This Thanksgiving I am truly thankful for my family and friends, those near and those far away, as well as those who have helped me academically during the last year. I am also thankful for the expert medical care I received and for continuing improved health.
So far my health and my strength are better than they have been for more than a year. I really felt a turn around when my weight began to increase steadily over the past two months and is now back up to the ten pounds I had lost since my surgery in February. Even my muscle tone has returned to a healthy firmness and my skin has healthy color as well and I feel so much better every day. I feel like a million dollars and now my clothes fit again too!
And thanks to my Modern British Poetry class this semester, I learned through my research of the poem "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot that there is such a thing as "sympathetic magic," something I knew about vaguely, but I realized it truly applies when it comes to my health and sense of well-being. The vegetation rituals and fertility rites that were enacted to produce energy and life can be very effective when acted out in faith. This is what Abraham did when he believed God's promise that he would have a son in his old age. The scriptures say that he didn't consider his body that was as good as dead, or the deadness of Sara's womb, but he had respect toward the promise of God that He was able to do what He had promised. I am most thankful for that lesson and the life it has brought forth in me even when my own body was a waste land.
Abraham wasn't enacting a pagan ritual, of course, but by faith he believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness, and he received his promise, his own son Isaac. I think my professors are shamans, I learn so much from them because of their participation in the learning process! The learning process forces me to push myself to reach new goals and obtain knowledge that is useful in my own life.
