All Things Bright and Beautiful....
Fall on the Close at GTS...nice time of year. The weather has gotten (suddenly) cooler, crisper. Students walk a little faster on their way here and there. The Michaelmas semester moves along, it seems, at a faster pace too. The pets have been blessed here, as elsewhere in the Diocese and probably in the wider church. It's really easy to get immersed in the local and forget that it has a wider reach. Probably a good thing about General Convention, drawing those distant by space, and maybe theology, from one another in a place together so that God may be praised. In that praising perhaps some bridges might be built.
Which sounds a whole lot like our Pastoral Theology reading about bridge building. It's funny how those things swirl about in your mind and drop out here and there like gumballs. And that is not the worst thing to happen, at least for me, since it reminds me that some of all that I am reading and hearing and trying to absorb is actually settling into me somewhere and that I can pull it up and toss it out when appropriate. Now, to keep that encouraging thought in mind for the exams in January!
My class is making a valiant attempt to ignore them - the GOE's, the General Ordination Exams. Do they sound ominous? They do to us. Almost all Episcopal seminarians have to take them usually in senior year (some Bishops do not require them...of course, mine does!). They are supposedly a measure of what you have learned in theology, about the church, about ethics, mission, this, that, the other thing. The Dean calls them a right of passage. Students call them other things which cannot appear in print. They are in essay format and are read and "graded" on a scale (last year 1-4, other years 1-5) by folks who have no idea who you are (you are assigned a number - no names please!). Are they just in their evaluations? Hmmm, maybe not so much. Here's an example: my husband, who had been a Roman priest for over 25 years, spent a year here at GTS doing "Anglican Studies." In January of that year he took the GOE's. One of the questions had something to do with being asked to do a seminar on how to prepare a sermon. At last, he thought, something I am comfortable in answering. It was, after all, something he knew and had done since he was a deacon in seminary. In his answer he went on to describe how he prepares his sermons (which by the way are really good). When the GOE results came back the reader wrote an evaluation that went something like: this is an impossible way to prepare a sermon; no one could possible prepare a sermon this way...well, you get the drift. I burst out laughing, ooops sorry, and shook my head and told him that I was sorry he had wasted over 25 years of his life doing something he obviously couldn't possibly have done! So, how seriously can we really take these exams and readers anyway?????
On a happy note: we have a newly minted, and the first in our class, transitional deacon. He was ordained last Saturday, the 4th of October. We shall have a second as of the 24th. Now it is getting exciting. We two New Yorkers are scheduled for March 7...really not all that far off.
All things bright and beautiful...the Lord God made them all!!!!