It’s late July, a hot afternoon bearing down after a morning rainstorm, and I’m sitting at home thinking about how my life has changed in the past year. I’m home for the summer, taking these months to reflect, relax, heal, and prepare for my second year.
Though I’d never even heard of divinity school before college, it had gradually materialized as the obvious next step for me. I was a sophomore when a senior friend was applying for seminary, and I started experiencing little bursts of jealousy. Seminary wasn’t something I could do: as a Catholic woman, I’d never even imagined it, and as a teenager, it definitely wasn’t cool or sufficiently radical. It simply wasn’t part of my world.
In those years, though, it became my world. I’d been pulled into the orbit of the Chaplain’s Office, the student interfaith organization, and the social world of religious/spiritual groups at my college. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but it somehow clicked: I was politically radical but fairly conservative in my personal life (i.e. I didn’t have the wherewithal to navigate the party scene), I longed for community and deep conversation, and I felt a need to root my commitment to justice in something deeper than secularized Protestant ethics.
I applied for divinity school as a senior because it felt natural. College had been wonderful but messy, a time of growth, heartbreak, loss, mental illness, and change. Maybe, I thought, divinity school would enable me to process what had happened – and cultivate the strength and resources to be in the heartbreaking world. I only applied to Union Theological Seminary: a favorite professor and my mentor were both alumni, and everyone told me that it was the place to study liberation theologies and work toward social justice in religious communities. Besides, New York City! I’d always wanted to live in the city; I fancied myself a bohemian writer-type undermining the status quo.
This time last year, I had no idea what Union would really look like. I’d visited and talked to people, but it’s the kind of experience you have to live. So, in retrospect, here’s what I learned in my first year at Union:
- Seminarians are just like everyone else. Even though I knew (intellectually) that even religious leaders are merely human, part of me still believed that seminarians would be kinder, wiser, more mature, more gracious, whatever. They’re not (we’re not). Seminary sometimes feels like high school. You’ll meet kind, loving people, but you’ll also find the requisite cliques, creeps, gossip, and hypocrisy.
- You’ll get lonely. Yes, there are cliques. You might think that everyone is having fun without you. It’s okay. Friendships are messy, hard-won things, not easy transactions that can be discarded at the drop of a hat. You will cultivate them.
- When you add God into the mix, things sometimes get worse, not better. Union is uniquely progressive in its professed values and classroom content, but I expect that some version of this happens everywhere. Our version of holier-than-thou is woker-than-thou. The more radical your position, the better. Even when it’s not explicit, we often speak with the authority of God. We’re often self-righteous, thinking we’ve got it all figured out. We all think we’re prophets.
- Deconstruction gets old. I mean this in an academic sense, though it permeates social life at Union: we love to dismantle ideas, take things apart, look at their component parts, and analyze each problematic piece. This is necessary, of course: it’s critical that we gain the skills to dismantle the racism, (neo)colonialism, and sexism that permeate our religious traditions. The postmodern deconstructive mode is our default, though. We get stuck there. I long for a deeply constructive social, academic, and political space; I want divinity school to be a place where we question and build, (re)imagine, create, believe, grow, and cultivate. Lingering in deconstruction is antithetical. Rather than simply say that everything is “trash,” why don’t we compost it and cultivate something new?
- You need small communities. My homes at Union are the community in which I live and a prayer service that I attend once a week. These are two of the spaces that became my pockets of love and nourishment on campus. When you’ve identified them, cling to them. Foster routine: the rhythm of regular ritual, the shared meals and prayers. They will sustain you.
- You need off-campus communities. Student orientation leaders told us this when we started at Union, and it’s held true for me. I spent much of the year attending churches throughout the city, looking for one that felt like home. One of my best friends lived ten minutes away in Harlem, and I spent many evenings at her apartment with her friends. I often attended an ecumenical youth group with her, which strengthened our bond as we followed separate religious paths in the same city. Even my two jobs off-campus helped. Leaving gives you perspective. It enables you to come back with fresh eyes and more grace.
- God is in the hard stuff. This year I moved from rural New England to New York City, started graduate school, had a devastating falling-out with my mentors, and lost two beloved grandparents. My grandfather died just after we’d talked about bereavement in my Pastoral Care class and I struggled to understand the loss theologically. I believe that death is necessary for life; this is central to my ecological worldview. We return to dust. Our bodies nourish the earth. A heron took a fish from the pond outside my house this morning. Dying is part of living, and I can’t believe that it’s evil. At the same time, I can’t believe that God ordains each death (murder, genocide, tragedy). I’ve begun to think that while death and loss are not evil, it is evil when humans try to author them. Death is not ours to deal as we please. Does this mean that God is the author of death? I think so, in the sense that God is ecological and cyclical, God is in the dying and the rising, and God accompanies us through everything. Even when we experience something cruel, violent, or unnatural, God creeps in, pulling us back toward the ecological rhythm that we are all born to.
- It’s hard if you don’t fit the mold. I’m a Catholic woman not on the ordination track. Union is a historically Protestant school, and I’m sometimes jealous of my mainline Protestant peers, who have a much easier path toward ministry than I do. Liberal Protestant anti-Catholicism is a real phenomenon. Classmates and faculty/staff have told me and other Catholic women to become Protestant when we express our pain. They laugh at our stuffy old tradition, sure of their moral superiority, and simultaneously demonstrate their ignorance of it (no, papal infallibility doesn’t mean that Catholics obey the pope’s every whim).
At the same time, of course, my experience has been smoother than that of my non-Christian classmates. Although Union is attempting to cultivate new programs in non-Christian traditions, it is deeply rooted in Christianity. This is fine – as long as Union is honest about what it is and what it is not. Resources for practitioners of indigenous faiths, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, and Hindus are inadequate. Racism, sexism, colonialism, and other forms of systemic oppression permeate institutional norms and curricula, just as they do at any institution. Many people at Union are trying to cultivate a new type of religious community, and their work is beautiful and transformative, but we must remember not to put our faith in institutions!
- Write what you want to write. One professor told us to always approach an assignment as part of your larger course of study. If a final paper enables you to do research that will be applicable to your thesis, do it! Approach your assignments strategically, not just as boxes to be checked off: think about how you will grow from them and how they will further your academic goals. This reminder helped me orient myself toward research that excited and fulfilled me.
- New York City is a broken and beautiful place. When I went to an elite liberal arts college an hour and a half from my hometown, I was shocked to see how little my classmates understood (or cared) about rural poverty. We lived in a bubble that isolated us from this reality. Our college town was much wealthier than its neighbors, but we couldn’t see our neighbors. In New York, homeless people sleep on the steps of the ivory tower. We are everyday witnesses to gentrification. What does our complicity mean for the state of our souls? Is it ethical to attend this school? God knows that Jesus wouldn’t have attended Union Theological Seminary. And yet I stay. I must live with that.
New York is a beautiful place, too. Cities pave over the evils of colonization, mass consumption, and environmental degradation, and yet weeds work their way through the cracks. There is music on the subways. There are sunsets over the Hudson and people living, despite.
(lay) revisionary 