Seminary in a Time of Stress & Strife: A Pastoral Letter to my Students

Phaedra Taylor, “Cabrillo Tide Pool” (2ft x 5ft, Watercolor and Ink, 2020).

(This is a letter that I have written to my students at Fuller Theological Seminary and that I am re-publishing here in case it might be helpful to seminary students elsewhere.)

Dear friends,

I am aware that the events of this week in particular and of the past year in general have generated an extraordinary amount of stress for you—for your family, your work, your relationships and your studies at seminary. I am aware of the strain that this places on you, whether mentally, emotionally or physically. And I am aware of the difficulty that it is to remain focused in your reading and writing.

I am aware, also, of the questions that these troubling and trying times have raised for you, not least among them, "Why am I in seminary, really? Shouldn't I be doing something different or perhaps more immediately useful with my limited time, money and energy?" These are important questions that deserve careful consideration.

Why study when the world burns outside your doors? Why read ancient texts that may offer no direct benefit to your life in a contemporary world? Why pen essays that turn you inward when the news of the day compels you to look outside of yourself to see the suffering of your neighbor? And why worry about tomorrow's grades when today has enough troubles of its own?

While you may not have asked yourself every one of these questions, I’m guessing that you have asked yourself at least one of them and that the answers have not been readily forthcoming.  I’m guessing, perhaps more accurately, that you simply feel exhausted by all the impossible questions.

You may feel deeply discouraged by the unfair reality that confronts you daily, trying as best as you can to manage your mental health, your physical wellbeing, your home life, your never-ending to-do lists, your responsibilities to family, the demands that your day job places upon you, and the contradictory opinions and often contentious expectations of fellow believers about how best to navigate this pandemic in the light of a volatile political landscape.

What I wish to assure you here is that you are not alone. You are not alone in your grief. You are not alone in your anger. You are not alone in your depression. You are not alone in your feelings of fatalism or despair. You are not alone in your struggle to keep your mental health in tact. You are not alone in your fight for justice, equity, peace and righteousness. And you are not alone in your desire to make it to the end of the day without feeling like an utter failure.

You are seen and you are loved. The Lord sees your struggle. He sees your affliction and your need, and he does not despise your neediness. The Lord looks kindly on the lowly and shows compassion for those who suffer in body or in soul. The Lord sees your traumas and carries them gently.

You are not alone in this class, either. You have each other, and as difficult as it is to imagine this fact on the first week of class, I assure you that you are God's provision of grace to one another in your hour of need.

I am with you and for you as well.

While I have a vocation to fulfill as your teacher, I am chiefly your brother in Christ, just as needy and broken as any other brother or sister in God's beloved family. And I have colleagues at Fuller who feel the same. Together, as faculty and staff, we resolve to do our jobs well but we readily acknowledge that we may also do our jobs poorly, and it is for this reason that we stand with each of you before the throne of grace, pleading for God's mercy.

We plead also for wisdom to know how to do our work well, when forces inside of us and outside conspire to create circumstances that make it all too easily to do our work poorly and to be at odds with one another, for any number of reasons. It is for this reason, again, that we plead for divine help.

Most importantly, you do not stand alone before the throne of grace.

Jesus, your elder Brother, stands with you. It is his life's vocation, among other things, to intercede for you as your Priest. He presents your whole life to the Father in love and, in turn, offers the often-incomprehensible love of the Father to you, which the Holy Spirit then deposits deep into the fibers of your heart, down into the deepest parts of your self in order to saturate your entire body, every tissue and cell, along with every square inch of your soul, with the sorely needed grace of God.

And when you find yourself coming up empty, speechless, adrift, partly faithless, at times hopeless, perhaps even loveless, the Spirit does the praying for you, through wordless groans and unutterable sighs that exceed your capacity to fully understand.

While I cannot presume to tell you what you should and shouldn't do in response to the travail of our times, I wish to reassure you that we need men and women like you, in seminary, doing the hard work of understanding the past so that you might gain a heart of wisdom for the present, adopting the disciplines of careful and critical reading of texts so that you can discern the spirit of the times, and writing honestly about your own life so that you can lead others into the kind of vulnerable life of faith that Jesus exemplifies for us.

We need students like yourself engaging each other in a robust and charitable discussion of hard things so that others might see and believe that it is possible to ask the hard questions of one another without automatically turning our opponents into enemies.

The last thing I'll say here is what I say every term: the first week of class is the week of grace. It's the week where we get caught up, dialed in, fine-tuned, and able to turn things in late without getting penalized. I trust that by week two we'll find our footing and be able to run the race that's set before us in this class, to borrow from the author of Hebrews.

I leave you here with a Collect Prayer that I wrote drawing from the imagery of Psalm 23:

O Lord, you who know your sheep by name, be my Shepherd this day. Where I am burdened by the cares of life, give me rest. Where I am harassed and helpless against the enemies of my soul, be my defender. Where I am weary, restore me. Guard me, keep me, shield me, so that I might feel your loving care this day. In the name of the One who lays down his life for his sheep night and day. Amen.

Every grace to you,

David

Phaedra Taylor, “Illumined Prayers for Life: A Prayer for God’s Care.”