Let's Dance!

TLDR: Someday I will not be here. I'm here now. Let's dance! :)

Hello my beautiful people! Long time, no blog. Let's fix that! Just when I think I must have learned and seen it all, life throws me a curveball. I believed that after a semester in Europe exploring all of these places I have been dreaming of since I was a little girl, my life could not possibly get better. And yet, it did. My past semester returning to sunny San Diego was full of more laughs, tears, and dancing than I could have ever thought possible. People have come into my life at the exact moment that I needed them most. I am always so amazed by the timing of love in my life. What a gift! In the blink of an eye, junior year has come and gone. I feel like it was just yesterday that I sat down to write Leave a Light On, and now here we are again, just trying to capture the beauty of yet another year of valleys and mountaintops and every precious moment in between. The days are flying by, and I feel powerless to stop it much of the time. In moments of spiraling, I am reminded of something a high school teacher of mine used to tell us, "yes, time flies. The good news is that you're the pilot."

What he didn't tell us is that being the pilot of your own life is hard sometimes. Growing up is messy and crazy and full of all kinds of twists and turns. After months spent skipping around these gorgeous countries with not a care in the world other than what to gourmet meals to purchase or what museum tickets to schedule, it felt very overwhelming to be back in an environment that has helped to shape me into the woman that I am but now felt so different somehow. It's such a strange feeling to be able to recognize your own growth. It's totally beautiful and also completely terrifying. I presume to know exactly how things will turn out even when I am caught by surprise almost every single time. We are evolving and experiencing, we are alive. WOW!

When I look back on the past few months of my life, I am struck by a number of beautiful things. One of the most notable has been the wonderful wisdom I have discovered in some of the most unexpected places. It will likely come as no surprise to people that I am a big fan of Dead Poet's Society. I have longed for those "standing on the desks" moments in my own life, and after years of experiencing the joys and pitfalls of academia, I have found it! This semester, I was registered for two theology classes simply because they sounded interesting. I think sometimes people get so caught up in credits and majors and minors and resume boosters that they forget that the point of college is to take classes and chase opportunities that you find interesting. I also recognize that this comes from a place of privilege of being able to have a pretty flexible major (shoutout psych!) and cool classes to choose from (shoutout USD!). As for my pre-med friends and pals with double majors, fear not, you will likely be receiving my entire paycheck someday. But in the meantime, I feel lucky to be able to take these phenomenal classes.

The first one I registered for was based solely off the title: The Problem of God. Wow. Okay. Yikes! I think I said all three of these things out loud when I first saw this course offering. But then, like any anxious college student, I turned to a trusty pal of mine: Rate My Professor. This professor had the most glowing reviews, one even stated, "this professor changed my life." I needed to witness this for myself, so I registered. I know many of my readers share a faith background that is different from mine, if any background at all. And that is more than okay. I myself have experienced a series of dramatic ups and downs in my own faith journey. I think that love and loss will do that to a person. Where I land at this point in time is that God and I are "getting there." Getting where? I'm not sure, but I know that I am going. I am on my way!

When I tell people I am taking The Problem of God, they usually ask me something along the lines of, “Well, what is the problem of God?” I usually respond with something about reconciling a belief in the existence of God when facing the tremendous evils in the world today. Can both exist? I think maybe they can. I wasn’t sure, and then I returned to Tijuana, Mexico for spring break in March. These remarkable people who have every reason to have a problem with God do not, and instead, they turn to Him at every opportunity. You can read more about their remarkable testimonies here! This does not mean that their prayer life is perfect or that they never fall victim to sin, only that they choose to see light where most people would only see darkness. Love requires freedom. It means that we suffer more, but life becomes exponentially more beautiful when it is led by love.

One of my most favorite books in the whole wide world is Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom. The book recounts the weekly visits Mitch makes to Morrie’s home every Tuesday, where they discuss important life topics such as love, work, aging, family, death, and forgiveness. Each visit becomes a kind of “class” on how to live meaningfully, with Morrie as the teacher and Mitch as the student. These lessons are all that much more important to Mitch because Morrie is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as ALS. This book always makes me cry without fail. Morrie has so many wise lessons that I cling to in times of struggle, including this one: “So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.” LOVE! It seems so obvious and yet so many people lose sight of it. They get caught up in the “unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing” and forget to slow down.

I refuse to be someone like that. I refuse to walk around half asleep and look at the world with anything less than utter amazement. How rare and wonderful is it to be anything at all? Our lives are only precious because they are precarious. Our days only have meaning because we know they are numbered. Our love only matters because we have known tremendous pain. That’s life, “a series of pulls back and forth... A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. Most of us live somewhere in the middle. A wrestling match...Which side wins? Love wins. Love always wins.” Time and time again, I am reminded of this. Love makes the world go around.

Spending a semester abroad in Rome changed me in ways I couldn't have anticipated. It was the daily act of stepping outside of what I knew, and I think perhaps this is why my courses grappling with the meaning of life have come to mean so much to me over the past several months. I think I have reached a place in my life where I long to find my purpose. Living in a city layered with history and culture forced me to slow down, to observe, and to question my own assumptions about everything I thought was true. I began to notice how much I take for granted at home, how often I move quickly through life without really seeing it. Rome taught me how to be present. I learned how to navigate unfamiliar spaces, how to listen more closely, and how to live with both discomfort and curiosity. That experience reshaped my sense of identity not by replacing it, but by expanding it.

Returning to school in San Diego was the most surreal experience. The familiar classrooms and routines were the same, but I wasn’t. I carried Rome with me in my heart and in the way I sought deeper meaning in what I studied and how I related to the people around me. Then, returning to Tijuana over spring break was something I had done before, but this time it felt different. My time abroad helped me see Tijuana through a new lens. This remarkable place is so much more than just as a site of service or need, it is a complex, vibrant community with its own history, beauty, and resilience. I was more aware of power dynamics, of cultural humility, and of my role not as someone who has answers, but as someone who is there to listen, learn, and serve with empathy. Rome gave me distance, perspective, and the tools to see my own life with fresh eyes.

As my favorite University Minister likes to tell me, "your joy has depth now." That is perhaps one of the most thoughtful things anyone has ever said to me. These experiences have given me this depth, and I could not possibly be more grateful. For as much as I have cherished my time spent learning in these classes, all the most important lessons I have learned have taken place outside the classroom. It is a privilege to be able to experience different parts of the world and to be offered a glimpse into a life that is completely different from my own.

At the beginning of the course, my professor posed to the class this question: what are we doing here? What are we doing here? For a long time, I has no answer to this. We studied influential thinkers like Plato and Nietzsche and Aquinas and Anselm and Augustine and Feuerbach and Marx and Steinbeck and Freud and Dostoevsky and Ricoeur (basically pick your favorite thinker in classical academia, and we probably studied them). Week after week, we completed these complex readings which grappled with the problem of evil and how this relates to our primitive view of what the divine must be like. But perhaps my favorite assignment was the viewing of This is Water which was delivered by David Foster Wallace, American essayist, novelist, and university professor, at the Kenyon College commencement address on May 21st, 2005. The last thing the fish is aware of before the fish dies is the water. Therefore, Wallace claims that "the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about." The fish spends their entire life surrounded by water, but they pay it no attention. David and Morrie seem to agree: so many people go through this life half asleep. They ask no questions, they challenge nothing, they do not dance when there is music (and even better when there is none at all). They are living, but they are not alive. Therefore, my professor for The Problem of God emphasized the importance of not what to think, but rather how to think and why it is important that we ought to think at all.

So we can return to the original question: what are we doing here?

We’re experiencing! We’re loving and living and laughing and playing and praying! We are opening our hearts to pain in an effort to make the most of this short go. Life is a wonderful, mesmerizing, magical, fun, and silly thing. And human beings are just astounding. We all know we are going to die someday, and yet still we wake up in the morning and live. We shout and curse and care when the trash bag breaks and share puppy videos on Instagram and go for a sweet treat just because we can, and yet with every minute that passes we edge closer to the end, the all encompassing void that waits for all of us. We marvel at the perfect sunset in La Jolla or the smell of a Christmas tree or the joy of your favorite TV show being renewed for a new season, even though we know that everyone we love will cease to exist one day. I don't know how we do it and yet we do it every single day.

Grief is a response to this evil, this disconnect, this fear. It all boils down to this electric shock feeling that consumes our hearts to let us know we are fully alive. It means we are connecting and creating and caring. We’re participating. “This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping.” For so long, I have struggled to explain to others what my faith means to me, and I think Elizabeth Gilbert completely understands the very essence of what it means to love people in the way that God loves us in her journey in Eat, Pray, Love. Religion is meant to be this uniquely grounding and communal experience. It is a community for everyone to take part in, regardless of who you are or where you come from. The love that you put out into this world will always find its way back to you, and how wonderful it is to find a community grounded in that love.

And if it comes down to my final breath and my faith journey has amounted to nothing more than the friends who have become family, the sorrow that has become joy, and the pain that has been transformed into love, that will have been enough.

What are we doing here? Loving and being loved in return.

This class changed my life, I am so profoundly lucky. But it was not this class alone. The other theology class I took was called Faith and Environmental Justice. I recommend it on all of my tours to anyone who will listen. This class is unlike any class I have ever taken before, it has made me into a better and more thoughtful person. This class aimed to explain the way religious ideas, attitudes, values, and practices, shape individual and cultural understandings of nature as well as contextualizing and analyzing the experiential value of spiritual ecology. Wow! Those are all fancy academic terms which basically boil down to one main idea: wonder. I loved this class and this professor so much, I started a little notes app section for my favorite quotes of his. The first and probably most notable of these quotes is one of my all time favorites: "I contain multitudes." He reminded our class of this at least once per class period.

I contain multitudes.

Yes, you do! You are a mosaic of anyone you have ever loved and who has ever loved you. How wondrous is that? "Love is the faith that can move mountains," he tells my sleepy class one warm Friday afternoon. Yes, it is! This type of relentless optimism may be the key to understanding that fleeting wonder. Our lives are only as precious as they are precarious. Life can change in an instant, turn on a dime. Our days on this Earth are so limited, so precious, so lovely. We fill our days with all of these mundane little moments we will someday long for in our memories. Nights spent getting ready to go out with the music so loud and mornings spent shuffling around each other in the kitchen seem so ordinary and routine, but these are the very things we will miss during the lonely moments in solitude.

There seems to never be enough time for it all. The days race by, and I am still trying to process things that have happened a year ago. It's all so much, and sometimes that feels like way too much to carry alone. Every breath we take is borrowed, every heartbeat is a fleeting drumbeat in a song that must one day end. The sun rises and sets without promise, casting this beautiful and perfect golden light on faces that will one day fade to memory. We walk through life with the illusion of permanence, while time peels away our days like pages from a book we’ll never finish. Moments slip through our fingers even as we try to hold on, and one day, the laughter will echo for the last time, and we’ll wonder how it all passed so quickly. Our days are numbered, and none of us know the number.

Linger longer. At the dinner table, in the doorway of a long goodbye, in the warmth of a shared silence. We must let our love be loud and bold and completely unafraid, holding nothing back, because the people we cherish are here now, but not forever. Say what aches to be said. Hold them tighter. Laugh until your ribs ache. Let your presence be a gift (your presence is such a gift!). Dance badly and dance often. In a world that rushes toward endings, let us be the ones who slow down. For love, for connection, for the sacred and fleeting and wondrous beauty of now.

In the words of the professor who has changed my life, "Someday, I will not be here. I'm here now. Let's dance!"

Thank you for coming on this journey with me, I hope you've enjoyed your glimpse of Gracie!