School Days with a Difference

By Susan Erikson, Ph.D.

It has been decades since I last arrived on campus — any campus — as a new student. I haven’t even returned to my alma maters for class reunions. 

So it was odd to climb the creaking stairs of Shelton Hall shouldering a backpack full of books. This time it was my husband rather than my parents helping me with my bags, depositing me in my “dorm room” and then driving off. But the feeling of anticipation and, to be honest, some trepidation seemed vaguely familiar.

I was about to start my first residential week as a hybrid-distance student in the Master of Ministry program. For Nashotah House it was also in some ways a week of firsts after months of restrictions necessitated by the pandemic. Both residential and hybrid-distance students would meet in chapel for Morning and Evening Prayer. We would gather for breakfast and lunch in DeKoven Commons — two to a table and wearing a mask as we waited in line for what turned out to be excellent, fresh food — but still breaking bread together. And this year we would also be able to celebrate Founder’s Day, attending a Solemn Mass, processing to James Lloyd Breck’s grave and then enjoying a community dinner in the refectory.

I say “we,” but when I arrived on campus that Sunday afternoon in April, I wasn’t yet part of a “we,” or at least not quite. True, I already belonged to a virtual community. I had briefly met my Shelton Hall apartment mate, Elizabeth Nash, in an introductory Zoom get-together at the start of Dr. Ed Smither’s Church and Society course. And I’d met Karla Banach in my very first course, Moral Theology with Dr. Elizabeth Kincaid, in January. The January term should have been my first residential experience, but a still-soaring Covid curve had forced it online. Apparently, you can get away with a lot when you appear only as a talking head on Google Meet-Up. Karla’s first words to me at the opening reception Sunday afternoon were: “You’re as short as I am!” 

But aside from adding imaginative inches to my actual 61, the pandemic had turned me, like thousands of others, into a mostly cloistered individual. My week at Nashotah House was a re-introduction into a larger community, made possible in my case by having been fully vaccinated some weeks earlier.

My residential week was, first of all, a re-introduction into a community of prayer and worship. I had been “attending” Sunday morning prayer online for over a year at my home parish of St. Philip’s in the Hills in Tucson. Now I worshipped in the physical presence of faculty and fellow students in the chapel of St. Mary the Virgin. The fact that we all wore cassocks added to the corporate feel of Morning and Evening Prayer, as did the antiphonal recitation or chanting of the Psalter. 

The power of the Daily Office to structure and inform one’s spiritual life has perhaps never impressed itself on me quite so strongly as it did during this first residential week at Nashotah House. 

Second, I was reintroduced into a scholarly community. In the immediate term, this re-introduction also had to do with the pandemic. But for me, a senior student in the chronological sense, it was a harkening back to the kind of intellectual excitement I experienced as a graduate student many, many years ago. Fr. Buchan’s class in early Church History was a marathon for us but also for him. He alluded to the fact that he is a runner and cyclist, and I can only imagine that these endurance sports — along with a quick wit and an eloquent enthusiasm for his subject — helped equip him for an amazing five-day march through the church’s first five hundred years. And this despite the fact that some of us in the class were present in person, while others joined in from home via Zoom.

At the end of the week I discovered that I was something of a doctrinal nerd: I loved those bishops at Nicaea and Constantinople — especially St. Athanasius — even more than during my very brief study of church history while preparing for the vocational diaconate. 

And remembering the high level of Dr. Kincaid’s Moral Theology course, both in terms of the readings assigned and Dr. Kincaid’s lectures and discussions, I left Nashotah House impressed with its academic rigor and the strength of its faculty. 

The final day of my residential week I woke up a little earlier than usual to try to fit in a run. Given my arthritic knees, I don’t run as often nor for quite the distances I used to, but I still love to get a better sense of new places by jogging through them. For most of the week the weather had not been very inviting; having lived in Wisconsin for almost thirty years, I knew what to expect in April and brought appropriate clothing, but my years in Arizona have turned me into something of a weather wimp. But Friday morning dawned clear, if cold. I headed left on Mission Road, running past a small cluster of deer both on the way out and back. For all the development encroaching on Nashotah House, the landscape I ran through seemed mostly wooded and rural, quiet and lovely. On my way back, a mysterious, dark animal ran out of the woods, crossed the road in front of me, and disappeared into the woods on the other side. Fox? Coyote? The early morning play of sunlight and shadow (and the fact that I wasn’t wearing glasses) made it difficult to tell. 

But I silently, and mostly wordlessly, thanked God for the natural beauty around me, and for this chance, at such a late chapter in my life, not only to run but to study and worship in such a beautiful community.

Susan Erickson (M.M. 2023) earned a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literature from Yale University in 1977 and taught German at Bryn Mawr College before entering law school at Temple University in 1984. She completed her J.D. at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1987, clerked for one year for a federal district court judge and then practiced law in Madison, specializing in employee benefits, until her retirement in 2011. She was ordained to the vocational diaconate in the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona in May 2020. A late-in-life convert to the desert and mountain West, she splits her time between Tucson and Jackson, Wyoming. Susan is married to James Dannenberg, a retired judge for the State of Hawai’i. She misses their two black cats Timmy and the incomparable Fausto (named for Tour de France winner Fausto Coppi) and is lobbying hard for a dog and, preferably, a cat, as well.