Published on Substack October 30, 2023
The plane descended and I looked out over low mountains, the tree canopy bright with autumn and the rivers and lakes disclosing themselves to my vantage point in a way that seemed almost intimate, as their shapes can’t be fully perceived from a shore or bank. I was traveling to New Haven to visit two seminarians, people I’ve known for only three years but who feel like old and important friends. I’m too foolish and wrongheaded to make a good mentor, but I couldn’t help thinking about what I could disclose to them from my experience, and planned on offering helpful reminiscences of my own time in seminary. I hoped for a jolly time, a break from the stresses of day to day parish ministry, yet as my plane descended into Hartford’s airport, I thought about how stressful seminary had been, and realized that this was probably a false hope. Now that I’m twenty years distant from it, I can see the good things that emerged from the fog of confusion and distress that surrounded me as a seminarian. But I was unprepared for the way that I would be dunked back into it, and find that, even after all these years, the worries and stressors of seminary are still with me.
What makes seminary so hard? Part of the hardship comes from the bare fact of judgment. Most of us worry that we’re being judged by others as we go about our day to day lives. Most of us are wrong about that. Other people are too wound up in their own concerns to even think to judge us, let alone take any time to do so in an intense and devastating way. But in seminary, one is being judged. It’s built into the curriculum. Professors and administrators have to send letters back to seminarians’ sending diocese, assessing their fitness for ministry. And since many seminarians live in community with professors and deans (at Berkeley Divinity School they even share the same house) that patient assessment occurs not only in class but at dinner, in chapel, even when you’re walking the dog or buying groceries for the house. Receiving grades for class work becomes a relief, because it is, at least, a very clearly delineated form of judgement. The other forms remain ephemeral, but they’re always present.
Add the rigors of formation to this accurate sense of being judged. A lot of this formation is internal. Seminarians are leaving their old lives behind to become something new. I am not a person who believes that ordination entails an ontological change. We do not step into a different mode of being when we are ordained. But we do step into a role that requires a great deal of us, that shapes and affects our thinking and personalities much more than being a bank teller, for instance, does. We are to model Christ’s love to the world, to be the bearers of a great and hard idealism. All Christians are, of course, but most Christians don’t get up in front of a crowd once a week to talk about it, or situate their work lives in places where their faith is always on display.
To become something new, something old needs to be surrendered. In classic Christian terms, something has to die for resurrection to occur. Seminarians are engaged in a constant parsing of the parts of them that need to die, and in a constant hope that resurrection will occur. Only resurrection never looks like we think it should. To the caterpillar, a butterfly is a ghost. Or at least alien, a different species altogether. So allowing things to die requires the surrender of control. It’s not success orientated in any way that makes sense, since you can’t name what success will look like, and can’t devise any clever scheme for achieving it. All you can do is look at yourself and say “here are the dying parts. Do I have the courage to let them die?”
Berkeley Divinity School is a very different place than Seabury-Western, the now defunct seminary that I attended. At Berkeley, I sat in on an amazing class, the kind of class I only dreamed about when I was a seminarian. It was a privilege to be there, and I think that most seminarians also carry that sense of privilege, no matter which seminary they attend. Not ‘privilege’ in the sense that they think they deserve their good luck. Rather, a recognition that most Christians don’t get to dedicate three years to the study of their faith, in the company of some of the finest scholars in the world. A priest is an odd creature. We are not better than other Christians. But we know more, at least intellectually. It is our role and our privilege to bring back the fruits of our study to the parish, to tell people about all of the things that we have learned. Seminarians who are being formed to do this have to ask “how will I tell other Christians about what I’m learning, how will I translate the language of the academy into the language of the preacher?” If that is the question, then missing a class or doing badly on an exam can be felt to have outsized ramifications. One wants to make the most of one’s education. One is also exhausted by the internal work that runs alongside the academic work but that the academy allots no time for. But if you miss something it might end up in you making a mistake when it really matters, once you’re out of seminary and people are looking to you for leadership.
Somehow, in the end, this intense and flawed process actually works. We manage to form good priests and ministers. As my visit progressed, I found myself wanting to remind my friends that the parish is not a seminary. Parishes can be weird, but they will never approach the extravagent weirdness of a divinity school. Priests are looked at and judged, but not by people whose job it is to judge them. Mostly we’re regarded with the hazy generosity of busy people. We continue to go through processes of death and rebirth, but those processes tend to elongate, and we go into and emerge from the tomb mostly when some huge life event leads us to, not on a monthly basis. And we can study at our own pace. I believe that continued study is one the basic components of the priestly life. But if I only half read a book before I preach on some point that it makes, few people will care or call me on it.
Perhaps it’s best to end with a prayer for seminarians. Here is my offering
Jesus Christ, creator of the universe, fill our minds with your thoughts and our hearts with your compassion. Be with our seminarians, as you are with all of your disciples, patient and attentive, modeling rest and graceful friendship. Help them to know that they are not alone as they carry their crosses, but part of a vast procession of those who have walked through the ages, answering your call and bearing your burden. Lead them to the tomb and into resurrection, from the room of fear into the wonder of the ascension. In your name we pray. Amen.
KPB Stevens 