I don't normally do posts targeted to one specific group of people, but right now I feel the need to. This is a blog post for my fellow first-semester seminarians here at Princeton, as we round the end of reading week and move into finals.
I am making a specific blog post because I have had the joy of getting to know some of you incredible people in the past three months, and I am so grateful you are in my life. Seriously. I think seminary is a particularly interesting grad school experience because we all come from such different walks of life, with completely different backgrounds and experiences and stories. We are different ages, we are from all over the world, we come from all different undergraduate degrees and careers, with extremely varied religious history. The stories of yours that I have had the privilege to listen to have been inspiring and beautiful. And in all the differences of these stories, there seems to be one common thread:
We all sacrificed something to come here.
For some, it was money. People who gave up thriving businesses and secure jobs to start a journey on the financial tightrope that is going into ministry. For some, it was a sense of home and rootedness. People who moved across the country or across the world to home here and still feel adrift without their friends and family by their side. For some, it was their community. People who were in communities that didn't supper their choice to go to Princeton, to go to seminary, or even to enter into ministry at all. For some, it was lifelong dreams and plans. People who had aspirations and ideas for how their life would go, before it took a jarring left turn that dropped them off abruptly on a small campus in New Jersey.
Every story I've heard has a moment where I discover the courage it took for the person to come here and I am astounded at the bravery of this class.
And I do not think there can be anything more discouraging than making such a sacrifice in order to follow God's call, and then feeling the discouragement, displacement, and despair that many of us are facing right now. The feeling that this isn't going anywhere. The feeling that we are not supposed to be here. The feeling that we have squandered the gifts we have been given. The feeling that we were completely wrong about what those gifts were in the first place. The feeling that after finals everyone will know that we're a fraud. The feeling of calling out to God night after night after night and hearing nothing. The feeling of frustration at vocab words that will not stick in our brains or outlines that seem pointless, and the panic that if we can't get it all done, our future at the school and maybe even in ministry is over.
It is awful and it is coming to many of us no matter what angle we come from. Whether we have a religious studies background and feel like we should be doing far better than we are. Whether we're second or third career students with degrees and experience in finances, computers, theater, business, and have never had to fit into an academic mold like this one and have been out of it for years.
And for those of us taking the more standard intro courses, it is frustrating because we are trying to cram so much sheer information into our brains. We feel like we're just regurgitating, and we are trying to figure out what the teachers want us to do so we can get the magical "right" answer and live another day here, as opposed to truly figuring out how to apply this to our lives and ministry. And we are told from those who have gone through this that "it gets better" and we hope that they're right, that once we're able to focus in on what is interesting to us that we will find that passion that we lost, but also we find it hard to trust in that hope when, for many of us, that flexibility doesn't come into our schedules until next fall.
So here's the thing I have to say for us, now:
This is not our teachers' education. This is our education.
Ultimately, this is not about these finals. This is not about our grades.
This is about our ministry.
I know, it's hard, when we are shaking with fear that we'll fail. Our midterms this semester were the first time I ever deeply worried about failing a test and that fear sat in my stomach like the worst sickness I've ever had. It was awful. But more awful is having that fear combined with the feeling that there is no point beyond this test.
I know for those of us on the younger side of things, who grew up with standardized testing and a very strong focus on "get straight A's so you can get into the best school possible", it's EXTREMELY. DIFFICULT. to focus ourselves away from the grades and the expectations from others (but more from ourselves) on this letter or number. We have been trained for almost all of our cognizant lives to fulfill assignments, and if we're here at Princeton, we're good at it.
But your grade is not an assessment of who you are as a person or as a minister. Your grade is an assessment of your ability to complete a certain test or assignment as decided by one or maybe two people.
That's all it is. We just think it's more because it is given power.
Here's the deal, my totally depraved friends: NONE of us are perfect. No one can deserve to be here, no one can claim righteousness. But I do believe that all of us are supposed to be here, because we are here. That is grace. The grace of God is all we have to lean on. Even if we do leave, even if we do decide that this isn't the best place or way for us to respond to God's call, God is at work in us now. God is using this experience to mold us, the potter always responding to the clay and shaping it.
The fact that none of us are or ever will be worthy or prepared and are here only by the grace of God frees us from worrying about being something we're not. But if you're in church history with me you'll know that I'm not THAT Augustinian, and I think we are faced with a task: to get what we need for ministry out of this education.
Those needs will be different for each of us, and I think that we'll be fine at picking out classes that suit our needs, but the hardest part of that is what we're facing right now: how to we get what we need out of classes that we didn't pick and often require us to learn in ways that aren't natural for us?
We are called to wrestle with these classes, and yes, these finals, like Jacob wrestled with the angel, screaming in their ear, "I will not let you go until you bless me." We are called to find the relevance, so that the memorization, while still rigorous and hard, isn't an isolated experience that will quickly be forgotten, but something that enters in us and informs our further study and work.
How memorizing outlines can be about knowing approximately where to go in the Bible to find the verse to use when faced with a person in need.
How struggling though Anselm and Aquinas can help us show the critically thinking person who is on the brink of leaving the church because they think there is no room for them in the church that there is a place for them and their mind.
How Hadewjich can offer solace to someone who has just had an experience of God they have no words to understand or communicate.
How knowing the movement of tribes and geography in the Ancient Middle East can shed light on the political issues still plaguing that area.
I'm not saying to ignore the test. I'm saying USE the test. I'm saying that if they tell us we have to know this information, our job is to figure out why we need to know this information. Why it is relevant to our lives. Because in doing that, we are not passively having education happening to us, but rather, we are self-educating. We are not ruled by the school - we are using it as a resource. And we might feel a little less lost, or less like we're wasting our time, and it might even be a little bit easier to remember, because it is OURS.
"Let a student enter the school with this advice: No matter how good the school is, his education is in his own hands. All education must be self-education. … A school should be an offering of opportunity, not a direction, and the student should know that the school will be good for him only to the degree that he makes it good. It is a field for activity where he will see much, hear much and where he must be a judge, selecting for his special need, and daily discovering his need. … The man who goes into a school to educate himself and not to be educated will get somewhere." - Robert Henri, The Art Spirit (sorry about masculine pronouns, seminarians.)
And of course, we will fall short of this. I know I fall short of it every day. We will fall short of everything we ever do, which makes the miracle of God's grace shine that much brighter. We are, as Mandela said, "sinners who keep trying". Let's be honest… I'm not going to remember all of these outlines even a few weeks from now. (Except Genesis. I've totally got Genesis.) But the work I put into them will continue to inform me. Nyame adom, it will.
We are all going to get through this. Whether it works out the way we want it to or not. God is bigger than all of it. God uses whatever happens--that is the glory of Divine Sovereignty. And as I look through my Facebook feed and see such extraordinarily honest statuses and reflections of our various states of frustration, depression, hopelessness, and fear (which also warms my heart from the sheer honesty that brings us closer), I wish the universe was a Proverbs claims it to be, with wisdom that WANTS me to succeed and a clear path. But it so often is closer to Ecclesiastes or Job. There will be a flash of understanding where everything seems clear and then darkness, and that moment of light only seems to serve to make the darkness darker. God will seem like the absent God of the psalms of lament, or the abusive God of Jeremiah. But even in the depths of Job's anger and frustration and confusion, the other side of the truth is told:
For I know that my Redeemer lives,Thanks be to God.
and that at the last he will stand upon the earth;
and after my skin has been thus destroyed,
then in my flesh I shall see God,
whom I shall see on my side,
and my eyes shall behold, and not another.
My heart faints within me!
