I have completed my first semester of seminary. It has been a fruitful if sometimes baffling experience. Like many of life’s events – we can listen with our intellect all we want, but until we start, we really don’t understand what they are all about. Seminary has had several of these life lessons for me.
“It’s a full time job.”
I have apparently forgotten what a full time job is like. Somehow, I thought that seminary was going to involve a respite. How much better can life get when your work is to read books you love? Plus, I thought that my 20 hour a week ministry, my 20 hour a week school volunteering, my 20 hour a week managerial job, and my full time family commitments would prepare me for any problems I might face in balancing life and school. This has not been the case. Consequently, many things that I had hoped to do, such as write these letters home more frequently, have been lost in the confusion.
“You must work to maintain your spiritual life.”
I must admit this sounded like complete foolishness to my pre-seminary self. I am in seminary. All of my work and the people around me are engaged in the spiritual life-right? Wrong. I am disappointed to report that when the Bible is required reading, it isn’t any more enlightening than the phone book. Seminary is not three years of monastic retreat, which was my fanciful imagination. Seminary is graduate school, with all the accompanying lectures on plagiarism and citing your source. It has been very hard to hear the Holy Sprit here; she is no academic! At one point, someone asked my how my relationship with God was and I was appalled to hear myself answer truthfully, “We aren’t on speaking terms.”
‘Seminary isn’t time out.”
It took me some time to realize this one. In many ways for me, it is time out. I am not working with the homeless, I am not writing sermons, and I am not offering spiritual guidance to anyone. Still, the ordinary and extraordinary parts of life are still happening. I still have to pay the car insurance. My children still want (and have gotten) a dog. My daughter is having braces put on and we are applying for her Middle School. Birthdays and anniversaries are still flowing by. It is important to remember and honor all of these things in their season and not forget them because I feel that I am in a time out.
I have learned a lot this semester. While I should perhaps not admit this, most of what I learned wasn’t Koine Greek, Christian History, or the genealogies of the Old Testament. I have learned that the relationships really do matter most. The spaces between me and my daughter, between me and you, are the places where God truly reveals himself to us. Keeping those spaces open and healthy and clean keep God present with us, and that work is more important that how to decline Greek nouns or where the chalice sits on the corporal. In old relationships, the comfort of God is found. In new relationships, the wonder of God is waiting. So my friends, both old and new, I offer up this hard earned wisdom from the CDSP seminary – call someone you didn’t get to see over the holidays and say hello or someone you met at a party and felt joy with. See how God moves in your life.
Blessings,
Heather Lee - Epiphany 2009
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