We are the Pod people (Epilogue)...

"Whoever thinks that he can find one error in Holy Scripture does not believe in Holy Scripture but in himself; for even if he accepted everything else as true, he would believe it not because Scripture says so but because it agrees with his reason or with his sentiments." (1868 quote from CFW Walther, “The Martin Luther of America” andfirst president of the LCMS)

This morning the Pod returned to the mothership... I guess we can say we are officially moved-in now!

Well, Day 1 at the sem wasn't too bad. We met my Greek professor yesterday evening at the ice cream social, so I sort of had an idea of what to expect. The guy's a hoot-- and he's been at it for a while (he said we're his 20th Basic Greek class). There are 25 students altogether, one of which is female. Most of the students are young guys who took pre-seminary courses in college, including Greek. I'm not really sure why they are taking it again (unless they couldn't pass the Greek entrance exam, which is why I'm taking it-- but I've never studied the language before...). There are a few old guys like me. The first classmate I met this morning turned out to be about my age, from Tennessee, married 29 years (with 5 grandkids already!), and is already ordained under a similar program I began back in 2005. (And the first church they visited here was the same one we did; the second one was the one we'll visit on Sunday...)

I guess I over-prepared myself for this course. Today we started at ground zero-- the Greek alphabet and English parts of speech. Oh well. Better than being under-prepared, eh?

One of the more meaningful parts of the seminary day is the morning chapel service ("Morning Hours") at 9:35. The pointed, pyramid-shaped building in the pic above is the chapel, designed by Finn Eero Saarinen (who also designed the St. Louis Arch, among other projects), and is second on the list of Wired.com's Divine Photos of America's Most Epic Churches. It's an acoustic masterpiece-- to be part of the nearly all-male voices singing during the service is very moving! The pointy object to the left is the bell tower.

[click to enlarge]

The campus is not large by comparison to most major college campuses, but it's a very idyllic place in most respects (designed, I believe, by the architect to resemble a pseudo-Scandinavian village). It opened for business in 1957, but has been training men and women for ministry in its present form since 1976 (one of two LCMS seminaries-- the other in St. Louis) . The St. Joseph river runs along the east side of the campus (behind the line of trees near the top of the aerial photo).

So I'm officially ID-ed now and processed in and am excited to have finally set the wheels in motion... I'm not much into academia (some folks make a lifetime of it); however, I really feel like I belong here!

Time for homework now. Maybe after I finish my wife will let me go outside and play before dinner...