I know I promised that I would blog about our diaconate journey, but honestly there just hasn’t been that much to tell. We read a lot, we go to class a lot, but it’s just not so remarkable that it generates much bloggable material. Perhaps that is my fault and I am not looking with the right eyes. Perhaps you will be amused by this. As I have once again waded into academic waters, I am finding that even though many years have passed since I was in college not much has faded in terms of my expectations for myself in regard to academics. Once upon a time when I went to college, my husband used to say that I took all of my courses “pass-fail.” The only problem was that in my mind, anything less than an ‘A’ was flunking. Going to school with my husband though has introduced a whole new wrinkle. Not only must I get an ‘A’, but I find that it is also necessary to outscore my husband in order to “pass.”
 
We are currently taking a series of transitional courses that are equipping us with a basic understanding of the academic lanugage of theology and scripture in advance of entering formal graduate study in January. These courses are also giving us a chance to get back into a classroom way of thinking and of course, to give the formation team a chance to spot those of us who will need extra academic assistance throughout this process. The course we wrapped up several weeks ago was “Introduction to Philosophy.” This course was hard. I did read a lot of philosophy when I went to college oh so many years ago. Enough philosophy so that I had read all or most of the works that we were briefly introduced to but, when I read them I wasn’t looking for the same set of things that we looked at this time around. Beyond that, we moved very rapidly from ancient philosophy to modern philosophy. If you’ve taken philosophy you know that the vocabulary used by one philosopher is used slightly differently by another and you may be able to remember who meant what when speaking of “forms” and “matter” and “material” etc. as you jump from philosopher to philosopher (rapidly) but it was daunting for me. I like words to be stable things and to mean roughly the same thing all of the time. Anyway, I agonized over this class. Add into the mix a little event that had a pretty profound effect on our lives named “Ike” which ended up causing us to do three weeks of class in one week (yes, I am hyperventilating) and I was wound pretty tightly. That’s all background….

All I need to know is this. If we tied, did I flunk?