have a lot to think about and very little time to do so. Tomorrow after church I'll seek out my earlier works and perhaps that paper on the value of literature and start there.

Today should have been devoted to working on the above-mentioned talk as "Featured Artist" for our area's creative arts council (which I serve as secretary), but I really needed a day to simply "jell." The kids were nearly as tired as I was today, and with the cloudy and cool weather we are experiencing, perhaps curling up on the sofa with episodes from "NCIS" and "Northern Exposure," courtesy of Netflix, was a splendid idea after all. Yes, I should have been working on my presentation, or at the very least reading my book for Logos (our literary group at church) for which we're reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for October. All of this is to say that yes, I shall be more regular in my postings once this craziness dissipates and providing that I survive my reading this Tuesday....

Recently I've been pondering the word "grace" and ran across an intriguing distinction in a post written for one of the Catholic homeschooling Yahoo loops I frequent. The poster differentiated between the Protestant (evangelical) definition of grace as "God's unmerited favor" -- a definition just made by Pastor Steve very recently in one of his sermons -- and the Catholic definition of grace as "God's very life in our soul," which includes but is not limited to "unmerited favor." Hmmmmm. I'm still chewing about that one....