Never Ending

I wrote this last Saturday:

So . . . yesterday we took two three-hour exams and today we took one more. I wish I had received Mompriest's comment last night because suddenly, at 9:00 pm, I lost any capacity for sleep, and began to churn through all my perceived errors. Today I've been able to put all that to rest, probably because . . .

the Hebrew passage, delivered to us at noon,, is the story of Elijah bringing the widow's son back to life.

I sank into a fairly profound depression for several hours as I contemplated wrestling with that one for five days. (Have you ever tried to count how many stories there are in the Bible of dead sons coming back to life? More than just the main one.) I thought about switching to Greek (it's up to us), but all things conspired against that brilliant idea: memory (none), desire (none), and reality: the New Testament passage in question is one of proclamation and, let's face it, I am way more attuned to narrative.

And when that thought occurred to me, the next one was: does that say something about a call to chaplaincy as opposed to a church, or what? Perhaps I will get something completely unexpected out of this last exam, in the form of clues for next year.

(And I'd love to hear from the other RevGals on this one. My sermons have been criticized this year for being exploratory rather than insistent. The assessment is accurate, but the question remains: Is there a place for exploratory, musing, contemplative preaching in the church? The events of the last seventeen months have made emphatic proclamation an impossibility for me. And, on the positive side, have made the journey through people's stories all the more compelling.)

I think I have to go to sleep soon; I'm exhausted. I hope I can pull this off and put testing behind me FOREVER.

****************************

Now it's six days later and I'm finally back home. Writing the exam was fine; I am getting much more adept at putting my personal stuff aside when I have to accomplish an academic task.

I spent some time on the phone this morning with a friend who has an urgent need to know about coroners, funeral homes, cremations, and ashes. I remembered how much it had helped me fifteen months ago to talk to friends who had that kind of knowledge and were willing to share it openly and candidly.

I have to say, the conversation this morning affected me a good deal more than writing the paper had.

Of course, the widow in the Elijah story turned out not to need the information that I now have.


(Louis Hersent Painting)

Break Time

I posted a bit about the Hebrew exam which we got yesterday and have to turn in on Thursday, and then had second thoughts, so I'll repost later this week. I was afraid that some kind of inadvertent discussion would ensue, and the last thing I need is to be the first person ever to have her exam discounted due to blogging.

It was kind of a nice day. I've stayed at seminary for the week-end, so I went to a GORGEOUS church this morning, a church at which one of our professors is the senior pastor. In the interests of even more discretion, I am not going to comment on the discussion some of us had afterward and my own observations contrasting this church with my home and field ed churches. Let's just say that between my classes and my experiences, I'm having a fascinating and enlightening year with respect to all the different ways worship might be.

It's been mostly dark and rainy so I've mostly stayed in and worked. (I did go for a soaking walk.) A fireplace would have made for a very nice afternoon.

Now I'm just exhausted. I plan to respond by playing around for a few minutes with one of those counters that tells where your blog visitors are from. So ~ if you're headed for someplace exotic, stop by for a visit!

And While We're On The Subject of the Challenges of Loss . . ..

I know that I have a number of good friends and readers who roll their eyes in disbelief, skepticism, irritation, and incredulity whenever the faith stuff comes up ~ and most especially in the context of things like my son's death, and death and loss in general. (Not that there is ever an "in general." It's always so painfully personal.)

If you've read any of Desert Year, then you know that I don't have a sentimental or squishy approach to faith, that I was besieged by a profound sense of God's abandonment in the year-plus after Josh's death, and that I am much more comfortable with questions than with answers. I am going to write more about all of that soon, but not now! ~ as I am confronted by the need to stop all unnecessary activity for two weeks in an effort to salvage my ordination exams, to which ironically, confident answers are the expected response.

I don't, however, want to depart for my husband's family and father's funeral and then The Library, without linking to one of the best things I've read in a long time about faith and consolation. I may have written that in the days after my son's death, I overheard my father say "At least she has her faith to comfort her," and that I shook my head as I kept walking down the hall, thinking that he didn't have the foggiest notion of the challenge of the Christian faith. Much of Desert Year was an exploration of that challenge, although I was far too immersed in pain to see or write a way out.

Ryan Duns, S.J. is an exceptionally thoughtful and articulate young man. I might debate his conclusion a bit, and suggest that there are times when consolation is not about confidence, which has a way of evaporating, but about hope when you can see nothing ~ and about not even your own hope, but that of others, who remain present to you and open to God and hopeful for life again, all when you have moved into some other dimension in which none of those things seem possible. Nevertheless, the post is a wonderful expression of an aspect of Christian faith seldom acknowledged. (I sometimes think that Ryan is channeling my first Jesuit spiritual director, something I recognize because I do it myself on occasion.)

At any rate, enjoy the music in the previous two posts ~ but don't think that I'm under the impression that faith is an easy road, especially when we live on life's most brutal edges.

I may be back sooner than later so that I can bemoan the need to write yet another exegtical paper in Hebrew ~ or I may wait till it's all over.

Mishbarim: Dismantling Your Life

Like most middle class Americans my age, I have invested most of my life in building. School, marriage, family, career, home. It all went pretty well for awhile. I was a reasonably generous person ~ nothing outrageous, no Mother-Theresa like complexes for me ~ but certainly I gave of my energy and my time and my money and my gifts to my family, my church, and my community. And why not? I had plenty to give; it hardly hurt me to spread a little of it around. Oh, every once in awhile I would find that I had over-committed myself in one realm or another and I'd have to invest some effort into stepping back, but that was about as difficult as it got. We are not talking Ms. Self~Sacrifice here. Except for a couple of times, when disaster hit and left our family confused and hurting ~ but we were capable of determined re-building efforts, and we were always surrounded by people who helped us. So re-build we did.

This is different. This is so different.

Everything has to go.

OK, not everything. Not much of anything exterior, really. The house is still (barely, per usual) standing , the Quiet Husband is still employed, I am still in school. The Gregarious Son and The Lovely Daughter are employed and moving forward, and working to heal a little. We are all trying to heal a little.

But the interior everything ~ it has to go. I have found virtually nothing in a traditional life of Christian faith and practice, at least as I once knew it ~ and I knew it pretty well ~ to sustain me. I remember that a year or so ago, a fellow blogger wrote frequently of feeling shielded under God's wing. No wing for me. One of my professors, when I visited him last spring to seek some academic advice, apparently felt obligated to offer some of what must have seemed to him to have been kindly words of pastoral assurance. It was all I could do to escape his office without throwing up. I have had a number of conversations with others who have experienced similar depths of trauma in recent years ~ and very few have found in church a place of respite or solace.

I have found nothing in my own efforts. I have been busily erecting walls of self-defense against the endless waves of sadness and anger but there is, in fact, no technology available for building walls thick enough to withstand them. I know that, of course. The primary emphasis of the program which I attended a few weeks ago on death and dying was on the need to go deep into and all the way through sorrow in order to make any sense at all of it and to absorb it into the rest of your life. That was not news. But the reality is that the dailiness of life requires a good deal of wall-building. The balance ~ between the barriers you need to secure in place to walk through the grocery or to withstand a basic class discussion on baptism (oh, right, actually I didn't make it through that one . . .) and the openness and honesty needed in order to confront and accommodate one's real life of struggle and sorrow ~ the balance is a tenuous one to maintain. It's no wonder that bereaved people tend to isolate themselves. I'm certainly much more content when I do.

I like that word, accommodate, at least for now. I've read several comments by parents of children who have died by suicide to the effect that acceptance of our loss will never be a possibility, but that accommodation is a realistic hope. I looked it up in the thesaurus and, while some of the synonyms make sense in this context and some do not, the one that resonates with me is attune. We do have to make room for and host this terrible reality, whether we want to or not, but it is perhaps an additional goal to attune ourselves to the nuances of loss and pain in this world, beyond ourselves.

To dismantle and to re-attune who we are, how we hear, what we see, how we know and how we understand. It seems to me an optimistic approach, given that our lives have been pretty well smashed into little bits of broken debris.

(And here's something interesting, for the academically inclined: For that mammoth paper I've finished on Psalm 88, I did a little research on the word mishbarim (breakers), because of the line in verse 8, "Every breaker of yours knocks me down." It seems that the word mishbarim is used in ancient Semitic writings in two fundamental ways: to mean either "waves" in the context of the sea, or "pangs," as in birth pangs (which of course, come in waves). In either case, it refers to powers that shatter or break. In one text in the Dead Sea Scrolls (no no no, of course I haven't read the DSS ~ but I can read about them), the images of birth pangs and the waves of a storm at sea are combined, and the mythologies of other Mediterranean cultures are filled with references to waters, waves, and floods of chaos.)

I am quite taken with that information; that for thousands of years people of a multitude of cultures have melded wave imagery for sorrow and brokenness with wave imagery for birth, and have woven both strands into their sacred texts.

Many (many!) years ago, before my children were born, I read some words of wisdom in some magazine article or other. In response to someone's Yuppie-oriented reluctance to have children for fear that they would change her life, the writer suggested that no one should have children until and unless she wanted to change her life ~ that that is the point, to want to change your life by bringing the abundance of love into it in a form that will change it in every possible dimension. To welcome mishbarim, both literally and figuratively.

Well. One does not want or welcome the mishbarim of the death of a beloved child. But here they are. Breakers and birth pangs, the complete dismantling of the old outlook and understanding.

Can it be reshaped, perhaps tentatively and gingerly, with something fragile and frail? That's what I'm going to imagine this Advent. I'm going to spend some time over in my Advent blog, and I'm going to take at least part of it to explore the Advent of the Heart words of Alfred Delp, S.J. Alfred Delp was a Jesuit caught up in the Holocaust. He shares a great deal in common with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose work we read a bit of in school last quarter; both were engaged in resistance work against the Nazis, both were imprisoned, both were executed shortly before the end of the war. (Interestingly, according to the introduction to this particular book, during his imprisonment Father Delp received assistance and care from a Lutheran pastor, and is probably quoting Martin Luther at one point. It would appeal greatly to my ecumenical leanings to know that Deitrich Bonhoeffer received care from a Cathoic priest as well. I have certainly heard him quoted in Catholic sermons. One never knows.)

At any rate, Advent of the Heart has popped up on my computer screen via various sources over the past couple of weeks, so I am taking that to mean something. There was nothing fragile or frail about Alfred Delp or his faith as he confronted evil and chaos during Advent. Nothing about Bonheoeffer or his, either. Mishbarim in both of its meanings, and neither of them ever forgot it, whereas I am much more inclined to let myself be shattered rather than reborn.

May this Advent be for the latter, even if in only the smallest of ways. For the tiniest flicker of candlelight in the midst of all this darkness.



Cross-posting at Desert Year.

Rundown of Day 2

Hebrew Exegesis is going to be fine.

Middle of the day: Very bad. Run-in over certain administrative rules I have unwittingly broken, the breaking of which produced some of my best educational experiences here. Result: Foul taste in my mouth over issue of rules versus meaningful learning.

Chapel: 0 for 2. One of the very few Gospel verses that has given me any solace during the past year was given a decidedly different twist by today's preacher. It felt as if a knife had been plunged into my gut and twisted, and I departed before communion, something I don't do. Well, actually, I've done it twice in the past several months. I'm thinking that it would be better sometimes to skip the preaching of the Word and proceed directly to the Sacrament. Those of you who are Reformed will recognize that as a fairly dire statement of desolation. Those of you who are not ~ well, we do Word all the time without Sacrament, but never vice versa. However, having now sat through several sermons which have caused me considerable pain, I'm ready to scratch them from my daily life for awhile.

And that from someone who is in seminary in part because she loves both preaching and listening to preaching. Or used to, anyway.

Day considerably redeeemed by spending the afternoon engaged in a wide-ranging conversation with my advisor.

Long walk; beautiful evening.

Two hours spent translating three Hebrew verses. Sort of. Could not have done it without English version also on desk, and still several of the words have refused to reveal themselves in the dictionary. I know what they are, but I'm damned if I can figure out what their roots are so that I can find them.

Going to read Bonhoeffer. Now there's someone I'm willing to listen to.

First Day Back

I'm not writing in my other blog for awhile, because my feelings are too raw these days to share in even a tiny and relatively anonymous public forum. So, over here, I'll just relay a little of how life in general is going:

The downsides:

People talking at me for six hours today, because it's the first day back; that's about five hours and 59 minutes too much of beng talked AT.

This morning's convocation sermon entitled "I'm So Happy To be Alive," which was preached one year to the hour from when three of us were sitting at my son's funeral, my son whose experience of life a week earlier had been so tortured that he could think of nothing but ending it. My best friend was sitting next to me this morning and ased if I heard any of it. "I listened to every word," I said. "I have to figure out how to get through these things." But now, twelve hours later, I remember nothing except how very painful it was to get through.

The upsides:

Seeing friends! Good conversations.

I am, as I had hoped, going to love my Church and Sacraments class. We have to write a short paper on how technology like church websites, blogging, twitter, etc. and their creation of disembodied relationships affects the church, for good and for ill. Will she admit to blogging or not? Maybe y'all can help me write the paper.

I was not looking forward to my required education class at all. Apparently there are many of us with graduate work and much experience as educators, however, and I found the professor to be delightful. It might be kind of nice to take some time to reflect somewhat systematically on the practice of religious education.

I'm all moved in to the dorm room which I will inhabit three nights a week for just one more year so, while I never did get around to reviewing Hebrew today, I now have a pleasant space in which a person who wanted to do such a thing COULD work on Hebrew.

I do not, actually, know such a person. Nevertheless, I now have to go and take a look at all that I've forgotten in the past five weeks, which is pretty much all of it.

Return to Seminary

Tomorrow at the crack of dawn I will the make the two-and-one-half hour (I hope!) drive back to seminary, arriving (again, I hope!) in plenty of time for my first class of the quarter at 10:00 a.m. That means that today will mostly be a leisurely rotation of laundry and packing, reviewing a little Hebrew, walking, cleaning house, and paying bills.

I am apprehensive and not a little envious and and a tiny bit resentful. When Josephine writes about her seminary experience, it sounds as joyful and filled with community and energy and delight as one might possibly hope for. (Her retreat sounded ideal, as well. Sigh.) I see on FB that the folks already back at my school for this past orientation week are similarly filled with exuberant anticipation. (Except for possibly one, who did not elaborate on a surprisingly (for FB) dark note.) Those would be the folks who, with only four or five exceptions, have never mentioned my son to me, or the reason I was not back in school a year ago at this time.

I was like them two years ago, but my life has changed. And there is nothing to do but endure it. Sometimes people ask me how I survive and the answer apparently is: like this. You do the next thing. You cannot wait for joy, or energy, because they are as elusive as the wind. You do the next thing, and you hope, in a reluctant sort of way, that someday things like energy and joy will return in some new and as yet unimagined form.

It's not that there aren't things to look forward to. I have some wonderful friends at school and tomorrow we'll be in class and chapel together and then at least a couple of us, behind the 8-ball for different reasons, will spend lunch discussing our field education assignments. I'm eager to study Church and Sacraments and grateful that one of our most outstanding professors teaches it. In another day I'll be in conversation about the new spiritual direction program just underway, on the advisory board of which I serve. And perhaps, with no chores beckoning, I will settle into Hebrew once again.

But I know that my experience of all those things differs in fundamental ways from that of all my classmates and professors. In some ways my perspective is off-balance; in others, more on target than ever before. Essentially, I feel completely alone. I plan to do a lot of listening and little talking this year ~ which is always a good thing, I suppose.

Today's reading from the PC(USA) website seems particularly apt for someone beset by the enemies which plague me, someone invisibly fighting her way through brambles and swamps:

Psalm 51

Give ear to my words, O LORD;
give heed to my sighing.
2 Listen to the sound of my cry,
my King and my God,
for to you I pray.
3 O LORD, in the morning you hear my voice;
in the morning I plead my case to you, and watch.
4 For you are not a God who delights in wickedness;
evil will not sojourn with you.

***

8 Lead me, O LORD,
in your righteousness because of my enemies;
make your way straight before me.
9 For there is no truth in their mouths;
their hearts are destruction . . . .

Amen.

Qals and Piels and Hifils, Oh My!

I am sitting in my own living room with Gregarious Son and Lovely Daughter and Quiet Husband, totally vegging out while they watch TV.

For the past 50-some nights, I have not been able to relax for one second without thinking that I should be going through my Hebrew flashcards.

What a bizarre sensation it is, not to have to give a thought to a stack of flashcards or pile of charts or other unintelligible material.

Exam over. Retreat and then month off. Phew.

Humor and Seriousness

Got back to seminary late last night and reviewed the meeting at some length with Dramatic Friend, a wonderful woman from my Presbytery whom I met last summer during CPE, who showed up here this summer for Hebrew, and who went to the meeting last night to support me.

She goes before Presbytery this fall and, after we rehashed the questions I was asked, she said she thought she'd go to her meeting and say, "Would you please ask me Gannet's questions? We've discussed them thoroughly and so I can answer them, plus ~ I can give you her answers!"

In all seriousness, and it took me awhile, but I realized something that we all should know by this time in life: it's hard to ask good questions in a situation like that. Questions that are conceptual and vast and seem tinged with a bit of an ideological bent are almost impossible to address off the cuff. (Unless, of course, you are a politican, which a couple of my FB friends thought candidacy meant!) The questions that work are those which address the specific and call for a narative answer.

It's the difference between a job interview question such as What's your greatest weakness? and one one along the lines of Could you describe a situation in the last few years in which you've made a big mistake, and how you handled it?

There I was, all prepared to talk about my life (which, yes, is a scary subject these days) and I got huge Scriptural and theological questions, the kinds that fill libraries. Do you suppose, I said to Dramatic Friend, that people thought that, under the circumstances, those would be easier?

The other reality, of course, is that some of what I was asked does not fall within my usual range of contemplation and action, which might explain why I could not translate the questions into stories upon which I might reflect. The upside is that I was reminded that there are things barely on my radar screen which are of great importance to others, just as there are matters of critical concern to me to which other people are oblivious.

Now: I really have to focus on nifal and piel!

Adventures in Ordination

I went to the Presbytery meeting.

No theological questions are permitted at this point -- not until next year. At this point, the questions are supposed to be about your call, spiritual experience, seminary, things like that. I had spent considerable time mulling over the statement I had submitted, trying to see it through different eyes and imagine what questions people might have.

I was asked four questions. One on call and three theological. None on anything I had written.

After the third question, someone in the congregation finally objected. But the fourth one was also theological, albeit better disguised as something personal.

I'm now a candidate in the ordination process.

But I can't say that I'm feeling too terrific.

And I have a Hebrew final in 59 hours.

Week Ahead

Guelph Labyrinth

Big week ahead.

Tomorrow night I go before my Presbytery for the next step in the ordination process. Usually these meetings are upbeat and joyful; mine will most likely edge far to the sober side of the spectrum. I have written candidly about Chicago Son in the statement I have to present, partly because his life and death are now so germane to my call to ministry and partly because I don't want people to feel that they must tiptoe around the edge of whatever real questions they have. I am hoping for some joyful moments at the end!

Thursday morning: our Hebrew final. I have a good grasp on what all the possible issues are (and believe me, that's a huge step forward). The question remains: can I remember how any of them work out? Four more days to cram it all into my brain, a few hours of writing, and then -- over!!!

Saturday I drive to Guelph for my retreat. For eight days the forty or so of us there will spend all of our time in total silence, excepting Mass if we are inclined to attend and a daily meeting with a spiritual director. I have written them about the circumstances of my life, telling them I need a retreat director who is experienced, resilient, and fearless. I have had my moments of trepidation, and long periods of wondering whether attempting to make another retreat, ever, after last year is an indication that I have finally and completely lost my mind ~ but mostly, I can hardly wait.

All of which means that a week from right now I will be surrounded by ~ SILENCE.

YES!

Exam and one term of Hebrew behind me, and The Lovely Daughter called last night to say she's been offered an Americorps job (!) that she was really interested in, and had given up on after hearing nothing since the phone interview six weeks ago.

More news when I know.

A long walk and a little mental break ahead today!

Middle of the Night Miscellaneous

~ One more quiz (tomorrow) and a final on Thursday and a full quarter of Hebrew will be behind me. I am SO grateful that one of my last summer CPE buddies who goes to a different seminary has shown up for this summer Hebrew here. We make an excellent study team.

~ The Lovely Daughter has a job interview tomorrow. Let's hope. As far as I can tell, approximately half of her friends are employed and half are not. Movement from the latter group into the former would be a good thing.

~ I have become addicted to The Secret Life of the American Teenager, which I can watch here but probably not at home. The tv switch from whatever to whatever has left us a one-tv family. No one seems interested enough in tv to do whatever needs to be done to change that situation. I suppose that if it interfered with my other addiction ~ early morning re-runs of The West Wing ~ I might drum up some motivation.

~ Michael Jackson's death has demonstrated to me that I am a complete moron when it comes to contemporary pop culture. What can I say? I think I just always thought that all his songs sound the same (which the Lovely Daughter says is true), so I never learned any of them. I was quite surprised when the Lovely Daughter filled me in on the Billie Jean lyrics. I did hear an interview on NPR to the effect that he was a dazzlingly innovative musician and performer. What do I know? Very little, apparently. Well, that's nothing new.

~ I can't think of a single interesting thing to convey. Silence is such a useful option sometimes!

Sarah's List

This post is not exactly about Hebrew.

As a small group of us were winding up our tutoring session with our professor in the library this afternoon, I flipped idly through the new issue of America magazine and found this poem by Benedictine Kilian MacDonnell.

As it happens, I am also finishing up a paper on a book on the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises as experienced by women, and so I am giving some thought to feminist critique of Scripture, of the Exercises, of the Christian tradition in general.

I have read Scripture and church history and tradition through a feminist lens for as much of my adult life as I have read such things, and so I am always translating, in my head at least, narratives and essays and such into perspectives other than those which appear explicitly on the page. However, I am no poet, and this man's (!) interpretation of Sarah's experience, at least as it is presented in Genesis, is far more evocative than anything I could write:

. . . And who consulted me

when you bid him burn my son

on Mount Moriah? Still I exaggerate?

. . .

Why did I not see light in your light?

Why did your truth not set me free?

As a mother who has recently lost a son and is now studying Hebrew via the story of the binding of Issac, I have had much occasion over the past two-plus weeks to consider Sarah and her plight.

Of course, we do not know, really, do we? The writers of Genesis 22 did not elect to present the story from her vantage point. Perhaps she did see light and truth, albeit differently from their presentation in the narrative of the journey to Mount Moriah.

Did her husband's decision to follow God's instructions kill her? Silence her? Or did she have some things to say? My experience of the last ten months leads me to believe that she had a great deal to say.

We will never know.

Sigh

I guess I will stop talking about Hebrew until it and the next six weeks are over. I'm sure that my whining is intolerable, especially to those who have found a deeply spiritual experience in their study of such a beautiful language of God's, a language of such cadence and elegance.

Here's my final (until after July 30, if ever) comment:

I just took a look at the first word of Genesis 22. ("And it happened . . .".) I've probably looked at, dissected, tried to absorb it and all of its three parts maybe 200 times in the last couple of weeks.

I looked at it for maybe the 201st time, and I didn't have the faintest idea what it was.

Jerusalem, We Have a Problem

I think I've written about his before: I got an A in Calculus, long, long ago, by memorizing the textbook.

I never had the faintest idea what Calculus was about.

Do you think that I could memorize every single letter and syllable in Genesis 22 and get through Hebrew that way?

I keep thinking of that scene in Apollo 13 where they dump the stuff on the table and say, "This is what you have to work with to get them back to earth."

I have to get through 6 weeks and 1 day more.

Of course, the main thing the astronauts had was people who wanted them to survive.

I have that.

Today's Hebrew Moment

So. (You might need to know a little Hebrew, or at least a little about Hebrew, to get the humor.)

We are learning Hebrew by dissecting Genesis 22 (the story of the binding of Issac) syllable by syllable. Twelve hours of class thus far; 1.5 verses.

I finally realized that I need to work ahead in the workbook as much as I can before class, so that I do not have to sit there in abject dismay as everything flies right by me. This way, I've gotten about half the material beforehand and I mostly know what I don't understand. (Not, as it turns out, always.)

This morning I made it through class and then spent a couple of hours with Long Suffering Professor. At first there was a small group of us, The Lost The Baffled and The Utterly Confused, but eventually our numbers dwindled to just me.

I had a few more questions, and I pulled out the copy of the passage that I had photocopied and enlarged on 8.5"x14" paper so that I could see all the little dots and dashes, and placed it on the table.

"You've got it upside down," said LSP.

Yesterday's Hebrew Moment

I went out for a very long walk, Hebrew flash cards with me. At one point, I realized that I had made a mistake with either the spelling or the pronunciation of a word ~ either one side or the other of the card made no sense.

As I walked through the park on the far side of the Little Lakes where many families were having picnics, I noticed a woman wearing a long skirt and long-sleeved t-shirt chasing after a preschooler. Ha! "Are you Jewish?" I asked her. (Obviously; it was 80 degrees out.) "Yes," she said. "Oh, could you help me with this?"

She was very gracious and assured me that I was right about being wrong.

Good thing I live here.

Summer Hebrew

So here's the thing:

The professor, who could not possibly exhibit more patience, explains the material slowly and clearly.

"So now you know [whatever it is]," he says calmly.

And some people, perhaps most people in the class, actually do.

I spend two hours with him later in the day; he basically re-teaches the entire morning's class to me.

I spend two more hours with the tutor and a couple of my classmates. She re-teaches most of the class -- my third time through in one day.

I spend hours with the workbook, reading and re-reading and slowly, slowly, slowly making sense out of the material, enough that I can understand it when I read it and practice it for the zillionth time, but not enough to have knowledge independent of the text. Not enough to be able to reconstruct or explain any of it.

I try the practice review in the text. I cannot answer a single question.

You know, I get it. I understand the value in being able to read, if only for a brief few months in time, some of the Scriptural text in the original.

But there are so many other things I want to learn that would be of so much more value to me in ministry ~

And all the time that would go to them is being devoted instead to a language that, if my experience with Greek is any indication, I will have completely forgotten a year from now.

If I were not so close to the finish line, I would seriously think about giving up.

Next Little Hill

A year ago I would have viewed what lies ahead as an insurmountable mountain but, you know, one's perspective changes.

I'm back at seminary and about to start summer Hebrew ~ two quarters of classes crammed into eight weeks. People frequently offer the opinion that it will be easier than doing it the usual way, since presumably the language is one's sole focus. Perhaps, if one is 23. And that view discounts the reality that I spent about 35 hours a week on Greek when that language was the bane of my existence. (My three other courses got occasional nods.) I would have to triple the time to accomplish the same thing this summer, and I'm not sure that there are 105 hours in a week available for study!

This morning I prayed with last Tuesday's Pray-As-You-Go, because I like the music. The meditation suggests attentiveness and appreciation toward the gifts of others, as opposed to arrogance about one's own. I think that I will have ample opportunity to engage in that particular spiritual practice today!