We’ve shifted here at Vanderbilt. The arboretum covers campus in green and the spring energy tantalizes as it builds summer humidity. The graduates have presented their theses at the Theses Fair, culminating years worth of soul-work and field education, community building, and the representation of an arc — who they were when they began here and who they are now. They’ve crossed the threshold into a new space. No longer divinity students but alumni.
Us first-years cannot believe this year has closed. We already feel like new people. Those of us who had been out of school for a while are grateful to feel our brains exercised, to have that intellectual atrophy massaged out with disruptive questions and nourishing conversation. We found invigoration in hallway pauses that brought, ounce by ounce, clarity, delivery, humor. I’ve seen representations of my colleagues’ individuality, home, and spirit.
I’ve seen glimmers of their altars.
Between classes, Tess goes to the courtyard to put herself in a sunbeam, close her eyes, and sit still. It reminds me to do the same.
Carl carries nuts in his briefcase for the squirrels.
The bows in Chandler’s hair tend to match her mood. We worried the day she wore black bows.
Traki will always offer to share her lunch with anyone sitting near her.
Our first exam felt like a group project. We lost our minds together. Dean Angela caught most of the cohort in the classroom an hour before the exam, sweating over flashcards, getting very Beautiful Mind at the whiteboard, and had to remind us the exam didn’t define us (and in fact, only defined 10% of our grade). We got through it together. As the blue books were passed out, the room chirped all around, “We’re smart!” “We can do this!” “This doesn’t define us!”
Now as we head into summer, I’m noticing preemptive grief in my belly. Here is home for now. As I watch the graduates say their partings, I twist a little nervously. These people have become home. The dwelling that is the way we draw into one another, collecting in clusters in the Reading Room, unwilling to part ways in the afternoons, has become a world unlike any I’ve known before. My heart flips at the spectrum of chatter at our tables — six or seven of us leaning in, immersed as a colleague shares a pain lived, then, in a moment, we’re unfolding the complexities of theodicy or the Puritans and just as suddenly, someone is making a joke fit for a middle school lunch table that makes us erupt into laughter and remember to breathe. How will I ever go?
I’m grateful for how I’ve been shaped — one of the graduates recently said like clay — this year. I think of the treasure, the divine within us, we have in jars of clay, in earthen vessels, pressed on all sides but not broken, not perplexed. Struck down, yet not destroyed.
But even as we have been nourished within the walls of Vanderbilt, the world has roiled outside. The headlines have brought us to our knees. Within our little world, our justice work can feel like wading through thicket, as if we’re peering through cracks to the action, tied up in deadlines and ordination proceedings.
When the thicket feels too dense, when we forget the reasons, we remind each other that part of this work is the presence with each other. The joy we bring is integral to the motion forward.
In the Master of Divinity (M.Div.) program, Audrey Fenstermaker-Rogers is pursuing the Episcopalian priesthood and Navy chaplaincy. While her Nashville roots are firm, she has embraced seasons across the United States, including some years on the Olympic Peninsula, where she first learned to hold others’ stories with care as a reporter. Through writing and learning care work, her vocational objectives at VDS are to understand how God shows up in a community’s truths, their stories, and how Jesus is working in the validity of interfaith spaces. Read more student reflections on the VDS Voices Blog.