Despite the weather, I got back to school after Christmas and J-term all in one piece. No, it wasn't weather that delayed the planes--it was weather that delayed my getting to the airport! It snowed the day I flew back to Gettysburg, and the Willamette Valley isn't very prepared to deal with snow. By 9:00 that morning they were barely starting to de-ice the secondary highways. We thought we left in plenty of time to get to the airport, but we weren't expecting it to take over an hour to drive the first fifteen miles. We got to the airport just in time to wave at my plane as it left. Southwest was easy to deal with, I got to BWI only an hour later than I had planned, and when my baggage got left behind they shipped it up to the seminary for me so I didn't even have to go down and get it. It was a positive experience.
I'm really starting to look forward to internship, much as I love the seminary; next year, I'll be in a parish full time! As of today there are 14 internship sites in Pennsylvania, five in Virginia, two in Maryland, one in Alabama, one in Florida, and one in Washington. More should be trickling in over the next few weeks, some from outside the area. It's kind of fun to go up to the Field Ed office and look at the booklets each church has put together about their site and their supervisor. That's why they trickle in--there's quite a bit of paperwork involved in applying for an intern, and a lot of churches try to do it in the lull between Christmas and Easter. Not that there's much of a break between the two this year; Easter is extremely early this year. (It's a moveable feast--it falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.) This year, it falls on March 23; the earliest it could possibly ever be is March 22. And it hasn't been that early since 1818. What this means for Western churches is that the down time between Christmas and Easter (the two great festivals of the year) is extremely short.
My classes are good so far. I'm in Exodus: Shaping a Community, Intro to Systematic Theology, Current Trends in Adult Christian Education, The Church Year, Stewardship Theory/Mission, and Funeral Proclamation. Exodus should be interesting; if nothing else it will make me practice my Hebrew. I have a lot of friends in that class, and the professor knows her subject well. Systematic Theology is a required course, and it deals with theology in a, well, systematic manner. It's basically how you take a few underlying theological principles and develop them out and apply them to other matters. What it's good for is helping people deal with new questions and situations by helping them build up a coherent theological model/outlook that they can then use to figure out things that maybe aren't obvious. It's a good way to do theology, but not the only way or necessarily even the best way; Luther, for example, wasn't a systematic theologian--he was an occasional one, that is, he wrote treatises about specific problems and ideas, rather than trying to cover everything. The Church Year is about the liturgical rhythms of the church and the theological reasons behind them, and the way Christians look at time in general--plus an interesting bit of liturgical trivia here and there.
Funeral Proclamation should be interesting. We have to preach two funeral sermons, and they can be for anyone real or imagined. (They've had funeral sermons for family members, before; they've also had Darth Vader and the Road Runner.) Only one can have died of old age. We can pick our own texts. I'd like to do my first one on a character, warm up with someone who's not real, and the second on a real person. I know who I'd like to do for the real person, I'm waiting on a few things to start planning. But if you have any suggestions for a fictional character, please let me know. My first thought was either Buffy (the Vampire Slayer) or Doctor Daniel Jackson from SG-1, but then I considered the theological implications of preaching a funeral sermon for someone who resurrected and thought better of it.
After talking with the director, I won't be singing in Schola Cantorum this semester, much as I have enjoyed it in the past. Schola is a community choir that meets here on the seminary campus. You have to audition to get in, and they do great music. I will miss it. Speaking of things I miss, as you all know I enjoy writing just for fun. Unfortunately, it's the kind of thing I don't do regularly unless I set aside time daily to do it, which I haven't done since college. I think I'm going back to that, because I do enjoy it when I do it.
