Seminary is a Cemetery

“Did I just see you guys at the café?” A generic looking Caucasian man said to me as I stood in line at a restaurant with Esther.

“Maybe so…we were just there,” I trailed off and turned my attention to the menu hoping to avoid a conversation.

He began to aim words in my direction again…

…aimless chatter…

“So what are you doing in Pasadena?”

“Going to seminary,” I said. I did not want to disclose the name of the seminary, lest I be obliged to defend myself.

“Cemetery?” His inflection seemed to indicate confusion.

“Seminary,” I corrected.

“Yeah, I heard you. I know exactly what that is.” His all-knowing pretentious tone spoke volumes.

I felt a combination of amusement and annoyance. I looked at him with what I hoped would be an unassuming smile, though I don’t know precisely how I came across. “Oh, ok.”

“I know all about seminary…” His voice was loud and seemed to permeate all the corners of the room.

…the conversation continued for a minute or two, and he concluded by wishing me good luck, which I thought just added to the oddity of the peculiar conversation.

I will not waste breath defending a theological education because I will likely be either “preaching to the choir” or pouring words onto deaf ears. However, I must say that it struck me as rather odd that a complete stranger would say something like that to me. After some informal research, which involved nothing more than turning to Esther and asking who in the world that was who spoke such tactless words to me, I learned that he was involved at a local church (I will not disclose which denomination or “nondenomination”). And I thought to myself, “We’re so bored and have lost any remnant of direction that we must fight amongst ourselves.”

Death and Love

I have not felt the urge to write a blog for quite some time, so I have decided simply to mention a few of the books I have been reading recently each accompanied with a brief quotation.

The Aeneid by Virgil. "Ah, merciless Love, is there any length to which you cannot force the human heart to go?” (110, Penguin Classics).

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. "Love stands opposed to death – it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death” (487, Vintage).

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats.

"Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?

For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,

Mournful that no new wonder may betide

Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam

And Usna’s children died”

(“The Rose of the World”, Scribner)

The Complete Poems and Plays, T.S. Eliot.

"Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many.

I had not thought death had undone so many.”

(“The Waste Land,” I. The Burial of the Dead; faber and faber)

The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade. "Religious man can live only in a sacred world, because it is only in such a world that he participates in being, that he has a real existence. This religious need expresses an unquenchable ontological thirst. Religious man thirsts for being. His terror of the chaos that surrounds his inhabited world corresponds to his terror of nothingness” (64, Harcourt).

The Rise of Christianity by W.H.C. Frend. "Christianity arose from the life, preaching, and death of Jesus of Nazareth” (12, Fortress). This opening statement of the first chapter illustrates this book’s rather peculiar underplaying of the importance of Jesus’ resurrection. Accordingly, I suggest this book be read in conjunction with The Resurrection of the Son of God, which expounds upon the significance that Jesus’ resurrection had for the early Christians.

I did not realize until after I compiled these brief quotations that they all involve death. I had not planned that; I did not plan to be so gloomy. However, I think it is important not to ignore death. I think it is important to realize that death is the fate of us all and that with Christ death loses its sting.