creative expression
In 2005 I signed up for Seminary classes at the Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Indiana. Among my classes that semester was Old Testament.
I quickly learned that there was a huge difference between the way I'd been reading the Old Testament--for my own personal spiritual nourishment--and actually "studying" Genesis through Malachi. In addition to reading the entire Old Testament in three months, we also had to read A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament, Global Bible Commentary, Women in Scripture, and many assorted articles. (My table mates clued me in about halfway through the class that the reading assignments were unrealistic and I shouldn't actually try to keep up. They'd stopped reading long ago.)
Other than the professor's interpretive strip tease to accompany our reading of the Song of Solomon, it was a very academic class, at least for me. I had, after all, spent four years as an undergrad giving speeches, watching films, visiting art museums, and learning to breathe the Tai Chi way.
So it came as a shock to me when the end of the semester approached and, in lieu of a final exam, we were asked to prove our learning through creative expression. My classmates quickly jumped on this, building a golden calf (with a television as its head), designing a stained glass window, writing narrative poems, baking manna, etc.
Yet the idea of being creative after months of etymology seemed impossible to me. It was like that calculus class I cried through freshman year. You can't ingrain in me that math is fun and then introduce me to limits and theorems and still call it math. (Hence the theater, art, and gym classes that made up the rest of my college study.) And you can't make me "think" about the Bible for three months and then ask me to "feel" it.
Long after our project ideas were supposed to have been turned in and I'd all but given up on ever being creative again, the professor read aloud to us from the book of Isaiah. When she got to chapter 6 she began: "In the year that king Uzziah died..." But the right side of my brain heard her sing: "The day king Uzziah died", as in "the day the music died" (which, as we've established, was pretty much how I felt about this class).
All hope was not lost! Don McLean and his American Pie had saved me. Now all I had to do was read through the 66 chapters of Isaiah and set it to McLean's 8 and a half minutes of music. Easy as pie compared to theology, etymology, and the other ologies to come.
Here's a little taste of the fun:
Singing my way through Isaiah because there is no test at the end!
I quickly learned that there was a huge difference between the way I'd been reading the Old Testament--for my own personal spiritual nourishment--and actually "studying" Genesis through Malachi. In addition to reading the entire Old Testament in three months, we also had to read A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament, Global Bible Commentary, Women in Scripture, and many assorted articles. (My table mates clued me in about halfway through the class that the reading assignments were unrealistic and I shouldn't actually try to keep up. They'd stopped reading long ago.)
Other than the professor's interpretive strip tease to accompany our reading of the Song of Solomon, it was a very academic class, at least for me. I had, after all, spent four years as an undergrad giving speeches, watching films, visiting art museums, and learning to breathe the Tai Chi way.
So it came as a shock to me when the end of the semester approached and, in lieu of a final exam, we were asked to prove our learning through creative expression. My classmates quickly jumped on this, building a golden calf (with a television as its head), designing a stained glass window, writing narrative poems, baking manna, etc.
Yet the idea of being creative after months of etymology seemed impossible to me. It was like that calculus class I cried through freshman year. You can't ingrain in me that math is fun and then introduce me to limits and theorems and still call it math. (Hence the theater, art, and gym classes that made up the rest of my college study.) And you can't make me "think" about the Bible for three months and then ask me to "feel" it.
Long after our project ideas were supposed to have been turned in and I'd all but given up on ever being creative again, the professor read aloud to us from the book of Isaiah. When she got to chapter 6 she began: "In the year that king Uzziah died..." But the right side of my brain heard her sing: "The day king Uzziah died", as in "the day the music died" (which, as we've established, was pretty much how I felt about this class).
All hope was not lost! Don McLean and his American Pie had saved me. Now all I had to do was read through the 66 chapters of Isaiah and set it to McLean's 8 and a half minutes of music. Easy as pie compared to theology, etymology, and the other ologies to come.
Here's a little taste of the fun:
Lucky for me Earlham School of Religion has a wide variety of classes so I was able to fill upcoming semesters with creative writing, role play, Harry Potter, and field trips. I never did graduate, but at least I learned to EMBRACE CREATIVE EXPRESSION.
Singing my way through Isaiah because there is no test at the end!
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