On the wisdom and foolishness of attending seminary-excerpt from a letter to a friend

Congrats on your accomplishments with all the work you have been doing. That must be gratifying. I suppose I believe now more than ever that odd things (or maybe better said would be "peculiar, unexpected things") come to us in life that in some ways change us but in deeper ways tell us about who we have been moving toward long before. Perhaps the great realization is when words or life or friends come to us in a way that echoes to something that has more whispered than rumbled within us. That is how I think many of the turning points in my life have come to be. Maybe they are nothing more than sign posts, but ever greater because of that. I write all of this not because anything in our conversation has necessarily stirred you. Much has been stirring within you for a while, that is for sure. I am just grateful that you listen to it, or question it (not in the skeptic's way, but in the way that Job indicts God to be God), or that you simply inhabit it.

If seminary is something that you are to pursue, it will more than likely pursue you. We can choose our hobbies, but it is hard to do that with passions. To be worthwhile, I think they need to be bigger than we are. I never have nor will I gain absolute certainty that I should be in seminary for certainties rarely comprehend and most often betray Certainty. That said, it is not foolish, or maybe it is the right kind of foolish, to throw ourselves into something new on a hunch, a nudging. Certainties we like to claim with science, safety we think we are afforded by the government or 401k's, but the only reason to even consider seminary would be if there just might be a God about whom we can't be certain and with whom we can't feel altogether safe. Good news often is bad news to us before it is good. And certainties are only worth their weight when there is nothing we can't comprehend. This move seems to make the world static to me, bite-size. Maybe I just like mystery, or maybe it is because miracles seem more true than the mundane, but I am only in seminary because I believe in a Living God. That sort of foolishness might be the primary requisite for seminary, and if not a belief, an imagination puts you close.

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Also, I love the quote that you sent. It strikes me that out of all the fantastical-ness of fairy tales, what they are most trying to communicate is that each stumble, each detail, each insignificant component of our lives is the locus of such immeasurable worth. Fairy tales are not meant to remove us from the world, but to move us into the world with the eyes of a child and with wisdom that can only be gained by living as one, fully thrusting ourselves into the world.