Seth Szymanski

“What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade"

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took questions
on how not to feel lost in the dark.

After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.”
― Brad Aaron Modlin, Everyone at This Party Has Two Names

“People laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas, you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“We then tried other coping devices, drugs, alcohol and even suicide. As the poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote: “God is dead and modern men (and women) gather nightly around the divine grave to weep.”*”
― John Shelby Spong, Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today

“Jesus taught that the age he lived in was controlled by forces of evil but that God would soon intervene to destroy everything and everyone opposed to him. God would then bring in a good, utopian kingdom on earth, where there would be no more pain and suffering. Jesus himself would be the ruler of this kingdom, with his twelve disciples serving under him. And all this was to happen very soon—within his own generation. This”
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee