Tonight I attended the opening All-School Communion of the 2009-2010 school year. This time of the whole undergraduate student body coming together to celebrate our Lord and Savior and our community is the last "orientation" event before the start of classes tomorrow. It is thus a significant time, a Janus-time of liminal contemplation. It is the final threshold of the new year. Maybe that's why I loved it so much. Or maybe it was the freedom of celebration and worship I witnessed across the student body. Or maybe it was the beautiful and true words of hard-won wisdom shared by so many students regarding the importance of being vulnerable with each other, of admitting our times in the desert, of reaching out and finding a cup of cool water in times of need, of glimpsing the joy that is to come. Maybe it was all of these.
Our college president, Dr. Litfin, gave the closing words. After 16-some years of service in this position, he is retiring at the end of this year. Thus, he spoke with the knowledge that this would be his last first speech of the year. The image he shared was of the school year as a race, a long race that we would run, but not alone. We will run this race in community. At some point during the night I had the sudden inspiration: wouldn't it be fun to chronicle this race, this year? To take little snapshots each stage of the journey, little tiny memorials each day as reminders of where we've been? I have a friend who once used her blog to post one picture every day for a month with a little caption or some such, and with this as inspiration I suddenly came up with this idea --
One Campus. One Year. That's my proposal.
I teach Classics at Wheaton College, a 4-yr residential Christian liberal arts college in Wheaton, Illinois. I have come to love this place, and I believe in it. I invite you to share my year, one snapshot of life at a time.
Classes start tomorrow, and I've been working hard to get everything ready. Here are all the books and such for my three courses.
Intermediate Latin, Advanced Greek - Thucydides, Latin 101.
What will this year hold? I'm ready to cross that threshold and find out! New year -- Let's go!
Cut-cover Thucydides makes his web debut!
ReplyDeleteThirteen years in the making! Good call.
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