Coming Home

When this last trip to the east coast, to graduate and to research, is done, I will go home. I will rent a little place not far from where I grew up and take this year for discernment. 

I am going home. Home to the wooded trails I know so well and to the ocean beaches and the dripping moss under the towering trees. Home to the maritime climate in one of the rainiest regions in the world, home to tiny towns and friendly people scratching out a living in a declining economy, home to hay fields and aging barns and failing farms, home to a place where the height of the year’s entertainment is the rodeo and county fair. Home, too, to the people I grew up with and to generations of my extended family—my great uncle and my baby niece, my mentors and pastors, my old bosses and coworkers, people who watched me grow up, some whom I want to see and others I hope I never bump into.

Over the past decade away, I have realized just how much this place has meant to me and just how attached I am to it. No matter where I have lived, this place, this land and its people bordered by the sea and the great forests, has made its way into my dreams at night and my deepest longings by day. And so it is time to come back to it, at least for a time and perhaps for a long time.    

I have always felt that I have belonged to this place in a peculiar way. As much as my education and my career path have encouraged me to become an individual without a history and without a fixed place, I have never been able to shake my loyalty to where I come from and to the soil that carries the bones of my grandfather and the sweat of my childhood labor.

 In a time where many wander and where so many of us long for home, perhaps it is time to begin to learn anew the value of place. To learn again how to find home. To learn anew how we become a part of something larger than ourselves and how we can become dependent on each other. In this time of economic crisis and hardship, perhaps this is our best hope for the future.

A Grace Period

Many of you know that I have decided to step back from the whirlwind that has been my ordination process and take this next year for discernment. 

There are many reasons why I decided to this. Most importantly, I feel a deep need to continue in discernment around my call. From the beginning of this process, I have remained committed to doing work outside traditional parish ministry. As I have matured in ministry, that commitment has remained and developed. As this year has unfolded, I have been less and less comfortable being on the “inside” of parish ministry and church work, instead of outside it with the people I love and respect so much. I have found myself in positions, while truly wonderful and doing good work, that are further away from where I feel called. I found myself making decisions that were in the best interest of a career in the church, but not necessarily in keeping with my deepest call.

I have been privileged to have found work and ministry that accesses my deepest joy and that makes me fully alive. Working alongside people on the street and people who live on the edge—as more and more of us are doing in this time of economic crisis—has made me become more fully myself. I have been deeply enriched by the wisdom and the courage and the faith of people in crisis due to an unjust economic system. I have committed myself to ministry in this context and to work that will confront unjust systems of power.

This decision, ultimately, is a choice for me to explore how I might do the work to which I feel called and to explore ways to do this in western Washington. I am open to the leading of the Spirit. I am also deeply grateful for the support I have received in the diocese to take this step and discern what my role in the church will be. I will remain a deacon in the Episcopal Church and continue to explore the future.

I approached this decision with a great deal of trepidation. After all, I was giving up a full time position after graduation and was halting a process that I had worked so hard to complete. And, yet, I have continually received confirmation that this is the right decision. While it means that my future is less certain, I am excited about what is developing and what God is leading me to do. I ask for your prayers as I take these next steps, catch my breath from several years of harrowing schedules and seminary work, and envision the next step in my ministry.

Mother's Day Musings

I had the privilege of spending the day with four generations of the women of my family--my grandmother, mother, sister, and her little girls. I am struck, looking at this picture, by how strong the women of my family are and how strong we have needed to be.

We have always worked hard. My grandmother and my mother both dropped out of high school to start working at fifteen and neither of them have stopped. My mom has raised three daughters and is now helping raise her three grandchildren. My sister is working three jobs to support her kids as a single mother. And none of them has ever complained.

We have survived a few difficult marriages, a few painful divorces, and some abusive men. And we have refused to let go of our self worth. We have also refused to let go of our humanity. We have come through and we have remained strong and remained ourselves.

Our story is rooted in the U.S. working class, in generations of hard working women who have raised families, worked multiple jobs, and supported each other in a world less and less secure. We hope, of course, that the little girls that we now hold will have an easier life. But we cannot guarantee that. We can hope, however, to give them some of the strength that is their heritage. For now, I can only stand in awe of the women in my family and feel privileged to be the daughter of strong women.