Graduation

On a cool December evening, my seminary education concluded with a simple graduation ceremony held at the Golden Gate chapel. During the commencement speech, I gazed through the chapel’s floor-to-ceiling windows to the lights of San Francisco glimmering across the Bay, and I remembered arriving on campus as a callow 23 year-old, unsure if I really belonged at the seminary or among the ranks of professional Baptist ministers. But, despite ill-advised encounters with felons, a small arms arsenal, two stoned construction workers, and a licentious retiree, I was about to walk out as a newly minted Master of Divinity.

Of course, the chapel afforded me no views of the future, so it was impossible to perceive how the course of my life would be shaped by a handful of years spent immersed in two very different worlds. The terms were not in vogue then, but studying Red State religion in a Blue State world had changed me. I had brought a host of questions to Golden Gate expecting ready answers, but my professors had, for the most part, shown a vexing reluctance to provide them. If anything, my seminary education had ended up raising still more questions that I couldn’t answer.

These doubts and struggles were more or less set aside for a long time, but eventually they came to bother me very much, as you may have gathered by reading various posts in this blog. In recent years, some of my faith issues have gotten resolved, others haven’t, and I have come to the overall conclusion that questions aren’t so bad, and answers aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be. No, that’s probably not what my old seminary professors were trying to teach me, exactly. And, as such, they should be held blameless for my present spiritual and mental state.

Of course, it must be admitted that during my seminary years, I was also influenced by the various denizens of Marin County who crossed my path. If the seminary gave me a broader view of my faith, then Marin and the Bay Area gave me a broader view of humanity in general. It struck me as a place where you got to be more or less whatever you were, and no one would make too much of a fuss about it. Even if what you were was a rather goofy Southern Baptist seminarian.

I kind of liked that open stance, and over the years I began to wonder if there was something almost Jesus-like about this easy, come-as-you are acceptance. It doesn’t take much reading of the New Testament to see that the main gripe people had with Jesus was that he was too inclusive—too ready to hang out with women, children, cripples, and assorted riff-raff. Maybe you can read too much into that tendency, but then again, maybe you can’t.

Perhaps that’s why I’m still in the Bay area almost 17 years after that graduation ceremony. My, how time does fly.