PeaceBang

She’s Got No Class

I concluded the last class for my Doctor of Ministry degree last night. I still have two papers to write, but the part about being a student with other students is over, and now I head into that wilderness of writing my final project; a process I hope will take no more than a year. I am both sad and elated.

My last class was one of the best ones I have taken in a seminary setting. Sure, I loved my Feminist Systematics class at Harvard Divinity School with Sarah Coakley, and Joanna Dewey at Episcopal Divinity School opened up my world during a 1995 course on the synoptic gospels, and Father Bryan Daley of Weston Jesuit School of Theology showed me what terrifyingly brilliant lecturing looked like — and my theological brain was stretched to its limits — by a class on the 4th century Trinitarian controversies. I loved HDS’s Helmut Koester’s lectures on the history of Christianity, and Kim Patton rocked my world with “Dreamers and the Dreaming” — a course on dreams in various traditions. I was happy to sit at the feet of Clarissa Atkinson and Margaret Miles and to soak up their genius (again at Harvard), and I was never happier than in a recent D.Min. seminar at Andover-Newton where I and 7 other working pastors learned from each other through case studies and prayer.

But this final class on the art of communal discernment blended academic learning and spiritual support in a way that was particularly deep, affirming and memorable. The professor, Margaret Benefiel, had a quietly masterful pedagogical style that was at once impeccably organized but also left room for the movement of the Spirit among us. She shepherded us through 4.5 and eight-hour sessions with a variety of exercises and mini-sessions that made the time fly, and wherein each activity had relevance and a larger purpose in the scheme of the learning goals of the class. The reading list was fantastic, if lengthy.

No time to write more on this, but boy, does my academic and spiritual cup runneth over. Thanks be to God.