I aitn't dead yet...

...To quote Granny Weatherwax.  It is hard to believe that it has been six months since I last blogged.  Those six months have been highly interesting, to say the least.  I spent time in DC finishing my Clinical Pastoral Education, learning the city, working at Starbucks to make ends meet, working on my last semester of seminary classes by distance, and finally graduating last month.  I am now looking at Ordination in exactly two weeks.  I moved back to New York, partly because DC was too expensive, and partly because Albany is my home diocese and I needed to be here for a while.
It was a crazy six months, but definitely formative.  Important things happened on a personal and intellectual level for me.  The personal things, I plan to keep personal, but the theological ones I will comment on.  CPE was brutal, mostly in a good sense. It functioned as a sort of ministry boot camp, and I am grateful for it.  I have no desire to function as a hospital chaplain, although I enjoyed the actual interaction with patients and doing visits.  I disliked the theological approach to inter-religious ministry, and that probably deserves a whole post of its own.  I am not basically opposed to inter-religious ministry, and even inter-religious prayer, but it takes some care to know how to do it properly.  Still, I think my experience with CPE, not to mention the extended stay in DC, was both humbling and strengthening, and at least in my own eyes I seem to be a more poised, but less arrogant man for it.

Next, I will say that the last semester of school work was challenging, mostly because of how busy I made myself with other things, and I ended up having to cram a lot of work into the last few weeks.  Oddly, that ended up being a blessing.  I ended up writing a term paper on Hans Urs von Balthasar and Sergius Bulgakov, for a study on Christology that I was doing.  I don't know why I thought this was a good plan, since these men are two of the more challenging, controversial theologians of the last century (Bulgakov was tried for Heresy by his jurisdiction of Russian Orthodox Church, but never condemned), and I was almost totally new to both their works.  Modern theology isn't really my thing.

Anyway, I managed to get a feel for both of these thinkers in the space of about two weeks, reading Mysterium Paschale by Balthasar and The Lamb of God by Bulgakov.  This had the overall effect of something like the intensive language course I took a while back, where a whole semester of Greek is compressed into three weeks or so.  You begin by feel totally overwhelmed, and as if someone is holding your face underwater, but at some point around the middle of week two something happens and you suddenly become able to breathe in the strange new environment.  I am no Bulgakov expert, still less do I claim to understand Balthasar, but I don't feel totally overwhelmed by their ideas any more.  Further, I think discovering Bulgakov has been the most important thing that has happened to me theologically in the last three or four years.

Fr. Sergius Bulgakov

I am not saying I am an out and out 'Bulgakovian,' whatever that would mean; there are some problems with his thought, some of which are pretty serious.  Still, he does provide a way of thinking and speaking about the relationship between God and the World that I find helpful.  Expect more on this, as I attempt to make a return to blogging.

I expect that the blog may take a slightly different path in the near future, as I transition from the life of a seminarian to that of an actively ministering transitional deacon, and finally a priest, but I don't want to let the blog die.  I think it helps me to have it, to get my thoughts out and even from time to time, to start conversations with people.  So anyway, I will be blogging again, especially as I have more sermons to put up. I think my sermons are among my best writings, and I hope they may, in fact, be of use to other preachers who might stumble across the blog.   See you soon.
Peace in Christ
Paul Hunter