Life Goals

In a junior high Family and Consumer Science class, we were each given a piece of paper with questions dealing with what we would like to do when we grew up. We were supposed to think about what we saw ourselves doing in the future.

I sat there and sat there, and I couldn't see myself doing anything. Well, other than watering the flowers outside of my cottage as I walked around in sandals and a sundress. That's what I saw in my head. So I wrote that down. I don't remember the teacher's comments when she saw that my life goal was to own an English-style cottage with sloping roofs and ivy up the side and to water my plants and sit and read in the sunshine. Doctor? Teacher? No, it didn't llamarme la atención.

Currently I am not doing that. I'm pursuing a graduate degree and working as a research assistant. And often I feel a little lost, like I'm a little minnow trying to swim upstream with a bunch of muscled salmon. That sounds a lot lost. Okay, maybe like a little kid trying to use the big words and use the same gestures as the big kids, trying to fake my way through until hopefully I actually do start to get it, do understand, can make my own sociological analyses and feel confident about them. Right now I think I'm just pretending.

Recently I took a personality test through the Enneagram Institute, and I turned out a 9, a peacemaker. Several of the graduate students I've talked to are 4s and 5s - Individualists and Investigators. I haven't met anyone else who identifies as a Peacemaker; easy-going, receptive, complacent. These make me wonder if maybe I am lost; maybe my personality doesn't prepare me to be a world-class sociological researcher.

Then why am I here?

When I took my first sociology class as an undergraduate student, it opened my eyes. I learned so much. I started thinking about my assumptions and prejudices. It changed me. I think it made me a better person. I continued with sociology, planning on doing social work. After an internship where I realized that it was mostly paperwork and a lot of redtape and dealing with unhappy children and unhappy parents, I thought maybe I could try something else. A lot of my professors, and friends, had been mentioning graduate school for a while. I started to take them seriously. I'm smart. I'm doing well as an undergraduate. Maybe I could be a professor and help students view the world in a different way as I had been helped. I read Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and felt excited by his encouragement in the value and validity of Christians working in higher education. I wanted to be part of that.

So here I am, halfway through my first semester. I have research projects that I keep sludging along with. I have three papers staring at me like a mountain in the Black Hills and I have my little MacBook of a pickaxe as I try to create Crazy Horse. But I'm also working as a teacher's assistant in an introductory sociology class, and I like that a lot. I was able to lecture on a couple of topics. I've had one-on-one interactions with some of the students, explaining on a personal level the nuances of a particular sociological concept. I like that.

We'll see where I end up. For the time being I will continue chiseling away at my future publishable papers, thinking about how my life experiences and my individual personality meet up.

So this frog hops into this bar...

I've been thinking about sex way too much recently. Being a TA for a professor who's teaching Sociology of Sexuality might do that for you.

I'm beginning to think that we do not know how to order our sexuality. Christians, Americans, young, old. How we teach sexuality to the young, how we think (or fail to think) about it in our own lives. We err either by licentiousness or by denigrating the body. In truth, God gave us bodies, with all of its emotions, desires, faults, and beauty. We order our sexuality out of honor for God. Our bodies are good, created by God. We are to bring glory to God with our whole lives, by moderation in our pleasures and chastity in regards to our sexuality (both married and unmarried)

Related to sex and sexuality is the simple fact of embodiment. I have a physical body that has needs, desires, problems, issues. I am never disembodied. I sit and study and my body causes me discomfort. I can forget about it for a time, but it doesn't let me ignore it for long. I have to pee or I'm hungry. Prosaic reality after reading Shakespeare or Paul.

What happens when we fail to use our bodies rightly? Related to sex, yes, but related to everything else that our bodies do? Is it wrong to not take care of our bodies? And then, what does "not taking care of our bodies" mean? We will all decay and our bodies will lose their strength, so to what level should we attempt to maintain health, and when do we gracefully let our bodies age?

Right now I kind of like my body. I'm young, spry, etc. It doesn't cause me too many problems. As I grow older I want to give my body grace and have patience with it. But what if I get arthritis? What if I get cancer? What if my body ages in a way that is painful?

I think that God gave us bodies for a purpose. We will never be disembodied spirits but will exist in resurrected bodies. they are not to be hated, as some soiled cloth that we must live with for a time but will eventually discard. We will be renewed but still embodied. Recently I wondered if we will still have internal organs in our resurrected bodies. It's odd to think of myself having a liver. I've never seen it, but I guess it's pretty important.

Paul says that he beats his body and makes it his slave, and as I struggle between these dichotomies of making the body everything or of nothing, there are many verses (such as this) that I am not sure how to understand rightly.

It's probably right for us to think seriously about embodiment and sexuality, especially as we live in a culture inculcated with sex and obsessed with a young, firm, trim, body. But there are other aspects of life that are also important. So many things to think about.

I should only tell funny stories on this blog. Thanks for reading.

Even as I have been fully known

I had the privilege of speaking publicly in the sociology/anthropology department chapel today. I'm copying and pasting my speech so that you can read it.

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My name is Karen Hooge and I’m a senior sociology major. I want to be known and I want to be loved. I want others to care about me, about me truly and to accept and enjoy me in that knowing.

I spent most of my time at Wheaton wondering what the hype about community was.

And when I finally start to understand little pieces of it, the number of credits I have says I have to leave. I want to be known and yet I’m so scared. I don’t want to leave the people who know me.

At one point during my sophomore year I had a slight altercation with an individual on my brother floor. I had thrown a piece of crumpled up paper at a friend who was sitting a ways away and hit this individual instead. He looked at me and said “I don’t even know you.”

I don’t care.

Yet I cared more than I thought I should. It bothered me.

Did I feel sheepish because I was clowning around?
But he was so derisive. "I don’t know you. I don’t care that I don’t know you. And I don’t want to get to know you."

Well I have other friends who know me. Other people who care about me.

I think I was thrown into a small existential crisis as I began to scour my friendships and wonder who really did know me. Sure people enjoyed my friendship, but there always is a point where they don’t understand me fully. And I’m not just talking about the antics and the words and the appearance of myself.

But who knows my thoughts and my foibles. And how I enjoy feeling that other people are envious of me And how rejected I felt when I didn’t get accepted into Teach for America.. And how I got up in the middle of the night to hold my roommate while she cried even though I was really tired. How there's more of the functionalist in my sociological thought than I would care to admit. And how I wanted to stop praying when faith didn’t make sense but I was too scared not to. And all my failings and flashes of brilliance and on and on.

Did I even know them?

And did I want any one to know all of this? Wouldn’t they think I was small and petty and disgusting and selfish? That I was pretentious and self-righteous.

1 Corinthians 13. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

Even as I have been fully known.

I came in a freshmen and all my prior years were unknown to the people I was living and eating and studying with.
I leave as a senior and all of these years will be unknown to the people I will meet and live and talk and share with.

But God knows all my years. All my days. My thoughts. I have been fully known and I am fully known. I will continue to be fully known.
I can rest in that. I don’t have to prove myself to my friends to my family to myself. God knows me. God sees me. And God loves me.

So it’s just me and God then, booyah. Not quite.

For some reason I need the body of Christ. After taking away my dependence on human acceptance because I see I am known by God, God gives me back to community. For we are social beings, but more than just our innate need for others is the call to Christian community. I do not choose the Body of Christ; I am chosen. For this reason, I cannot say to someone else, “I don’t need you.” Oh but I do say this. I say it in many ways. I say it by ignoring you as I walk by you and by not giving you the opportunity to share your story with me.

I am still afraid of being hurt if you reject me so I guard myself. I am also afraid of the awkwardness of not knowing how to handle something you share with me. I do not seek to know you, and I do not allow you to begin to know me.

But 1 Corinthians 13 still calls me. I have been fully known. I can be open and honest and vulnerable with the Body of Christ because I know that there is eternal acceptance beyond the human acceptance. When we let each other down there is forgiveness because there is one who holds our hearts.

When my own faith struggles and falters I can lean on the faith of those around me and those throughout time. And when others struggle, they can lean on my faith.
I can accept your vulnerability and failings because I know that you also are known truly and loved by God. I do not see you as you are, but one day I will, and I can love you.
I am frightened to leave a place where I have discovered community and being known but I am not crippled, because the integrity of who I am – all the pieces seen and understood together – is held by God and not by myself or by the people around me.

I’d like to end with some verses from Colossians 3 which have been meaningful to me in dealing with community.

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you so must also forgive. And over all these things put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

Arteries that don't pump life

I had an interview today in Chicago, and I took the Eisenhower Expressway into the city. I could not help but notice how the outbound traffic was backed up for miles and miles. I wondered if it would still be slow when I was finished with my interview.

On my way back, I decided to check out the traffic before merging onto a possibly slow-as-molasses traffic artery. And yes, the traffic was still barely moving. But I know my way around Chicago well enough that I found another road that would take me back towards Wheaton. This road wound through several neighborhoods, and the demographics of pedestrians and languages on the signs changed as I drove. Often the affluence of the neighborhood was apparent through architecture and the level of street cleanliness. Why are some areas so poor and others so wealthy? Why are these economic distinctions so often closely aligned with race? I would not have seen any of this if I was mindlessly cruising the Eisenhower with its tall stone walls blocking out most of the surrounding area.

Though I by no means am intending to imply that all people who use the Eisenhower Expressway are consumeristic, materially-driven suburbanites who only care about getting where they are going. But I was struck by the way that we are so used to the unpleasant and the disturbing being blocked for us. We know that urban areas often have more economic difficulties than the suburbs, so why remind us by daily assailing our eyes with such unpleasantness? It is easier to shrug it off and continue with making money and driving home as quickly as possible.

What is important in our lives? What are the foundational driving forces that provide the impetus to our actions? Are people really important or do money and security precipitate our choices more often than we care to admit? Does American society build people or do we build on people?

This post is also informed by thoughts on Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed.