Dear Anthony,
May God bless you and bring you peace! Relax, Big Guy, you'll do fine!
Just before my oral exams for my doctorate, I was hit with a kidney stone attack.
I was shipped off to the hospital where I writhed in pain for just over six hours - it took that long for the painkiller to kick in.
Every minute was like an eternity. I couldn't believe life in such pain, couldn't fathom it.
To add to the nonsense, the nurse couldn't find a vein in my arm to give me intravenous.
Soon, a pool of blood developed beside me. When I later came to, I thought someone had died on that bed and that they forgot to change the linen before they put me on it . . .
My life really went before me. In my agony and moaning, I saw people get up and move away from me. That upset me even more.
And just when I was about to leave, a nurse knocked into me and almost killed me via the intravenous - air could have come into me that would have done me in, according to the senior nurse who screamed at her assistant: "Do you want to kill him?"
Later that week, I went in for my three-hour oral exam before six nasty-looking professors.
No comparison to what happened in the hospital.
And Alexander Schmemann saved my bacon on the day of my orals.
One prof was going on about something "phenomenological." Happily, I remembered something Schmemann wrote that resembled that and mentioned it (in his book "The Eucharist").
When I returned to learn I had passed, the chair of the committee said that professorial phenomenon had asked me to include the quote from Schmemann in the body of my written work.
I'm telling you all this just so you don't think you are the only one in academic history that went through a bit before PhD exams . . .
And remember - I would have preferred to study religion and theology. I did my PhD in sociology and had to really force myself to study . . .
You like religion, don't you?
There are some great Akathists here you might like to use too - to Our Lady of Fatima, Lourdes, Guadalupe, St Francis and St Theodore Romzha.
Alex
Previous Topic
Index