Yesterday was my last day
of class at seminary: an hour of musical repetition for Corpus Christi and two
hours of General Sacramental Theology.
For a moment I thought
that my days of school were over, that twenty-one years of formal education had
come to an end. It was not so; next year I will still have to take some weekend
classes. But the balance of my life will shift to real-life observation
(initially) and practical assignments (as my internship advances).
In a way, I am looking
forward to it, despite feeling quite unprepared. There is much I still want to
practise, many questions I do not know the answer to, many books I would still
love to read. But perhaps the point of the past twenty-one years consists in
that realization.
Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion
Wine contains the following exchange:
‘Well.’ She started
pouring tea. ‘To start things off, what do you think of the world?’
‘I don’t know
anything.’
‘The beginning of
wisdom, as they say. When you’re seventeen you know everything. When you’re twenty-seven if you still know
everything you’re still seventeen.’
‘You seem to have
learned quite a lot over the years.’
‘It is the privilege
of old people to seem to know everything. But it’s an act and a mask, like
every other act and mask. Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and
smile, saying, How do you like my
mask, my act, my certainty? Isn’t life a play? Don’t I play it
well?’
So what have I
learned at seminary, besides living a liturgical life?
Partly, to be more tolerant and patient. And this at a seminary which has the
reputation of being strict and conservative. Whatever they tell you, you were
not born to change the world, only to help some people take some small steps,
hopefully without doing too much damage in the meantime. As St. James says,
Let not
many of you become teachers, my brethren, for you know that we who teach shall
be judged with greater strictness. For we all make many mistakes…
(3:1-2)
But (not to
end on too depressing a note) also this: the Bible is much more interesting
than I thought. It is a patchwork and a whole, it stimulates but eludes
interpretation: call it ‘hard-to-get’. It is a pluripotent stem cell of meaning
with many offshoots that are interesting in their own right.
