Sunday, June 6, 2010

Reflecting on Seminary (or Learning How To Wait)

So, the Navy delayed the board that decides my entry into Active Duty or the Reserves leaving me with two more weeks of waiting on where the next chapter of my life takes me.  This has provided me with an opportunity to do some things I probably wouldn't have been able to do over the last few weeks.  I got to travel to Hawaii to see a good friend get married.  The time has allowed me to put quite a dent in the stack of books sitting on my desk that seminary did not afford me the time to read (fiction and military history being the largest categories I am tackling.)  I have been working on the house, finally getting to some home improvements I was putting off and also dealing with a bunch of things that happened to break in the last week.  Next I head to DC to visit some old roommates and then off to Montreat again this summer but this time I will get to work with college students that are helping out the conference.  But more than anything else I have been able to reflect on the last three years and what this time meant for me and my future ministry. 

One major thing I have realized in this period of reflection is what seminary taught me and what the three years taught me.  Seminary, for the most part, was not where I learned how to articulate my theology or how to engage the world in a theological manner.  This is not to say the time was wasted or to discourage others from the process.  Seminary provided a great venue for me to learn how to think and write in a completely different manner than I had learned during my engineering studies and my role in the submarine force.  I didn't realize I could read or write that much in a week.  Not only did I learn how to write in a manner that would fit an academic context, but I also learned in my preaching classes how to write and speak to the context in which I would find myself whatever that would eventually look like.  I also learned that there is not singular theology to which we should all follow.  I think we all come out of seminary, or even from a particular congregation, with slightly different ways of speaking of God and our encounters with God.  The wide variety of reading in seminary showed me that in a stark way as they all have a slightly different take on the subject.  But none of these things really helped me to articulate my theology in a way others would understand. 

I have to admit that I learned theology outside the confines of classes.  There were times in which my fellow students debated what I believed and I learned how to articulate theology to those fluent in the lingo.  But I had to work in congregations to learn how to articulate theological themes, which can get quite complex, to those without the vocabulary.  Children taught me how to explain those complex themes in powerful ways that we can all understand.  My experience with kids shows they understand theology in a deeper and more powerful way than those of us "educated" folks.  The way they describe things cuts away the fluff we like to put on those themes.  But perhaps the place I really learned about theology was working at a children's hospital for the last three years as a volunteer.  They didn't care why I was there, only that I was there with them in that moment.  I entered into extreme suffering and extreme joy and learned how to feel comfortable in both emotions and that God is definitely in both of those spaces.  I learned that every interaction with another person is a sacred moment and that God is there in all of the relationships that I made with the children and their families.  I learned theology in the extremes and in the uncomfortable places of life not in the comfortable place I found myself in the sub force.  Now I have to wait and reflect some more before God sends me out to the extremes of life again to learn more theology in a different context and to pass on the lessons I learned over the last three years.