"Do you see where I am?"

In the week before the start of spring semester, I am eager to get my hands on the books for the courses I’ll be taking: American Religious Histories, Constructive Theology and Worship.  I am roughly midway through my seminary studies and I’ve been looking back at where I’ve been and looking forward toward what is still to come. When I think about it, perhaps a theological education was always in my future. In elementary school I asked for a book on saints and martyrs for a birthday present, and after reading it, I presented my father with an ethical, if not theological question.  “Dad, suppose a person was about to be martyred for the faith and they realized they could do more good by staying alive, would it be wrong, then, to recant?” My father looked at me with a perplexed expression. I don’t remember his answer, but I remember his long, confounded gaze. We lived in Omaha, Nebraska, an ordinary family; we went to Mass on Sundays and our grandparents’ houses for dinner afterwards. There was nothing about our lives that suggested we were in danger of being martyred. Nor we were a family given to theological speculation: hearing adults ask each other what they thought of the new Pope was about as edgy as it got.

It was decades before I would understand the scope of my own question.  I went to El Salvador for a global justice course as part of my seminary studies. In one of the books for the course, Witnesses to the Kingdom: The Martyrs of El Salvador and the Crucified Peoples, Jon Sobrino writes about the interconnected theologies of liberation and martyrdom.  He notes: “For us – in contrast to most of the people in the first world – reality is a great hermeneutical aid.” There were things I could learn only by going to El Salvador and hearing people tell their stories. And there was something I could see only by walking with thousands of people through the streets of San Salvador with candles held aloft in the night to commemorate the assassination of Oscar Romero thirty years before.  It was in those streets that I witnessed the reality of resurrection.  Now I would be able to answer the question of my grade school self about refusing to recant vs. the pragmatic wisdom of staying alive: justice and love cannot be recanted. To refuse to recant them keeps them alive.

This was not something I imagined would be addressed when I enrolled in seminary. I remember someone asking me then, a bit incredulously, “What are you going to study there…God?”  I suppose seminary brings to mind images of other worldliness, an endeavor removed from the jostle of life. I think people might be surprised at the this-worldliness of our studies, the spiritual life we try to give voice to together, coupled with life experiences in a hospital or prison, or parish internships, or global justice courses.  I love both aspects of my studies; I love trying to address a question as absurd as, Who is God? and I value trying to ascertain what that means in the world in practice.

As I turn toward the new semester with anticipation, I recall standing in the chapel of Divina Providencia in San Salvador before the altar where Archbishop Romero was assassinated. My father had passed away by then, not knowing the turn my life had taken towards seminary and I thought of how surprised he would be if he knew where I was. In the stillness of that moment, the question formed suddenly in my heart. “Dad, do you see where I am?” I asked.  It seemed to me that from somewhere in the world I heard him answer, “Yep.”
 

- Kathryn Price, MDiv student