Weekly post

April 25, 2006
Dear friends,
I waited until today to post, instead of posting yesterday, because the university has been holding a remembrance service for Yam Ha'Shoa, Holocaust Memorial Day. It began with a brief service at 6 p.m. yesterday, then moved into a 24-hour reading of victim names. The divinity school slot was at 10:00 last night, and four of us divided up the 30 minutes. I also did some listening to other readers.
It was eerie, painful, very painful, and also very affirming. Hearing name after name read off without pause, echoing onto the quad, yarzheit candles flickering, made me think of the person who went with each name, a person prematurely extinguished by the Nazis.
When it was my turn, I discovered that the list, in a large notebook, was sheets that appeared to be photocopied from Nazi records, the dark small typeface, neat lines, numbers, hometowns, categories all fanatically precise. A person's existence reduced to lines on a page.
The Holocaust has been more on my mind lately because of my term paper on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It's good that the school observes Holocaust Memorial Day. To tell others is to honor the victims as well as the resisters and the survivors.

I have turned in all 5 term papers and 2 presentations and am now preparing for final exams. I'll be done with the exams at 12 p.m. on May 3. It's amazing that the year is almost over.
Keep the faith.

Grace and peace,
Beth

Weekly post

April 10, 2006
Dear friends,
Another year older. I'm now 39 -- really! I suspect I may have to put up with a year of friends teasing me about "holding" at 39.
I've also officially registered for the fall term, making me, I guess, a "rising middler," the typical term for seminary students, who are usually classified as junior, middler, and senior.
If things sort out the way I expect them to, I'll be taking Greek, theology, ministry of pastoral care, introduction to the spiritual life, and Art of Ministry II. That last is the framework for a yearlong 15-hours-a-week internship, which I'm working on constructing. I hope to be spending that time at a Greensboro workplace offering chaplaincy services to get a better feel for doing "ministry in the marketplace."
It's term-paper season, followed closely by final-exam season, so you may not be hearing much from me the next couple of weeks.
Grace and peace,
Beth