Experiencing a Gift

I went to church this past Sunday, the 3^rd Sunday in Advent, at St. Mark's, Berkeley. I had planned to go to another church that is rather distinctive in their worship as a learning experience, but I had to change plans so that I could meet some old college friends in town for the day. I picked St. Mark's mostly because it was pretty close to campus. St. Mark's has a lovely choir and music program (their choirmaster and organist is actually my music professor at CDSP). The music and hymnody was beautiful and very well attuned to the day in the church calendar and the readings. The service was a pretty straight-forward Holy Eucharist, Rite II, the most familiar service for most Episcopalians my age.

It was exactly what I desperately needed.

For me, at that moment in my life and study, the elegantly basic service at St. Mark's was extraordinarily nourishing. The beauty of the music, the familiarity of the hymns, the ease of following a familiar service that was carefully designed and prayerfully led all helped heighten my prayer and connection to God at a time when I needed that help. I'm tired here at the end of the semester. Tired of being away from my family so often. Tired of having to be ready to defend every minor observation from the critique of my fellow seminarians. Tired of trying to say something useful in class. Tired of asking hard questions of myself. To be able to just follow along, sing, pray, and not worry about asking or answering questions was like an early Christmas present. I realized why why our church can be a gift. We are supposed to be healers and reconcilers. I didn't need a lot of healing yesterday, but I needed some. I've been studying all kinds of complicated theologies of healing and reconciliation, but yesterday, in something no more intellectual or complex than a fairly standard service of our faith tradition, I experienced healing and reconciliation. It can be as simple as Holy Eucharist, Rite II.

Small Things

In my class on suffering, we've been discussing the book “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by Jean-Cominique Bauby. The author knows a thing or two about suffering. At the age of 43, he suffered a stroke that took him from being the editor of the French magazine Elle to a being unable to move but with a fully functioning mind. He could only communicate, and he dictated the book, by blinking his left eye. His book is remarkable in many ways.

In our discussion, we examined the degree to which he was able to find peace through many small things – the smell of French fries, the memory of a place, of simple pleasures. We recognized the degree to which the book brought home this point, so often said, that these small things are, in many ways, the meaning of life. We all found our appreciation of these things enhanced by Bauby's experience.

Previously, I was very dismissive of this kind of thinking. Statements like “It's the little things in life that matter” always felt a little trite to me. I felt like surely the great truths deal with the big questions and provide complex answers. I felt like if the small things are the meaning of life, then life must not be very meaningful.

I think now, though, that the phrase or concept does capture a wisdom, though not necessarily literally. Ice cream, kittens, holding hands, none of these are the “meaning of life” in a literal or even philosophical sense. But, the deep satisfaction that they provide, a satisfaction that all humans can relate to is a type of understanding. It is an understanding that is more of a sense of peace and connection rather than a solution to an intellectual puzzle. These small things and experiences also provide wisdom and satisfaction through their commonality, through their shared nature, through our ability to know that we share some understanding together.

I need to practice my ability to recognize this type of wisdom. Perhaps one aspect of ministry is helping others to make these connections; connections that are not trite, but deeply satisfying, what a connection with God feels like.

Thinking Theologically

One of my goals when entering seminary was to become more adept and consistent at what I call “thinking theologically.” By this I mean looking at the world with more attention to God's action in the world, and, more importantly perhaps, to orient my thinking on a day to day basis to try and be in line with a greater divine purpose. What I'm hoping to do is move from approaching questions, problems, and issues with a “strategic approach” (what is the most efficient way to solve this issue?) to using a theological approach (how would God call us to solve this issue?).

I had an “a ha” moment in my class on Anglicanism. We were discussing the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1886/1888. (For Episcopalians, check your BCP pages 876-888, for others, click here). In this effort towards ecumenicism, first the Episcopal Church and then the Anglican Communion tried to define what elements of Christian faith we considered essential or non-negotiable in inter-denominational dialog. We settled on four, essentially: 1. The centrality of the Old and New Testaments, 2. the Apostolic and Nicene Creeds, 3. Baptism and Eucharist, 4. the Historic Episcopate. It is the last one, the importance of having bishops considered to be in succession to the original apostles, that has often been one of the biggest sticking points in dialogs between Anglicans and churches that do not have bishops. Apparently, however, our intransigence on this point begins with Thomas Cranmer, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, who felt this was non-negotiable because bishops are actually in the New Testament (see 1 Timothy 3:1-2; Titus 1:7). They may not be in the Gospels, there may not be a line where Jesus says “You have to have bishops,” but he felt that the strong reference to bishops in the early church indicated that we really didn't have a choice in this matter, God wanted us to be organized this way.

Hearing that, I thought “a ha, he may not be 100% right, but at least that is an example of thinking theologically.” By this I mean that they didn't think strategically, which might lead you to say “you know, this bishop thing is getting in the way of the worthy goal of inter-faith dialog, let's dump it in the interest of moving things along,” they said “hey, how does God call us to be a church?” They then said, "hey, since we think the Bible is crucial to our understanding of what God calls us to be, we really can't blow off these texts that suggest that God's church includes bishops." Now, I can completely understand how other churches may have come do different understandings of how God has called them to be, understandings that don't include the Anglican fixation with the episcopate. I'm not saying that isn't a reasonable interpretation or even that I fully understand all the nuances of our own Anglican understanding of the theology of the episcopate. However, I did admire the way we approached the problem.

Practicing What You Read

I had an interesting convergence of personal struggle, class readings, and spiritual practice last week.

In a previous posting, I noted that the honeymoon ended, and I’ve had some frustrations, doubts, and questions about the way I’m doing this whole seminary thing. While my experience hasn’t entailed a crisis of faith or any fundamental doubts about my basic call to serve, I have spent some time wondering if I was called to be here, at this place, doing this study, this way. Since I thought I had discerned that I was supposed to be doing this, I’ve been rattled by these questions. I’ve found a deep need to try and reconnect with my call, to reconnect with my sense of God working in my life.

Meanwhile, I’m reading the Pelagius-Augustine of Hippo debate in not one but two classes. For those of you not immersed in early 5th century theological debates, this one centers on the relationship between grace from God and human free will. Pelagius was a great believer in the power of the human will. He argued that humans can freely choose to be good, can, in effect, use their free will to live a good life and achieve salvation. Augustine of Hippo, Mr. Original Sin, argued vehemently against this, emphasizing the total dependence of humans on God. He felt that even our ability to choose good is a grace from God. (For those of you who are or have been immersed in early 5th century theological debates, I admit that just generalized a great deal. In case you are wondering, as far as the Christian Church at the time was concerned, Augustine of Hippo won the debate).

Hearing this debate and pondering it in the midst of a personal struggle to reconnect with God, I found Augustine of Hippo’s viewpoint very amenable. Wrestling with doubts, doubts for which there really is no simple or obvious answer certainly made me feel, realize, and/or recognize that I am, in fact, highly dependent on God and God’s ongoing grace. I’m dependent on something beyond my own murky, cloudy desires; that even my own will is insufficient power in my own attempt to live in a right relationship with God. St. Augustine may have been wrong about some other things, but I think he nailed this one.

That realization hit me just as I was trying to find concrete steps to aid my ongoing discernment. I had been debating whether or not to go attend a small-group spiritual formation meeting. I had a moment of great clarity where I realized that A: If I am, in fact, admitting my dependence on God and B: If I continue to believe (as I long have) that one way to hear God is through community, I should C: Go to said group meeting. I did. It is a long-term commitment, that I’m following through, like a lot of this, on raw faith that if I keep working as attentively I can, and follow what I know in my heart and head, I will, through the grace of God, hear what I need to hear.

Angelus

The honeymoon between seminary and me ended this past week. A bunch of frustrations and doubts all hit at once and I felt very low about the whole enterprise. I wrote a very crabby blog that I've decided to sit on a little more, to see if I really mean it.

I'm climbing back out, I think, or at least climbing up a bit. I've been helped again by the bell (see earlier blog). A few weeks back in my class on Anglicanism we were studying the Anglican and Episcopal Church in Africa. The Episcopal Church had a strong mission presence in Liberia. This reminded me that my grandfather, the Rev. Fred Seddon (who I called Granddaddy), had been a lay missionary in Liberia before he was ordained a priest. The class got me interested in my grandfather's experience and I've spent a couple of weekends with my Dad (his son), looking at old photos, newsletters, etc., from Granddaddy's mission experience in Liberia.

This weekend, I read an old mission newsletter where one of his companions described a typical day at the mission station. I noticed that days at the mission were punctuated by ringing the angelus bell. Three rings -pray- three rings -pray- three rings -pray- nine rings. That's the bell that rings throughout the day here at CDSP. I've been cheered somewhat by that connection to my grandfather. There, across the decades is that darn angelus bell. It keeps ringing, calling, whether or not I feel up to answering at any given moment.

Taking the Bible and Truth Seriously

This past week I found myself doing two odd things. One would be odd to other people (or at least some of them) and one was odd to me. On the first count, I found myself reading and quoting the Bible right and left. This may not seem an odd thing for a seminarian to do, but remember, I'm an Anglican seminarian, an Episcopalian seminarian. We are frequently accused of not taking the Bible seriously. Folks outside our religion accuse us of this, as do other Anglicans from time to time. But the truth is, for a group suspected of not taking the Bible seriously I found myself reaching for my Bible on my iPhone (best app I've bought yet), where I can easily look up chapter and verse. I did this on average every 10 minutes as I wrote papers, read interpretive studies and moved slowly through my training. I will agree that we don't read this document in exactly the same way as everyone else who does, but let me tell you, from a seminarian's viewpoint we take it tremendously seriously. I've now had to read Leviticus front to back, the whole thing, not just a law or two, three times. You try that sometime.

The other odd thing I did was use that document to argue that there might, in fact, be some absolute Truths out there in the world. The anthropologist in me shuddered a bit as I did that. The whole focus of my anthropological training was to emphasize the contingent and culturally conditioned nature of most truths. Anthropology generally stresses “relativism;” that it is hard to judge a viewpoint without understanding, relatively, where it comes from, without understanding its cultural context. Now, back in Anthropology school, we danced up to the limits of this way of thinking. We did agree that some things – violence against women, children, etc. - might be bad under any cultural system, but we didn't go much farther than that. We never settled how to make those decisions. It's tough if you want to emphasize analysis rather than judgement. Well, if you are in the Truth-with-a-Capital-T business as I am now you don't get to dance away from those questions. Some Anglicans in other countries, in countries that now accuse we Episcopalians of not taking the Bible seriously, have tried to use the Bible to encourage women to stay with abusive spouses. I found myself arguing that, no, the document doesn't say that and that in fact it commands us to protect the most vulnerable among us. Furthermore, I argued that this was, in fact, God's message to us, perhaps one of the central tenants of that message. I found myself making Truth claims, something I'm haven't done much of before.

I have not yet found a completely satisfying approach to Truth that honors both my conviction that there is Truth in the world and my understanding that all of us approach it in culturally conditioned manners. I do still feel that our grasp of the Truth, whether we get it from our culture, or the Bible, or some other text, sacred or otherwise, is always tenuous, approximate. We have to take the tools we've been given, by those who have gone before, by our culture and others, to do our best to find our way. We also can't dance away from the Truth, it has real impacts on real lives for real people. We may need to do it humbly, reaching for that Bible every ten minutes, reading it, re-reading it, and thinking about what it says in light of our lives and the words of others. The advantage of a sacred text is that it gives a starting point for all those who hold the text sacred, it is a gift that can form a common beginning and reference for our endless human arguments. The Bible is not the only sacred text in the world, and while I will be happy to swear that it contains “all things necessary for salvation” (asked of all Episcopal priests), I don't necessarily feel that it somehow has a lock on all the Truth out there, or if it does that we are yet capable of seeing it. But it is a start. And we take it seriously.

Comfort Ye

To the right you can see what it looks like when an admitted liturgy-geek does liturgy planning. CDSP does a lot of liturgy, 15 services a week. The main service is the Thursday evening Eucharist, which is designated as community night. I was put on the team for the Eucharist this past Thursday, which meant I got to participate in the planning for said liturgy. What you see is a suite of hymnals, a midi keyboard (to plunk out hymns and see how they sound), various prayer books, and other resources I used to draft up what I thought the liturgy should contain. I then met with the rest of the team and we put all our ideas together. It took a great deal of effort, probably two hours each for a group of about 8 people. In other words, two full days of work for one person. I thoroughly enjoyed it and loved the intentionality and specificity it brought to the service when we finally worshipped together.

The really interesting thing about this service is that we deliberately toned down our usual liturgical variation. At CDSP we typically do lots of different kinds of liturgies-Rite I, Rite II, Enriching our Worship, as well as newly constructed liturgies borrowing from all around the Anglican Communion and beyond. When we met to plan we looked at where we were as a community (half-way through the semester, just before a week break for Reading Week), and unanimously decided that what the community needed was something familiar, something easy, something comforting. We basically took Holy Eucharist Rite II, the most familiar form for most Episcopalians, made careful hymn selections, tinkered a bit with where to chant and where to speak different sections of the service, fiddled with the choice of prefaces, and called it good. It seems to have worked. People expressed appreciation for not having to "think too much for a change" and for the ability to follow along easily, enabling more reflection and prayer.

Coming home for reading week to my home parish, I had new appreciation for the level of consistency in our prayer and worship. Like many parishes, and unlike a seminary, we don't do much liturgical tinkering or change. Having capped off six weeks of lots of services that demanded your full attention with a service designed to be comfortable, I had a new appreciation for the freedom that a comfortable and familiar liturgy gives for personal spirituality. I do think that it is important for a seminary to expose us to different liturgies. Each community has its own comfortable style and I have no idea where I'll end up. I also think that communities can benefit a bit from a little liturgical innovation, or at least careful planning and intentionality. If liturgy is too comfortable it can become so easy and familiar that it doesn't speak to where you are now or to where you need to go. But a little comfort can give space for the Spirit to work.

Christian Conflict Resolution

When introducing a Gospel reading during the Daily Office (Morning and Evening Prayer) do you say “A reading from the Gospel According to X” or “A reading from X?” This question engenders strong responses here (and, truth be told, probably elsewhere). I was taught one thing during a class on worship fundamentals. I then had an opportunity to put the teaching into practice at Evening Prayer the same night. I was strongly informed by someone else that I had done it the wrong way, causing me to literally bang my head on the lectern in frustration (during the rehearsal, not the actual prayer). I then decided to stir the pot a bit and raise the individual squabble to a community discussion. Having seen this form of debate over liturgical practice occur in other settings and over other issues, I decided (in consultation with other students) that it was time we solved the general problem, which is: How do you decide what to do when something isn't specified? I raised the issue at a Worship Committee meeting, emails have ensued, and the conflict is on.

The problem stems from lack of explicit details in the rubrics. The rubrics, or official church details regarding liturgical (and other) practice, are the small font, usually italics, in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer (BCP) or the nature of the text itself that give directions for how to conduct public prayers, worship, services, etc. In this case, the BCP specifies “One or two Lessons, as appointed, are read, the Reader first saying “A Reading (Lesson) from ________” (see pages 84 or 118 of the BCP). There is a lot of space in that blank. Space enough for “the Gospel According to X” or for “X.” Communities usually fill in those blanks in the rubrics with customary practices, things they have settled on that work in the particular community. Sometimes these are codified in an actual text, or “Customary.” In the case of CDSP a draft customary has been under revision for quite some time, leaving all kinds of room for little battles over these issues.

The wonderful side of these conflicts is that they show that we really do deeply care about worship, including the most minor details. My wife was stunned that we could even be perturbed over such a small set of words. It turns out that those who favor “A reading from X” want to make absolutely sure that the Gospel is not “proclaimed” in the Daily Office, as it is during the Eucharist. The rubric for introducing the Gospel reading during the Eucharist specifies saying “The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to ______” (BCP, page 357). About half of the community wants to distinguish the proclamation of the Gospel in the Eucharist from the sense of simply reading a text in the Daily Office; they prefer to drop the “according to” phraseology during the Daily Office and to replace it with “A reading from X”. Others prefer to always distinguish the Gospel from other texts and “according to” does that very nicely. It turns out that, at least in the learned opinion of a distinguished liturgical expert here on campus, either is actually acceptable.

So how will we settle it? My hope is that we will find a way that is either distinctly Christian, or at least encapsulates our values of respecting all people, paying attention to the marginalized (in this case the quiet ones who never say anything), and seeking reconciliation. I am supposed to be learning how to live and operate in and even lead a “Christian” community, not just any community. I hope I'm not being too literal in wanting to actually discover what, concretely, this entails. So far, the process has been fairly typical of any conflict resolution in any organization I've been in. We've had meetings, sent emails. In the discussion, many people have shared stories of being “chewed out” over some perceived violation of rubrics, customaries, or some such. Sadly, like all communities, we frequently hurt each others' feelings while trying to enculturate them. Where will the “Christian community” solution come in? Will it be in the details of what we do, or will it be in how we do it? Or both?

Formation

Before I came to seminary, I received a lot of ominous warnings from priests and other former seminarians that seminary was going to be a new challenge for me, not just another graduate school. Not a lot of detail was given. Many statements were made about how it would work on your whole person, but I wasn’t quite sure that meant. Being who I am, I naturally took these predictions seriously, but was mostly left wondering what strange beast I might be facing.

Well, having now completed five weeks of seminary, I can say I’m still not quite sure what strange beast I’m facing, but I had perhaps a glimpse of it. Earlier this week, after a morning of lecture classes, I spent time with my music professor and he tried to help me wrap my mind around singing music on a two-line staff notation and give me tips on practicing my chanting. It was an hour in the chapel that was almost entirely centered on my throat and mouth and trying to make my body do something it didn’t naturally want to do. I left that and hustled across the street to the library where I sat down and immediately fired up a different part of my brain to thrash through an exegesis of Paul’s concepts of sin and salvation. The article mentioned the Greek genitive case. Multiple times. I finished that and worked on reading historical texts, which needed a different part of my brain. Then I hustled off to Evening Prayer to try and sit with God for at least 30 minutes. I might have had a spiritual experience and I might have just coasted through the service on autopilot, hard to say. I then went to dinner, where, though I don’t remember the conversation, I can basically guarantee that at some point my table-mates and I got into an intense and highly animated discussion about how to integrate some part of this into actual faith community life. Then back to the dorm to practice my chanting and then maybe read the Bible for another class.

I frequently hit 9 p.m. wiped out in a deep way. Working all of you indeed.

Defining Church Community

I just had a lovely visit from my wife and daughter. I'm doing a very odd commute to seminary. My wife has kept her job back home, which does a lot of things (financial) and otherwise, for our family, making commuting a good option. Most weekends I fly home, sometimes they come out. This weekend they visited, and we had a great time. We puttered around the Berkeley waterfront and hiked in the hills, we ate out, saw a movie, and also hung out with seminary folks. We helped with a fundraising event, ate in the dining hall, and, most importantly, attended the Thursday night Community Eucharist and dinner. The latter is a big deal here on campus. The Eucharist is planned carefully well in advance, and it is followed with a communal meal. It is the CDSP version of a regular Sunday service for a parish.

Of course, being who I am, I kept second guessing myself. Am I doing enough to integrate my wife and daughter into this community? Are we the weirdoes that no one ever sees? Of course, when I really think about it, we aren't unusual here. The community is no longer defined by the bounds of walking distance. We have people living right across from chapel in the dorm, people a block away in student apartments, people living across town, and people living several hours away. I commute a particularly long distance but I'm not the only commuter. Some of these folks I see frequently, some I almost never see.

Are we all weirdoes? Truthfully, I think CDSP is now mirroring most communities. Our ability to travel greater distances means that what used to be a “church community” defined by the geographic area within which folks could walk to church, is now less and less common. Back at my home parish, no one flies in for services, but some folks do drive from distances of 30-45 minutes. We have communities where the ties that bind are not geographical proximity, but shared interests, hopes, dreams.

This gives me hope for the role of churches in communities today. They can be one place where what draws people together is a sense of longing, higher purpose, a desire to serve, something outside our personal desires. It is no small thing that a weekly Eucharist is a big deal.

Living Under the Bell

In what is now New Mexico, in the 16th and 17th Centuries, mission churches were established by Spanish colonialists among the native pueblos of the region. This historical process, transformative and painful, has been summed up with the phrase “Living Under the Bell.” Communities that previously marked time in their own traditional ways, attuned to their needs, suddenly had the regular, systematic, ringing of the mission bell sounding over their village and land, calling (and in many cases forcing) them to live in new ways and under an alien schedule.

At CDSP, we also live under the bell. Out of the window of my dorm room, right across a small garden space, I can see the bell of our All Saints' Chapel hanging above the chapel's red door. The bell is rung once each morning just prior to the onset of Morning Prayer at 7:30 a.m. It is rung again at 11:20, calling us to the daily Eucharist at 11:30. It is rung again at 5:20, to call us to Evening Prayer or Evensong at 5:30. Three times a day, five days a week we hear the bell and are called to prayer, or at least a brief moment of remembering our calling and purpose (even I don't make every one of the 15 services, though I do attend at least one a day). At mid-day and early evening, the bell is rung in an “angelus” format, 3 rings, prayer, 3 rings, prayer, 3 rings, prayer, 9 rings (a trinity of trinities followed by a trinity of trinities!).

When you have chosen to live under the bell, it is a lovely thing. For me, it helps me to remember the bigger picture in the midst of trying to knock off reading, assignments, and other tasks. Hearing also fills me with joy over who we are. No other school in the Graduate Theological Union prays and worships publicly as much as we do. It is a particularly Anglican and Episcopal approach to work, life, and study, and our bell calls that out to the world. I am enjoying it while I can! The trick will be to leave here and be that bell in the world; a bell of joy, mystery, and praise, while not being a bell of oppression and colonization.

Basics 2: Study

I have now completed two weeks of classes and am beginning to get the hang of things. It has been a little odd to find myself plunked back into the classroom; in some cases in actual wooden school desks I remember from elementary school. (The church is nothing if not willing to reduce and reuse). I’ve spent so much time as a professional with a career that to be sort of a blank slate again feels out of alignment with who I have been for so long.

But I’m not complaining, getting to dedicate myself full time to reading, thinking, commenting, and discussing things that previously I could only occasionally talk about with a few people is very, very stimulating. I’m taking six classes: Introduction to the Old Testament, History of Christianity, Introduction to Anglicanism, a systematic theology course called Suffering and the Human Person, Fundamentals of Worship, and Fundamentals of Music. This would be completely insane if not for the fact that the last two courses are one-credit courses and I’m auditing them. The remainder I’m taking pass/fail.

This load makes me run around a lot, quite literally. CDSP is part of the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), a consortium of seminaries all in the Bay Area. I can take classes at any of them, and I am. I’m taking Old Testament (OT) from the Lutheran seminary located after a 10 minute drive to the top of the Berkeley Hills. My course on suffering is taught by a professor at the Jesuit seminary (though it meets on the CDSP campus). I study most often in the GTU library, across from CDSP, where it is quiet and you can spot the occasional napping monk.

I have several days that are wild and crazy. Mondays I’m in class nearly all day, with Anglicanism meeting from 2 to 5 p.m. I’m finding a 3-hour lecture in the afternoon to be a bit brutal. Tuesday mornings consist of what I have termed Mr. Toad’s Wild Berkeley Ride up to OT with the Lutherans at 8 am and then bolting out the back of the class and riding the brakes downhill to CDSP for Fundamentals of Worship 10 minutes after OT ends.

In the midst of the load there have already been a few wonderful moments of insight. My course on suffering has caused me to abandon my hope of solving the dilemma of “theodicy,” or, how can it be that if A: God is all-powerful, and B: all-loving, then C: evil and suffering still exists. The prof came right out on the first day and said that the only way to “solve” this intellectual dilemma is to “fudge” one of the three propositions. He then proceeded to show us how many fancy theological concepts (with Latin names and everything!) were basically ways of fudging one or another of those points. I was a great relief to realize that no one else, after thousands of years, had solved that problem! It’s not so bad to be back in the classroom.

Basics of Seminary Life

When I was a professional archaeologist trying to write for the general public, I always had to remind myself that people were less interested in the high-falutin’ theoretical debates I was immersed in than they were in the seemingly mundane details of daily life in the past. They were less interested in “what is the role of ritual in the development of complex chiefdoms” then they were in “what did they eat and how did they get the food?” My blogging here may veer towards the former, but in the interest of the latter, here are some of the details of my daily life at seminary.

I live in a dorm, Parsons Hall, right on the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP, in Berkeley, CA) campus. Thankfully, all the rooms are singles, and I don’t have a roommate though I do have to share a big communal (male) bathroom with two private showers. So far there have been no shower conflicts with the men, I can’t speak for the women who are greater in number and have the same number of shower stalls. My room is spacious enough for my twin bed, a bookcase, a huge desk, and a bedside table. I also have more closet space here than we do in our 1927 house in Salt Lake City.

The CDSP campus fits neatly on an irregularly shaped lot which is one block from the north edge of the U Cal Berkeley campus. I look out of my dorm room window at a lovely green courtyard and across to the CDSP Chapel. I can also see Gibbs Hall, a lovely brick building used as a guest house, and if I lean out a bit I can see Shires Hall, which is the main administration, classroom, faculty office, etc. building. Some days I could potentially get away with never leaving campus.

However, I do not eat on campus. Due to crumbling kitchen infrastructure at CDSP, we can no longer use the campus dining hall. Consequently, we now eat at the dining hall on the Pacific School of Religion (PSR) campus across the street. There are some advantages to this. The PSR dining hall has a balcony with a view of the bay and San Francisco. I also run into students from the other seminaries of the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) in the dining hall. One morning I had a rollicking conversation with a Quaker about restorative justice whilst eating breakfast.

For exercise, I bought an inexpensive membership at the U Cal Berkeley gym. I take a short bike ride across campus to get there. The place is full of undergrads, who are considerably more cheery than the average “real” adult. Rather than trudging on the treadmill with a “workout, then job, then pick up kids, OMG what will I fix for dinner?”-look on their faces, their faces tend to say “workout, eat, sleep, drink beer.” I’m enjoying that little change of scenery.

As I finish this up, I can hear the bells from the Cal Berkeley carillon. The proximity of a bunch of nearby seminaries also means that I can hear their bells, for prayer, chapel, worship, throughout the day. There are a number of things that make going to seminary a challenge and a sacrifice, but the environment here is, for me, a source of abundance and blessing.

Practicing Faith

Going to seminary was a real act of faith for me. I mean this in a literal, concrete way. Actually getting in the car about a week ago, kissing my wife and child goodbye (if only for a week), and pointing the car on the concrete and pointing it west into the vast Great Basin desert took an act of will and an act of faith. I’ll be absolutely honest, when I woke up that morning my main thought was “I don’t have to do this. I could just stay home.” As I passed each NV city along I-80 I thought “Here’s a place I could turn around.” Despite years of thinking, praying, reflecting, and planning, when it came time to actually do it, it was harder than I thought it would be.

There is an argument that faith is not as much a matter of consistent, wholehearted belief as it is a matter of practice; of acting as if God is good, just, loving, gracious and faithful regardless of what you believe. As an anthropologist, this concept resonated with me. I am an adherent of “practice theory;” the theory that our daily acts and practices from the mundane (getting dressed) to the complex (worshiping a deity) form our beliefs and culture as much as or more than our ideas, cosmologies, and ethics. So, the idea that faith itself may essentially be a practice holds a lot of appeal for me. My only quibble with this concept of faith is that I don’t think anyone simply acts; you only behave if, in fact, you believe.

My drive to seminary added a layer of complexity to this question. Certainly my beliefs felt very distant when I actually had to get in that car. My stomach was roiling and my head was full of that confused fog you have when you are filled with strong emotions. I more or less had to exercise discipline and just make myself do it. It was an ACT of faith in a moment of doubt. Perhaps a gift we all have is that our moments of strong belief, our times of deep, intellectual faith, do not actually have to align at every moment with our acts of faith.

Starting Questions

Here is the beginning of a list of questions I hope to finish seminary either A: having answered, B: having better tools to answer, or C: realizing it was a dumb question (and knowing why). I do this with some trepidation, as it makes me realize the depth of my ignorance and I fear that all of these will be answered “C.” Please feel free to add your own questions to my list and I’ll do my best to figure them out too.

The order here is arbitrary:

1. What do we mean in this day and age when we say “God is sovereign”?

(Note: My father asked, “do we still say this?” My answer is, we do, at least during the Venite in Morning Prayer, Psalm 95:7, “We are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.” Are we just saying that just because it sounds vaguely comforting? What do we mean by a belief that God has and/or can act in history?)

2. What does it mean to “pronounce God’s blessing”? What do we mean when we say “We bless God”? What the heck is a “blessing” or “being blest” anyway?

3. What is a “marriage” in our church and what is “blessing a civil union”?

4. Is there a theology of religious diversity and non-belief that is defensible from an anthropological perspective?

5. Why do we pray?

6. Is there an existing theology that adequately considers the time depth of the earth (as evidenced geologically) and the universe (as evidenced through astrophysics)? The phrase “A thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past” (Psalm 90:4; see also 2 Peter 3:8), while a beautiful metaphor, doesn’t feel sufficiently rigorous to me....

7. Where or what exactly is/are the reconciling point(s) between our critical scholarship (text criticism, translation, contextual criticism, etc.) on the Bible and our deep understanding that this is an extremely important document that we (or at least some of us) are called to make meaningful today? Another way to put this is, I know (and love) all the scholarly attempts to unpack and understand the text of the Bible itself, particularly those aimed at understanding the Bible within the social and historical context(s) under which it was written. However, we will never fully understand the context(s) in which it was written, nor, importantly, are we the same society as the one(s) that wrote it. How do we take the valuable scholarship seriously and still make the entire text meaningful and important, here and now?

8. We Episcopalians still espouse (at a bare minimum in liturgy) atonement theology (Jesus died for our sins). We don’t play it up, but we haven’t discarded it. What the heck do we mean by “Jesus died for our sins”? What does “being saved” mean?

9. Can we reclaim Revelation and Daniel from the fundamentalists?

10. Can I improve my singing voice to the point that I can lead a smaller congregation in song without everyone cringing?

11. Do the Buddhists really have the best explanation of suffering? Is theodicy (why, if God is all powerful and all loving, is there suffering?) a fruitful area of inquiry? Or is Rabbi Kushner right, the only thing that matters is our response to suffering?

12. Do the translation difficulties surrounding the Greek word “epiousion” (often translated “daily bread”) matter in daily community religious practice? If so, why and how?

13. What particular aspects of Christianity are uniquely insightful for us today? What aspects of Anglicanism?

14. How can we as Christians meaningfully and seriously consider and incorporate the fact that Judeo-Christian beliefs occupy a historically (and geographically) brief blip within the overall scope of humankind’s theological and religious thinking? “We finally figured it out” doesn’t really cut it for me.

15. What do you say (or what are some options) in the following situation: you are visiting someone who is suffering and they (as they do rarely but occasionally) lay some theological explanation on you for the event they just suffered, and you completely and fundamentally do not agree, but they are looking at you with that “right?” expression on their face and you can tell that whatever the explanation was, and however you disagree, it just gave them a lot of comfort.