Seminary Classes Come to an End (Tomorrow)

Last week as I drove home from work, I thought about all the changes that have happened just in 2021, and for a brief few seconds, I couldn't breathe.  I should know better than to let my brain go down this path while I'm driving.

Then I parked the car, came inside, had some homemade mac-n-cheese for dinner, and settled in for my New Testament seminary class, the last one of the term.  

I see this as a metaphor for what life has been like lately.  The pace of change has been dizzying, and the types of changes have been even more staggering.  For a brief moment when I let myself think about that, it's like getting too close to the edge of a mountain path with a steep drop off, and I back up quickly.

This morning is not the morning that I want to move closer to that edge, so instead, let me focus on this last week of seminary classes.

I have been grateful for the solid internet connectivity in our condo building.  It has made me reflect on the poor service that I settled for (thanks, Comcast!) in our old house.  Back then, I said that at least I had reliable internet at work, and then, this year, we had 3 weeks of no internet at work, followed by a mifi hotspot, which is fairly reliable, but not as good as in the condo. 

This semester of seminary would have been much more difficult without reliable internet.  I've been amazed that I could attend class, meet in small groups, access the library resources that I need, meet with my advisor--in short, that I could live in all the online ways we live now.

There was a 2 week time in early November when my computer was sloggy after an automatic update.  That time gave me a window of insight as to how difficult life is without a decent computer.  My computer has gone through this cycle before, and I never know how to fix it.  After a week or two, it sorts itself out, a most unscientific and unsatisfying answer.  I know that at some point, it's likely not to sort itself out.

Even with the sloggy computer, I could still participate in Zoom classes, although my image was about 3 seconds behind my audio, so I'd speak and then my lips would move.  I found it distracting, and I was so relieved when the problem went away.  It wasn't a result of slow internet speed, since it happened both at work and at home.  It was clearly a computer issue.

My classes have been a combination of Zoom meetings for virtual classes, complete with small groups, and recorded lectures.  The recorded lectures are rich and full, but I prefer the Zoom meetings.  I am now on my 3rd legal pad; yes, I take notes by hand on paper, even as I'm accessing it all electronically.  It helps me concentrate on the presentation.

However, I do see the advantage to electronic notes--much more searchable.  Would the advantages justify buying another laptop, so that I can take notes on one computer while information is flowing from the other?  The thought of lugging another laptop everywhere I go exhausts me.

I am not done with class, not really.  I still need to write my papers, which I'm doing on the laptop. So let me finish this reflection now.  Maybe when I'm truly done with class, I'll do another look back.

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

The readings for Sunday, December 19, 2021:

First Reading: Micah 5:2-5a

Psalm: Luke 1:47-55 (Luke 1:46b-55 NRSV)

Psalm (Alt.): Psalm 80:1-7

Second Reading: Hebrews 10:5-10

Gospel: Luke 1:39-45 [46-55]


Finally, we have moved away from John the Baptist--although he's there, in utero, leaping at the sound of Mary's voice.

I love this Gospel vision of improbable salvation: two very different women, yet God has need of them both. I love the way this Gospel shows that even the impossible can be made possible with God: barrenness will come to fruit, youthful inexperience will be seen as a blessing.

Take some Advent time and look at the Magnificat again (verses 46-55). Reflect on how Mary's song of praise sums up most of our Scripture. If we want to know what God is up to in this world, here Mary sings it for us. He has raised up a lowly woman (who would have been a member of one of the lowliest of her society). He has fed the hungry and lifted up the oppressed. He has continued to stay with Abraham's descendants, even when they haven't always deserved it. We can count on our strong God, from generation to generation.

Take some Advent time and think about Mary's call to be greater than she could have ever expected she would be. She could have said no to God--many do. But she said yes. That acceptance didn't mean she would avoid pain and suffering. In fact, by saying yes, she likely exposed herself to more pain and suffering. But in saying yes, she also opened herself up to amazing possibilities.

Think about your own life. Where do you hear God calling your name?

How can we be like Mary? How can we be like Elizabeth, who receives an even more improbable invitation? Where would we be led, if we said yes to God?

God has a greater narrative for us than any we can dream of. Let this be the year that we say yes to God and leave our limited visions behind.

Unlikely Advent Places

Here is a quote that spoke to me today.  I found it in James Lumsden's blog post, which is worth reading in its entirety.  The quote is from Henri Nouwen, a favorite theologian across all of my ages.

We expect God to show up in “spectacles, power plays, significant and extraordinary events” that will change the course of history in their grandiosity. We, ourselves, are often taken-in by wealth, prestige, and sparkling things that glitter and shine. We can be so easily distracted. Perhaps that is why God chose to come to us as a small child of Palestinian peasants in an insignificant stable surrounded by animals and shepherds. This way we see that God’s kingdom is humble, simple, small, and very vulnerable. One of the gifts and surprises from Jesus is that he shows up for us in the most unlikely little places – and if we refuse to look for holy in what is small, we will likely give-in to despair.

And here is a sketch I've been working on for the past week.  I didn't begin with an intention to draw a stable and a manger.  Those appeared as a surprise, distressing at first, because the page wasn't what I envisioned.  But as I've worked with it, it's become one of the highlights of my week:

Now it's back to finishing grades for my online classes and finishing papers for my seminary classes.

The Feast Day of Santa Lucia

 December 13 is the day that Scandinavian countries celebrate Santa Lucia day, or St. Lucy's day. There will be special breads and hot coffee and perhaps a candle wreath, for the head or for the table.The feast day of Santa Lucia is one that’s becoming more widely celebrated. Is it because more Midwestern Scandinavian descendents are moving to other climates? Are we seeing a move towards celebrating saints in Protestant churches? Or is it simply a neat holiday which gives us a chance to do something different with our Sunday School programming and Christmas pageant impulses?

In a time of ongoing global pandemic, I wonder how people will be celebrating this year. They will probably celebrate the way that I almost always have, in their own houses, with their own family members.

But it wasn't always this way.

I first heard about St. Lucia Day at our Lutheran church in Charlottesville, Virginia. As the tallest blonde girl, I was selected to lead the St. Lucia day procession when I was in my early teen years. The grown ups placed a wreath with candles on my head and lit the candles. The younger children carried their candles. I walked up the church aisle and held my head very still.

I still remember the exhilarating feeling of having burning candles near my hair. I remember hot wax dripping onto my shoulders--I was wearing clothes and a white robe over them, so it didn't hurt.

It felt both pagan and sacred, that darkened church, our glowing candles. I remember nothing about the service that followed.

A year or two later, Bon Appetit ran a cover story on holiday breads, and Santa Lucia bread was the first one that I tried.

A picture from that cover story

What a treat. For years, I told myself that baking holiday breads was a healthy alternative to baking Christmas cookies--but then I took a long, hard look at the butterfat content of each, and decided that I was likely wrong. I also decided that I didn’t care.

I still bake that bread every year, and if you’d like to try, this blog post will guide you through it. If you’re the type who needs pictures, it’s got a link to a blog post with pictures.

As a feminist scholar and theologian, I’ve grown a bit uncomfortable with virgin saints, like Santa Lucia. Most sources say we don’t know much about her, which means that all sorts of traditions have come to be associated with her. Did she really gouge out her eyes because a suitor commented on their beauty? Did she die because she had promised her virginity to Christ? Was she killed because the evil emperor had ordered her to be taken to a brothel because she was giving away the family wealth? We don’t really know.

The lives of these virgin saints show us how difficult life is in a patriarchal regime. It’s worth remembering that many women in many countries don’t have any more control over their bodies or their destinies than these long-ago virgin saints did. In this time of Advent waiting, we can remember that God chose to come to a virgin mother who lived in a culture that wasn’t much different than Santa Lucia’s culture: highly stratified, with power concentrated at the top, power in the hands of white men, which made life exceeding different for everyone who wasn't a powerful, wealthy, white man. It's a society that sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Or we can simply enjoy a festival that celebrates light in a time of shadows.

I love our various festivals to get us through the dark of winter. When I lived in colder, darker places, I wished that the early church fathers had put Christmas further into winter, when I needed a break. Christmas in February makes more sense to me, even though I understand how Christmas ended up near the Winter Solstice.

So, happy Santa Lucia day! Have some special bread, drink a bracing hot beverage, and light the candles to light up the darkest days of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere).

Holiday Treats

 While I have not done any holiday baking yet, I have had some treats.  Let me make a list so that I remember later:

--I've been enjoying the holiday lights.  Each morning, with each block of my walk, there's at least one house that has lights on.  Delightful!

--We also had a holiday light tour of a different neighborhood on a golf cart--fun!

--Last night, we were spontaneous.  I came home from work and said, "I'd really like to go over to the beach to the Hollywood Brewery and have a burger and a beer."  And that's just what we did.  I get off work at 3 on Fridays, so we got there before the crowd arrived.  We enjoyed our food and drink and the view of the ocean.

--Early this morning, I made this Facebook post: "Kitchen alchemy: craving a Starbucks peppermint mocha but not wanting to drive to the closest store that's a few miles away. I have milk, peppermint extract, coffee, sugar, and cocoa. I have tried this experiment before, and I know the dangers of peppermint extract. This time, the smallest amount, added to the milk first. It's a different take on peppermint mocha, less sweet and cloying, with more dark chocolate depth. Yum."

--One of the biggest treats of the week:  I've been writing some poems.  Hurrah!

--Let me also record a poem idea, in case I don't get a chance to write it next week.  Here is the title or the first line:  On the feast day of Santa Lucia, I pay the credit card bill.

--It has also been a week of good sketching.  Here's my favorite of the week:

The Blogging Poet-Seminarian Who Teaches First Year Comp

 Before I started seminary, for the decades before I started seminary, I worried that I wasn't smart enough.  As the years marched on, I worried that my brain had turned to mush.  As I've been in this first semester of seminary, I'm realizing all the ways that I've been preparing, even as I was doing something else:

--I am not one of those English Ph.D.s who got her degree and stopped writing.  I've still done some academic writing here and there.  But more importantly, I've done other writing on a daily basis.  In 1997, I started doing morning pages, the kind recommended by Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way:  3 pages, by hand, every morning.  That practice prepared me for my current practice of daily blogging.  Most days, I write 500-1,500 words each morning.

--Because I'm an English major at heart, I write in complete sentences with correct spelling.  While some part of me believes that we should give permission for rough drafts to be REALLY rough, my rough drafts don't have grammar or spelling errors.  Is that important?  I think that it is--less to proofread and catch later.

--I write every day, which means I know that I don't have to wait for inspiration.  I know that writing brings inspiration.  And because I write every day, I'm always on the lookout for things to write about, and my brain is already working on it on some level.  I know how to compose before I've ever approached the page/blank screen.

--I have taught Composition since 1988, which means I have not forgotten how to document outside sources.  Based on some of the comments of my professors, some seminarians have forgotten the basic rules of documentation.  I got a compliment on my Works Cited page for one paper.  That page was not anything special.

--I have not continued to read academic writing in my Ph.D. fields of 19th and 20th century British Literature.  In fact, I haven't continued to read the primary texts of those fields, although I have occasionally returned to them.  Instead, I started reading theology, and much of it's pretty deep.  I remember going home to see my folks and going to lunch with them and a group of their church work friends.  One of them asked what I was reading, and I talked about the Henri Nouwen book that I'd brought with me.  The response was, "That's pretty deep stuff."  On some level, it was deep theology, although it was a slim volume.

--As I look back to what I've been reading and writing, it's clear that I've had a love of theology for decades.  You may or may not be surprised to find that some seminarians do not share this love of theology.  There are other reasons to become a seminarian, of course.  But if one doesn't love theology, I think it's harder to slog through some of the courses, and it's harder to write those essays for class.  When I got this comment on my first homework assignment for New Testament class, I thought I was going to be OK:  "This shows that you've got quite a bit of background in biblical studies (you mentioned the Babylonian exile, work by Walter Wink, etc.)."

--It's been interesting to be writing my final papers for seminary classes while also grading the final papers of my students.  I've always been a fairly generous grader, so I don't think it's impacted me that way.  I have been the kind of grader that didn't put much in the way of comments on A papers.  As a woman who writes A papers, I'm realizing that a more developed comment might be appreciated.  Have I written that more developed comment as a teacher?  Not yet.

--I am a poet who delights in making interesting comparisons.  I am aware of that personality trait of mine, and I try not to let that part of my brain run wild while writing papers for seminary.  Still, I think my poet brain sees things that other might not, and my seminary papers are stronger for it.

--I am a woman who has juggled many activities through the decades:  teaching, reading, writing, administrator work, church work, a variety of volunteer jobs, family, friends.  I am used to grabbing every scrap of time.  If I only have 15 minutes, I'll write a chunk of seminary paper or read the next part of the text.  I am not waiting for huge swaths of time to get things done.  Huge swaths of time are not coming.

Speaking of getting things done, it's time to get ready for work--and all the other activities of the day.

Sermon Notes: December 5 Sermon on Mary and Elizabeth

Before we get too much further away from Sunday, let me write up my sermon notes.  We're using Dr. Wilda Gafney's A Women's Lectionary for the Whole Church.  On Sunday, the Gospel reading gave us Mary's visit to Elizabeth.  Here are some of the points I made.

I began by saying that thought about bringing Mary from the creche to serve as a focal point--but what if she breaks?  Of course, a broken Mary also fits into a certain approach, about how God can use us in all of our brokenness.

I talked about this time of year as being one of the only times in the traditional church that we hear about women at all.  Mary has a starring role, often the only starring role for women throughout the church year.  I talked about my experience of church Christmas pageants when I was a child, when every girl wanted to be Mary.  As a tall, blonde girl, I never got to be Mary.  But at least I got to be an angel.  Less lucky children had to be animals in difficult costumes.

Mary and Elizabeth are marginalized in all sorts of ways.  They are women in a patriarchal society, they are Jewish in a Roman society that would see Jews as lesser.  They live far from the center of power.

Mary and Elizabeth are constricted by biology:  biology of being female, biology of being older.

Who would be the best bearer of the message that God wants to get out into the world?  The Roman emperor would be the likely choice:  rich, powerful, a way to spread the message.  But no, God doesn't go with the obvious choice.  In fact, God chooses one of the least obvious choices.

Look at creche Mary:  look how clean and pretty she is.  She would have been much dirtier and raggedy.  Think about Elizabeth, who has failed at the one thing she was supposed to do, which is bear a child.

I talked about my difficulty with the text:  women as incubators.  But it was the first century and the text was written by men.

I talked about this Women's Lectionary project written by Wilda Gafney who tried to correct the male focus of centuries of Christianity:  what would a lectionary with women at the center look like?

Mary and Elizabeth have a longer conversation than the conversation with the angels.  Intergenerational support!  In past years, that aspect of the story would have been the part that spoke to me.

What is speaking to me this year?  God issues invitation to Mary and Elizabeth, and they say "Yes."  And here we are in the 3rd year of the pandemic.  It is a good time to hear this message, of God's invitation.  God appears over and over again, with an invitation to be part of God's creative plan, to be bearers of the miracle.  Often in the most difficult circumstances, God appears with an invitation.

No matter how broken we are, God can create something beautiful.  Even though we're not in the blazing good health of our youth, God invites us to be part of the work of creation.  God asks, and if we say no, God will reappear with an invitation.

I concluded the sermon this way:

Stop listening to the part of your brain that tells you that you're inadequate.  Scripture tells us again and again of God choosing the most unlikely person and doing something miraculous.

I am here today to encourage us--because so many of us are tired, so many of us are thinking of all the opportunities we missed, all the ways we've screwed up, all the things that are left undone--we have declared ourselves barren, and God comes to us to say, "I am doing a new thing.  Come and be part of this new thing I am doing."

I encourage us to use the words of Mary to say yes:  let it be with me according to what you have described.