In 2021, I graduated from Union Theological Seminary with a degree in Pratical Theology. I still don’t fully understand what that means, but my hope was to make the theoretical real and embodied. I just read a post I made right after graduation, when we were still in the pandemic lock down and there felt like space was available for reflection, but alas 5 years later I am now writing the follow-up post.
How did seminary go? Well generally – it was great. I ended up taking more ethics classes than I thought I would, didn’t actually take a lot of church and society. My studies were interrupted and ultimately suffered a bit from pandemic lockdown. However, the truth is, if it weren’t for a full work/study from my 6th floor apartment life, where I am currently writing this post, I don’t know that I would have graduated at all. It was much easier to hop from tasks to tasks (couch school life, desk full-time work life) than traveling between disaster zones, Harlem, midtown and Brooklyn.
Beyond the practical benefits of no-commute work and learning, there was the gift of time to read and struggle with the creation of faith practices beyond the communal connection of in-person life. When we were all out in the streets on a regular basis, I didn’t have the time to do daily prayer, stare at out the window and let God speak. At the same time, I missed the opportunities for casual coffee with professor and classmates. The informal ways that a campus environment feed the soul and help us form relationships with colleagues that are deep and abiding.
For this series, my hope is to offer some advice that is not new, but hopefully adds to the voices of others who have chose this path. While there are many reasons for people to go to Seminary, it isn’t for everyone and I want to be transparent about where it can be life-giving and life-limiting. As you can read in that first post, my goal was to use the academic space to understand my call. I had given up on ordained ministry so I just wanted to know what this space was all about and how my gifts and skills could be used in a church environment as a lay person.
Lesson 1: Seminary is an academic way to engage formation.
For the most part, professors are academicians, while they care about mission and ministry, vocational call and the rest, their jobs are about making sure that you learn material, engage it and can deploy it in your desired context. This last part though is usually the last thing on the list. Especially for those seeking to be formed as clerics who will lead spiritual communities, the Greek meaning of a word may help your congregation, but only if you know how to deploy the message. While not always required, I believe it is critical to have spiritual directors, a coach or mentor on call to help you build the bridge from the academic to the practical from the brain to the spirit.
This need for bridge work played out most in Old Testament class (now Hebrew Bible) taught by David Carr. We were his guinea pig class for his new book that he was rewriting while teaching. The end product was The Hebrew Bible: A Contemporary Introduction to the Christian Old Testament and the Jewish Tanakh, 2nd Edition which I highly encourage you to read even if you aren’t in seminary.
About half way through the semester, we were focused on the Psalms. As an assignment we were asked to re-write a Psalm to engage our modern day experiences. Well for some this blew their mind. How can I re-write the Bible? For others it was a problematic assignment at best or heresy at worst. One student even said this was one of the reasons he could no longer stay.
What I learned on the first day of class ( 1) there are two creation stories 2) how the first creation story echoes the building of a temple) blew my mind so much that I ran to a friends house in total ecstasy realizing that it this was the exact right choice. I also witnessed colleagues faith, maybe even some of my own, fall apart as we learned about how the sausage was made. One friend who went through a similar process in EFM said, “so when is it real? when do we get to the real part? is any of it real?” After one month in Bible classes this will become a real question for you. and you will have to have resources and community in place to help you come up with an answer.
As a cleric many will be asking you these same questions and you will have to have an answer. Here’s mine:
- What do you mean by real? Is it 100% historically accurate? No. nothing is.
- Why does the Bible matter if it is not historical? Because it is theological. It is a documented history of people whose faith tradition I follow grappling with the hard things of life and sharing their experiences of divine intervention, incarnation and expression in ways that might inform my own lived experience.
- The Bible reminds me that I am not alone – what is documented and has ben translated/restranslated, shifted from oral to written is all a part of what makes it divinely inspired. Bishop Schori once wrote while reflecting on the break-up on the Episcopal Church that as humans our understanding of God evolves over time and did not end with revelations. This is a core tenant of the Anglican tradition that reason plays a part. And what I learned is that powers and principalities decided when and where the Canon would end, but that was not a divine decision, that is an institutional one.
All this to say, an academic space can be a life-transforming place to help you explore the segments that build your spiritual life, but it is not the same thing as helping you form a spiritual life. The academic space will provide facts and research, but then there will be more work to do. How you enter seminary, what beliefs you already holds about this faith elements – how much you are tied to them being TRUE, will ultimately define if and how you make it to the other side.
Seminary was so critical to my faith formation and the challenges of the academic research only deepened my understanding of the Good God and the humans as a part of a complex interconnected creation that gets to choose everyday how it shows up to be in co-creation with that God. That is where I landed, where do you land?
Questions for consideration:
- What tools and resources do you use to help deconstruct and reconstruct your faith?
- How do you engage your faith when new pieces of the puzzle are revealed – especially when they challenge deeply held beliefs?
- How do you hold truth loosely enough to sway when challenged and grounded enough to be rooted?
- What community exists to help you through these moments of struggle and challenge?
- How can you hold this space for others?
Pursuing Call 