Reflections

I have officially finished my first academic year of seminary:  I got my grades in the mail and my final papers returned in my student box.  My friend Dale asked me what I most hoped to cultivate from this year, and I was only able to answer because of the two weeks of travel from which I had recently returned.  I have learned a whole new set of criteria - a new set of eyes - for looking at the world around me.  I have magically gained a whole new awareness of underlying patterns and issues in a given situation, as well as a nascent ability to reflect on such from a theological perspective.  I was so busy reading books and writing papers all year that this newfound ability comes a somewhat of a shock to me!

Kristin and I got to do a lot of talking in the last two weeks - we took the kids on a nine-state road trip in which we visited both her family and mine as well as some of our beloved spots in the Appalachian mountains.  We toured the French Quarter of New Orleans by horse and carriage, we visited Civil War-era forts on the Alabama coast (where I found that the ammunition storage under that cannon batteries felt remarkably like a chapel, with lots of curved brick archways and tall narrow windows that let in the sunlight), and we got investigated by wild ponies in the Mt. Rogers high country of Virginia.  We saw widespread tornado damage across several states - places where trees were twisted and snapped like toothpicks and houses were reduced to piles of rubble.  We taught the kids how to fish and discovered the limits of their hiking abilities.  It was a fantastic trip, with much long road time for discussion.

Over the course of conversations, I realized that the ideas and issues that I chose to discuss and reflect on somehow reminded me much of the classes and discussions I had been a part of in my schoolwork.  In the Great Smoky Mountains, for instance, we wondered aloud at why so much of the park's interpretive energy was focused on a narrow century of its millenia of development - and why we still idealize that tiny slice of history when people built log cabins and lived in the woods.  I found myself questioning the basic impulse behind such idealization, and what it says about those of us who long for such contrived simplicity when we are surrounded by a very different reality.  Why is most of our energy instead poured into systems which negate the very utopia we claim to adore in the park?

This is not the stuff of my pre-seminarian conversations.  This type of discerning is new and fascinating to me, and I look forward to developing and applying it more as I move ahead in this process.  I still have two years left, and I'm sure that each will have its own unique character, but this new lens is what I appreciate most about my first year of school.  It came by way of the combination of nearly all my learning - I can't attribute all of it to any one class or professor.

On Wednesday I begin a new chapter in this story.  I will be a hospital chaplain here in Austin for the next 12 weeks, spending half my time with patient visits and the other half in group reflection about my experiences.  Many priests look back to this Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) as a defining moment in their formation, and I expect no less.  Because of that, I'm fairly anxious about it!!  Please keep us all in your prayers, and we will do the same for you.