Hazelnut Reflections

prospecting

I just read a post by Sophia at I Will Sing that reminded me of my prospective student story. . .

I arrived at Seabury excited but also anxious, because I was showing up outside the traditional ordination process (diocese I was resident in had a longstanding moratorium) and because I knew my parents were going to have serious issues with my pursuing this vocation.

(No really, the rest of this is a funny story).

So I showed up at breakfast, and the day's prospective students were me (being me) and this other man, who had been a deacon for many years in his diocese, and who looked like a classic picture of Anglo-catholicism--black suit, clergy shirt and collar, complete with monk like hair and medieval looking beard.

I was quite intimidated by his presence, and tried to make conversation but didn't get much of anywhere.

Of course we both went to Seabury and over the years became good friends. At our middler retreat, he finally admitted to me that he had thought to himself, at that first meeting over breakfast in the refectory, "if they're all going to be as perky and extroverted as HER, I'm really going to be miserable."

And I told him, in response, that my thought had been, "if they're all going to be as introverted and stuck-in-the-mud as HIM, I'm really going to be miserable."

(The truth was, I had acquired great respect for him because he was the only person I knew who spent more money in the seminary bookstore than I did).

posted by Emily @ 4:52 PM