Real Estate

I have final papers to write and I need to clean in preparation for graduation visitors. But I also finally know where I will be going to serve beginning in July. So, instead of doing my homework, I have been searching the magical interwebs for apartments.

I've only had to search for an apartment one other time in my life, and it was in a city I had already lived in for three years. My only major requirements at that point were a six-month lease and proximity to campus. So, this whole moving-to-a-new-city-finding-my-own-place thing is totally foreign to me. I'm a little excited about having my own apartment, but I also feel like I have no idea what I'm doing.

What's more important: proximity to work or proximity to fun?
Do I want two bedrooms or just one?
What sort of pet policy should I be looking for, and what constitutes a "small dog"?
What are hidden charges for cable and wi-fi like?
Is there any way to know what sort of neighborhood the apartment is located in without spending days driving around?
How much should I really pay for a two-bedroom apartment?
Do I need two bathrooms, or just one?
How much kitchen space does a just-barely-cooking, busy 24-year-old need?

But there are a few things I absolutely insist upon:
1) The apartment MUST have a washer/dryer. I am no longer willing to drag all of my clothing all over the place whenever I run out of clean underwear.
2) It must have air conditioning. I don't want to be known as "the pastor who sweats like a pig" after my first summer.
3) Must allow dogs. See earlier post.
4) Cannot be a neighborhood so sketchy that I don't feel comfortable living alone.
5) Cannot have a sink that drains into the dishwasher. (I know that sounds like a strange requirement, but after having such an arrangement in a past apartment, the only acceptable response is: EW!)
6) Should not smell like a mixture of smoke and bad Indian food. (This scent lingered constantly in the apartment with the dishwasher-draining-sink. Again, EW!)
7) The shower should be shower-shaped. As much fun as it was to have a space-pod shower, it's a little disconcerting to feel like you might be launched into orbit, naked, with shampoo in your hair. (This feature, too, belonged to the apartment with the dishwasher-draining sink and the smoldering curry scent. That was truly a special apartment.)
8) Must have internet availability. I already have Skype coffee date plans with my seminary friends.

It's so much more fun to cruise online apartment listings than it is to write papers. Is it time to graduate? Here's your sign.

Completely Classless

Me: I went to my last class today. I mean, my last class possibly EVER. It's weird.
Dad: So, you're classless?
Me: Yes. I'm totally classless. I have no class.
Dad: Wow.

For the first time in my memory, there are not classes on the horizon. After two decades of education, I'm done with going to classes. I'm done with lectures, group presentations, discussion groups, colloquies, and seminar groups. I'm done taking notes, cramming, and taking exams. And, to tell you the truth, I'm not really excited about that fact. Sure, there's relief at not having to worry about attendance points or participation grades. But I love school. I love learning and discussing ideas. And I love the academic setting of growing with classmates and being guided by teachers and professors. I love being in a place where the main purpose of the work is sharing ideas. I will miss those things. I'm tired of worrying about grades and assignments, but I'm going to miss learning in a classroom context.

At this point, leaving the school community and my friends is too surreal to contemplate. For now, I'll just keep humming, "School's out for summer. School's out forever..."

Holy Saturday

I haven't really observed Holy Week this year. I mean, sure, I went to the Palm Sunday service, and Maundy Thursday, but in the middle I went to classes and drove back and forth from Virginia for an interview, and spent what little time I had left unwinding with my friends. After all, when else am I going to get to be with them in these casual ways? When else will I get to run errands and cook and dye Easter eggs with these amazing people who have shaped my life for the last three years? But I digress. I haven't been in the spirit of Lent much and I certainly haven't been in the mindset of Holy Week.

But this afternoon, on this quiet, lonely, drizzly Holy Saturday, I've been thinking about Lent. I wonder if the disciples knew, in the forty days leading up to their leader's execution, what was coming? Somewhere in their hearts, in the back of their minds, did their intuition tip them off? Did they feel the growing dread in the pit of their stomachs as they approached Jerusalem? Did they see the discomfort in Jesus' eyes as he listened to the shouts of Hosanna from the mouths of the same people who, he knew, would be shouting, "Crucify him!" only a few days later?

Could they fathom the meaning in Jesus' actions in the upper room? Did they realize that, when he said he would not eat and drink with them again until they were together in heaven, that I was warning them about his imminent death? When they fell asleep in the Garden, did they understand that they were slumbering away their last moments with God on earth?

I frequently wonder about the disciples. What made them follow? Did they believe that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, God incarnate with them? Or did they think that Jesus' words about being the Son of God were somehow metaphorical or hyperbolic? It seems so often that they misunderstood. Even after he revealed his identity, did they really understand?

And, if they did, what must they have thought on Friday, when they watched the Messiah, their hope, be crucified as a criminal? What must they have thought when the man they expected to be king, to liberate them from Roman occupation, to save them from persecution and death, was killed by the government?

But most of all, I've been thinking about Saturday. What did Christ's followers think and do the day after their leader, their friend, their hope had died? The Bible doesn't talk about what happened on Saturday. It skips straight from the momentous events of Friday's death and burial to the women's discovery of the empty tomb. No one recorded Peter's guilt after he denied Christ. No one talks about how the disciples reacted when one of their own, Judas, was found hanged outside the city gate. Mary Magdalene's tears and grief were not expressed with ink on paper. Did they have any hope left? Or did they see only that the one who had guided them for three years, who had conquered disease, temptation, and death, who had taught them so lovingly and given them hope, was gone from their lives, seemingly forever? Did they have any hope in what they did not, and could not, see?

Confusion, pain, grief... where is the hope in that? When your loved one is gone, what then? When everything you believe in is washed away, what is left? I do not know. Now we know that Easter will follow, but the disciples did not. And on Holy Saturday, resurrection seems like a weak, amorphous, dreadfully tantalizing impossibility. At that point, there is no hope yet, there is only continuing to exist; inhale and exhale, and live.

Beginning of the End

Papers, books, TV shows, and movies all have specific beginning and ending points. Life is not quite so well defined. The end of my term in seminary is nearing its end, but the endings are already beginning. On Friday, I went to the last Student Council meeting under the current administration. I watched my classmates hand over their posts of leadership and representation to the newly-elected folks. I represented my fellow third-years for the last time. And somewhere in my guts, I felt the familiar farewell sensation beginning to build. Suddenly, I have the urge to take my camera with me wherever I go, just in case I need to capture the last time that *insert significant event here* happens. The last girls' breakfast, the last Thursday night out, the last church choir practice, the last lunch in the student commons... I don't know when these events will occur, and I'm afraid that one day I'll realize that the last one is already over and I somehow didn't capture the memory well enough.

Some of the farewells are exciting. For instance, on Sunday afternoon, I sent in my thesis for grading. It was an exciting moment, a farewell to a large project and bit of stress. But some of the farewells are so frightening, so sad, that I'm dreading them already, even though they are at least a month away. I don't even want to think about the last time I'll drop by friends' apartments, the last time we all eat together or play games. And, strange as this may seem, I don't want to go to my last class ever. It's utterly bizarre to imagine the day after I finish my last class; I can't fathom a moment when I'm not anticipating another class, another semester. I've been in school for twenty years...I'm not going to know what to do when I no longer have to worry about classes and papers.

I'm trying to mentally prepare for the endings without becoming so focused on the finality of them that I no longer just enjoy them for the moments that they are. I'm trying to look forward to the future, but that's a bit difficult when I still don't know what that future will look like. (Waiting for an appointment is rough that way.) This, perhaps, is why we need rituals so much. We need the demarcation to distinguish between the past and the future. We need a time of communal recognition to say, "That was then, this is now." But how do you ritualize parting when the departures aren't synchronized? I feel a bit like an iceberg, like bits and pieces of my life as I know it are breaking off and floating away. I suppose that's the danger of long, lingering goodbyes.

But life really happens in the liminal spaces. It's in the in-between moments that we learn to cherish one another, to recognize the beauty and value in things we used to think were ordinary. We learn to live the moments-not-taken-for-granted. Too bad it's all tinged with goodbye.

Borrowed Wisdom

I have been devoting whatever intelligence and good writing I've been able to muster lately to trying to finish my thesis. (Today I reached the minimum requirement of sixty pages, which, when you print it out, looks and feels really impressive.) As a result, I have very little of good substance to say. Instead, I'll share with you three pieces of great wisdom that I have picked up in my classes in the last couple of weeks:

1) "Living in Boston, there were a whole lot of times that I shoveled six inches of partly cloudy."
-Rex Matthews

2) "An amateur is someone who doesn't know what can't be done, so he does it."
-John August Swanson

3) "God did not call an outfit. God called you and who you are."
-Theresa Fry Brown