May They Never Be Lonely at Parties (An Introduction)

On the morning after my fist night at college I woke up to find an email from my dad, at the bottom of the email was a poem a friend had sent him on the occasion of my going to college. The poem was titled "a prayer for our daughters" and reads as follows.

Prayer for Our Daughters
by Mark Jarman 

May they never be lonely at parties
Or wait for mail from people they haven't written
Or still in middle age ask God for favors
Or forbid their children things they were never forbidden. 

May hatred be like a habit they never developed
And can't see the point of, like gambling or heavy drinking.
If they forget themselves, may it be in music
Or the kind of prayer that makes a garden of thinking. 

May they enter the coming century
Like swans under a bridge into enchantment
And take with them enough of this century
To assure their grandchildren it really happened. 

May they find a place to love, without nostalgia
For some place else that they can never go back to.
And may they find themselves, as we have found them,
Complete at each stage of their lives, each part they add to. 

May they be themselves, long after we've stopped watching.
May they return from every kind of suffering
(Except the last, which doesn't bear repeating)
And be themselves again, both blessed and blessing.

This semester, My goal is to take a piece of this poem each week and reflect on it, and share that reflection with you. I'll jump right in with, "may they never be lonely at parties." Now orientation isn't exactly one big party, but a lot of it certainly has a party feel. A nervous excitedness that creates (or is created by) a certain awkward tension, a feeling that comes from glimpses of that great and terrible unknown: the future. Now, I'm not sure if anyone has picked up on this, but I'm a bit of an introvert (gasps of shock all around, I'm sure), which means that in those situations, where an entire residence hall is gathered together to play real life mario kart, I'm fine. Until the race is over and I'm left with no task but the terrifyingly broad "socialize" and it's close cousin "get to know people." But these are not my idea of a party, and that's one of the great things about the word party, it's vague to the point of irrelevance, spanning a gauntlet from four close friends playing a card game to 20 people in a room watching a movie, to a shifting multitude dancing. The only connotation that party has that holds true across all applications is joy and friendship. To be lonely at a party, doesn't mean that you're doing something wrong (though I can attest that it sometimes feels that way), being lonely at a party means that you're at a crossroads (although I believe we spend most of our lives in a crossroads) I expect to be lonely at parties quite a few times in the coming years, but there are parties coming too, where I can be assured that I will not be lonely, and those are the ones to dwell on.

-Bastian

Move-in, Orientation, and More.

So yesterday I moved into the dorms (2nd vanReken), and today I (or rather, we, the incoming class) participated in Streetfest, an event that I've grown up around, yet never participated in, more on that later.
Orientation is, put simply, overwhelming. I'm not sure of the exact size of the incoming class that has been here on campus since yesterday, but I can assure you that it is a lot of people. Being from Grand Rapids Christian High, I have a perplexing (if not unique), social challenge, It's been roughly twelve years since I've had to make new friends from scratch which means I'm uncomfortable around people that I don't know, but at the same time, I didn't come to Calvin for "Christian High II - Return of the people you've known since first grade" which makes me uncomfortable around the people that I do know. I'm sure once a routine begins the process of finding the balance between new and old, comfort and discomfort, challenge and reward, will start, but until then I'm in limbo. Orientation started off with some group-building exercises on the commons lawn with our orientation groups (mine is 31). Once we'd tried some name games and standard mixer games, we filed into the CFAC, for the opening session.While we waited in our seats, some very well intending orientation staff, tried to get us "pumped up", I'm an introvert (you're all shocked, I know), and I've gotten "pumped up" for exactly one thing in my memory (A Hank Green concert I got to attend this summer). So there I was, sitting in the back-middle of the CFAC auditorium, music blasting, lights strobeing, surrounded by strangers, with people trying to start a wave (my participation in which could be generously called half-hearted.) After the loud, mostly ridiculous, and I'll be honest, already mostly forgotten, opening session. We broke back down into our smaller orientation groups, when that let out it was 9:13 and I was feeling beat, but before I even got back to my floor, I met the rest of my floor coming out, we sat on the soccer field behind the dorm for another hour, as dorm leadership (Mostly RAs) Introduced the other dorm leadership, and went over rules and guidelines for dorm living. After that meeting, there was a floor meeting, where we played name games, and then broke into rooms to do initial dorm-room assessments, that finished around 11:35 and it was past midnight before I was asleep. This morning I slept in to the late, late hour of nearly 6:40, and after a bit of personal time, headed out to meet my orientation group for breakfast. Then we headed to the CFAC for streetfest chapel, Maaike gave an excellent talk on the meaning and importance of place (the songs were disappointing, not one out of the three songs we sang was older than me.) Again to orientation groups, and then, loading onto a bus that would take us to gilda's club: Grand Rapids, on the west side of town.
The hour grows late again, and my bed calls to me, so I'll finish my reflections on today when I've had a good nights sleep.

-Bastian

Goodbyes and Good Friends

Yesterday I dropped my family off at the airport. They left for Budapest for the semester, my dad is again teaching the semester program for Calvin. This time though, I'm staying here, in Grand Rapids. It was strange, dropping them off, it didn't feel real for a long time, it still kind of doesn't. We sat there in the airport lobby after dropping off the luggage and talked and joked. When it was time to go we stood and said what we could of the blessing from the book of common prayer. 

"May the peace of the lord Christ go with you: where ever he may send you; may he guide you through the wilderness: protect you through the storm; may he bring you home rejoicing: at the wonders he has shown you; may he bring you home rejoicing: once again into our doors."  

I say "what we could" because there was a sudden glimpse of reality, of finality, in that blessing, a preview of the five months we are about to spend apart from each other. Then there were hugs, and goodbyes, and tears (mostly mine and my moms) and then they headed off to the security checkpoint and I followed my grandpa out of the airport. When he dropped me off at home, I was greeted by my old friends and new housemates, Taylor-Mary and Jen and our friend Sarah, and we sat and talked and eventually people trickled in, the third housemate, Amelia, another Hungary student and friend, Chelsea, and Taylor-Mary's boyfriend, Seth. We had pizza and laughter. I snapchatted my sister, waiting in the airport, and sent a picture of dinner to my dad. Now, the next morning, I'm sitting in the kitchen waiting for my first skype call from a family newly removed.