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.
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Whew! That just exhausted me. I hadn't thought about the chanting thing, but yes indeed, there are some priests who do that well; some not so well.
I don't know if you know, but Pete Winder was chaplain at the high school I attended. He was a priest starting out there, and in fact met Bonnie, who was teaching nursery school, there, too.
Pete is perhaps one of the best preachers I know - or listen to. But I can tell you, getting him through the singing/chanting piece of his priesthood was challenging for those of us in the pews. Gotta do it, I guess. And frankly, I've always admired him for just chanting right along, no matter how out of tune it was! ;-)
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