An Overabundance of Riches

The frustration of blogging the Duke Youth Academy is all the stuff you end up having to leave out. There are just too many riches over these two weeks to be able to record it all. In the past week I've been focusing a lot on those aspects of DYA that I am directly involved in leading, such as the Arts Village and the Prayer Practice Workshops. But that is really only the tip of the iceberg.

We've heard a number of powerful presentations on our daily themes by lecturers over the past few days, including Prof. Edgardo Colon-Emeric on the Crucifixion, Prof. Warren Smith on the Resurrection, Prof. Stanley Hauerwas on the Church as Witness, and Sarah Jobe & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (of Rutba House, an intentional Christian community associated with the New Monasticism movement) on the Church as a Community of Reconciliation.

The Rev. Julian Pridgen, my colleague here who is our Ministry Coordinator in charge of service and hospitality, has also been inviting our students to consider social justice components of their Christian calling through exposure to outreach ministries in the Durham area. Katherine Smith summarized their activities on the first Wednesday of the program in the DYA Daily Journal:

"Students traveled to the Durham Rescue Mission, the Crisis Response Center, Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers (TROSA), Croasdaile Village Retirement Community, and Anathoth Community Garden to assist with projects and hear the stories of members of our local community."

Then yesterday, our students spent the afternoon on a "pilgrimage of pain & hope" through Durham, hearing local residents speak about legacies of racism and attempts to embody reconciliation in the present. That trip gave our students a way to think about their discipleship in concrete and contextualized ways, through "listening to the stories of members of this particular community and - hopefully - discovering new ways to understand the places from which we each come."

Of course, each night our worship services (planned and led in the second week by the students themselves) have been occasions of celebration and feasting. We have sung and prayed our faith nightly, while being fed by the preached word of God and the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist.

By this point in the summer session, DYA begins to feel like it is racing toward its conclusion. That's tough in a way, because I think I'd be willing to go another two weeks (with a little extra sleep, anyway!). But we've still got a couple of great days ahead of us, and I'm looking forward to enjoying those.

Oh, and one more thing: This morning in plenary we heard once again from Prof. Fred Edie, who is the Faculty Director of DYA. His lecture was on vocation, and he framed it under the title: "Life in the Spirit - Calling." Fred drew connections between the reality of our baptism and our calling into a lifetime of ministry (whether that ministry is lived out as an ordained clergy or as a committed layperson). He posed these issues for us to reflect upon:

What is a calling? - God's specific intentions for you, both in the present and for your life in the future.

What is God's calling for us? - Living into the story of God's people as related to us in the Bible, over against the stories of the world that try to lay claim to our lives.

How do we live into that? - Discernment over our Christian vocation, which can come through a growing closeness with God and our participation with one another within the body of Christ.

Fred wanted our DYA students to consider these questions in light of all they've been learning here, of course. But they are questions that every Christian should consider in a deep way.

[Note: Photos in this blog post were taken by DYA student Nathan Milleson]