We live in two worlds, a fleshy body married to a soaring spirit. This tension, this liminal space, can be the source of our energy or the cause of our greatest fears. The Psalmist wrote that we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Fear of death, of powerlessness, drives our lust for control, our greed for wealth and power. We have been busy creating gods in humankind’s own image to assuage our fear, to justify our greed. And yet, Divinity surrounds us. Spiritual leaders have come, one after the other, to abolish death and open us to life, joyful and giving.
I was aware of this tension between our lives and our spirits from a young age. The love that I found in the Gospels, the love that flowed from my family, was matched with the noble ideals of my Virginia forefathers and the stunning beauty that is Nature. The family’s beat-up old Dodge Wagon would lumber up a mountain, stopping at an overlook, the Shenandoah Valley a divine vista before us. Monticello and Mount Vernon were likely stops on the road back to Tidewater. But when we returned we were in a city filled with racial conflict, the legacy of those same forefathers. We attended an all-white Southern Baptist church and listened to a gospel of judgment and exclusion. By the time I reached high school I knew that the faith tradition of division was not for me, and I began exploring my relationship with the divine and with my fellow humans.
This turned into a longer journey then I might have anticipated in those first years after high school. An economically unviable year in college was followed by enlistment in the Army. This was followed by more college, over a year as a Jesuit lay volunteer in Saipan, work with youth-at-risk, and another round of college. I served my community both in partisan politics and in work for others, including service on the local boards of the Association for Retarded Citizens and the American Lung Association. Along the way I had seriously explored Catholicism, Buddhism and Unitarian Universalism. The work of discernment was serious work indeed, and it was always at the forefront of my life. I was also busy integrating my identity as a person with a chronic disability (a disease called Ankylosing Spodylitis). I was unsettled; unable to bring the part of me that lived in a magic awareness of our daily blessing with that part of me that had worldly cares and needs.
After a year in Europe I returned to the US and quickly found work as a UU religious educator. I was on the more traditional Christian edge of Unitarianism, dividing my time between the teachings of Jesus and those of the Buddha. When the Most Rev. John Shelby Spong spoke at my church in support of his text Liberating the Gospels, I had the opening I had been seeking for years. I could re-enter a dialog with Christianity, a Christianity I had briefly glimpsed years before in works of liberation theology and creation spirituality. I solved the problems of worldly success by moving to New York and building a career as a technical trainer and manager. I spent my days preaching technology best practices and my nights and weekends searching for an authentic spirituality. Then the Towers came down.
Like many other Americans, I spent the months after the 9/11 attacks looking at my own life. What had I done with the magic? Where were the ideals? Did I awake each day joyful? In a world so filled with amazing love and eminent divinity, how could I not? Twenty-seven years after first realizing that I was called to serve God, I finally said yes. I opened my eyes, my heart and my mind to the magic, accepted that it wasn’t a promise of another world but a promise for today.
I returned to school fulltime to complete my baccalaureate, and after a semester I left my job to focus on my studies. Completing the double major I began decades ago, English and Studio Art, I was blessed with great professors, and was intellectually challenged by my introduction to critical theory and contemporary philosophy. I completed an Honors Thesis titled “The Destruction and Resurrection of the Subjective Self in the Christian First Century.” I found a church home consistent with my beliefs in Judson Memorial, a dual UCC and American Baptist congregation with a long tradition of pursuing justice and supporting the Arts. And I learned to live in the space that is both worldly and divine.
Today I am a M.Div. student at Harvard Divinity School. I am active in my local UCC church, work several hours a week for a UU advocacy group, and fill what few moments remain as the Chapter Counselor for the MIT Chapter of my fraternity, Sigma Phi Epsilon, making me the link between the undergraduate chapter and the national organization and local alumni corporation, as well as the advisor in the chapter’s daily operations.
The first year at HDS was as transformative as you might expect. I am committed to a theology that could be described as “emergent,” reflecting the trans-denominational movement by the same name. The Emergent Church is a church that is alive, that is about justice and the Kingdom of God now, that is willing to embrace the ambiguity of Scripture and the ease with which humans create systems for their comfort that do not always reflect the Gospel. In other words, it is a movement of Evangelical, Mainline and New Age Churches that is willing to see beyond petty division to a new and revitalized faith modeled on Jesus. This should sound to you like the United Church of Christ! I believe that the process that lead to the formation of our denomination also forged in our collective spirits a willingness to engage in the hard work of change.
I am called to preach the Good News of Jesus. I also feel called to liberate it from the Pharisaic voices that dominate the public forum. I hope that in addition to serving a congregation, I will be able to work as a constructive theologian, teaching and writing to help others develop as preachers, pastors and teachers.