And so it was that on Valentine's Day many of us juniors here at VTS got calls inviting us to serve at parishes throughout the dioceses of Virginia, Maryland and Washington for two years of field education, starting next fall. I am very happy and thankful to have received a call from Peter Ackerman, rector of St. Christopher's in Springfield, VA. Am also very happy that he has invited me (if I want) to start worshipping at St. Christopher's. I do very much want to do that; I've greatly missed being in a parish these last months, and am happy to have a place to spend Holy Week, which is also VTS's spring break.

I am extremely excited about working at St. Christopher's and with Peter. The senior who is the current seminarian there has had a great experience, and Peter is a relatively new rector (since 2010), so it will be an education in and of itself to watch him navigate waters that still may be somewhat unfamiliar to him. 

Interestingly, Peter, who graduated in 2007 completed his field ed across the street from the seminary at Immanuel Church on the Hill under the supervision of Sam Faeth, whose rector once upon a time was Taylor Moore. Peter went on to become the associate at Immanuel before receiving the call to St. Christopher's in 2010. Sam retired about that time, and she and her husband recently became members of St. Christopher's. So, I will be serving at a parish where my supervisor was once supervised by my sending rector's parishioner, with whom I'll be regularly worshipping. As my friend Martha, a priest working on an master of arts degree here at VTS, says, "There really are only six Episcopalians. The rest is smoke and mirrors."

Here's the link to St. Christopher's, with a message from Peter: http://www.saintchristophers.net

Ash Wednesday at VTS has been good, although I did miss being at St. Peter's. As is the custom at VTS, Ash Wednesday is one of handful of "quiet days," meaning we start out with morning prayer and a meditation inviting us to silence, we usually have a noonday office or Eucharist (today a Eucharist with imposition of ashes), and a closing at 3 to end the silence.

We are fortunate to have former presiding bishop Frank Griswold teaching a class here this quarter, so he did the morning mediation and the homily/meditation at noon. He's pretty amazing and said a lot of really great stuff, but my favorite thing he said (and this is a paraphrase of someone he was paraphrasing, can't remember who) concerned spending some time with Psalm 119. He suggested we chew on it like a cow chewing on cud, and like a cow, we should not become hysterical if we end up chewing on a thorn or two. Good for me to hear, since I sometimes get a little anxious when prayer is not going the way I think it should be going--as if I actually have all that much to do with it. Thank goodness I do not.

As a Lenten practice I am trying to set aside more time for prayer each day, and to that end am doing another Ignatian retreat-in-daily-life. I'll get a sampling of Ignatius's spiritual exercises over the six weeks, which I'm excited about it. I remain a big fan of Ignatius of Loyola, and am looking forward to discovering what these six weeks bring. Right now, though, must study a map of Paul's travels for an NT quiz and vocab for Hebrew. . . .

Spent  yesterday visiting wineries in northern Virginia with seminary friends. I'd planned to spend the day at a local coffee shop reading, but I think I made the right choice: riding around hilly Loudon County in the snow, tasting the Virginia varietals (lots of viogniers and petit verdots) with my friends Andrew and Greg seemed the absolute right thing before delving back into school full force on Monday. We did four different tastings at three of the dozens and dozens of wineries in the area (who knew there were 150 Virginia wineries??), plus a wine flight at lunch beforehand, so it was a full day of swirling and sniffing (and one that ended with me being a little loopy). Andrew and Greg, Californians well-practiced in wine tasting, were great tutors for my first winery experience.

And this brings up the issue of balance. I think I was so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of reading last semester that I rarely did much exploring around the area. This is not to say that I was always reading; I wasn't. I was just a little scared to separate myself too much from the books that needed to be read, if that makes sense. So, rather than take some time on the weekend to go into DC and visit a museum, I would sit in a coffee shop, or in the library or in my room with the books open but waste a lot of time on facebook, for example. This semester, I hope to take better advantage of all that's around me, to put down the work for a while and take real breaks.

This is the plan anyway. We'll see how it goes after we begin again on Monday. (Happily, on Monday we start on Paul!)

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.