Conversations with the Rookie & Veteran

A unique interview experience between a current student and an alumnus of Nashotah House.

In the following interview, the Rev. Steve Schlossberg, ‘07, and his son, Nashotah House “middler” Jacob Schlossberg, speak about their respective calls to serve God, their ministries, families, and time spent in formation at Nashotah House.

JACOB: What about Nashotah House defied or subverted your expectations?

STEVE: In my doddering old age, I can’t remember what my expectations were. I’m sure I had a lot of them, and I’m pretty sure I would have tried to suppress them, if only to avoid disappointment. That’s how pessimists cope with life. But I wasn’t pessimistic about Nashotah House. I was really excited to go there, and to finally learn all the things I’d wanted to learn about the Scriptures, the tradition, the liturgy – the whole megillah. But one of my surprises was that I ended up learning some things I didn’t go there to learn. 

JACOB: Like what?

STEVE: I thought I understood leadership before I got there, but I learned that I knew a lot less than I’d hoped. Some of my best teachers when it came to that were some of my classmates. And that was another surprise for me – the way we helped each other learn. We were a motley crew, I suppose like most classes are, all over the map when it came to churchmanship, theological orientation, and life experience. But over the course of three years, we learned to learn from each other. And I got challenged by others in ways I didn’t expect. That wasn’t always enjoyable, but it was almost always honest and charitable. And it left me better than it found me.  

But you’re going there differently than I did, Jake. For me, Nashotah House was something completely new and strange. For you, it’s a place where you spent some growing-up years. So I’m guessing you brought some expectations to it that I didn’t. Have any of yours been subverted?

JACOB: For most of the time we were here then, I lived my life adjacent to the seminary. I loved attending the Easter vigil, community dinners, and schooling you on the basketball court, but I knew very little of seminary life. I thought I was cognizant of my ignorance, and I tried to bring very few expectations, but I was surprised to discover how very great that ignorance was. For being a near-cradle Episcopalian, I had (and still have) a lot to learn and wrestle with in our tradition. 

STEVE: You lost me when you mentioned schooling me on the basketball court.

JACOB: I know. Another thing is that I thought I would find more time for personal prayer, maybe with long walks in the woods; to my surprise, it turns out that they teach us about prayer in Ascetical Theology and then give us no extra time to practice it. Part of the education seems to be shoehorning prayer into miniscule pockets of time. Which might be an accurate representation of ministry life. 

STEVE: I think it is. Which is why learning to pray the Offices at the House has been so important to me as a priest. It’s the anchor of my daily prayer life. So when a day goes off-schedule and I end up blundering my way into one thing or another, I am leaning on the habits of daily prayer I learned at the House – including the habit of shoehorning.   

JACOB: What do you miss most about Nashotah?

STEVE: The first thing that leaps to mind is schooling you on the basketball court. 

JACOB: In your doddering old age, I think you’re remembering that wrong. 

STEVE: Anyway, the second thing that leaps to mind is the collegiality. As a student there, I was surrounded by peers, and for all our many differences, we were all on more or less the same journey, facing more or less the same challenges, hypothesizing solutions to the same problems, and we all loved talking shop. A part of the experience of parish priesthood is a certain amount of loneliness. Pastors have to work hard to keep from being isolated. Isolation is a spiritual killer – and being fairly introverted, I’m prone to it. I was prone to it at the House too – but the community of the House drew me out of that, both by demonstrating the dangers of it and the rewards of resisting it. One thing I definitely do not miss is that it’s impossible to get a good pizza pie in Wisconsin. You know the old story about the time I took your mother on a date to the allegedly Italian restaurant in Delafield ...

JACOB: Yes. I know the story.

STEVE: So anyway, when I ordered the calamari appetizer, the guy brought me three fish sticks. When I told him he got the order wrong, he said, “No sir, those are calamari steaks.” 

JACOB: I’ve heard the story before.

STEVE: Seldom have I lost all amorous feelings more quickly than I did at that moment. Am I over-disclosing?

JACOB: No more than usual.

STEVE: So anyway. What were we talking about?

JACOB: I can’t remember.

STEVE: Anyway, what in your experience there so far has been most rewarding, Jake? 

JACOB: I have loved growing into the Daily Office. In the fall, I felt like I was stumbling through it; I didn’t understand why we sometimes said the Apostles Creed and sometimes not; I couldn’t get the rhythm of the Psalms; I felt awkward in my cassock and even more so in my surplice. But over the year I have settled into the rhythm, and now I’m no longer self-conscious about what I’m doing, I finally feel present in worship. I’m ashamed, however, to say that I’m not representing the Schlossberg name very well here: in three turns as thurifer I have not committed a single act of arson.

STEVE: I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about. 

JACOB: Are the burn marks on the floor of the Sanctuary in St. Mary’s Chapel from you or Uncle Bert? 

STEVE: Is Uncle Bert going to read this?

JACOB: I don’t know. 

STEVE: Well Uncle Bert matriculated at the House in the 1960s. I think a lot of stuff got burned back then. 

JACOB: We burn stuff too, but it’s all legal, and it’s mostly at bonfires. In this COVID season we have had to scrounge to find the community that we expected to be part of the Nashotah experience. We have found it in bonfires and picnics behind the Peaks; we have found it in socially-distanced coffees on the Refectory lawn; we have found it in dish crews and work crews. I am sure some of this is normal Nashotah, but tinged with COVID protocols, it has come in fits and starts. 

What do you wish you had taken advantage of here that you didn’t?

STEVE: My single greatest regret is that I cared too much about my grades, so I avoided some academic challenges. So for instance, whenever I could, I chose to write papers on subjects I already knew something about. When I had a choice, I chose to read theologians I was already in sympathy with. So I graduated a narrower thinker than I could have been. But even if you repeat my mistake, Jake, you are going to graduate better trained than I was. And I think I was trained exceptionally well. But I’ve told you before how much I envy you for some of the courses you’re taking, which weren’t available when I was a student. And some of the approaches to the academic disciplines there are wiser and richer now than they were in my day.  

JACOB: I’ve loved every class I’ve taken so far, but one of my favorite assignments has been writing book introductions for my New Testament class. This brought me greater intimacy with the Scriptures. Seeing our work in that class, paired with our work in Greek, coming out in the sermons that my classmates and I have written has affirmed our sweat and tears under Fr. Paul Wheatley and Dr. Garwood Anderson. I’ve shared my homilies with you, so you’ve seen the way my exegesis and writing have evolved over the course of one semester. But more than that, the class taught me to be a better student and listener to other people’s sermons. Having to provide feedback on a sermon forced me to pay greater attention and notice details, and that informed my own work. 

STEVE: That’s another thing you and I have in common: we’re both students of Fr. Henery. And that’s the first thing he taught me in Homiletics: how to listen. 

JACOB: Maybe the greatest challenge so far has been learning to balance what I need and want to do with what I am able to do with the time I have. This has been a regular topic of conversation between Jillian and me, how we find time for each other, for ourselves, for our daughter, for her job and for my studies, and for our spiritual lives. There is a lot to balance and we are finding ways to do it; it amazes me that you and Mom did it with even more children. But I suppose that’s another accurate representation of parish ministry. 

STEVE: It is. But to be fair, that’s an accurate representation of practically everyone’s life, ordained or not. And maybe that was the most important thing Nashotah House gave me: it prepared me to be ordained by teaching me to return to my baptism and begin living it out as an ordinary disciple.  

JACOB: One of the first days in Pastoral Ministry class, Dr. Anderson lectured on the ethos of priestly ministries based upon Titus and Timothy; it was a sobering look at what is expected of us. From there we dove into Canon Law case studies and waded through failures in pastoral conduct. But standing in contrast to this are the lives of the faculty, displaying their love for Christ and his Church every day. It is a gift to be able to pick the brain of Fr. Wheatley, play basketball with Fr. Olver, to go for a run with Fr. Buchan (or Fr. Bucket, as Juliana calls him), or have a beer with Dr. Anderson. What we get from them in class is great, but it is the interactions with them outside of class where the characteristics outlined in the Pastoral Epistles are on display. For them, it begins and ends with the practice of love. And I guess that’s the most important thing we carry away from the House into parish ministry. 

STEVE: It is. Did I ever tell you the story about the time I . . .

JACOB: I’m sure you did, Pop, but I’m getting hungry now. 

STEVE: Me too. What are you feeling?

JACOB: I could go for some fish sticks.

STEVE: I know a place. 

Fr. Schlossberg serves as Rector at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia. Previously he served at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Troy, New York; Zion Episcopal Church in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin; Nashotah House as director of field education and communications; and the Lamb Center, a ministry to the poor and homeless in northern Virginia. He and his wife Angie have five children: Jacob (married to Jillian), Isaac, Abraham, Joseph and Lydia. No stranger to suffering, he is a fan of the Mets, the Jets, and the Nets. He also likes rhyming. He loves the Bible, relating our worship to our service in the world, and how these things combine to grow us in faith, hope, and love. Jake Schlossberg is an aspirant to ministry through the Diocese of Central Florida, though he is most recently from the western Chicago suburbs. He and his wife Jillian are subservient to the whims of three-year-old Juliana, who will have her throne destabilized by the birth of a sibling later this year. Jake inherited his father’s masochism by cheering for the Twins, the Washington Football Team, and the Wizards. While Jake loves literature, he can’t rhyme. 

The preceding article was originally printed in Nashotah House’s Fall 2021 Missioner magazine, volume 35, number 2, pages 36-39.