I’m closer to 60 than 50. I’ve had a really good first career. I was respected for what I did in my first career and I loved most of it. The honeymoon for that old life didn’t end till about 25 years in. And even after the honeymoon ended, my job, my life with that job and my feeling of daily accomplishment were still pretty good.
But I came to realize I wanted something more. I wanted to operate in the realm of the spirit, and feelings and whole people (certainly often wounded, but people with hearts and histories and soulful aspirations). All of us in my old life were a lot like some “advanced species” of aliens you might see on a low budget space exploration show. We were brains lying out on a table with a glass dome over top and mysterious tubes coming in keeping us alive. We believed ourselves a master species of thinkers that had taken the world down to its essential analytic elements. But I wanted a heart, personal history, a spiritual journey and I wanted to share those with others who also prioritized those non-head parts of themselves. I wanted to be in and run meetings where the meeting stops, total change of direction when someone shares a sorrow of import. Not a work meeting where you may not even acknowledge that someone’s parent died a day or so ago.
But I worry that at this age, at this time in life, I may never be really good at this career. Will I have a fraction of the skill of those ministers who have seen tend to congregants, who I see light up a congregation with wit, wisdom and life changing spirit and inspiration? Will I have a clue as to how to handle the really challenging things that come up in congregations and soulful community? Will I be able to talk with people in a heartfelt way with the appropriate balance of gravitas, humor and at least some wisdom, without crying as my heart breaks open once again at the wonder and awe of it all?
A friend shared a post in the “Ask Polly” column that provides a few tentative answers. Ask Polly is Ann Landers for the modern world. The question was from a middle aged writer who has had successes, but doesn’t feel successful. She particularly doubts her calling when she measures herself by friends who have been on Oprah and have thousands of Twitter followers. Polly answers with some wise words suitable for a second career minister in formation. “So what do we deserve? We deserve to work really hard at what we love. That’s a privilege. We deserve that[1].” And this is her concluding punch line “We wake up very early in the morning, before the sun comes up, and we say to the world: I AM OLD AND I AM A NOBODY AND I LOVE WHAT I DO. You will be just like me someday. If you’re lucky.” I am just that lucky.
[1] http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/09/ask-polly-should-i-just-give-up-on-my-writing.html?mid=fb-share-thecut#
One of the hallmarks of the SKSM educational paradigm is its focus on countering oppression. Be it poverty, race, gender, sexual orientation, environmental change, oppression of workers, the third world, and tribal peoples or the intsectionality of several of these. SKSM is working to educate us about it, and empower us to understand and change it. Studying such a curricula is intense at any time, but to be there during 2014 and 2015 Black Lives Matter movement is particularly powerful. A seminarian friend from another seminary said that he spends a lot of time wondering “what am I going to figure out I’m wrong about today? It all boils down to developing my personal capacity for being uncomfortable.” Maybe the fact he is at another seminary and feels just like I do means that these feelings are just UU ministerial formation, not specifically an SKSM thing.
And at the same time, I deeply believe in ahimsa. That is Sanskrit for the principle of nonviolence toward all living things. Gandhi espoused this belief, and to me it includes non-violence even to me. Changing myself non-violently. Waking up, often feeling somewhere between wrong and wishing I’d done something different and yet treating myself (and others) non-violently. Yep, formation.
I’m still learning that. Even figuring out the list of things to learn, much less learning it is daunting. AND for sure one of the things you need is the stamina to keep working, doing hard, sometimes very hard work. Social Justice Work takes stamina. Work in congregations take stamina and I’m sure I’ll learn that providing pastoral care also requires stamina. Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt gave us an assignment of exploring our theological grounding. As a former New York Times journalist, she is giving us the gift of framing our theology in less than 500 words on one page. Why should we need more? This is what I wrote, focused on resilience and stamina:
My theological grounding is in the power of God. This isn’t the power that others may see, for I don’t understand God to be either omnipotent nor omniscient. I certainly don’t view God as somehow represented by someone who arrived on earth about 2000 years ago, or as someone sitting up there on a throne. Nor do I see God as doling out heaven tickets for those worthy enough to go up. Instead my belief in God is completely tied to God’s miraculous and unique power to use bad things as fodder to create good. World War 2 and its many atrocities were horrible. The existence of God as some others understand it (gender neutral pronoun) is called into question by those horrible events. For me, random terrible things happen because humans are capable of doing those things to one another, and because nature usually wins, and simply because shit happens. God is about the creation of wonder and blessings out of some of that horror. Eli Wiesel and Nelson Mandela prove to me that God exists in the midst of human horrors. Building community in the event of natural catastrophes proves to me that God exists. Human kindness in the wake of shit happening (heroes who jump into frozen water and save someone who was on a bridge that collapsed) reaffirms my view of God. No that magic doesn’t always happen, but it does happen often enough to affirm my beliefs. Again, it isn’t that the positive must balance, nor outweigh the negative, just that it is findable. Henri Nouwen in Wounded Healer seems to express something close to my belief when he talks about the usefulness of a healed (or sorta healed) wound in allowing you to become a minister. Yes, that is my belief too.
Not all UUs believe in God, many don’t. In the middle of the last century most didn’t. But this is where I am in my formation now.
I attend Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, CA. Unfortunately I don’t actually get to live in cool, hip, Berkeley with perfect weather year round, but instead I get to stay in nice (word carefully chosen to be about a 6 out of 10 on a scale of wonderfulness) Rockville, Maryland. I live here with my partner Ken and our son Nathan 15. Because Nathan is in a high school which is a great fit for him, we won’t move while he’s there, and unless something goes seriously wrong, I’ll have graduated from Starr King by the time he graduates from high school. So I won’t get to live in Berkley.
If you are a Unitarian Universalist you may have heard of Starr King. It is one of only 2 UU seminaries, and the only one with an ongoing residential program. Thomas Starr King was a Harvard educated Unitarian minister who moved to California to serve a Universalist congregation in 1860. While there he worked tirelessly to keep California in the Union during the civil war. If the Union had to fight both the Southern separatists and California separatists I don’t know how the Civil War would have ended. His career also represented the early blending of our Unitarian and Universalist pasts. Rev. King died of exhaustion, pneumonia, and diphtheria all sustained while working to save the Union. Starr King School for the Ministry (SKSM) was named after him to honor all of these facets of his life.
More recently SKSM has been embroiled in a controversy – we don’t have to go into the details here. Suffice it to say that our new President, Rosemary Bray McNatt, who I love and admire, spent part of this summer teaching a course named “Theology and Ethics for UU Ministerial Leadership; Ethics, Accountability and Calling.” It isn’t a coincidence that ethics is in the title twice.
I got to spend a week with Rev. President Rosemary as a student in that class. Part of the core of the controversy at SKSM came out of the fact that everyone at the school did not share the same definitions of secrecy, privacy and confidentiality. I was very much looking forward to the part of the course where Rosemary would expound on these ideas. Yet the days slipped by with hardly a mention of those themes. Instead we worked as a large group and in a small group on a mired of ministerial formation topics. Interestingly the small groups stayed the same all week. Was that an oversight or something else? In my small group we got to know one another well and considerable trust developed between the 5 of us, despite representing different position on the controversy, as well as different ages, races, sexual orientations, residential patterns (e.g. living in Berkeley or not) and durations in the school. And the topic at hand wasn’t being covered – here we were at about lunch on the last day and ….
Finally the topic was covered. We were asked to break into our small groups again and define each of the terms in a ministry context and then say whether it was negative positive or neutral ethically. The terms again were confidentiality, privacy and secrecy. Starr King being Starr King, the groups reported back in various ways. One did an interpretive dance and for me at least it captured the definitions that our group came up with using many words. I can’t share the content of our work together, as we promised each other confidentiality, but I can say ministerial ethics, and the differences, if any between these words has now been explored and I think we are all on much the same page.
It was intentional we were in the same groups; it was profound that this was our last topic of the day. Formation – Friday at 6 we left with smiles on our faces and deeper knowledge of an important topic.
Formation is the process of creating something that wasn’t there before. Formation is also the name of what happens in seminary and in the other processes of becoming a minister. As one of my mentors says “they call it ministerial formation for a reason”. As a potter, and sometimes sculptor, I think of formation as modifying the shape of something or adding material, or taking material away – all ways of forming. My media is porcelain. You might add water, or for us potters, you almost certainly add heat, oh and sometimes silica powder in liquid suspension that forms a glass coating over all. All of that is what I’m going through as part of my process of becoming a UU minister.
Guess I should add that I love it all and this is exactly where I want to be.
Alexa Fraser August, 2015
To follow this path I left my career of close to 30 years as a health and environmental researcher. For all those years I’d worked on great projects, that I felt were socially relevant, trying to understand what environmental exposures would have what health effects on people. In that career, working for one of the best companies in my industry I was trying to understand what the extent of an exposure was. I have a PhD in environmental studies and what in some settings (though not the one I worked in) I might be considered to have some expertise in statistics. Words like pesticides, asbestos, blood borne pathogens, fecal contaminants in water, health outcomes and budgets, big budgets were always in my mind and mouth. I wanted a change but one thing I didn’t foresee was that my definition of who I was at a deep level would have to change. And along with a personal redefinition came the question “who are we” when I use the word we? I’ve reflected on that question and I’m in what ministers call liminal space, a time of transition that makes it hard indeed to have a “we”. But there are support groups, and interest groups, and people undergoing their own transformative change. This is my list of we for me right now:
- My church (thank you Revs Liz and Leon and the whole beloved community of UUCSS)
- The Starr King community (thank you all for welcoming me, particularly Revs. Gabriella and Lindi)
- My cohort group at Starr King (4 of us get together every 2 weeks by video conference and work our formation together, I love you all).
- The Church of the Larger Fellowship Support group for seminarians (thank you Rev. Meg)
- The White Allies support group also run by the Church of the Larger Fellowship (thank you Bob Lavallee)
- The Joseph Priestly District “In-care” program for seminarians (thank you Revs. Megan and Kate)
- The Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association Chesapeake Bay District (thank you people who went before who realized that seminarians in a certain place in their studies need to connect with actual ministers and opened the door to those in Candidate status.)
- The Hard Conversations about Race group (thank you Patti Digh)
- Members of the Continental Gathering of UU Seminarians and the UU Seminarian Salon who knew that we all need each other for this journey and started those groups before I joined
The fact that I’m a distance student and an older student made my need for communities other than Starr King acute. My challenges when I quit working for my old firm and started full time as a student pinched my toes hard. But after 6 months as a full time student, tied to all those groups I see my way to a new definition of we.
In short I’ve swapped one big corporate we for a much more multifaceted sense of identities. My corporate we was stable, very comfortable, prestigious and all encompassing. Yes, before seminary I had church as well, but my corporate identity and church identity were essentially one dimensional identities. The reality of today is much more patchwork, evolving and three or even four dimensional. I’m a quilter too and this is what “we” looks like in formation.
