From Statement from Primates 2016

It is our unanimous desire to walk together. However given the seriousness of these matters [The Episcopal Church’s change in their Canon on marriage] we formally acknowledge this distance by requiring that for a period of three years The Episcopal Church no longer represent us on ecumenical and interfaith bodies, should not be appointed or elected to an internal standing committee and that while participating in the internal bodies of the Anglican Communion, they will not take part in decision making on any issues pertaining to doctrine or polity.

This was not a statement I expected to be reading today, of all days. This evening, I will have my first meeting with my discernment committee, a group organized in the Episcopal parish I attend, to explore what God is calling me to, and particularly, if this might be a called to ordained ministry within The Episcopal Church.

A few months ago, I met with the Bishop of The Episcopal Church in Connecticut and members of the Commission on Ministry about my calling and my desire for discernment. One of the questions I had been asked ahead of time was how do I “anticipate, as an ordained leader, helping the Episcopal Church in Connecticut be more faithful to God’s Mission”., and I wrote my response, “On Expecting the Unexpected”.

Friends told me that this would not be well received, but it was the honest truth, and I felt it was more important to speak this truth than to come up with some acceptable statement that didn’t truly express what I was experiencing.

I was asked about this during my interview, what is it like to expect the unexpected? How have I done this in the past? I spoke about taking jobs that did not exist five years earlier, and my priest mentioned, that with all the changes going on in the church today, the job of priest in The Episcopal Church is likely, in many ways, to be something very different from traditional views of priesthood. What does it mean to be a bi-vocational priest? What role does the internet play? This later question is one that I’m especially interested in. As I mentioned in a recent blog post, I feel more closely tied to online communities of interest than I do to geographic communities, even though churches remain strongly focused on geography. The discussions around the announcement out of Canterbury accentuates this.

What will we talk about during my discernment committee? How does the announcement out of Canterbury fit in? What will the response of The Episcopal Church in Connecticut be, or of The Episcopal Church as a whole be? How do I, personally, react to this announcement, as I seek discernment?

As a communications professional, I like to return to the mission statement. I’m not sure if there is an official mission statement for the church, but I like the phrase about restoring ““all people to unity with God and each other in Christ”. I don’t see the announcement out of Canterbury doing this, and I want my words, as much as possible, to point in this direction.

I’ve re-read what I wrote for my meeting with the Bishop, and it seems like, perhaps, it fits not only for my own discernment process, but also for my thinking about how we react to the announcement out of Canterbury.

On Expecting the Unexpected

For pretty much all of my adult life, I’ve tried to convince myself that those gentle tuggings at my heart of God’s Love was not something I needed to attend to, that I could do what God wanted of me as a lay person. Yet God called to me, unexpectedly, at a poetry conference at Yale Divinity School. During a guided meditation, after I was overwhelmed by a sense of God’s presence and loving kindness, we were instructed to reflect on how God has the same love we were experiencing for everyone. The moment of bliss changed to a moment of epiphany. This is what I’m here for, to share God’s love where it is too rarely felt. Everything I have been doing so far has just been a prelude to this.

When I ran for State Representative, I ran knowing that it was unlikely that I would get elected. Yet it gave me an opportunity to encourage people to think about how they could show God’s Love and justice in the legislative process. As a social media manager for a Federally Qualified Health Center, my job is to show God’s Love and healing to underserved patients and in online communities.

With this epiphany comes a challenge. For I have not loved God with my whole heart. How can I better share God’s love where it is too rarely felt? I no longer believe I am doing as much as I can, or as much as God wants me to. I have left undone those things which I ought to have done and one of those things is to pursue ordination to the priesthood.

Why the priesthood, what sort of ministry does God have in mind for me? I keep asking God that question. I ask myself. I ask my friends. I am not sure, but I expected it to be unexpected, joyful, yet tempered with awareness of the suffering in this world. Sharing God’s Love where it is too rarely felt includes visible signs of God’ grace in unlikely places. It is making God’s grace visible to the homeless people that hang around on the street outside my office. It is proclaiming God’s Love in online communities, and challenging others to do the same. It is calling out in the post-modern twenty-first century wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord.”

This captures much of my current thoughts about how I “anticipate, as an ordained leader, helping the Episcopal Church in Connecticut be more faithful to God’s Mission”: by proclaiming the Gospel in unlikely places, in the post-modern twenty-first century wilderness.

God’s Love and God’s peace passes all human understanding, so, it seems to me, does God’s plan for my life, for all our lives. So one of the most important parts of God’s plan for me, I believe, is the unanticipated, the unanticipatable, here and now. It is one of the most exciting aspects of what I believe God’s plan for me is, as well as one of the most frightening.

I believe that God is calling me to proclaim the peace and Love that passes all understanding in unlikely and unexpected ways and places. I believe God is calling me to do this, in my current life as a lay person, in the future as an ordained leader, and especially, publicly, in community, through this process as I yield myself to a closer alignment of God’s desire for me and my desire for myself.

As I reimagine God’s desire for me, as I think about Jesus coming to start a movement and not just an institution, to borrow from Presiding Bishop Elect Curry, I hope to help those around me, both within the Episcopal Church in Connecticut and beyond in restoring “all people to unity with God and each other in Christ”.