Moments of Blindness

I have been working on a project for school. It is the last big thing of my formal education...well unless something else crops up that I would like to learn in a formal way. I spent a couple of months writing the prospectus. I knew that the next step was to submit it for critique. I also have great confidence in the people who will critique my work. However, when the criticism came, I had this sense of failure, of being overwhelmingly inadequate. One of my advisors wanted me to read some other material. I read it and understood about half of it. (J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things With Words and John Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality) On Friday, I felt like surrender. I sent a note to my advisors and I got a response that was encouraging. Despair has its effect, and I think it has some value. The effect is humility.
Humility should not paralyze us. In fact, perhaps it should set us free. Today, I happened upon these words from Annie Dillard.
Speaking to someone who has had success in writing a book: "I have an urgent message for you. Everyone feels like a fraud …separate yourself from your work. A book you made isn’t you any more than a chair you made, or a soup. It’s just something you made once. If you ever want to make another one, it, too, will be just another hat in the ring, another widow’s mite, another broken offering which God has long understood is the best we human’s can do – we’re forgiven in advance."
We are forgiven in advance. That is the nugget of information that releases us to try. When despair comes, we have been blinded to the goodness that surrounds us. In those moments, when we think everything is bad, we are most blind. Every offering is broken. That should not prevent us from humbly making the offering.