Under the Rafters

I live just down the road from the seminary where I graduated eight years ago. I still teach in their online program. If anyone had told me I'd be walloped by emotion by this past weekend's homecoming event, I would have chuckled. Homecoming? That's what you do when you go back to visit places. We never left!

And yet in many other ways, we really did. Anyone who has ever been around academic communities for any length of time knows how quickly and completely they can change, at least every few years. Pretty much all of the students I studied with (4 years) and all of the co-workers I worked with afterwards (3 years as part-time staff) have long since gone. The faculty is almost entirely different from the one I studied under. Although I am still very blessed to be connected with the school (I love teaching in their distance program, where I have had the privilege of guiding some amazing adult learners and continuing to learn and grow as a scholar and a mentor) my life for the past five years has been in a completely different season.

When we realized it was time to leave seminary, our daughter was two. I was still finding my way into parenthood. Our daughter was going through a really difficult year (that's a story for another time). We went through an incredibly long season of unemployment, of vocational blankness, of questioning whether or not we'd been wise to go to seminary. Once we realized, once and for all, that God was calling us to stay in this area, our work and ministry lives began to revolve around our church and other local organizations.

I was still on campus fairly often to use the library or to attend adjunct training, but there were days I felt a bit like one of the Hogwarts ghosts. I'd slide through the walls, invisible, because almost anyone I ran into was no longer someone whose name I actually knew or who knew my name. I'm exaggerating, but only slightly. The grief I felt over such displacement dissolved after a while. I found I could take the sweet girl to play on the seminary lawn in the evenings and it was okay, a lovely place to play, a place with some good though fading memories. This past year I was able to get plugged into a homeschool co-op group with some of the newest student families, which put me on campus once a week again. The main connection I share with these ladies and their kids is homeschooling, but I enjoy listening to them talk about their classes and their spouses' study schedules and the new professors. It makes me grin a bit to remember some of my own student days.

But in the past ten days, D. and I have both been on campus more than we have been in years. A conference last week, a homecoming (the first of what they hope will be an every few years event, I think) and we found ourselves attending lectures and dinners and hanging out with some people we'd not seen in years (except on Facebook!). It was all good, but I found myself overwhelmed with emotion during a couple of the lectures.

Oddly enough, I think it was because of where they were held. Newer classrooms, renovated since we were students, are now used most often, but for larger events, crowds get moved into a multi-purpose area in one of the old buildings. I had almost every single one of my classes in that building, the majority of them in that room (or the smaller classroom in the corner). Sitting listening to someone speak on theology and church history, standing to pray evening prayer, what moved me in my gut was the fact that these were the same windows, the same rafters overhead, that I had studied under a decade ago.

Weird, I know, but we human beings are strangely visceral people. It was when I looked up into the rafters that I was flooded with memories, not just of people, but of the joy of learning and reading and writing, the whole passion I felt during that season of study. Two professors in particular helped formed my ability to think, read and write theologically, to think with my heart. Sitting in that classroom, I felt tremendously grateful to them, and for the ways that spiritual and intellectual formation still enriches my life. I may still not fully understand why the Lord brought us here and the very different ways he has guided our path since we first came (oh how different our lives are now from what we imagined we were being prepared for!) but I think I have a newfound sense of peace and trust that nothing experienced in this past twelve years has been a waste. It's all there, ready to draw on, "life and food for future years."