Loading...The church I attended growing up was named Trinity Episcopal in Excelsior, Minnesota. It was there my Christian formation began, but I’d say it was also where my formation began that led me to, decades later, discern my call to become a priest.
Trinity was where I attended Sunday school, confirmation class, and was a member of the youth group. It was in those years that girls were allowed to become acolytes…something that had been reserved for boys. I was under five feet tall, and scrawny, but I became one of the first female acolytes in our diocese. It was a few years before I was strong enough to lift high the cross and become a crucifer.
As an acolyte, I memorized the words, chants and motions of the Eucharistic Prayer from observing the Rev. Daniel Pearson, not knowing that I would eventually become a priest myself. It was my mom, when I was younger, who suggested I watch the activity at the altar. Perhaps because my brothers and I were behaving too much like kids, perhaps because there was something there that she wanted to share with me. I was mesmerized. Looking back, I believe that was the moment I received my first call from the Holy Spirit to serve God, even though, at that time, women were not yet allowed to be ordained in the Episcopal Church.
I served in many ways. I was a lector. When I think back on the times I was reading scripture as a teenager, I remember reading it extremely fast, like it was a timed event. I can’t believe they let me continue to do that ministry!
When I was in high school, our diocese was just beginning to offer a program for kids my age called Teens Encounter Christ, or TEC. If you have attended a Cursillo retreat, it was similar but designed for teenagers and included a dance party. This was a time of awakening to a more spiritual, more prayerful, more scripture reading time in my life. I was introduced to teens from the Minneapolis side of the Twin Cities who shared stories of who God is and how God worked in their lives. Some of the teens had something traumatic that made them know Jesus or feel the Holy Spirit moving in their lives. I never felt like I had a story like theirs, but I think hearing about them gave me insight into the many ways people lived.
After I graduated, I was attending a local community college and living at home, so it was easy to slide into more responsibility at Trinity, like becoming a member of a Sunday School teacher team. I also joined the adult choir. I played flute throughout my school years, so I couldn’t also sing in the school choir. I was teased by my brothers about my singing voice, so I was reluctant to sing in a choir. I loved being in the choir. It gave me more opportunities to learn all the priest moves—the bowing, making the cross, knowing what to do, when.
I was also involved in the young adult version of Teens Encounter Christ and Cursillo, called SEARCH. The spiritual high that went with serving others and being in a community of faith was pivotal for me. I sang with the music teams, served on or led other teams. I was a part of something that shared the love of Christ. Agape love, that unconditional love, fed me and helped me try to keep my life focused on Jesus. Eventually, after Jeff and I were married, I led a whole weekend.
In the midst of these experiences, during those first two years out of high school, I hung around a group of non-denominational, charismatic, Christians. I learned a lot from them. Dated one of them. I believe this was an important part of my formation, that I was supposed to have this experience, to be slightly embedded with this group, so that I would come to realize that their path to knowing God was not mine. I was learning there was no question: I was the Episcopalian I was raised to be.
When I transferred to a four-year college, I joined the choir at St. Paul’s Episcopal church and became active in Lutheran Campus Ministry, where we worshiped together every Wednesday night at 9:19. I spent a lot of time in the campus ministry house, developing friendships and strengthening my understanding of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.
I became a Fool for Christ, clowning in area churches, miming messages of hope and love, and learning that when that greasepaint was on my face, I could be something I didn’t think I could be without the paint. Over time, I realized the point was that I could be that person without the paint. Loving others, expressing God to others, was becoming easier when I trusted that what I was doing was from God.
I believe that in those formative years of my life I came to have a deeper understanding of who God was to me and who I was to God. I began to read scripture more often and while for years I struggled with extemporaneous prayer, I observed and heard how others did it, and decades later, came to feel comfortable with praying with others from my heart and not my head.
It was in those three years at this college I met Jeff. Our story would only be our story with God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit working with us and through us. We met the first time when he was playing disc football with one of the evangelical Christian groups on campus. We met for the second time at choir practice at St. Paul’s. I introduced him to Lutheran Campus Ministry and to SEARCH, that young adult retreat program I loved. We became the best of friends, accidentally started dating a year later, and three months after that, when Jeff walked me to my apartment after church, he felt a strong message that we both know was divine. He said, “I feel like God is saying, ask her, you dummy.” And we were engaged.
We were married two weeks shy of our seventh anniversary when we had our first child, Ray. We had gone through years of infertility, with tests and medicines, and when my health insurance would no longer pay for treatments, we let go of expectations and gave it even more fully to God. What we learned in this time is that God’s time is not our time. We were not supposed to be parents any sooner than we were.
19 months, two days and 10 hours later, we had our second child, Erin.
We know God works in mysterious ways. We know that following the way of Jesus is complex. We know that the Holy Spirit has nudged us and challenged us to take risks and roads less traveled to better see our place in God’s world.
Jeff and I together have only known a life together that includes the Holy Trinity. We have always been a part of a faith community that served and loved us. We chose to serve and love in return. We raised our kids in the church (whether they liked it or not) with the help of many others in that faith community.
When I had lunch with a soon-to-be ordained vocational deacon and she suggested I enter the discernment process to become a deacon, it began a whirlwind decade, where again, we learned that God’s time is not our time, but that the Holy Spirit does not let up, even when the stakes are high and the complications many.
You may be scratching your head, wondering why I am telling you about my story with the Holy Trinity.
This Friday marks the tenth anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood.
This has been a journey of discovering who I am to God and what it is God is calling me to do. This is all about trusting that the story of God throughout creation is told to help us understand that God desires a meaningful relationship with all, and that my part in this story is to teach this divine desire to all who will listen. Ordained or not, we all can tell the story of God’s abundant, life-giving love.
It has been a journey, discovering that Jesus is the Savior of the world. His divine presence in the world was necessary to teach those who would hear him that we are to love God and then show our commitment to that love by loving others. I believe Jesus was sent to let us know that humans have made love harder than it has to be – by creating rules and laws that separate us from one another, making it more difficult to share God’s love freely.
It has been a journey that has always included the presence of the Holy Spirit, who has given me strength when I have questioned my worthiness to do this work. It’s in the God-moments that make no sense but make all the sense in the world: The random names that pop into my head, prompting me to say a prayer for them. The opportunities to be in the right place at the right time. In the lovely words from Proverbs today, where we heard how Wisdom, which we can consider another name for the Holy Spirit, has been present since the beginning of time.
The Holy Trinity, as mysterious as it is, has, throughout my memory, been a constant companion. All three are one, and I can’t explain it – and I don’t think I’m supposed to be able to make it make sense – but I can confidently say that God is love. Jesus is the Way to knowing that love. The Holy Spirit will never let us forget that we are loved.
Together, they help us know the brilliance of creation and our responsibility toward it. They guide us to be people who see the depth of God’s love in the face of others. They demand our action in the world that shares our own stories of who God is for us and how we understand who we are to God.
For all these reasons, we give thanks.
Will you please turn to page 836 in your Book of Common Prayer and pray A General Thanksgiving with me?
Accept, O Lord, our thanks and praise for all that you have done for us. We thank you for the splendor of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world, for the wonder of life, and for the mystery of love.
We thank you for the blessing of family and friends, and for the loving care which surrounds us on every side.
We thank you for setting us at tasks which demand our best efforts, and for leading us to accomplishments which satisfy and delight us.
We thank you also for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone.
Above all, we thank you for your Son Jesus Christ; for the truth of his Word and the example of his life; for his steadfast obedience, by which he overcame temptation; for his dying, through which he overcame death; and for his rising to life again, in which we are raised to the life of your kingdom.
Grant us the gift of your Spirit, that we may know him and make him known; and through him, at all times and in all places, may give thanks to you in all things. Amen.
