This morning, as I sat drinking my breakfast tea and looking out the big windows that overlook the courtyard at the back of my apartment, I heard again the screeching sound I’d heard several times in the last week. But this time, I also saw the source of the noise – a small flock of green parrots. Not exactly what you’d expect to see in Chicago, Illinois.
I moved here to Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood a little over a week ago to get ready to begin my graduate studies at the Lutheran School of Theology. It wasn’t an easy move, what with me, my dog and three cats to carry 600 miles. Thankfully, my mother agreed to fly up from Florida to ride with us. She also stayed a week and faithfully helped unpack all the boxes (of way too much stuff) to get my new home organized so that it actually began to resemble a house and not a warehouse.
In the days since, I’ve enjoyed meeting other dog owners and their pets in nearby Nichols Park, admiring the older homes, finding a wonderful little produce market (not to mention a great source of fried chicken) and just trying to get a sense of my new digs. And as I don’t yet have the window air conditioner installed, I’ve been thankful for the balmy weather we’ve been having.
It’s probably a good thing that I arrived in the summer, so that I could get connected to the place and make some friends before the famously brutal Chicago winter sets in. I’m not completely unfamiliar with winter weather, having spent my youth in New Jersey and my undergraduate college days at Purdue University. Visiting my parents in Florida for Christmas break was a welcome break from the cold. I will never forget the experience of leaving the Tampa area one year in early January where it was 70 degrees and arriving 21 hours later in W. Lafayette, Indiana where the wind chill factor was 70 degrees below zero.
But I’ve been a Georgia girl for over 25 years, and I know I’m not used to all that coldness. Luckily, I do own a down coat and some sweaters, but I’m sure I’ll have to make an investment in thermal underwear. That kind of material investment will be critical, but there are other investments I’ll need to make to survive the winters here. As I investigated the presence of South American parrots in Chicago, it seems that once again I can take a cue from nature on adapting to an unnatural environment and climate.
These small Quaker parrots moved in to my neighborhood in Chicago back in the early 1980s – right around the time I left Indiana and settled in Georgia. And now that I’m here preparing to immerse myself in the study of theology I find it ironic that these hardy little birds are also known as monk parakeets. And like their namesakes who are known for clustering in communities, monk parakeets are able to withstand the cold weather here because they nest together in groups to keep themselves warm. According to the website eHow.com, “these highly intelligent little parrots have adapted to the urban environment and cold Midwestern winters by building communities.”
In my visits in the last year to various seminaries and divinity schools, it became important to me to get a sense of what the community in each place was like. Did people connect to each other in common purpose, or was there more of a cut-throat attitude of nearly voting people “off the island” like they do on television’s “Survivor”? My sense was that this Lutheran school had the best of both worlds – a small institution with a family kind of feeling that was connected to the amazing academic resources of the University of Chicago and all the other seminaries in Hyde Park. And it was the only place where I felt that deep gut instinct that said “this is where I want to be.”
Theologian Howard Thurman once said “The moving finger of God in human history points ever in the same direction. There must be community.” I’m new here and just beginning to make friends, but I’m hopeful that I will thrive in this environment, that I will feel I have found my flock.
Showing posts with label Lutheran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lutheran. Show all posts
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Monday, April 20, 2009
We Will Know It When We See It
For the last seven months, I have been immersed in a journey toward graduate school. Ever since the cloudiness cleared and this step emerged as the next one for me to take, I’ve been spending a lot of my time visiting schools, preparing applications, writing essays and searching for scholarship funding.
The task often seemed overwhelming, and there were moments when I thought I’d drown in the sea of possibilities – so many schools, so little time. Sometimes I wondered if I’d ever be able to figure out where I should study.
So the road trips began. I visited Duke Divinity School, Vanderbilt Divinity School, Candler School of Theology at Emory University and Columbia Seminary, an almost-next-door neighbor to Emory in Decatur. The mail brought catalogs from other institutions in the Northeast, New England and even California. Each one carried a mixture of tantalizing courses and traumatizing tuition costs. Yet I kept remembering the people who assured me that there was money out there to help pay for seminary education.
It had been clear to me from the beginning that this path would not ultimately lead to ordination into the ministry but would more likely lead to a career teaching religion or theology. For that reason, I did not feel limited to the schools in the Lutheran tradition, my religious heritage.
One’s faith heritage is an interesting thing. I was baptized in the Lutheran church, and spent much of my life there. Since moving to Habersham county, I’ve been worshiping in a wonderful Presbyterian church where I have been nurtured well. Yet when I returned to my Marietta church for a long-time member’s memorial service, I realized how much I’d missed that Lutheran liturgy. It’s funny how seeds planted so young in life grow trees with strong roots that keep one planted in a particular place even into adulthood.
I applied to a seminary where I’d discovered there was a Jungian psychoanalyst on faculty (an area of study that I’ve enjoyed on my own over the years) at a moment of panic when I worried that limiting my applications to schools in the southeast might have been a mistake. When that school accepted me but offered no merit scholarships, a dear friend suggested I give the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago a closer look, as they might be able to offer more funds.
A little over a week ago, I got on a plane to Chicago, planning to visit two seminaries there. Prior to this trip to the Midwest, I’d not yet had a strong sense of pull to any one school. I’d connected very strongly with a professor at Vanderbilt and recognized that I could get an excellent education there or at Candler, both places to which I’d been accepted. But I found it curious that I’d not yet come away from any school with the feeling that it was the place I should go. But as soon as I walked into the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, I had this sense of coming home.
In his poem “Little Gidding,” T. S. Eliot wrote “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Yes, this school was a place I knew – I knew this way of worshiping, I knew these friendly people, I knew that this light coming in the big windows was glorious and I knew the feeling of community here was something I would treasure.
Though nothing is yet written in stone, I have a strong feeling that I will be moving to Chicago this summer. It looks like it’s time for the country mouse to become a city mouse once again.
The task often seemed overwhelming, and there were moments when I thought I’d drown in the sea of possibilities – so many schools, so little time. Sometimes I wondered if I’d ever be able to figure out where I should study.
So the road trips began. I visited Duke Divinity School, Vanderbilt Divinity School, Candler School of Theology at Emory University and Columbia Seminary, an almost-next-door neighbor to Emory in Decatur. The mail brought catalogs from other institutions in the Northeast, New England and even California. Each one carried a mixture of tantalizing courses and traumatizing tuition costs. Yet I kept remembering the people who assured me that there was money out there to help pay for seminary education.
It had been clear to me from the beginning that this path would not ultimately lead to ordination into the ministry but would more likely lead to a career teaching religion or theology. For that reason, I did not feel limited to the schools in the Lutheran tradition, my religious heritage.
One’s faith heritage is an interesting thing. I was baptized in the Lutheran church, and spent much of my life there. Since moving to Habersham county, I’ve been worshiping in a wonderful Presbyterian church where I have been nurtured well. Yet when I returned to my Marietta church for a long-time member’s memorial service, I realized how much I’d missed that Lutheran liturgy. It’s funny how seeds planted so young in life grow trees with strong roots that keep one planted in a particular place even into adulthood.
I applied to a seminary where I’d discovered there was a Jungian psychoanalyst on faculty (an area of study that I’ve enjoyed on my own over the years) at a moment of panic when I worried that limiting my applications to schools in the southeast might have been a mistake. When that school accepted me but offered no merit scholarships, a dear friend suggested I give the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago a closer look, as they might be able to offer more funds.
A little over a week ago, I got on a plane to Chicago, planning to visit two seminaries there. Prior to this trip to the Midwest, I’d not yet had a strong sense of pull to any one school. I’d connected very strongly with a professor at Vanderbilt and recognized that I could get an excellent education there or at Candler, both places to which I’d been accepted. But I found it curious that I’d not yet come away from any school with the feeling that it was the place I should go. But as soon as I walked into the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, I had this sense of coming home.
In his poem “Little Gidding,” T. S. Eliot wrote “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Yes, this school was a place I knew – I knew this way of worshiping, I knew these friendly people, I knew that this light coming in the big windows was glorious and I knew the feeling of community here was something I would treasure.
Though nothing is yet written in stone, I have a strong feeling that I will be moving to Chicago this summer. It looks like it’s time for the country mouse to become a city mouse once again.
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