When people ask me about South Africa, they occasionally ask something like, “What do you miss about South Africa?”

Here’s my partial list:

• the people, obviously
• in South Africa, I felt like I was closer to the centre of things, not in the sense that I was the centre of the attention (though my skin colour assured me of that) but in a broader sense that it was in places like Itipini that the truly important questions of faith, mission, and reconciliation are most profound.
• I realize this now only in retrospect but I probably felt closer to Christ than at any other time in the past. If Jesus was alive today, I have a feeling he wouldn’t be spending his time at Yale Divinity School.
• Despite all the many obstacles and frustrations, when everything “worked” in just the right way and something happened at least sort of as I wanted it to, the transcendent feeling of satisfaction I had was and is like nothing else I’ve ever experienced.
• This last one was added yesterday morning when I went to a church in New Haven known for its high liturgy. It reminded me so much of the congregation I was a part of in South Africa that I felt a sort of “liturgical homesickness.” But I also like being able to understand the sermon.

There’s also a list of things I don’t miss – driving everywhere is one of them – but I’ll save that for another time.

One thing Yale does not lack in is course offerings. There are scores of classes to pick from at the Divinity School and then scores more to pick from at the various schools and departments elsewhere in the university.

It can be easily overwhelming. There can be too much choice. Except for some broad distribution requirements, there are very few paths that a M.Div student must trod before graduation. He or she can feel like a kid in a candy store, limited only by the four or five courses we can take each term. I know this because I’ve heard it expressed by several of my fellow students.

For me, the story is a little different. Because I am doing both an M.Div and a Diploma in Anglican Studies and am also – simultaneously and confusingly – a student at Berkeley Divinity School, I have a fair bit more guidance. In fact, on the first day of orientation, we were given an advising customary that strongly recommended the four courses to take in our first term so that we can meet prerequisites for later courses and distribution requirements. My schedule isn’t quite set yet but it looks like I’ll be taking at least three of those four courses.

Usually, I resist such efforts to “meddle” in my choices. (Yes, I know it’s just the accumulated wisdom and advice of years of previous students, not meddling.) But this time I found it so liberating. While everyone else was obsessing about what courses to take, I was not. It was one possible stress-inducing factor that was happily lifted from my shoulders.

Thomas Merton in The Seven Storey Mountain writes about how when he arrived at his monastery for the first time, he found “the four walls of my new freedom.” I never understood what that meant – freedom? in a Trappist monastery? Now, thanks to this experience of choosing classes, I do.

I wrote recently how important it is to listen to the stories we each have to tell. Divinity attract fascinating people and I really enjoyed the orientation because I could basically sit around and chat with people.

It turns out, however, that Yale doesn’t give grades for chatting. (I would ace that course.) The harsh light of reality set in on Wednesday with the onset of classes, particularly the full weight of reading assignments. And the horizon are the mid-terms, papers, and exams that most assuredly will follow.

Sigh… if life is really about relationships, how I’m supposed to build relationships hunched over a book in the library?

I have been thinking lately about the stories we all have to tell. Mainly, this is spurred by my experience at Yale Divinity School orientation last week. I would have liked to have spent so much time with each person hearing more about their experience. But then the meal/session would end and we’d go our separate ways and I’d remember there were 150 or so others to meet as well.

(Now that classes have started, the number of people to meet has tripled. Egads! And there’s actual reading and work to do, which means I can’t sit around talking to people all the time.)

But what has really been staying with me is this article from Monday’s New York Times, about elderly immigrants

Together, they fend off the well of loneliness and isolation that so often accompany the move to this country late in life from distant places, some culturally light years away.

“If I don’t come here, I have sealed lips, nobody to talk to,” said Devendra Singh, a 79-year-old widower. Meeting beside the parking lot, the men were oblivious to their fellow mall rats, backpack-carrying teenagers swigging energy drinks.

This part really stayed with me:

A recent health survey by Dr. Carl Stempel, a sociology professor at California State University, East Bay, found that most Afghan women here suffer from post-traumatic stress.

“I thought they would be so happy in this country — all the houses, the food, the cars,” said Najia Hamid, who founded the Afghan Elderly Association of the Bay Area, an outreach group for widows, with seed money from Fremont. “But I was met with crying.”

We all have stories to tell – but who takes the time to listen to them?

I find myself thinking a lot about language in this in-between time from the close of my orientation to the beginning of classes.

Again and again during orientation I found myself marveling, “This is so easy! I can understand what everyone is saying!” After struggling through so many interactions in South Africa because of the immense language barrier, being able to communicate in English is a great blessing. (I do have a newfound perspective on the life of an international student and have been listening to their concerns – “everyone speaks so fast!”)

But there’s a new language to learn as well. It’s the lingo of Yale and Berkeley Divinity Schools. There’s a whole wealth of words, acronyms, and phrases that continue to confound me: Second Temple student, ISM, Patristics, CLC, and many, many more.

There’s also the language of the academy and the ivory tower. The challenge for me is to a) re-learn this and b) figure out how to communicate my experiences of the past few years in a way that people understand. There’s so much I want to share sometimes but I just don’t know how to say it in a way that does justice to the experience. I can talk until I’m blue in the face about the importance of the Anglican Communion but it doesn’t come close to the experience of actually belonging to a non-English-language church in another province. I wish other people here could have that experience.

I should note that amid the challenge of learning and re-learning all these languages is the challenge of just figuring out how life works – where classrooms are, where the ATMs that don’t charge fees are, who everyone is and where they come from, and so on and so forth. It can be kind of overwhelming.