Reflections on My Spiritual Journey & Call
My grandparent’s East Tennessee home
Throughout my life, God’s continual calling of me to ministry has taken on a multitude of voices, with some as quiet as hushed whispers between myself and the divine in a moment of prayer and others as loud as my mother’s excited voice over the telephone saying, “I knew this day would finally come for you,” after I was offered my first role as a seminarian.
I first heard the quiet, barely perceptible whisper of God in the old, wooden pews of my grandparents’ Appalachian backwoods Baptist church in East Tennessee. It was there that I colored my way through illustrated Bible stories and learned that an only child like myself had a constant conversation partner in the God who rustled the leaves of the trees and moved the waters of the streams I spent hot summer afternoons playing in. With older parents who rarely attended church at the time, these Sunday afternoons of my early childhood, spent hiking up my church dress to ramble through the creek in my grandparents’ backyard while talking to God out loud, proved foundational in building my lifelong practice of listening for the divine voice in even the most mundane of moments.
Me, age 12, and my friend Maddy, who first invited my family to church, directly after my baptism
I deeply and quietly wished that this affirmation of my ability to speak to God publicly through prayer would have been coupled with an affirmation of my ability to speak about God publicly through preaching. However, while my young male counterparts were frequently invited to preach on stage, I was informed that the ways in which I felt called to publicly share Christ’s radical, inclusive love were wholly incompatible with the complementarian theology our congregation adhered to. This gave rise to a cognitive dissonance within me - it felt as though my faith leaders during this time in my life were willing to affirm my call to ministry, but only insofar as it didn’t disrupt the patriarchal church hierarchy that they were operating within and benefiting from.
With each summer spent on my grandparents’ farm, my intrinsic sense of curiosity brought me out into deeper waters, both literally and figuratively, and I would often find myself trekking knee-deep into the cool stream while asking God big, open questions about the way the world was structured around me and my purpose within it all. As the summer of my tenth year came to an end, I sought to bring the questions I was asking in the foothills about God and the interconnectivity of all God’s creatures back home to Nashville, where I resided during the remainder of the year. My parents, seeking a container for the questions of their inquisitive child, asked our neighbors, who attended church far more often than we did, for a recommendation for a congregation with a well-fleshed-out children's program. Within a week’s time, our little family of three began attending Fellowship Bible Church, a suburban non-denominational congregation that drew me in just as much with its casual dress code and hip rock band as it did with any of its sermons or children's lessons.
I spent the remainder of my childhood and teenage years deeply involved in this faith community, desperately searching for the voice of God amid the loud clamors of the drums and the booming echoes of the surround sound speaker system during worship. And yet, it was during the quieter moments, in which someone would ask me to pray aloud for a small group of people, that I would feel most connected to God speaking through me. As I grew older and began to volunteer as a peer leader for any Wednesday night youth service or Bible study I caught wind of, the church’s pastors began to affirm that they too could hear God resonating through the words I prayed over our community.
My family on my first day of college
Holding this dissonance close to my heart, I went off to college at Georgetown University with the same sense of curiosity that carried me through childhood, but with a new set of questions guiding my inquiry: I wanted to understand what about the context I was raised within led to a cultural and religious climate in which my gift with words and passion for people were only deemed as appropriate to share during the part of the church service labeled as “prayer.” In short, I began to ask why those I revered affirmed my ability to call on God publicly in one way, but not in another. As I toiled with these questions in the classroom, I sought the tutelage of those who worked to trouble the boundaries within their own tradition, like Rabbi Dr. Julia Watts Belser, a queer, feminist, wheelchair-using Hebrew Bible scholar and disability advocate, who taught me that the voice of God can also sound like my own righteous anger, as I interrogate the ways sacred texts have historically been used to suppress the cries of those who speak of injustice.
It is also through Dr. Belser’s work, in tandem with that of the many other compassionate and insightful scholars in the Georgetown Disability Studies department, that I first began to consider what might be gained by crafting a personal theology that makes room for disabled bodies like mine within the church. These professors held my questions week in and week out as I spent all of my undergraduate years piecing together a distinctly disabled mode of theology that would allow me to fully embrace my continuously deteriorating eyesight and hearing; one that would help me reconcile with the likely shortened expected life span that accompanies the connective tissue disorder I was born with.
As my peers became increasingly aware that I was wrestling with questions about both theological and literal spatial access in the classroom, they began to come to me asking how they too might engage in the holy work of “making more room” within their own varied religious communities. I became an unauthorized hallway chaplain of sorts, spending the moments in between one class period and the next walking with, and listening to, the questions of my peers navigating the types of faith transitions that often come along with one’s first time away from home.
When I would arrive from campus to my apartment each night, I began, if almost by accident, to lead what I now identify as my first interfaith ritual space: my Sikh, Ethiopian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Agnostic housemates and I would gather to cook a communal meal and talk about the faith traditions that raised us. Just as the spices from each of our respective homelands would complement one another in the dishes we prepared, each of our individual ideas about God would complement and further expand how we all conceived of the divine.
my housemates and me before graduation
I could hear God’s voice so clearly in the words of my Sikh roommate as she spoke of our shared belief that all living beings are crafted in the divine image. As my Roman Catholic roommate spoke of the beauty that comes with leading a life connected to the liturgical seasons, her words almost exactly mirrored mine only a second prior as I affirmed the importance of sacraments and religious rituals in marking the passage of time. With each morsel of vulnerability my roommates shared over our meals together, it became increasingly impossible for me to conceive of a God that couldn’t find the beauty and the inherent value of their respective faith traditions, and thus I began to actively seek out a Christian denomination that aligned with my belief that no one tradition possesses an authoritative, exclusivist lock on “the Truth.”
In my search for a Christian denomination that welcomed people of all backgrounds, bodies, and beliefs through its doors, yet still spoke of the redemptive, salvific hope of Jesus Christ, whom my beloved grandmother taught me to treasure, I enlisted the help of Georgetown’s Protestant chaplain. When I sat down in the chaplain’s office and told him of the ways that I had been filling my days with conversations about what it means to be a young person seeking to refine and redefine their faith, he jokingly asked me “not to work [him] out of a job.” He then earnestly encouraged me by saying that the work I was already doing on my own time was deeply in line with that of a higher education chaplain. The same God that met me in the river behind my grandparents’ home and in the kitchen of my college apartment met me once again in this moment and told me with the most clarity I’ve felt to this day, that this work, the work of a higher education chaplain, would be a part of my call to be “a shepherd of transition.”
When I shared with the chaplain what I felt God had spoken to me, he affirmed that he felt the same, but added that “shepherds too must cling to the things they find most sacred during their own periods of transition and upheaval.” So, when I then told him that my most deeply held theological belief was, and still is, that all people are inherently worthy of welcoming into the kin-dom of God, he laughed with knowing eyes, and told me that I “need look no further than the United Church of Christ, ‘the church of radical welcome’” in my search for a new denominational home. And he was right. It has been in UCC congregations that I have been able to hear the voice of God most consistently nudging me towards a life in ministry.
My first time leading a worship service in full was in a UCC congregation, First Church Somerville, several years ago. In the moments after the service concluded, I found myself haunted by all the small, first-timer mistakes I made along the way. Though I had convinced myself it had gone horribly, as I packed up my bags to leave, the guest musician caught my attention, and whispered to me, “I know this is your first service, so as you continue to preach, I want you to know that God has given you a strong voice and that you have a lot left to say.”
It was her words and knowing that at least one person was able to find God’s voice in something I shared that day that sustained me as I applied for and subsequently began as the seminarian at Plymouth Congregational Church UCC in Belmont, MA, in the fall of my second year of divinity school. When I started working with this community, I had little idea just how many transitions I would shepherd congregants through during my year with Plymouth. However, as I led a weekly Bible study on “the big questions of the faith,” assisted with memorial services, welcomed several new members into the church, and eventually helped the congregation say farewell to a beloved senior pastor who had accepted a new call, I grew to understand that my passion for helping people navigate transition extends far beyond the scope of only what occurs during ones’ college years. I’ve begun to consider how God is asking me to meet people during other periods of life transition as well.
First Church Somerville
This summer, during my Clinical Pastoral Education training at Hebrew Senior Life’s long-term chronic-care hospital, I supported many geriatric care seekers as they transitioned from life on earth to their final resting place. During this time, I was able to further explore my passion for working with families and care seekers of all ages through seasons of change. While I still feel a strong call to work with young adults in some capacity, I have been keenly listening for the ways God might be nudging me towards broader, more intergenerational ministry in the future.
If my time in the UCC has taught me anything, it has taught me that “God is still speaking.” What I once could only hear as a barely perceptible whisper from the divine in the wooden pews of my grandparents’ East Tennessee church now feels much louder and clearer, as God’s words, embodied in the voices of my community, call me to take this further step towards serving the church through ordained ministry.
