Graduation, Paradise Lost

Forgive my sloppy referencing, but nearly two years have passed since one afternoon when I happened to be teaching a British Literature class on Milton's Paradise Lost. We were on Book IV--in which Milton vividly describes Eden, or "Heaven on Earth." I had the perfect Lewis quote too; I think, from his famous Preface to the poem, something like (a rough paraphrase): "Paradise is a place in one's mind, which ought to be cultivated, cared for, and visited often." Lovely class discussion too, on what it means to have a mind like Paradise, filled with Heaven here on earth.

And then someone knocked on the door, and I had a message in the office from St. John's College, saying that I had been accepted into the program. I had been longing for graduate school for two long years, and my rejection file was growing thick. The dream of full-time Paradise cultivation in a grad program somewhere had grown faint and wispy. And its realization was fully miraculous.

It's a nice memory. I wasn't even going to apply to St. John's, but the admissions advisor talked me into it. My family all just happened to be in town due to various random appointments on the day I heard I was accepted so they could take me out to celebrate and look at pictures of Santa Fe that I had started collecting in an effort to revitalize the dream.

My time there has been rich; having taught me better how to talk, and hopefully, listen. I have learned just how impossible it is to have an untheological conversation about anything from Euclid to Freud. And hopefully my mind's Paradise has grown and widened with more to remember, more to explore.

I was a little sad not to find a teaching job right away, but then I remember it was a pile of rejections that brought me here, and here is where I am happiest to be.

Praise God, from Whom all Blessing Flow, and His Son, who prepares a place for me in the True Paradise, which I pray to think upon until that day.

Thanks too for my sweet family, who all helped me to come here and learn, for Husband, who let me drive the Jetta for the past two semesters of commuting, and who always came out to welcome me after the long drive, for all my school friends and especially to Marci, who said that Truth has no exceptions.

Pictures hopefully to follow.