My "Racism"—Anecdotal History. Part Sixteen. Living Into Immanence.

Today is Sunday, and we priest spouses read and prayed and broke bread together. When I read aloud yet without a congregation, I sink into the text. I envision and dramatize it. Today I read the familiar story in II Kings about the Shunammite widow and the prophet Elisha. In short, the wealthy widow who had often offered the wandering prophet hospitality, now all but scoffed at the idea that she might need something to repay her generosity. I’m fine, she said. (How many times do we say that when we know it is not quite true?)

Elisha, however, is compulsive and insists on recompense. She is cheeky, calls Elisha’s prophetic bluff, and boldly tells him not to mess with her In God’s name, Elisha pushes his luck. The women gets pregnant, bears a son, loves him like crazy and of course he dies. (I say "of course" because biblical stories always take treacherous turns.) The mother, in a raging sorrow, chases after Elisha. “Did I ask you for a son, O prophet? Did I not tell you, ‘Don’t raise my hopes?’ ”

You would think Elisha being a bit of an amateur, would give up, but no, he carries it to extremes. He ends up stretching his warm body onto the son’s cold dead body—twice. Like any good miracle it works out against all odds. The story shot me back to a time in my life when I felt like the Shunammite.


Scene XLVIII.  Sinking In

I’d experienced the thrill of pushing life into the world with the force of my uterus—my womb alive/creating. Childbirth had reconnected me with God in my flesh—immanent in a forceful, profoundly painful, fruitful way. I had children to love. The sprawling blossoming lives of my four children kept me alive as I pursued the God I knew as a child, in my children, and now I needed more—for myself.

I entered a decade of death—my youngest sister died in 1979; the parish priest and my chief supporter left; Dad died in 1983; my divorce from my husband of twenty years was finalized in 1983; I had suffered rejection in the ordination process in the Episcopal church in 1978 and 1981.

My chosen vocational course was left in a shambles of doubt, my self-love dwindling, and my soul trembling with fear and rage. I had no idea who I was, where I would go, who I could love. Many people in grief lose their grip on their connection with faith or God or theology, but— paradoxically or ironically or both—mine strengthened. I continued to pursue God’s identity with foolish yet honest greed as if I could contain, possess, ground, or at least secure Divinity.  

How odd that my frantic search for God would be my anti-racism training—or part of it anyway.

Scene XLIX. Christian Existence as Life in the Spirit

“The Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God . . .”  (I Cor. 2:10b)  This phrase leapt off the thin crinkly page of my overused Bible. It was a phrase from  St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. I engaged with this passage because it was central to a course I was taking,  and because it contained a spirituality that ran deep—as deep as the very soul of God Godself. Paul’s teaching went on and on as Paul does, but my grabby soul latched onto this one phrase as salvation.  

The course was offered by a favorite professor, Luke Johnson. It was  a journal course on experiential theology with no required reading, so students flocked to it. “Christian Existence as Life in the Spirit” based its premise on the biblical phrase that had hooked me. I was ready to let the Spirit run wild. I was running wild by then, too. Was I led by the Spirit or was the Spirit leading me? To me these felt different. I never found out—exactly.

We heard lectures on big, fat, unmanageable theological words— grace, holy, faith, sin, idolatry, prayer, possessions, sexuality and gender, anger, freedom, truth—then wrote our own experiences of these ideas.

I had to let go of the tyranny of my intellect. I couldn’t think my way out of this, so I wrote and it hurt.

Scene L. The Organizing Power of the Holy: Life Narrative.

“God is in me from my beginning.” That was my first sentence. I elaborated a bit on  immanence, but then I suddenly wrote: “I am early aware that God in me is hard on me.” What? If this Spirit searched into the depths of God as if by torch and searchlight, then there seemed no escape from this Spirit—even for God. I wanted such intimacy and distrusted my worth. I wanted to know once again that I mattered in the flesh. Where was Holy? Luke said that the Holy had organizing power. Organizing? I needed internal organization. I just hadn’t counted on such a right-brain process.

Without warning I wrote about black Carol Lee and the painful compromise I’d made to exclude her from my birthday party, because I wanted it to be at our racist white beach club. Was that holy? I wrote: “Part of the little-girl-God in me dies. Is God black?”  

Memory: My second daughter Jill had a horrifying sledding accident when she was about eight. I had left the three oldest children with my parents and taken the baby to visit friends in lower Connecticut. Jill and her cousin were thrilled with the snow. Jill slid on an ice patch and ran headlong into a barbed wire fence. Screaming and covered with blood, she ran back to the house for help, her frightened cousin right behind her, calling, “Jill, are you all right?” Jill was not all right. When she got to the house Ether opened the door and sprang into action at the sight. She grabbed Jill up into her strong arms, got towels, yelled for my father who came running. He drove as fast as he dared to the hospital, and Ether sat in the back seat holding Jill . She pressed her head to stanch the bleeding. Jill later told me: “She held my head so hard against her body, like she was holding me together.” At the hospital a brilliant plastic surgeon named Dr. Platt stitched Jill’s face up and saved her eyes.

Ether was black. Dr. Platt was a woman. Is God black and female? Yes.

The memory about Jill’s accident came to me when I was writing my journal chapter on Faith: Obedience and Creative Fidelity. We were supposed to focus on Jesus, but Abraham came to mind. In the story about God asking Abraham to sacrifice his own son Isaac in order to prove his faith God stopped Abraham from faithful obedience—just in time. God loved Abraham more than his obedient faith, and Abraham loved God unlimitd by obediential demands.

I wrote: “God is going against himself in this request and call. God has asked Abraham to disobey him, to choose against the promise. But God himself is more important to Abraham than God’s promise. How about that? God is not defined by his promise!”  Professor Luke wrote in the margins: “Yes. Good.”

Was I getting God? Did I have the Holy? My writing was honest, vulnerable, and honestly all mixed up about the ways God could be experienced and still be God. Whatever the Holy was it was driving me nuts. My daughter Jill helped me again. She by now was seventeen and expressing angry feelings, telling me she did not feel loved. When I asked what she wanted she said she wanted to go see our family therapist with just me. I felt afraid, but we went and Jill blurted out: “I feel second best. You value your church activities more than me.”  

I made explanations.The therapist invited Jill to keep repeating her feelings. I was locked up inside my own fears and wrote: “She was hurt, and I was getting a bandaid. I couldn’t open myself to her wound without sacrificing my faithful obedience to my own “good mother” illusion.” I had made an idol of my motherhood. The ordination committee had told me that I could not be a good mother and a good priest at once. A “dual vocation” they called it. I wrote: “In fact, what blocked me in that process (ordination) was the same thing that was so painfully blocking me with Jill. I had made an idol of my motherhood. . . . I could not be creatively faithful to what was my real love as a parent to Jill, because I was being destructively faithful to my self as a perfectly caring and loving mother.”  
                                   *  *  *  * 

To be a mother is no more or less holy than to be a priest. All I had to do was choose, I thought. To be black or a woman was no more or less holy than to be white. But I couldn’t choose my sex or the color of my skin. Could God? More tears, more years, my search continued, but for today right now, this.
            
    The grace of God cannot be fixed
    or fastened to a sanctioned spot;
    when we move as the Spirit moves,
    there is no place where God is not.  
                 Michael Hudson, text. Doxology/Eighth Tune

2021.01.31 My "Racism"—Anecdotal HIstory. Part Fifteen. Immanence

The arrival of 2021 is freighted and illuminated with grand dreams, even some magical thinking—new executive leadership at the federal level, a vaccine that will immunize the entire global population against a lethal virus and end a death-dealing pandemic, a bipartisan effort to alleviate ongoing global warming and save our planet Earth, bipartisan policy and legislation that will save democracy and end racial, class, gender, and economic inequities, and finally, multi-faith cooperation to end the crisis of inequality by promoting an image of Divinity that is both true to scholarship and frees Godde’s image and identity from limitations imposed by patriarchalism’s sexist language.

My hopes and dreams of all the years are at stake. What in my own history will help me weather such a deluge, help me not succumb to white supremacy? Am I too white?  

(To catch readers up in this “racism” series, I write about 1980; I’m in seminary, a commuter, hoping to be ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, and learning some new theological words that assure me that the image of God is not, well, white.)  

                                                    *  *  *  *

Scene XLI. The Christian Testament, Called “New”

In my second year at Yale Divinity School, I sat in the same huge lecture hall, my pen poised, my mind open. I was ready for the New Testament—“our” testament, the one starring Jesus, the hero of Christianity. I wondered whether anything could top the Old Testament, also why this one was not called “young” instead of “new.”

I was a Christian; I did not know Jesus except through stained glass windows or sermons from mile-high pulpits. The sermons were either sentimental or divinely untouchable. It was obvious Jesus was divine, but not clear how he got that way. I felt guilty about my ignorance—a little.

Nevertheless, I was alert and bewitched just to be where I was.  


Scene XLII. Luke Timothy Johnson and Immanence Theology

This professor was spry, darn near jolly-old-elfish, and laughed a lot.

This man promised something new. We were to begin with the biblically obvious order: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. The syllabus, however,  indicated that we would begin with Mark whose gospel was chronologically first. Every Sunday School thing I’d ingested was about to be dashed on the rocks of scholarship.

The room fell silent. Into the solemn silence someone sneezed—loudly and explosively. Luke Johnson responded without missing a beat: “God bless you and all vegetative processes.” Everyone laughed—and breathed. Thus was launched the New Testament. Thus began my first inkling that Jesus was human like us, and like his predecessors in the Old Testament.   

I was to benefit from Luke Johnson’s scholarship as well as his style and his pastoral care. He was totally delighted doing what he was doing—lecturing about holy texts to unformed—or ill-formed—students, some even middle-aged! This professor’s spirituality was contagious. I made an appointment to talk with him about my fears and frets about the Episcopal Church and my having been turned down in the Connecticut ordination process. I knew Luke was Roman Catholic, had even been a monastic. He too had been hurt by his church when he tried to get laicized. I was trying to get un-laicized. He wanted out of the ranks and I wanted in.

“I loved the Bible and your course, of course,” I stammered when we met. Luke nodded. “I am trying to get ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, and the resistance to women priests is, well, stiff.” Luke listened to my feelings with care. He was supportive with no answers. As we wrapped up I stood to leave just as another professor walked by Luke’s open office door. He was a learned professorial type—tall, erect, and fully uniformed in black with the traditional high-rise Anglican clerical collar. He was a nice man, kind and learned, specializing in Patristics (old guys—the Fathers—who articulated early church politics and theological justifications thereof). We students liked him, while also joking that we bet he slept in his collar.

Nodding in his direction, Luke said softly with a smile: “Lyn you don’t fit the model.” He added, “But God knows who you are, so trust God.” That could be good or not such good news.

For now I would dive into my latest God-word: Immanence. Luke used this word a lot and I thought he lived it pretty well. Immanence attracted me. It was close to imminence but with much more— ah!—profundity. Imm-AH-nence had not been on any of the lists of God-defining words I’d heard in Sunday School or from any pulpit.  Now I heard it from an academic podium and soon would read more in an essay about the Jesus of history written by a man named Marcus Borg.

One reason I found Immanence so alluring was that it described the God I’d met under the table as a child— intimate, reachable, and silently conversational. Immanent means “remaining within.” Pulpit Gods were mostly transcendent, almighty, unreachable, and remaining without. Jesus knew all about Immanence.


Scene XLIII. Bill Muehl and Immanent Preaching

As I was rejoicing over Immanence I was simultaneously more and more exposed to people in seminary whose skin was not white like mine. God, I figured, was immanent in them as well as in me and all living things. This I got from the Genesis Creation story, but Immanence was the classy theological word for it—a word that made racist imagery for God impossible.

Hearing black students preach properly and firmly confirmed for me the absurdity of racism. I heard them in the regular chapel worship and in the preaching class required of us all. Students prepared written sermons of course, but the moment of truth came when we had to deliver them—out loud from a pulpit in front of the class and the professor, William (Bill) Muehl. 

 

Meuhl had a sharp, wry wit, was a lawyer by training, and famous for his book All The Damned Angels (1972) deploring all sorts of rigid moralisms and gooey piety about the Cross and its bold dominance in Christian parlance. He once said that a miracle could be performed by accident, and in his book he landed square on the dirty business of Immanence, God’s life in the flesh: “I have had to be content with damned angels and the facts of life.”

I was already suspicious of too much unfleshly transcendence, and really did not adore the cross, although having to preach to Bill Muehl might feel a bit like that. I took courage from the black students who did not seem scared and let it rip with vigor, energy, and an intimacy I loved but knew I didn’t have in me. I was too white.

None of this helped me feel less fearful about Muehl’s critique. I’d heard of it but hadn’t yet experienced it. Good thing because it might have caused me to die before I ever got to the pulpit for my turn.

I remember the text he assigned the day I was to be the preacher in class. It was one of St. Paul’s semicolon-loaded passages in Romans 5— all about justification by faith through grace via Christ, and then actually bragging about your sufferings. I was already suffering. But all would be well, St.Paul assured us, because “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”  Why? Because God’s love had been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. No problem. As far as I could tell, this passage was supposed to include the answer to all of life’s problems—just not mine right now.

Crucifixion suffering was overkill, and resurrection felt like avoidance of suffering altogeher. So, I focused on “poured” and imagined a huge pitcher full of Divinity, somehow liquified or magically de-solidified, pouring into me for the better. I’d never heard of water-boarding, thank heavens, so water seemed safer to me than Christ’s blood. This was a kind of suffering I figured, because I tried to convey the joyful horror of drowning in God. I passed the class.

Muehl would bemoan the fact that he never understood how students did well in his preaching classes and then got out there and preached “pap” in their parishes. Was I a future pap-preacher? I’d already developed a severe case of pulpit-paralysis in a small class.

Listening to the black students preach helped. These students had to be just as scared as I was, but when they got in that pulpit their words sang with Immanence,  jumped for joy.  It was so intimate that listeners talked back: Preach it sister! Say it! Amen! Yes. I felt exhilarated and daunted all at once.

But I was white.

White preaching was emotionally reserved, distant, bleached—transcendent. Was God even in it?  Was I? Muehl advised against imitation and told me to be myself. “You’ll get used to it,” he told me, adding something like, “but of course you’ll get flack about your female voice, so pitch low." I told him I was an alto.

Nevertheless I promised myself that I would experiment with preaching from the center aisle not the pulpit, maybe without a script, aka “cheat sheet.” Pulpit and written manuscript provided distance and a shield of protection from Immanence. 

My promise would prove impossible to honor—but not completely so.

Overbrimming Cup:Yale Divinity School, October 2010

This decade is my reunion decade. I’m not a reunion person, preferring I guess to leave the sanctity of the original experience in sanctity, but now I’m gathering together the many fragments of my life for my memoir—and reunions re-member.

I did my high school 50th in 2006. Turned out I liked the same people I’d liked 50 years earlier. And I got to spend a whole day of uninterrupted conversation with my oldest, dearest, most intimate friend Annie before she died the next year leaving me wanting more.

Did college 50th in May, 2010. Missed some friends and re-loved others. I was still enchanted with the things that had brought me there in the first place: the beauty of the campus, the continuity of the institutional commitment to women’ education, and the alluring mystique of women together— learning without fear. I felt proud of my women’s college.

My seminary reunion at Yale Divinity School (YDS) October, 2010, was my 28th, not even an official reunion year. It was also my first reunion there. But it turned out to be the most exhilarating of all my reunions—and the most exhausting.

I wrote to a friend earlier today: “Just got back myself from 3 days of reunion at my div. school. My cup runs over.  Exhilarating and exhausting.  Is there such a thing as TMS (too much stimulation)?  Not if it's real Spirit juice I’d say.  It just keeps going on giving life. The 80-90 year olds were the most inspirational.  “Celebrating 8 decades of women at Yale Divinity School” was the reunion’s focus. All my memories fell into the deep bowl of history where they felt nurtured not swamped. One at a time we women have done it starting from the first four woman enrolled in 1932 with 204 men (YDS founded in 1871) to 2010 when the school is 50/50 male/female. I am grateful for my big fat broad ecumenical education—different from the strictures of a denominational seminary whose graces are the bestowal of ecclesial identity plus. And........ we got a baseball cap marked with Yale Divinity School. Also one more carry bag for my collection. Faith and excellent worship, preaching, intellectual papers on the latest theological developments, and the arts. Did miss Eucharist but they do that in their regular chapel worship. I saw the rota. I’m flying.”

My friend wrote back that she had wished she’d gone to my reunion instead of hers where the men were all old and bald and the women frumpy and full of shit.

The pioneer women were brave and they can still laugh about it. Margaret Farley, RSM, first full time woman on the faculty and first tenured professor in Ethics, gave the key note address. She reminded us that there had been amazing advances and still women do not have a lasting home in ministry. Perhaps the journey is the home, she suggested, as women keep forging new roads to full inclusion that will help other women find homes when they come knocking.

Many women it’s true have laid down their lives for the love of the right and to make sure other women benefit. A Jesus-y thing to do. It’s a great and lengthy love story that goes on. Every great love, Margaret reminded us, is tried by love and not destroyed. The point of the cross of Christ is that relationship can hold— no matter what.

It’s amazing how the truth of something you have known and know can again illumine and stun.

My own memory of Margaret Farley from an ethics class back in the ‘70s is small but I never forgot it. She was talking about faith and saying not to assume or presume. “After all,” she’d said, “Peter thought he had faith and found out he didn’t. And Judas thought he didn’t have faith and found out he did.” (I was flipping back and forth being Judas and Peter.)

Bits of humor, wisdom, and challenge to remember our love story at YDS and take it forward.

In the 1950s women had one bathroom across campus. They called it “The Women’s Room” after Marilyn French’s book title. It was YDS’s first unofficial women’s center.

The Dean in 1950 lamented to the 10 new women students what a serious thing it was that they (all 10 of them) were here, because they kept out all those men. Your pictures were the deciders the dean told them. We picked the ten who looked as if they could stay the course. (Good thing they weren’t posture pictures or centerfolds!)

Fueled by the fervor of the ‘60s, women flooded into the seminaries. Recruiting wasn’t allowed. Joan Forsberg, 1953 graduate was then dean of students and affectionately remembered by many as a steadfast encourager, really savior, of women’s vocations, said “I’m not recruiting. The Holy Spirit is just blowing them in the doors.” (By the time I blew in (1978) there were 185 women to 418 men.)

Believe in your gifts with humility but without apology!

Education in some denominations is suspect. One woman told us she wanted the “halo effect” of a Yale education and now makes it her ministry to use her privilege to help women see that education has value and doesn’t threaten spirituality or charismatic holiness. (Being at YDS opened my mind, also opened my heart and soul to the Holy.)

A 2007 graduate, with her generation’s charming uptilt of voice, told how they brought the Vagina Monologues to YDS, only getting backlash because they performed it in the chapel. (I did a monologue script with my collar on and brought 2 astounded young women to our parish. Who knew vaginas could do evangelism.)

To balance the personal and the professional remains a challenge for most women, and many men now too. (The surety that I couldn’t balance these two was a chief reason for my being turned down in the ordination process in the Episcopal church. “Dual vocation” they’d called it. Now I lobby the church to recognize bivocational ministry ie. serve as a priest in a parish and in another setting too. So far bishops don’t favor this but as always economics and failing parish endowments will drive the part-time agenda home to roost.)

“I came to YDS a devout Roman Catholic and left a pagan,” one woman said. The late Professor Letty Russell a much revered feminist, author and advocate for GLBT inclusion told her, “You don’t have to be in the church to do ministry.” (Letty once told me that inclusive language was more about God than it was about humanity.)

Wives who had helped their husbands get through school were honored, remembered, and applauded.

Beloved mentor the late William Sloane Coffin, some time chaplain at Yale, told women, "Faith is reckless. First you leap, then you grow wings.” (I did that.)

Nancy Jo Kemper, ’67, recipient of the William Sloane Coffin award for peace and justice, is famous for her response to the KY.law that allowed guns (loaded I presume) to be brought into churches, “Jesus would puke!”

The presence of female students in the early days didn’t stop professors from addressing their classes, “Gentlemen.”

Don’t listen to the noise of dismissal and silencing or shut down difficult conversations or confrontations in the name of reconciliation!

Encourage a different perception of religion. Go beyond, like Jesus did.

The Alumni Award for Distinction in Congregational Ministry went to Lillian Daniels, ’93, who was told by her committee she had “no discernible gifts for parish ministry.” (A certain trinitarian committee of Three overthrew that judgment as the same Three overthrew the dual vocation judgment on my behalf.)

“You can’t help others be comfortable with you being powerful!” (It took me years to get that and still I can demure and recede from my authority.)

In a NYC city Methodist church a parishioner said to the woman pastor when the congregation had hired another pastor, “Pastor, we’re getting a woman!” (Reminds me of the parishioner who said as I was standing there, “I better ask the priest”—the priest being male.)

One women chose interim ministry to expose congregations to women leaders so they might call a woman pastor. Desensitization works.

A woman got an A in Old Testament, scandalizing the school. The professor surprised himself. “I don’t usually give my A’s to women. What will they do with them?”

A humble award recipient Nai-Wang Kwok ’66 thanked YDS for its report card with the A-, saying he’d done some things right and there was more to go.

A 70s wife remembered the “irregular” ordinations of women in 1974 and ‘75 and called them “astonishing” and a new vision. “The Altar Guild was the ultimate and you had to be invited to be on it by a male clergy,” she remembered.

What made this reunion so special for me was of course the history and the remembrances and seeing how far women had come. Yet one can celebrate awards and hear great memories at lots of reunion gatherings. At seminary reunions, however, all energy, study, and song is devoted to Divinity. Worship punctuates the round of events, and it’s not just token worship. There is praise for the assembly, yes, but the praise that shines most brightly shines on God. Halleluia. (In Hebrew that means shine your praises on God.)

I am grateful to have gone to a school that is not denominational. Diversity is what makes growth and creativity. Too much homogeneity can stunt growth, suck the soul right out of faith.

In 1971 The Berkeley Divinity School (BDS) an Episcopal seminary merged with Yale Divinity School. When I was a student there BDS had a building a dean and offered some prayer book services. It was a non-demanding presence for Episcopalians who felt like orphans and/or needed support from the "mother" church.

Now there seems to be an effort to make the BDS presence more visible, give it its own curriculum, require more worship attendance of Episcopal students.

At one of the worship services I noticed a little “army” of Episcopal women clergy, sitting together, all collared up looking quite stiff. They all crossed themselves at the same time. It looked odd, even ominous to me. It smelled of regression, a kind of elitism. They stood out like sore thumbs, and their presence didn’t look like a proud act of witness or resistance. They were there for the BDS graduate society luncheon that followed.

I thought of the bright white clerical collar I once lusted after, the collar that signified belonging, authority, vocation, inclusion. At first I wore it a lot; then it got stiff; now it has a ring around it. How do you join with the people, advocate for the ministry of all the baptized when you stick out like a sore thumb?

I remembered my spiritual director Madeleine L’Engle in the 80s said to me, “Now, my dear, when you get ordained do not turn into a little man.” When she said that she meant be a woman priest in my own style, not imitate the current model, march to my own, and on good days, the beat of Sophia’s drum.

Luke Timothy Johnson, New Testament professor when I was a student, consoled me as I lamented having been turned down for ordination. “Lyn,” he’d said jerking his thumb toward the office down the hall and lowering his voice, “look at the model.” The “model” was an Episcopal priest, a dear professor who lived with his dog and his pipe, a man who we all swore slept in his mile high collar.

Dr. Marcia Riggs ’53 had just preached on the gospel story of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15. This unnamed woman had confronted Jesus, called him up short when he displayed exclusive attitudes about the dispensation of healing miracles. A woman who took risks, a woman not of the Jewish heritage, a woman who told Jesus off, who refused to allow him to limit the mission of God’s gospel. A woman model for us today.

I went to the BDS luncheon and felt as if I didn’t belong, being one of the few clergy out of uniform. The collar that had meant I belonged now by its absence meant, or felt as if it meant, I didn’t belong. What counts for belonging?

I wondered about separatism and thought it painful. I am proud of my tradition and its breadth of spirituality. I would hate to see it make of itself an end in itself. I would love to see BDS grieve its former identity, accept the new creation the merger had effected, give its money to YDS, and encourage Episcopal students to celebrate the rich diversity that will grow their souls and yes enrich the beauties of their own tradition as well.
* * * *
I had gone to YDS in the ‘70s because I could commute. At the time I had wondered if an Episcopal school would have been more formational in the tradition I’d chosen and loved. Would I be Anglicanized enough? Would I fit in? I struggled many years to get ordained a woman Episcopal priest. I still rejoice in my vocation and love my tradition and church.

AND.............

I would choose again to go to YDS and would recommend it to anyone wanting a theological education, whether they aspired to ordination or not. I would recommend it for its academic excellence but also for the experience of belonging it offers today in a church that is softening denominational boundaries and being de-institutionalized for its own good—and for the sake of its own spiritual belonging in the evolution of God’s mission of peace, justice and love for all.