Trees and Loves

I've been negligent in my commitment to mention a few things I will miss about my high school on a more regular basis. I just wrote a college essay about how awesome my high school was, so I'm well prepared to submit two today:

I will miss attending a school that puts up, count 'em, 4 (big, full, tall) Christmas trees with lights and all. And there is none of this "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings" or "Festive (insert religious/belief/thought neutral statement here)" but it's "MERRY CHRISTMAS!".

I will also miss attending the high school that has the best religion classes ever. Actually that a high school even has religion as a (real) class is pretty cool in my book. Today's religion class at Providence Academy was especially cool. First we discussed the liberal arts, and in an almost telepathic fashion my teacher gave me the perfect apology for my favorite liberal arts college, Thomas Aquinas College. I was using, "learning about the created world brings us closer to God, and so any study of that, whether in math, literature, music or any other pursuit, is worthwhile and noble" but I like his "the liberal arts allow you to and actually think" better. Much more direct.

And then we got into talking about real friendship. The class's vihament opinion that evil people can have friends, and that beliefs have nothing to do with friendship held up the whole thing. I contend that Stalin had no friends ( he killed whatever you could call a friend) and the devout Nazi and Jew were never friends.

But it caused this great need in me to spend too much time rereading C.S. Lewis' The 4 Loves and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Bks. 8 and 9). I have been slowly finding time for Lewis over the past 3 weeks, and I was actually just nearing the chapter on Friendship. And I had read The Ethics during a particularly gruesome part of philosophy class, so it was done pretty shabbily. I took my time and found a lot that I missed! Oh if only I could do homework to actually learn.

And in addition to finding stuff I missed, I actually knew what it was all talking about! It was such an awesome feeling. I could puke it out on a test last year, but now I actually know what it's all saying. I could have wrote out "Eros thinks that a woman being herself is infinitely more important than that she is a woman" a year ago, but re-reading it today I know that it's true.

And that is why half of me wishes I could go to Providence Academy for another 4 years. And the other half of me wishes I could skip the next 10 years of life.