So I Finished My First Year of Divinity School…

What did I learn?

That has been the question of the summer for me. I have been turning it over for three months and it’s still hard to even think about, because I honestly never felt like school ended…at least up until I started working as a hospice chaplain. But when I thought of my classes, I didn’t feel like I had any clarity, any spiritual wisdom or understanding that was different from what I felt before. Instead, I felt like a deflated balloon. It was as if, in the fall and spring semesters, I had expanded, grown beyond my body, and then whatever air had moved and motivated me in those seasons had somehow escaped through a small, undetectable hole. I was a skeleton operating a suit of loose skin, and the world around me continued as if nothing had changed. My family and friends looked at my face and they saw the same person they have always seen, but it felt impossible that they could not see the gaps in my bones. I knew I was somehow different, altered, subtly wrong.

In talking with my friend Cara recently, we discussed how each day of the first year of school was like someone coming into your bedroom and slightly changing one thing. Your lamp is a different shape, your dresser a different color, and your door is half an inch to the right. You don’t notice the changes at first, maybe one or two, but then by the end of the year you look around yourself and are lost because you no longer recognize the room you are standing in. Then you spend the next several months when things aren’t changing to catalogue all the differences and compare notes with your peers and ask:  Do you also feel disoriented? Please tell me you also feel disoriented. Please tell me I am not alone.

Div school is a unique experience in that we are not just developing coding skills or learning how to design a building or memorizing anatomy or studying law books - and those are challenging in their own ways - but we are doing soul work all of the time. My whole scaffolding of belief and faith and truth has shifted, leaned, and for some parts of it, collapsed. I was never told what to think, but I was taught to question. 

Why?

What purpose does this serve?

How does this affect people?

How does this change how I view God or the Divine?

The thing about religion though, is if you hold too tightly to it instead of to faith, questions like these can seem dangerous. Questions like these can be bombs that can destroy you. Yet, they are armed and present for every single one of us regardless of our spiritual background, and most of us never fully face them. Most of us never have to. However, divinity school is one of those places where our professors turn us around and point out those bombs, talk about them, ask about them, and we have to either learn to diffuse them or get hurt. Sometimes we do both. 

I feel like I have never understood the tower of Babel (1) more. I had been building in the wrong direction and God knocked me down, scrambled my language, and set me to figuring out how to communicate with the people around me when all our words and images of God are entirely different. I had misunderstood the whole project of div school from the start. This degree is not just studying theology, reading the Bible, or gaining the skills of a spiritual leader. There is that, but even more it is discovering all the hidden oases and hopes God has for each of us, and it is seeing all the ways we destroy, uproot, burn, and bar each other from ever reaching them. 

So I finished my first year of divinity school empty and angry. I was so angry when I began writing this piece three months ago. In some ways I am still very angry, but I am no longer as empty. Still to understand how I got here, you have to understand that there is a common saying among us, passed down from upper-years and alumni: Div school is like drinking from a fire hydrant. This phrase is tacked on to certain professors, certain classes, where the information comes pouring out, beating you up and knocking you around in the process. At the end, you’re left bruised, embarrassed, wet, and still slightly thirsty. Then suddenly, classes are over and finals are turned in, and the hydrant is silent. You are left to sit in the puddle of your own attempt to drink, not knowing what just happened but also missing the pressure and push and direction of it. This is the emptiness. It is wringing out your shirt and trying to understand why it's a different color than the one you remember. 

The anger is everything else. 

I left my first year of divinity school angry. It feels like an anger I have been building all my life. I am angry because I believe in a Creator who desires the flourishing of every person. I am angry because I believe in a Savior who reconciles, welcomes, heals, visits, and feeds us. I am angry because I believe in a Spirit who resides inside and beside every person.  And I am angry because I live in a society, a country, that worships power and wealth over those communal goods. 

I am angry, and heartbroken, because we celebrate men who worship their own ego and power and wealth in a desire to gain access to that same power and wealth. This is idolatry - holding someone up to the sun and praising them in the hopes we can receive the same privileges they have, as if our devotion and our loyalty will be rewarded by people who cannot see beyond themselves. We know this, because these men do not act as if they live in a community. They promote images of themselves as kings, or as a pope, as gilded conquerors over land or sky that is never theirs. They use language that elevates themselves and diminishes all others. They use their power to destroy international programs that help feed and heal millions of people, to put military force on the streets to harass, beat, kidnap, and disappear our neighbors and community members, to cut off our payments to the educational and medical coverage programs that help us have access to schools and doctors. Why is this what we celebrate? Why is this what we worship? 

Is this the model of engaging with each other that we want to follow? That whoever can be loudest, meanest, biggest, richest gets to determine who can be seen as human, who gets to eat, who gets to stay with their family, who gets to have their medication? No politician or business man or public figure or pastor or even political party ever deserves our unquestioning devotion and loyalty. We question people to know them. Just like we question God to know God. And if all these questions upset them, or even upset us, then we must ask ourselves why. Why are they unsettled? Why are they angry? Why am I nervous? Why am I threatened? 

What do these questions reveal about myself that I am scared to face?

I promise you, love, that whatever it is, you can face it. I have seen so many people over the summer face much scarier questions and realities, because one of the biggest things we run from is our own mortality. We are mortal. We are dying from our first breath. It is terrible, and it is beautiful. 

What filled my emptiness this summer was working as a hospice chaplain. I still held my anger and will probably carry it with me for the rest of my life or until we dream up a new culture where we act as if we actually value each other, but it cuts me less when it's not the only thing taking up residence in my chest. While I was in classes, I felt restless and caged as if I was always pacing at the bars of my thoughts because I could not see or understand how what we were learning would change the suffering of people. That was always what I wanted to know - what does this mean for my community, for my church, for people of my faith, for my family, for my friends? Because it’s fun and exciting for me to chew on a new concept of God or way of reading the Bible, but it means nothing if it's unrelatable to or disconnected from people who are not in academia. And on some level I know that is my role, to be the translation from what I am learning and thinking to how I act and teach (2), and yet when I am caught up in only the mental exploration of faith, I start to gnaw at my own ankles. I was nervous I would feel the same way about chaplaincy - trapped by all the things I could not say, a silent witness to hurtful theologies or damaging misconceptions. How could I be present with someone I fundamentally disagree with? How can I love them in their pain despite the ways they may be contributing to my own? 

Instead of an enclosing, I found my work to be such an expansion. Most of the time I was engaging with people whose image of God did not in any way match my own, and maybe in a different setting, we’d have picked a fight about it, but that was not our purpose in our time together. I found that in this role on the edge of death, there are a lot of different fronts we construct around our lives, but we all share in grief, fear, anxiety, love, and hope. Several patients or their families over the summer asked me how I faced so much grief and death every day. I would always answer that yes, I did see a lot of sorrow and a lot of dying, but I also got to witness so much vibrant and mundane love and joy. One of my favorite questions to ask was, “What is something you want me to know about your loved one?” and have people tell me their wife’s favorite tv shows, that their brother could always be heard laughing in the next room over, that their father was stern but freely gave the neighbor a car when she needed it, that their mom cooked for the whole church weekly, that their friend was an excellent guitar player. I got to see glimpses of how my patients lived and loved, and I got to see who in their life returned that love with tears and nights spent on the couch and laughter and adjusted blankets. Working in hospice was one of the most consistent experiences of the sacred in my life. It was unbelievably hard, and there were nights I would carry home my own grief for a particular patient or their family. Still, I wouldn’t change this summer for the world. It taught me how to stretch my hearing beyond the words that were being said to reach the heart of the emotion or thought behind them. It taught me to search people for our connections, despite our many differences, whether that was recognizing frustration at their situation or relating to the process of making deer jerky (albeit second-hand through my brother, thanks Kyle, sharing about you helped me connect to many a hunter). 

This being around and with so many people - listening to stories, listening to someone breathe, listening to my own heart, and listening for God - filled the emptiness that had plagued me since the end of classes. It helped my skeleton grow to fit my skin, and now, as classes have started again, I find that my experience has settled me. I feel more grounded and steady on my feet as I walk into this next semester. My anger still dogs me - our taxes are funding bombs and starvation in Gaza, our own troops are being sent into our cities to attack us while our countrymen praise them, our queer and trans siblings’ bodies are being policed and legislated against, the wealthy and powerful who do not deserve our love are still fawned over and glorified. We chase each other out of Eden (3) and set up a watch to make sure no one returns. This is not human flourishing; this is not of God. 

And yet my classes continue, and death continues, and we must continue. I pray that we do so while asking why and listening to the response that comes behind the words that are said. We will see the reflection of ourselves in that which we refuse to say. Perhaps then we can begin to change. 

So what did I learn from my first year of divinity school?

We are the death dealers in God’s garden…and we are capable of great life when we choose it.

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Hello loves, it has been very long since I last posted here indeed. Over a year! Who can believe it? Time certainly flies by. I definitely wasn't working on a blog from the summer of 2024 talking about my time at the Chautauqua Institution in NY that I never posted. I definitely don't still have the tab on my computer open for that. (It was actually a reflection on consumerism, convenience, and the environment and how we are biblically called to live lives of friction! Maybe in the future it will see the light of day. But alas grad school is grad schooling and this does not feel the space for my essays.)

Surprising no one who followed me during my YAV year, I am finally posting this piece about completing my first year of divinity school....a month into my second year of divinity school. But to be fair, I couldn't have ended it without getting some time and distance to also reflect on my summer working as a hospice chaplain. It felt like that was really the missing keystone of this whole piece preventing it from crumbling into bitterness and despair. (I promise I am okay, I write and run and scream MCR songs in the car to avoid the pit of cynicism.)

I tried something a little different this time with this post. I wanted to keep this a bit shorter and less scavenger-hunty for all of the little asides and footnotes I have been prone to use. My mom told me that it used to take her a week to read all of everything that I wrote, and I realized that it was probably not the clearest or most accessible style.

Also, this is obviously not the most up-to-date place to see all that I am doing and becoming. If you're interested in hearing more from me (why?), please give me a friend on Facebook @Allison Blackwell or a follow on Instagram @aj_blackwell13. I will be posting exciting things there like when and where I'll be preaching if you want to tune in! (October 26 at Southminster Presbyterian Church (USA) Nashville!)

As always, thank you so much for reading and spending your time with me, and now for the footnotes (there are only three - trinity!)!

-A

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1. This is a reference to the infamous biblical story that appears in Genesis 11:1-9. In her book, Holy Envy, priest and author Barbara Brown Taylor talks about professor Emmanuel Lartey's reimagining of the typical understanding of this story (pgs 179-183). His idea is that the message of Babel is not about diversity being a punishment for human hubris and more about God reframing the purpose and aim of our labor from reaching heaven to building community and seeking to understand each other. This interpretation has had a profound impact on me and the way that I approach biblical stories.

2. In the Presbyterian Church (USA), where I'm seeking ordination, pastors are considered "teaching elders," which I think is a cool lens through which to view ordained ministry.

3. Eden in the Christian tradition is a mythical garden that symbolizes the perfection of God's creation, of which humanity was a part until they disobeyed God's laws and were punished by exile. It commonly believed to be a paradise that followers of Christ can return to after their deaths. The story of the garden of Eden is captured in Genesis 2:8-3:24.