(Dis)Orientation

Some of us just walked back to our apartments from a workshop on leading the Daily Office worships here at the seminary campus. It brought a lot to my mind about my orientation experience upon arrival here this Fall. I am currently being steeped in the very dark tea called Episcopal Church Culture.

We use so many terms that are disorienting to non-Epsicopalians or to really new ones (those who haven't been Episcopalian for ten years). We dabble in the Latin and the Greek; we borrow from Eastern and Western traditions, and, if you please, we like our terms old and fussy. It gives us a certain sanctified feeling. (I should give a nod to the ancients: It isn't just old for old's sake. So much of the old has incredible value, right? For example, as the incense rises through the santuary and your prayers go up mingling with it, you are using your nose to pray as well as your lips. But this post will not be an arrangement of ancient images meant to praise the Church. I want to focus not on how orienting our culture can be, but how disorienting.)

When my fellow first year students and I arrived in Berkeley for our upper-level enculturation process to begin, none of us knew exactly what version of the culture we would receive here, or how it would complement what we brought with us. Some of us came from Emerging Churches, some of us from Anglo-Catholic parishes, and some from evangelical community churches. There is such a wide variety of backgrounds we carry, it is hard to believe we start assuming much in common at all!

And yet, I did feel throughout orientation and our first weeks of classes that I was below average in the enculturation department. I am exploring whether I was made to feel this way by those around me, or whether I put this pressure on myself. I found some of my classmates were well-versed in liturgies called the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament and could recognize a maniple if they saw one, but I sure as heck wasn't one of them. And some were unaware of the complete breadth of christological theology terms (Donatist, Montanist, Marcionist, Gnostic, Arian, Docetist, Monophysitic) floating through Christian history -- but I learned these a long time ago. In my first few worship classes I felt smacked by the Latin and Greek flying through the room without explanation or translation. Others felt completely at ease and wondered when we were going to get on with it.

How might our orientation experience reflect more deliberatley upon the complete sprawl of Episcopal knowledge represented in each incoming class, and how could we help each other learn and find needed information? Our Moving and Thriving on Holy Hill guide was helpful to enculturate to Berkeley, but what about the culture of our own Church? I find ECUSA much more complex a village! Are we unsure how to take a group of 40 students and poll what they know and don't know and point them in the right direction? Do the current students and faculty care to guide the new students (and one another) as they go? I have started imagining liturgical terms handouts in the orientation booklets, and an evening session set aside for those who've never spoken "Liturgy" in their lives. I envision more discussions initiated by instructors concerning how to articulate the history of heresy to our congregations. My model for this is my Greek instructor, who often integrates practical homiletic points and theological nuances with our text translations in a way that makes Intro to Greek a lot more than memorizing definite articles.

Something Understood pointed out simply that if you don't know something, just ask. Of course; this is not a 4 year Summer Camp where we are spoon-fed each theological bit we must digest. Yet I wonder -- what might be the pastoral posture of a seminary in these matters? In graduate studies, we acclimate to a new place and a new discipline. The classroom, to a great extant, holds the keys to the culture of the subject at hand. In seminary, though, it is a more complex assimilation of thought histories, practice histories, ethos histories, and the expectation upon us that when we depart our seminary experience, we will be the keepers of the theology, worship, and ethos for everyone else! If we think our student body experiences are broad and various, imagine our future congregations!

So, SU brilliantly suggested we compile something ourselves as a gift to the community and its future members. I feel called to contribute to this process and invite any ideas to be posted or emailed to me. For any of those in seminary or who were once in seminary, what was particularly disorienting to you? What did your seminary not explain well? What were you forced to learn on your own? I hope that out of this collaboration will come a group of happy, relaxed first year students next year. :)

My thought in motion right now is the awareness that as a cradle Epsicopalian, I did not expect to know so little about my own tradition. Others who are newer to the church than I have amassed lists of resources and teachable spirits so that when questions arise it is not an unexpected feeling -- they know what to do. I anticipate, though, that other cradlers and old-timers will still have many questions, and I'd love to anticipate some for future students' peace of mind.