So an entire week has passed at seminary and it feels a bit like a year, in a good way. All of the first-year students (including M.Div., M.A. and Anglican Studies folks) have started a month earlier than the rest of VTS, “nesting,” “orientating” (including figuring out the online learning system and the best way to get to the grocery store without a car), making various Hogwarts references and jumping into our first classes.
It’s wonderful being on a campus again, full-time, though it’s very different from the undergraduate experience – for many of us, this is a second or third career; students include couples and families with children from very young to teenage. I’m living in a dorm (my sister has been amused by the fact that we have R.A.s – called “proctors,” or, if you want to go there, “prefects,” as suggested by a Harry Potter-literate proctor), but all are single, with private bathrooms, so we have little sanctuaries to return to for study and reflection and naps and decompression when needed.
In a sense, seminary is what our future work and ministry will be – living and growing and learning and journeying and worshiping and breaking bread together in community – and that’s intentional. We come from all over, from Kenya and Alaska and Wisconsin and Florida and Russia and the Sudan. Some of us (the M.A. and Anglican Studies folks) are already ordained deacons or priests; in our previous lives we’ve been teachers, social workers, youth ministers, attorneys, musicians, stonemasons, curators. There’s a great sense of honesty and vulnerability among us; there’s been a lot of laughter, but also some grief – we’re all leaving people and places and jobs and lives behind.
This morning we carpooled into D.C. for the 10:00 a.m. service at the Washington National Cathedral (which, in addition to being the nation’s church, is also the cathedral for our Episcopal Church). Some of us were invited to be part of the liturgy; all of us were moved, some to tears (including me) by the music, the beauty, the fellowship of the place. And it was equally wonderful (and also amusing) to find that national cathedral or no, they have a coffee hour afterwards (with donuts), and part of the morning’s announcements included a reminder to sign up to get pictures done for the church directory.
Afterwards we spent some time on a guided tour of the great church, and then scattered – my group stopped for brunch in Georgetown (Cafe Bonaparte has really delicious crepes and coffee) before heading back to campus and to finish our reading assignments for Monday.
I’ll include here a link to the cathedral’s recent statement on the racism communicated from the administration, which is direct and prophetic and necessary: “Have We No Decency? A Response to President Trump.”
Here is the moving sermon we heard, from the Reverend Canon Jan Naylor Cope, remembering Martin Luther King, Jr., more than a century after he preached from the same historic pulpit:
