Ave 2023
Another year comes, and here we are, now.
I wanted to post in the new year, in lieu of writing a Christmas letter (although I have actually never written a Christmas letter). The rule with such things is to recap your year, and to wish others good cheer. However, I’m too melancholy and my year has been too uneventful for that to work. Also, I’m not sure if blogging as an act of self-expression even makes sense in 2023, both because it’s so old-fashioned, and because it seems selfish to trick good folks out of a couple minutes when I don’t really have anything much to say. Ah well.
In January I was fortunate to get a new job doing administrative work for a small company that tests backflows on water lines. The people I work with are lovely, and I’m very grateful to have steady work after the disruption of the last couple years. In the spring my church merged with another local church, which meant I got to know many new faces, which has done me good. Finally, this last fall I traveled overseas for the first time since 2017 (which for me feels like an interminable gap). I’ll try to post more about that later, but I visited a series of central European capitals and historical sites. Two themes dominated: first, the Habsburgs, and with them the history of the Thirty Years’ War, in which neighboring potentates violently intervened in Germany to shore up their own political positions. The second was the holocaust. I followed its trail, from SS headquarters in Berlin, to the so-called “transit ghetto” of Theresienstadt, and finally to Auschwitz. When I left the camp and headed for nearby Krakow in southeast Poland, I found Ukrainians there, fleeing their own violent terrors. To paraphrase Eliot, “history is now.”
For our world, then, the year has been anything but uneventful. American politics remains both chaotic and goofy, simultaneously (un)/serious, and as fractious as ever. Mired each in our narratives, it’s hard to say what direction anything is really going. In Ukraine, we see a more bald-faced aggression than we’re used to, although this is in some ways simply more high-profile, or more noticed in our media; there are other countries were this violence is nothing new (Yemen, Ethiopia, DRC, etc.). And there is the great silence from Uyghuristan. And yet we cannot disengage with each other: western Europe can’t seem to do without Russian gas, the US economy can’t disown China, and there can be no national divorce here at home. Yet selfish nationalism, if I can call it that, seems rampart across the globe, and if it remains unchecked, it will lead to more sputterings of violence, smoldering away at the seams of our community. I feel that we must try honestly, for once, to live up to a set of moral, liberal international principles in our foreign policy, or else it will just be universal hypocrisy, and there won’t be any decent alternative.
But I feel a bit hypocritical myself. I say that nations must be selfless, but I myself want to save up money for myself, while others are in poverty around me. And that speaks to the tension I live with – I remain deeply committed in my faith, because without it there’s no real chance of hope beyond this broken world, and yet I am conflicted about what exactly it requires of me. I find myself often struggling between more conservative, traditionally orthodox theology, which I believe intellectually, and more ‘liberal’ Christians (for lack of a better term) who I often feel much in common with. It’s difficult to make emotional sense of truth at times. I’m trying to work my way forward, but I’m not sure if I’m making progress, or where exactly I’m going.
That’s really the takeaway from 2022: I don’t know where I’m going. I plan endlessly, but doubt I will follow any of them to conclusion, either from indiscipline or simply because they were never achievable to begin with. Progress seems too slow, given the speed at which life passes, and I’m unsure if what I’m doing is worthwhile. I feel as though things have turned a corner from the sense of broad possibility I took for granted in my twenties, and now the uncertainty of the future feels less like opportunity and more like doubtful mediocrity. Still, bearing up hope in the praxis of small steps, I move into 2023. I hope that it will be interesting. I hope that you shall all be well.
