Last Tuesday Erynn and I hit the Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition at the Milwaukee Public Museum before it closed. It was again quite moving, even having already seen it once with Angie and her family back in April. But in the same way that teaching the same lesson is an entirely fresh experience with a different group of students, it was a different experience to see the exhibit with Erynn, as we inevitably noticed different things, reacted to one another's comments differently, and pointed out new observations to one another.
Later we wandered through the Native American, bird, Streets of Old Milwaukee, and then the insect displays, including the Butterfly Room. We spent a considerable amount of time really looking at the details of the "European Village" connected to the Streets of Old Milwaukee, and the cottages with their representations of the arts, crafts, furnishings and fashion of the places from which came the bulk of Milwaukee immigrants. We particularly loitered around the Norwegian display, while Erynn entertained and sickened me with descriptions of the gross fish products of the Norwegian side of her family, and the various things she had been tricked into eating by relatives. I was surprised that she had never been there, for all the years she had lived in the Milwaukee suburbs, so I got to have that cool feeling of having successfully showed someone something interesting about the town. There was more that looked interesting, but we had to be heading out so that Erynn could meet her coach for her afternoon training as she prepared for the NCAA Regional meet. The temperature had spiked up to 82ªF, and we had both conspicuously dressed for cooler weather, which I think drew us some funny looks as we walked passed everyone wearing shorts and t-shirts.
Thursday was Francis Sullivan's 87th birthday, and so my morning was taken up with writing him a letter of congratulations as well as a bit of a report on the current state of the dissertation. In particular, I wanted to share with him how personally compelling some of his work on a theology of charisms has become for me in the last few weeks, as I have not only had to do formal work in theological writing, but also to consider the significance of related experiences in my own past. It's one thing to simply accept and recognize your past. It's another thing to have to truly assess it with academic rigour. That is, some questions in life you don't necessarily have to answer: you can simply accept something as a complex or ambiguous situation, perhaps a very meaningful one, even personally meaningful, but never actually feel compelled to sit down and work out exactly how or why it is meaningful. I had never put myself to the work of considering some of my own spiritual experiences in this way: I felt no need to. I know I'm being a bit vague, here. I'm not sure that I feel the need to go into some of these experiences in a public way, here in the journal. But in really coming to terms with what Sullivan had written in Charisms and Charismatic Renewal, I could no longer write about such things without really deciding what I thought, personally. And so I wrote to him of some of this, because when I did have to write this material, it became far more clear to me than it had simply by several readings, which is not unusual in the academic or writing life. And I felt I owed it to him to let him know that this work was having a wider impact on me than just the writing of a disinterested academic exercise. I look forward to visiting him at Boston College when this chapter is – at long last! – finished.