Personal/Theological Notebook: Bob Flees The City; Merton Lost In Mail
Bob just stopped me a while ago, while I was walking over to the Gesu for Pentecost Mass, hopping out of his car by the Jesuit Residence on Wisconsin Avenue to speak a few words and to say good-bye. Bob had been in town from Ann Arbor over the last week, doing dissertation research on Paul, and was supposed to be here for another week, with us having dinner plans for Friday and probably a chess-and-wine sunset series behind Joan of Arc, as we've now done a few times. But his young son Logan was getting a new bike, he said, and he just couldn't stand being away from his kids another week. He freely admitted, with a laugh, that this was the case in spite of how much he wants to get away from them in order to work on his dissertation when they're distracting him. So at least we had a good night on Saturday hanging out at the Lloyds', which I'll journal about later, since I need to get back to my own dissertation. We also had a few shorter "study break" sorts of conversations in the Library, too, and so at least I don't feel that I completely missed him. And he might come back late this summer with the whole family, which would be great: we haven't seen Carmen in maybe three years, certainly not since she completed her residency and became an attending physician, and I don't think any of us have met Logan or Renée, their still newish little girl.
On a much lesser note, I finally had to give up hope after two months of denial, that the last of three boxes of Thomas Merton books I bought on eBay would ever show up. So I deleted the following from my Library Thing account and will have to add them to the collection some other way. I can't be too annoyed, because I really got the other two boxes of books for a song, even if I average the money for these into the equation. But it still would have been cool to round out some parts of my library with such ease. The Literary Essays are usually harder to find at a cheaper used price, and I think Langers or some high school student of mine long since have added Thoughts on the East to their own library.The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton
Introductions East and West: Foreign Prefaces of Thomas Merton
Thoughts on the East
The Springs of Contemplation: A Retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani
The New Man
Seasons of Celebration
The Living Bread
Seeds of Destruction
The Silent Life