Some big news

a personal update

For those newer to this newsletter and to me, I apologize for this personal update post. It’s the easiest way to share this news. I will be back soon with more reflective commentary on the world at large and all the ways we can companion one another as we walk it.

When I was nine years old, I walked down the aisle of my Baptist church to declare I wanted to be baptized.

When I was twenty-nine, I was ordained as a minister at my ever-and-always-beloved church, Journey.

At thirty-nine, I became a spiritual director.

And just recently this summer, freshly forty-nine, I was confirmed as a member of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.

I guess I do things in 9s.

Many of you know I’ve been a member of the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration for nearly a decade now (9 years and change, as it happens), and I’ve known for a long while that this denomination is my home. But making it official is…tricky, because becoming officially Episcopalian also meant renouncing my ordination within another denominational tradition by default.

This is something I have, quite simply, been unwilling to do.

I haven’t served a church in eleven years now. I left mine after, you guessed it, nine years of being a pastor there. If you had asked me a year ago if I would ever serve as a pastor again, I’d likely have said no. And yet, the idea of letting go of my ordination was unthinkable. It feels like cutting out my own lung. My own heart, even. So, for years, I’ve joyfully bridged these two realities of being a congregationally ordained minister loosely in the Baptist tradition and a lay Episcopalian. And the wonderful priests and people of Transfiguration have let me, giving me opportunities to preach and teach, and also just sit there and receive. It has been a glorious nine years.

But then Palm Sunday happened. There I was, sitting in the pews, when a wave of emotion came crashing over me and I realized: I am not going to make it. I am 49 years old and I simply cannot go another 20, 30 years without being a minister, here, in the Episcopal Church I call home. In a moment, what was previously workable became entirely unbearable.

I guess I’m not done being a minister.

I probably do not have to tell you that this came as very surprising news to me. Of course, I know I AM a minister. I walk around in the awareness of that identity every day, even all the days I haven’t served in a role with that title. I’ve been that person since I was a very little girl, and there is no getting around it or away from it. It is quite simply who I am, at my core, undeniably. But this feeling to move toward claiming it outwardly, in a religious institution, formally, is just not something I ever expected, or needed. I’ve lived by choice on the margins of religion because that is where I have always felt most at home. It’s where I like to help make others feel at home in the sacred, too. And yet, here comes this strange longing/calling to be in one of the oldest institutions there is.

Photo of stained glass window and its reflection by Jakub Pierożyński on Unsplash

So, friends. After much discernment and prayer, I’m officially in the process of becoming an Episcopal priest. Dan and I will be moving to Virginia in August for me to attend Virginia Theological Seminary for my required year of Anglican studies. We see this as a kind of second chapter of marriage that almost writes itself. When we were twenty-nothing years old, Dan packed up his Honda Accord and drove to the East Coast to live in a one bedroom apartment for me to go to seminary. And now, 26 years and two children later, we’re again going to pack up Dan’s Honda Accord and drive to the East Coast for me to go to seminary.

You can’t make this stuff up. As we’ve been saying, we’re doing it for the plot.

A lot remains to be determined about what my life as a priest will look like, and what will come next. How will I juggle all that I do and still feel called to do- spiritual direction, being at the Haden Institute, running Via Forma, writing books? I genuinely do not know, though I remain faithful to the commitments I’ve made. We are trying to stay in the moment and be faithful to what’s in front of us and trust that, in time, a path will arise. Dan is going through his own great transition, as he just left his job of twenty years and is discerning what is next for him, too. It’s a season where we will find our new path forward together. We covet your good wishes and prayers.

For me, I continue to marvel in the mystery of it all. As I was gathering up all the requisite paperwork, I came across my baptism certificate and realized that, forty years almost to the day after I was baptized, I knelt in St. Mark’s Cathedral in Dallas to be received into the Anglican Communion. What a long, strange trip it’s been. And yet, it all feels exactly right.

As it happens, I’ve been drawn to this liturgical tradition for a very long time. One of my friends who came to Journey during my last year of pastoring there called it “hip Episcopalian,” which I received as a compliment. As a child, I attended Episcopal school and went to chapel every day. I have always said it was those experiences that led me into ministry, far more than Sunday services at my own church did. So while moving from Baptist to Episcopalian might seem like a far leap, I’ve actually been bridging these traditions my whole life. I love this tradition and am moved by it every Sunday. These prayers and feast days and rituals and liturgies keep me in sacred communion with God, and I adore them.

I guess that’s one of the things I’ve been pondering, this sense of…adoration…that brings me to this place. I’ll probably write another post about “why Episcopalian” as this one’s already too long, but suffice it to say, I love the practice of rituals which call me to adore the sacred. More than love them, I need them. Especially now, when so much in our world feels profoundly devoid of our adoration, and even our care.

So that’s part of it, too, this longing to help others find a place where they can do the counter-cultural work of worshipping something beyond our own selves, a love that is good and true and beautiful. To host spaces where we can gather around ritual and symbol and liturgy that forms us over time into people who care.

I also want to be clear that this is not some huge turning away from the religious roots and influences that got me here. I know the word “Baptist” can conjure a certain kind of upbringing, but that’s not the one I had. My childhood pastor was everything you’d want one to be: kind, both smart and wise, thoughtful, generous, compassionate. He had what you could call Mr. Rogers vibes. My youth pastor was the same. We didn’t go to church much, but I felt loved and accepted there- yes, even when as a woman I decided to go into pastoral ministry. (They gave me a scholarship!) At Baylor, I met so many colleagues who are now Baptist ministers, many of whom remain friends. I was nurtured and encouraged by Baptist professors who taught me so well and affirmed my gifts. (Back in the day, Princeton recruited directly from Baylor’s religion department. We arrived on campus very well prepared, thanks to those academic Baptists.) As a seminarian, Wilshire Baptist Church Dallas welcomed me as a stranger to be their intern, and I remain friends with their retired pastor. I have many Baptist friends and colleagues, and I’m grateful for them all. And the personal piety I got from those healthy Baptists continues to color my own life with God in the best way.

I’d say my relationship with the Baptist denomination itself has been one of benevolent distance. I can’t say the wider denomination has really claimed me much, nor I them. And that’s ok, too. I think people’s souls just have types and preferences, and mine happens to be inclined to bowing and incense and chanting the psalms. (Well, either that, or experimental art installations, poetry, alt music, conversational sermons, and couches, which is what my church Journey did. I’m not really inclined to much in between, as it happens.) So I leave with gratitude and I also leave knowing I am going somewhere that does, finally, feel like a real fit.

At heart, this feels like an act of integrity, where I am becoming more of who I am, and not less. It’s a way for me to make more visible how I already serve the world in a priestly way. And in the places where I try to bury, deny, disavow that, I cease to be who I am. I cease to be true to my own soul code.

In all the spaces I’ve traversed, from being a chaplain to the elderly and a chaplain to college students, from the years I gave to the emerging church movement, the years I spent with the Buddhists and the time I still spend there, all the time I’ve been a spiritual director and dream worker, and all I learned as a Spiritual Director in Residence and church consultant with my friends at Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church…all of this is what makes me- is making me- a priest. It just feels honest to say that all of this is priestly work, and so literal priesthood is a thing that feels right and good to do.

One final word to my agnostic/atheist/religion-skeptic/other religious traditions friends: I hope it is self-evident that I’ll continue to have room for all your belief and unbelief and differing beliefs in the same way I always have. And also, just in case you wonder— Episcopalians have a very big tent. Their generous orthodoxy and their commitment to hospitality and compassion are some of the things I love most about them. I know priests married to people of all religions and none at all. I plan to keep writing about big tent things here and I hope you’ll stick around.

If anything, this change will be so nice for the many who have asked me over the years what denomination I’m in and I’ve had to give the most confusing, diffuse answer. (And it will make me happy that people will no longer misidentify me, including that one time a journalist labeled me an evangelical. Excuse me sir! ) After being so many places and also not one solid place, I’m quite ready to call the Episcopal Church my home.