Mepkin Abbey

Well, I've been back from Mepkin Abbey for a week now. Mainly I've just been packing things up and getting ready for the big move tomorrow to Philadelphia (I'm not sure how long I have to live there to be able to call it Philly without being a poser). The parental units came up yesterday and loaded up all of my furniture to take it back to Conway so now I've just got to pack all of my clothes and books into my car and make the 11 hour trip up to Glenside, PA and move into my mansion. I kind of feel like the Fresh Prince.

About the abbey. It's an amazingly beautiful place. If I was going to be a monk, I would definitely go be a monk there. It feels like an awesome summer camp for adults. If you could swim in the river there, it would be absolutely perfect. I went down to the abbey with my friends Jeremy and Jeff who I led in a Bible study when they were freshmen. They're two of my favorite guys I've ever had in a Bible study, and now they're two of my closest friends. We decided to go down there to spend some time for ourselves as individuals (they started their last semester at USC on Thursday, and I'm starting grad school in two weeks), and also to spend some time together since we won't be seeing each other for awhile. I think it was successful on both fronts. I was able to read a lot, pray a lot, and spend a lot of great time with those two guys. We didn't do much in the way of monk stuff; we mainly just used it as a place for personal time of reflection.

What did I learn . . . One of the main things I was thinking about was Randy's question about how we keep our private worlds in order. As luck would have it, there was a really helpful chapter in The Reason for God that gave me at least one way to answer that question. In his chapter on the problem of sin, Keller says something to the effect of this: one of the problems of sin is that we build our identity on things other than God and our relationship to him, and when we build our identity on temporal and non-universal things, it inevitably leads to pride, exclusion of others, and anger at those who don't meet our expectations or the expectations of our group. Of course, Keller had much more reasoning and examples to back the statement up, but if you haven't read the book you'll just have to trust me when I say that his argument was convincing. So, I spent a lot of time thinking about who I've been bitter towards and cynical about and what that might tell me about what I'm building my identity on rather than God. As I get ready to go to a relatively conservative school that's way more reformed than I am, it's been really helpful to realize that my cynicism towards people who I think are unreasonably conservative stems a lot of times from the fact that a big portion of my identity is seated in being opposed to the unhealthy aspects of the type of person I used to be (unwaveringly, unthinkingly conservative and really really naive as a result). It's not a bad thing to be opposed to some of the unhealthy aspects of the type of Christian I used to be, but if being opposed to something is what I'm basing my identity on (instead of positively being rooted in Christ, and then being secondarily opposed to that which Christ is opposed) then I'll always tend more towards exclusion than embrace.

I'm getting tired of writing right now. I hope what I just wrote made at least a little bit of sense. It was sort of stream of consciousness so it might not be organized very well. Oh well.