How My Life Is Being Changed by Seminary

Last week, when I was in the middle of reading Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (and actually enjoying it!), I found myself thinking, "There's no way I would ever do this on my own."  That's not to say that I would not engage with the Hebrew Scriptures in some way; but, without taking this required course, I'm pretty sure that I would never have taken the time to wade through these books as I am now doing.  Instead, I'm fairly certain I would have cherry-picked a few passages that I liked and ignored the rest.

And this morning, as part of my site work for my Community Studies course, I met a homeless man who, at age 60, decided he wanted to learn to read and has been going to classes for the past couple of months.  Last week, at his recovery group meeting, he read the serenity prayer out loud to open the meeting.  Would I have met this man had I not been in seminary?  Not likely.  I might have waxed on about the determination of many homeless people to learn and grow, but this kind of first-hand engagement probably would not have occurred.

So, what I'm learning from seminary is not so much "things" (as in facts and figures); rather I am learning how to engage with the world in new and meaningful ways.  In other words, that whole "living our way into new ways of thinking" thing seems to be working for me.

I am so grateful for this opportunity for deep and profound learning.

And here's a common thread across courses that I just picked up on: embodied experience.  It's a term that's central to the theology of Sallie McFague (whose work I'm learning about in my reading for my upcoming Liberal Theology course); it's also what I'm learning about in my field site; and it's definitely a central theme in the Hebrew Bible.  More on this topic later . . .