My courses this semester, which are American Religious Histories, Constructive Theology, and Worship, sometimes seem to be remarkably, synergistically related: weaving together a comprehension of our faith traditions historically, building on what we know to construct what we are reaching towards theologically, and applying how we will give shape to these understandings liturgically. At other times, I look at the books for these courses and they seem like disparate chunks that only serve to threaten my efforts to concentrate on any one of them: how can I focus on all of these subjects at once? And at still other times (and there comes such a moment in every semester) I decide that my otherwise lovely teachers are mad, that they have lost all sense of proportion in terms of the amount of reading and writing that they assign, and that, incredibly, they persist under the illusion that their class is the only class their students are taking. (Such moments pass.)
One of my favorite parts of campus is the native prairie restoration area in front of the parking lot. When I pull into a parking space, I sometimes linger for a moment after shutting off the car. At sunrise and sunset especially, the long, arching grasses glow in the angled, golden light. If I were to put voice to my experience of those moments, it would translate largely as “Thank you.” I have heard that this same slice of prairie caused a resident of the neighborhood to wonder if the school, in fact, was still in operation, taking the long grasses for signs of neglect. I take them as a sign of fidelity.
Once, when I was a hospice volunteer on the inpatient unit of a hospital, a doctor I had not previously met came to the nurses’ station, and seeing me there, he pretended to answer a nearby phone with this greeting: “Hi, I’m a hospice volunteer, I can’t tell you anything.” The truth is, as a hospice volunteer, I wasn’t allowed to give out patient information. His little pantomime seemed so belittling and outrageous that I decided I’d do him one better than deliver a scathing remark in response: I turned my face firmly, angrily away; not exactly the other cheek, but a resolute sign of dismissal. A nurse, seeing my expression, hurried over and whispered, “He’s a fabulous oncologist who used to be a comedian; his patients love him.” Before I could decipher the logic of this message, the doctor walked over to me and held out his hand, smiling. It turned out that he had worked as a standup comic in New York before becoming an oncologist. In explaining this unusual trajectory, he said that it was observing the caring manner of his father’s doctor when his father had cancer that made him want to become one. He wanted to know why I had become a hospice volunteer since nothing in my life at the time indicated an organic connection. My answer had something to do with the stories of people, that at a time in life when people most needed to tell their stories, I was afraid that no one might be listening. Such are the beginnings of vocations, the tracings that we may not perceive at the time as hints towards a different future. Some vocations declare themselves in whispers rather than calls. I am not entirely sure of my future goals, and sometimes this concerns me. I am investing so much of myself in seminary: where will it take me? But just as I once signed up for hospice training without really knowing why, it seems that my response to this uncertainty can only be fidelity: a continued fidelity to the whisperings that I do hear.
In the prairie restoration on campus, someone heard the call of the earth to be itself and they responded, even if in only this one small patch of ground. Sometimes that’s how I think of seminary, and vocation. I think I must do the same.
- Kathryn Price, MDiv student
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