After having read "Why Read Literature" and "Darkness, Questions, Poetry and Spiritual Hope" by Paul T. Corrigan and "Reading for Transformation..." by Francis X. McAloon, I found it hard to find a topic to write about seeing that all of these pieces are very different, but also very much relate. So for this blog, I believe I will just write about all three.
Professor Corrigan relates reading literature to physical exercise in "Why Read Literature." Both are "fundamental aspects of daily life" and "requires discipline and perseverance." Many people find it difficult to stay committed to physical exercise and staying healthy as well as many find it difficult to stay mentally healthy by reading literature. Little do those people know, reading literature will probably come easier to them than they think. Professor Corrigan suggests that everyone loves a good story whether it is about sports, romance, mystery, different types of poetry, ect. Anyone who reads because they are interested is reading literature. They just may not realize it's literature. Through "discipline" and "perseverance," one will find that reading literature becomes more interesting and meaningful and will find a deeper appreciation towards it. By being disciplined and persevering through literature that may not even be pleasurable to read, one will find that their appreciation will increase even more.
In "Reading for Transformation..." McAloon claims that using poetry to pray can open us up spiritually to even more than what we can imagine. He uses poetry to pray through a series of events he calls "lectio." It is basically a process of meditating on the poetry and allowing it to come from his heart in the form of prayer. Through this, he discovered an appreciation for poetry that he originally was uninterested in. This reminds me of the statement, “What you get out of what you read is determined by how you read.”
In Corrigan's essay, "Darkness, Questions, Poetry, and Spiritual Hope," he talks about sitting with our questions from dark experiences as opposed to "finding" our "spouting" out answers. We are merely humans and don't necessarily understand why the death of loved ones have to occur in the timing that they do. We don't understand why catastrophes happen and put our hearts into depression. These are questions that are hard to come to terms with. I love what Corrigan says in the second paragraph of the essay: "A mixture of optimism and answers is nice while it lasts, but in order to have a spiritual hope that is authentic and what will sustain us in the darkness, we must take an intimate account of suffering." Christ suffered for us and tells us that we too will suffer for the cause of Christ. It is in Him that we will find comfort and joy in times of darkness.
The rationale behind having these three pieces be read together is to get you thinking about reading, or to get you to continue thinking about reading, since we've already begun that.
ReplyDeleteYour summaries here of each piece are okay. But I find myself wanting to see more of your own voice and ideas in this post. What do you think? What do you feel? And so on.
(Also, to clarify, I didn't write the "Why Read Literature" piece.)