Consider me catechized!

It's done. This morning, I passed the exam on the Small Catechism.

I have to say, it wasn't always pretty. Marney, the Ph.D. student proctor, had to feed me a word a couple of times when my mind went blank under the pressure (not that there was that much pressure — Marney was casually enjoying a bit of breakfast and kindly affirming me with a regular "uh-huh"). But the big memorization ordeal is over nonetheless.

If you don't know what I'm talking about (reading my last entry might help, too), the dozens and dozens of students in my Lutheran Confessional Writings class had to memorize Martin Luther's Small Catechism and recite it (or randomly selected parts of it), orally or in writing, by today. In the last week, the little, orange catechism book has been the hottest spring fashion item at Luther Seminary. You could spot almost as many of those bad boys in the hands of anxious students as there were squirrels jumping around the seminary vegetation.

Speaking of cute, free-roaming animals, I took a picture of this cat, which is always walking around and meowing outside my apartment building, while staging pictures of the catechism booklet on my patio. I liked the cat picture better, so here you are. There's a small amount of relevance. Since the day that I started working on the catechism, I have been inexplicably sneezing. I remarked to my wife that since I'm allergic to cats, maybe I'm also allergic to catechisms. More likely, it's a cold that has been ailing me. But ever since I finished reciting the catechism this morning, my nasal passages have been A-OK.

At any rate, I wanted to share with you the great amount of relief I feel. There is still a lot of work to do in the next month, but this is a big load off. I'll really have to make a conscious effort not to forget everything I memorized, though. There is a lot of really good stuff in the Small Catechism that I hope I never forget.

I have a feeling that the parts which I memorized to music — whether songs from a musical catechism CD that has been floating around campus, tunes of famous songs that fit for some reason or random melodies that I created to fit the words — won't be leaving me anytime soon. I wish I could have taken the time to put the whole thing (and the titles of the Augsburg Confession, which we also had to memorize) to music, but that would have taken forever.

I realized in the exam that I could definitely recall the musical parts much better. Well, there was the point when I got ahead of myself with the excerpt from Titus 3 and had to restart my arrangement to the old 1960s "Batman" theme in my head to remember what came next. And when I accidentally skipped a piece of the Lord's Prayer's First Petition , which I memorized somewhat awkwardly to the tune of "One (is the loneliest number)." I learned a long time ago that I memorized things to music really well. How else could I still be able to recite McDonald's entire circa-1988 menu? Thanks, McDonald's Menu Song! Hey, now that I think of it, I wouldn't mind celebrating all this with McDLT.

Well, shucks. Looks like they stopped serving those in 1990.