SCHOOL DAYS W I T H
A
SUSAN ERICKSON, MTS ‘24 It had been decades since I last arrived on campus – any campus – as a new student. I hadn’t even returned to my alma maters for class reunions. So it was odd to climb the creaking stairs of Shelton Hall, shouldering a backpack full of books. This time it was my husband rather than my parents helping me with my bags, depositing me in my “dorm room” and then driving off. But the feeling of anticipation and, to be honest, some trepidation seemed vaguely familiar. I was about to start my first residential week as a hybrid-distance student in the Master of Ministry program. It was also in some ways a week of firsts for Nashotah House, after months of restrictions necessitated by the pandemic. Both residential and hybrid-distance students met again in chapel for Morning and Evening Prayer. We gathered for breakfast and lunch in DeKoven Commons – two to a table and wearing a mask as we waited in line for Chef Randy’s fresh, delicious food; but, nevertheless, we broke bread together. And this year we were also able to celebrate Founder’s Day, attending a Solemn Mass, processing to James Lloyd Breck’s grave, and then enjoying a special dinner in the refectory. I say “we,” but when I arrived on campus that Sunday afternoon in April, I wasn’t yet part of a “we,” or at least not quite. True, I already belonged to a virtual community. I had briefly met my Shelton Hall apartment mate, Elizabeth Nash, in an introductory Zoom get-together at the start of Dr. Ed Smither’s Church and Society course. And I met Karla Banach in my very first course, Moral Theology with Dr. Elizabeth Kincaid, in January. The January term should have been my first residential experience,
12
THE MISSIONER
but a still-soaring COVID curve had forced it online, so my virtual interaction with my classmates was literally, and exclusively, “face-to-face.” Karla’s first words to me at the opening reception Sunday afternoon were, “You’re as short as I am!” But, aside from adding imaginative inches to my actual 61, the pandemic had turned me, like thousands of others, into a mostly cloistered individual. My week at Nashotah House was a reintroduction into a larger community, made possible, in my case, by having been fully vaccinated some weeks earlier. My residential week was, first of all, a re-introduction into a community of prayer and worship. I had been “attending” Sunday morning prayer online for over a year at my home parish of St. Philip’s in the Hills in Tucson. Now I worshiped in the physical presence of faculty and fellow students in the chapel of St. Mary the Virgin. The fact that we all wore cassocks added to the corporate feel of Morning and Evening Prayer, as did the antiphonal recitation or chanting of the Psalter. The power of the Daily Office to structure and inform one’s spiritual life has perhaps never impressed itself on me quite so strongly as it did during my first residential week at Nashotah House. Second, I was re-introduced into a scholarly community. For me, a senior student in the chronological sense, it was a harkening back to the kind of intellectual excitement I experienced as a graduate student many, many years ago. Fr. Buchan’s class in early Church History was a
