"DARKNESS, QUESTIONS, POETRY AND SPIRITUAL HOPE" left me with a lot of questions, but none the less, I enjoyed it. Professor Corrigan put in some great quotes, and really made me think. This essay was much easier to read than the last, but the fact that it was about multiple topics did throw me off a little. I was trying to see how all of the stories went together or how they related. I understand that they were all about some darkness we go through in life, but it may have been to scattered.

My all time favorite quote from this essay was...“We should make sure we have truly heard the question,” Freeman states, “before trying to get the answer right . . . Important questions create silence.” This goes along with what we have been learning all semester. How we need to sit in silence to think about what we have just read and meditate on it, and re-read it. This reminds me of what it says in James...You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. I feel like today we are always trying to answer questions quickly because we are too busy, or feel as though a teacher will get upset if we don't answer quick enough, or maybe because we are so caught up in defending ourselves. That's the one that gets me. Whenever I'm in an argument, I always try to come up with a quick come back, that sometimes I don't even wait for the question to finish before I answer.

Another quote I really liked was... “One can never understand what hope is really about unless one wrestles with despair. The same is true with faith. It's like when people say " I know how you feel" when really they don't because they have never been in your EXACT position. What's hope if you have never been through a hard time or have ever been without hope??? You wouldn't know.

This was a great essay. I'm surprised that the other one was published and this one wasn't. I was able to relate to most of what was in this essay in one ay or another.