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.