intense

the One Spirit Interfaith Seminary Class of 2023

I posted this on Facebook but I want it here too, so I’m cutting and pasting. If you’ve already read this much, skip to below the link now.

To quote my seminary classmate Edward Trout, “I did a thing!” 

Fact: after a two-year program of online classes and a four-day in-person retreat, I was ordained on June 7 as an interfaith-interspiritual minister by One Spirit Learning Alliance. Introducing: the Rev. Dr. Susannah Helen Bloch.

Fact: on June 10, as we lined up to enter Riverside Church for our commencement ceremony, I was overwhelmed by the certainty of being a total and ridiculous fraud. There was a lot of talk about getting in touch with our inner voices and our true selves, but the voices are ruthless and I doubt that the shattered, disconnected mess that is my self is capable of “ministering” to anyone, at least not in any professional sense. 

To all those responsible for the fact that I walked down that aisle anyway – a list including but very much not limited to Kimberley Dana Brown, Maria Cataldo-Cunniff, Saibhung Kaur Khalsa, Scott Godlew, Gregory Bloch, Sarah Bowen, Melissa Little, and whoever was playing Ode to Joy on the organ so I could sing along instead of collapsing in tears – thank you. Maybe this is the start of something. Maybe not. If nothing else I’ve met some amazing people along the way for whose support and love I am eternally grateful.

Video of our commencement ceremony here. Really, improbably, this actually happened. It's long, but don't miss our class speaker Kareema Parrish's speech starting at 1:34:30.

This was only two hours of a two-week trip to the US. Which I will (with some luck) write a lot more about. But for now, sticking to One Spirit: the seminary program is two years long, with online or hybrid weekend classes once a month and a once-a-year in-person “intensive.” Someone said that they call it an intensive because retreat might give us the idea that we were going to relax and go hot tubbing or something. Ha. Both intensives were indeed intense, though not in the sense of containing a lot of information to absorb, almost the opposite of that: lots and lots of time dedicated to not much of substance, which gave us nothing better to do than be present to ourselves, our classmates, the tutors, the program…just sort of ALL OF IT AT ONCE. Which was not always comfortable.

Last year’s intensive was online because of pandemic concerns, and I decided to attend from a hotel room mere minutes away from our apartment. On the way to the hotel, along the fence for the big tram depot, grow these cool huge dandelion puffs (not dandelions at all but some kind of salsify, it turns out, but same-same for the purposes of this report), so dandelions became my companions for the week. I’m kind of a weed myself, I realized: always trying to sprout in places I don’t really belong; often sowing my little seeds and moving on before anything can come of them... Rather a waste of natural resources, I often think. And yet here I am, and what am I going to do about that? You two dedicated readers of this blog may remember this poem from a year ago which, in summary: I have no plan, but off I go.

poof.

This year’s intensive took place at Stony Point Retreat Center, about 45 minutes north of New York City. I was not a little nervous about what it would mean to meet and eat and share bathrooms with my formerly-online-only classmates in person, but I needn’t have worried quite so much: the awkward parts were outweighed by the fun of getting to let my American flag fly high. Hugs! People who wanted to see me! Flexible timing! DECAF DRIP COFFEE! It was hard to explain to anyone why I was so excited about the oatmeal bar at breakfast. But it was quite intense all the same. Here I am, being "ordained." What in the name of all that is holy is that supposed to mean?? What hit me particularly hard was how fractured my life is, how my habit of straddling worlds (CH/US, tech/spirituality, various jobs and hobbies and friends who will never meet) means that the whole me is rarely present anywhere. Can’t be seen? Is afraid to show up? Both? The image that accompanied me this time was of a plate of glass smashed beyond repair. Which was depressing, and in the end not even a good metaphor because I don’t think my work going forward is about repairing something that was once whole, but about stitching together scraps that didn’t belong together to begin with, but nevertheless are what I have to work with as I patch together the second half of my life. It's not re-membering, it's collaging.

“Alter” by [maybe I’ll find out someday] in the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, New York City.
My second favorite piece of art from this trip, stay tuned maybe for the first!