Winning a Challenge

I just crossed a milestone in my college pursuit by finishing my freshman year at Ave Maria University. It took me 3 years to get the required 32 credits but through God's grace I was able to accomplish this goal. It's kind of amazing because looking back, I wasn't sure I'd make it through high school at the pace I was going! I move really slowly and then juggling the books is always a physical challenge, especially when I have to write papers and use quotes in them. In these instances, I have to type on the computer and then peruse the book for quotes which entails me looking somewhat upside down at the book that is usually to my left. Multi-tasking....what a challenge! I took two philosophy courses last year with Dr. Fedoryka and they had their good and bad points. The first was Nature and Person which was an introductory study of Philosophy and a reflection on nature, man and God. We learned about the meaning and destiny of man and his relation to God - the unity of body and soul in the human person - and the immortality of the soul. The soul is destined to live with God in Heaven but man has free will and can choose to either serve God or mammon. My favorite part of the course was studying Plato's Allegory of the Cave and John Paul II's Fides et Ratio. Then Dr. Fedoryka had us write a paper on self-movement vs. subjective satisfaction using Albert Camu's book The Stranger. I loved writing that paper! It was such an interesting topic that once I got into it, I felt like I could go on writing for pages and pages! I found the topic of self-movement very interesting. We learned that transcendence or looking at reality as it is in itself gives man the ability for self-movement (ability to move his will to choose the good) while imprisonment comes from seekking only to satisfy our subjective desires. Freedom comes in doing the good. We lose our freedom whhen we reject the good and focus only on satisfying our whims. The Stranger, though depressing, was a good source to use because the character Merault really personified one who becomes imprisoned by his own subjective desires and cl0ses himself off from reality. He refuses to have a relationship with anyone - even his mother - because it would demand an affective response from him and showing affection would require him to go outside of himself and look at things in the world as they truly are. Remaining indifferent allowed him to subordinate the things of the world to himself or use them for his own pleasure. Interesting, huh? I know in my own life that I can get bogged down in all the material things in the world (i.e. getting a computer, buying a new electric chair with tilt-in-space and goes faster, earning money for school, etc) and I tend to lose sight of God and the beauty in creation which He created. This them of freedom in doing the good vs. subjective satisfaction was taught more in depth the next semester in Ethics. I did another paper roughly on the same topic but from a different angle. I had to explain how man is free when he binds himself to the good in the moral law and then show how he is trapped when he just does whatever suits his fancy. Again...very interesting! I didn't really like Ethics because we had to study current moral issues that oppose the Catholic faith and while it is good to know how to defend the Catholic Church's position in these matters, it was emotionally draining to study the issues (i.e. abortion, contraception, euthanasia, etc). If there are any philosophy professors or students majoring in philosophy out there reading this blog, I apologize for bluntly stating: I do not like philosophy. My brain is not philosophically inclined. For example, I didn't understand St. Thomas Aquinas very well and his take on the Natural Law in the Summa Theologiae. The way he writes it is hard to understand what he is saying. Maybe when I study Aquinas in theology, I'll understand him better because I think I'm more theologically inclined.