Nightmare

You've all had them. Every single one of you. I haven't had a dream like this for a long time.

Last night I turned in my (really bad) Spirituality paper. (This part is not the dream). The premis of the paper was the spirituality of the Church as it relates to the Eucharist as source and summit. The way I went about it was to begin with the theological definitions, including "sacrament", discuss how the sacraments open us to grace, how we must have the disposition to receive the Eucharist, and finally, I discussed the Eucharist. But the Eucharist (as are all of the sacraments) are also a cause of grace, thus the source, and it is related to liturgical prayer (all prayer is fulfilled in the liturgy-important point in the paper), and we also need private prayer in order to have an ongoing dialogue with God. Which of course leads to ongoing conversion, increase in virtue, etc, self-knowedge, which leads us back to the sacraments for the disposition required to receive the Eucharist as the source of nourishment. And the final point...the mission of the Church to bring Christ into the world. We couldn't do any of that; we are fully dependent upon God to draw us to Him and to nourish us in order to carry out His will.

It SOUNDS like a solid plan, doesn't it? But no, it's too much to have to hit, it is a synthesis of the entire course, and pulls in info from our Vatican II course. So it's a synthesis of two courses in one. In 8 pages. (Mine is about 8 1/2, plus endnotes.) And it's the most dismal paper I've ever written. You think I'm kidding, but I can tell you the theological definitions are not there, thus I missed connections, I missed important points from the course that I KNOW the prof will be looking for, and really, it's just a jumble of information no one but a theologian can follow; and errors anyone can see.

So I turned it in anyway, realizing I was fried, I worked on this disaster for three weeks, and all I have to show for it is this rag of a paper.

Then the dream....last night I dreamed that I handed my paper to the Prof. He glanced at it, set it down with a groan and with a bright red pen gave me my grade: "F ! " And underlined it. And wrote some really nasty comments about my work.

I was shocked and begged him to change the grade; I told him he hadn't even read the rest and mentioned the points I did hit...she he changed the grade to a "C" which didn't make me feel any better because he only changed it because I begged...not because the work deserved better grade.

I am SO glad that it was only a dream! Although I don't really feel that much better because, in fact, I won't have the grade back for a couple weeks, and I do think a "C" is a good possibility. And I don't consider that to be an acceptable grade.

Yeah, I know, no one in the future is going to ask me what my grades were like in Grad school, and when I die and go to my judgment, God is not going to ask me about that "C". (He's more likely to ask me who I ran over to get a substandard grade!)

So I'm just goign to go about my day now. This is our last weekend of class and then I'll have about 6 weeks to not have to worry about writing any papers.

That must be God's gift to our class for Christmas. Thank you, God.