Some Words for Those Beginning Seminary

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Ed Watson is a PhD candidate at Yale University, focusing on questions of theology and conceptualization. He is currently working on a dissertation exploring the relationships between Christian talk of grace and racial difference.

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A new academic year is beginning, which means thousands of people across the country are beginning seminary. If you are one of them, this post is written for you (though I hope it is worth reading even if you are not!).

Almost no one arrives at seminary for a normal reason. After all, the most common reason for applying is a sense that God is specifically calling you to be an ordained minister, which is an odd feeling, to say the least. Alongside and within this, countless idiosyncratic struggles and passions lead people to devote at least two to three years of their lives to studying any aspect of religious life. If you think about why you are at seminary, you will likely find that questions of inestimable and unconditional value have driven you. Your classmates may share these questions but they are also in some irreducible sense yours. None of it is normal. By the same token, having a normal time at seminary is almost impossible. On balance of probability, the next few years will make things strange in ways that cannot be made sense of at the start.

One consequence of this is that it is hard to find helpful advice for beginning seminary. In my experience, at least, seminary tends to be one of those things where you can only learn what you first needed to know by getting to the end. There is at least one thing that I think is worth knowing at the start, however, something that I have not seen expressed before—and so I figured it would be worth trying to express it here. It is something relevant to navigating academic and community life. But it is also fundamentally bound up in our sense of who God is, and so the character of the love we hope to serve.

For many people, their time at seminary is shaped by the fact that learning has been made a painful matter. This manifests itself differently in different places, but it has been true in more or less every educational setting I have been a part of, and it has almost never been spoken: learning has been made to hurt.

This is perhaps most clearly evident when it comes to academic learning. When almost every week of every semester of every year for over a decade involves receiving some kind of grade that you are told will shape your future prospects, it can be easy to believe your value is wrapped up in your capacity to get a good grade. After all, this is how you are being evaluated. It is also easy to think that whether you belong in an academic space depends on your ability to know. This has the perverse effect of leading people to feel as if they do not deserve to inhabit places of learning if they do not already know the material they are being taught. If you do not already know, then you do not deserve to learn, so if you need to learn, you do not deserve to know. This is not a belief to which we often give voice—but if you are someone who feels shame and self-doubt at the mere prospect of “failure,” or if you know people who feel this way, then there is a good chance that this logic is at work, buried deep within the workings of the self. It can make the mere fact that one needs to learn a deeply painful matter.

Beyond the classroom, learning can also be made a matter of pain when it comes to being the kind of people we want to be. It is possible, after all, to dull the pain of academic learning by convincing ourselves that we already know everything we need to know, either because we are already experts or because what we do not know is overly or insufficiently intellectual (in my experience at least, both arrogance and disregard tend to be ways of avoiding knowledge of one's insecurity, and both deserve compassion, even if they can lead people to be contemptuous of others).

When it comes to being a loving person and a caring person, however, avoiding the need to learn is much harder. At the end of the day, after all, most of you are starting seminary because you want to be agents of divine love. Love and care are also, however, things that need to be learned; it is hard to love well and to care in all the ways we want to. And the need for this learning can hurt far deeper than feelings of academic inability. If I do not know how to love, then it is easy to think I cannot love. If I want to care for someone but do not know how to do so well, it is easy to think that I do not actually care. And if I cannot already love, can I consider myself someone worthy of love—worthy of either loving or being loved? The sense of precarity invited by this question can be terrifying. I think most of us tend to distract ourselves from it by pretending to ourselves and others that we already know how to be everything we want to be. I know how to perform love and say the words I want to hear, and for as long as reality can be glanced beyond, this is typically enough. But again, that implicit logic is there at work, the idea that if I do not already know, then I do not have to learn, and so if I need to learn, then I do not deserve to learn.

I am writing this because seminary, at its best, is a place for learning of the most fundamental kind. I have seen students learn not just new facts, not just about new thinkers, but take these facts and use them to weave new possibilities of meaning out of them, transforming both what they learn and themselves. Because none of us go to seminary for normal reasons, we can connect what we learn with our weirdness and become even more beautifully weird. But the oft-unspoken truth that can frame all this wonderful work is that, for many of us, learning has been made to hurt. And if this hurt is left unnamed and uncared for, that potential for wonderful weirdness remains unnecessarily bound up with a power for wounding.

The good news is that this pain is not necessary, and there is a way of working against it. It rests in seminarians continually reinforcing for each other that they have an unconditional right to learn, because the idea that one needs to know in order to learn is nonsense of the highest order. This right to learn then means the right to be wrong, the right to say stupid things in class, to misread a text in obvious ways, and to not know something everyone else seems to know (these are all things I have done). It just also means the right to do these things in conscientiousness of others—not worrying that they will think I am stupid, but making sure that my work of learning is bound up in and responsive to my classmates' work of learning. And it means finding joy in the work of learning, in the wonderful fact that we are most fundamentally creatures who learn, who can always discover wonder beyond what we already know.

Teachers can, of course, do this work of reinforcement quite effectively. But it is you yourselves who have the greatest power in this regard. More than anyone else, students get to shape what kind of place their school will be. And you can make learning less painful by not just admitting but really living into the fact that you are here to learn, to learn with and from each other. What it looks like to do this depends on place and person. But it feels like talking to someone in full reality rather than through the performances with which we have learned to try and convince people we are already who we most want to be.

Most of this is true for any educational environment. It is particularly significant for seminaries, however, because how we feel the need to learn is inextricably bound up with who God is in our lives. Returning again to that vicious logic, that if you do not know, then you do not deserve to learn: to feel this logic as determining the value of our flesh is to feel it as patterning God's judgment, a judgment which could only damn us for being what we are afraid we are, namely learners. And as much as we might want to proclaim another God than this, it is hard to proclaim another God truthfully to others when this is the god we believe in for ourselves. When seen under the aspect of grace, however, it cannot be the case that creatures must be well before they can be healed; it cannot be the case that we must know before we can learn; it cannot be the case that we must know how to love before we can learn to love. Under the supposition that we desire all these things and that God desires all these things for us, we can learn to have faith in a God who does not desire that the need to learn should cause pain. We can learn to have faith in this God by learning to act out of honest kindness to each other and by learning to learn about all the wonderful weirdness communicated by those arcane texts and strange words. This, after all, is what seminary is for. I hope you will have the best of strange times.