Even though not much to do schoolwork-wise, still had a pretty eventful few days. Saturday, I got to be a torchbearer at the cathedral in Baltimore for a classmate's ordination to the transitional diaconate. The service was beautiful, and while I realize it was not in the least about me, I was very happy a) not to have caught anyone or anything on fire, and b) to wear my new alb (I own an alb!).

Last night, I spent the night at a church down the road with a couple of other classmates, overseeing the overflow hypothermia prevention shelter there. We had nine men sleeping in the nave of St. Clement's Episcopal Church (aka St. Clement in the Dark, because of the lack of any windows in the nave), and the thing that struck me most about all of them was that except for the fact of their backpacks and duffel bags, I would have never guessed they were homeless. They were all neat and clean and many of them had jobs. One of the guys told us he'd had some legal troubles and just got into a bind financially; as my classmate pointed out, it just shows you how easily any of us could be in their situations. They were extremely grateful for the space, and I was thankful they were inside, especially on a night when the windchill got down to 7 degrees. Of course, so many more were outside in the cold.

Tomorrow, I have the first of two interviews for field-education, which will start next fall. VTS (and the diocese) requires three semesters of field eduction, which is usually done in a church. A senior recently mentioned to me how great it is to finally get to be part of a parish again during your middler year. She pointed out how we leave these really loving communities to come to seminary and then don't have any sort of church home for the whole first year of school. As juniors, we spend most Sundays of our first year visiting lots of different potential field-ed sites; I've been to a different Episcopal church almost every Sunday I've been here, and while seeing the varieties of Episcopal worship is fascinating, it also makes actually worshipping in any meaningful way a little challenging.

Last, I was really happy to get word I got into the clinical pastoral education program at UAB Hospital in Birmingham. CPE, as it's called, is where you dig into your psyche and learn all about how you function as a minister. Now just have to find someplace to live for the summer. . . .

So, I'm back in Alexandria after being in Mississippi for a few weeks, and am very happy to have had no homework for the past couple of nights. Technically, I have two books on the historical Jesus to read before classes start in Feb. and there are lots of things I could read that I didn't last semester, plus things I could read to get a head start on the new semester, but there's nothing to read for the next few days, which is a huge relief after months of lots and lots of work.

Even when I was home, I had to get three books read and a paper written for my January term class that started yesterday, I was working on a project for work study, and I was trying to see lots of family and friends that I've greatly missed during my time away. While it was wonderful to be home in Vicksburg and Oxford, it is nevertheless a great gift to be back in Alexandria with little to do for a few days.

My current weeklong class is at Wesley Theological Seminary's downtown campus and is on the topic of church leadership. It's actually been pretty good, with lots of (what seems like) very practical information. It's offered as part of the Washington Theological Consortium (at VTS, we're required to take at least 2 hours of consortium credit), so besides the resident United Methodists, there are lots of Baptists and a few nondenominational people. It's fun to hear everyone "amen" occasionally but not so fun to get bogged down in a discussion based on very literal interpretation of Paul. I felt kind of bad for the teacher, who gave her best effort to get these students to see beyond their kind of narrow interpretation, and to steer us back to the actual topic.

Also, it's really kind of fun to be in DC for the day and see all the movers and shakers moving and shaking around the city. And, it's nice to come home in the evenings to the seminary, where it's fairly quiet, since only about half my classmates are back. Many of the rest of them are in Myanmar, Jerusalem or the Dominican Republic right now, and though I didn't travel this January, I very much hope to get to go somewhere with my classmates next year.

After a what seemed like a really quick trip home, I came back to a hurricane, an Ignatian prayer retreat, Barbara Brown Taylor up close and in person, Halloween, and Old Testament and New Testament classes. The terrible destruction of the hurricane notwithstanding, it was a good--even transformative--week for me.

The retreat, recommended to me by my spiritual director here at VTS, was called "God's Abiding Love: An Ignatian Retreat in Daily Life," and has been sponsored once a twice a year by Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown since the 1980s, I think. (Holy Trinity, by the way, is the oldest Roman Catholic parish in DC and was John F. Kennedy's parish.) I am now a pretty big fan of Ignatius of Loyola and after struggling to pray in any sort of fulfilling way for a while, I think I may have found something that works for me, that allows me to engage more fully with God, or probably more accurately, it found me.

In other news, I got to sit about six feet away from Barbara Brown Taylor during a forum here at VTS (and also got to hear her lecture later that night) while she answered questions about preaching. "Are there any absolute don'ts?" one of the seniors asked. "Don't," BBT said, "apologize. Don't open with an apology about how difficult the readings were or having to preach on Trinity Sunday. That's your job. Suck it up. Can you imagine fireman showing up and complaining about having to put out a fire?" Good advice, I think.

In addition to all that, I got to see my friend Carlos dressed as a banana. Carlos is a New York City hipster, a Peruvian citizen, a recent college grad and, on Halloween and again just a while ago, after a really lovely home-cooked dinner in one of the common rooms with some other juniors, he was a banana. A banana going on about the injustice of homelessness, and the election and his Greek class, but, dressed in yellow foam, a banana nonetheless.

Quarter is ending and I'll be back in Mississippi soon. Have written my short papers for Church History, taken my Hebrew exam, and finished my service learning hours for Theology and Practice of Ministry. Now just have to study for and take the Church History exam, and write my TPM portfolio, which includes addressing such issues as how my personality type affects my leadership style, and the way my spiritual disciplines inform my ministry.

The past weeks once again have been kind of whirlwind but included attending at Simchat Torah service at a local synagogue with my Hebrew class. Fantastic. There literally was dancing in the street (or technically the parking lot) to celebrate the congregation's having read through the Torah. After a short prayer service, the congregation gathered in a bigger space (kind of like a parish hall) to take turns carrying the Torah scrolls and dancing. Then, toward the end of the celebration, one of the scrolls was unrolled completely. We made a huge circle and held it up while the rabbi walked us backwards through the events of the Torah, with some of the recently bat- or bar-mitzvahed kids interjecting with the canting of different sections. So, if anyone ever asks if you want to go to a Simchat Torah service, your answer should be yes.

Tomorrow is a reading day, so I will try to figure out what in the world has been going on in the first 800 years of church history. Gotta get all those heresies straight. Reading church history makes me think it's only by God's grace that the church exists at all still. We've tried pretty much everything we can to break it and very thankfully we haven't succeeded.

Kind of a cliche among bloggers, I think, but I'll say it anyway: I have been lax in the blogging but hope to do better. Really.

And now for news: In the couple of weeks since I've posted, I served on a chapel team, which happens once a year for us VTS seminarians and for me involved being a chalice-bearer at a Eucharist with the new (female) suffragan bishop of Virginia, during which we temporarily ran out of wine, which was a little stressful; visited General Seminary for an Episcopal Evangelism Network conference, where I attended a very cool jazz morning prayer service and also a jazz Eucharist with the Theodicy Jazz Collective, a band you should Google; got news that I am a student body chaplain (there are lots of us--19 I think--and I am very happy that my fellow Mississippian Alex Allain is also in that group); had a bit of a melt-down after missing a chapel team meeting during a week that was jam-packed with stuff to read and write and be present for (it so happened that my melt down, a bit of crying in front of my very kind chapel team leader/professor and another member of my team corresponded with lots of other junior class melt-downs); had a really nice lunch in the Refectory with Bishop Gray, who surprised us all but mostly Alex, who discovered the Bishop was here as he (Alex) wandered into breakfast Wednesday morning; found a spiritual director; overslept for morning prayer after staying up way too late listening to a senior and a middler discuss the difficulties of transitioning into seminary life and how a lot of what happens here is "hazing," in their estimation.

And then there's the school work. I have lots of stuff to write in the next several days, though thankfully none of it has to be all that long. There's a church history essay and a log entry on my service learning site as well as a case study to write up and present to my TPM class. I also have to recite the Shema in Hebrew on Monday and then come up with some prayer to say in Hebrew on Thursday. And then in a few weeks are exams and then fall break and on to Old Testament and New Testament, where I believe the rubber will meet the road for me. I hear I will be reading pretty much nonstop. I am very thankful I actually like to read.

Two weeks of classes down (I have no classes on Fridays, or Wednesdays for that matter, though of course plenty of work to do), and the days have become sort of a blur. I've learned that there's no real normal at VTS. Just when you think you've established a routine, something comes up.

Today, for example, our afternoon language sections were canceled so that we could board a charter bus for Catholic University of America. There, we met students from other seminaries in the DC area at an ecumenical prayer service. After the service, we were randomly divided into groups of four or five and whisked off to various Catholic centers, monasteries and houses for dinner.

I had the good fortune of hanging out with a group of Franciscans at Holy Name College, which is their house in Silver Spring, Maryland. The house is attached to what they laughingly described as a "mega-parish," St. Camillus, where four priests (also Franciscans) celebrate 9 masses each weekend. The masses are said in English, Spanish and French (for the large community from the Congo). The congregation represents more than 100 countries, and the Easter Vigil usually includes around 150 baptisms.

Also, we didn't get to meet him, but Robert Lentz, a somewhat well-known iconographer lives and works at Holy Name. He's "written" icons of a female Jesus, Harvey Milk and other somewhat "challenging images" (to borrow a phrase from trinitystores.com, where you can view his work), so he's not particularly well liked in some circles. Either way, his creations are fascinating.

During the more routine days of the last couple of weeks, I've gone to class, read, gone to chapel, read, worked out, read, eaten, read, slept, read, and read some more. And even so, I still didn't quite get to everything. I understand now why so many priests kept telling me, "Don't try to read everything. You can't do it." Amen and amen. Now, to bed.

So all of us juniors have survived August term, which ended with our Greek and Hebrew exams on Thursday. The Hebrew exam was not nearly as hard as I'd expected and I think I did pretty well. While I still love Hebrew it will be good to meet twice a week versus every weekday. In celebration of our making it through August and also to celebrate the four August birthdays in our junior class, there was an 80s' Luau on Friday night. Almost everyone came out for it--even some of us older seminarians--and it was good to celebrate together (my celebrating ended long before midnight, while others were up till around 2 a.m., I'm told). Thankfully, if I turn the air on in my room, I can't hear too much of what's going on on the patio down below.

When school starts after Labor Day tomorrow, I'll not only have Hebrew to worry about but also a required liturgics class formally called "Oral Interpretation of Scripture," but informally referred to as "read and bleed"; a required "Theology and Practice of Ministry" class (which in addition to class time involves 15 hours of community service, in my case helping formerly incarcerated men and women with resume writing and interview skills); church history; and "Introduction to Singing," which I'm really excited about since I'm a pretty terrible singer. In the second quarter later this fall, I'll pick up Old Testament and New Testament classes, having finished TPM and read and bleed during the first quarter. In addition to all that are daily worship, work study (in VTS's fundraising office) and Tuesday morning formation groups. I will be busier than I've been in a long time.

And of course I will need to fit in time to explore DC. I was able to do some of that on Friday, and visited the Hirshorn Museum, the Smithsonian's modern art museum, which had a great installation called "Belief + Doubt." This consisted of huge red, black and white words covering the walls and floor of the museum's bottom floor. My favorite part was the wall reading, "Belief + Doubt = Sanity." 

On Saturday several of us attended a funeral in DC for the mom of a fellow junior. This was held at St. Paul's K Street, known for its AngloCatholicism. It was a beautiful service, but sadly St. Paul's, which is all about social justice and also very much for gay rights, has never allowed a woman to serve there. I hear the rector is working to change this attitude, thankfully. 

On Sunday, I saw the complete opposite end of the Episcopal continuum at St. Mark's Capitol Hill. Church in the round--with the altar in the middle of the nave, and chairs surrounding it--is a pretty cool concept and I was glad to experience it. The rector there, Paul Abernathy, believes firmly in open communion and made a point to say that just as Jesus would not exclude, no one is excluded from receiving communion at St. Mark's, baptized or not (despite the canons of the Episcopal Church, which he of course didn't' mention). Also, the rector had written much of the Liturgy of the Word, we used language from Prayers for the Inclusive Church for the Liturgy of the Table, we read only the Gospel lesson, there was no creed and we skipped the confession, so visiting there raised a bunch of theological questions for me. 

But while parts made me a little uncomfortable, other parts were deeply moving, including the Prayers of the People, when anyone could speak up, finish with a "This is my prayer," and then hear the congregation respond with an "Amen." Also moving was the communion, which was celebrated jointly by the rector and his young female associate. Communicants gathered around the altar, received bread and wine, waited for everyone else around the circle to receive, then the rector dismissed the small group with a hearty "Go in peace!" Also, the people were extremely warm and inviting and seemed to genuinely care for one another as well as those in need, which made me wonder if messing with the liturgy is okay for a church that identifies as Episcopal if the people of that church are in fact living out the Gospel.

And last, here is the blessing from St. Mark's Capitol Hill, which I believe is also from Prayers for the Inclusive Church:

May the outrageous welcome of the Mother and Father accept us for who we are; may the incarnation of the Word touch us and hold us close; may the wandering of the Spirit help us risk ourselves for love; and the blessing of God, Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer be with us and remain with us always.