The day after I got a concussion from colliding with a bedframe, I got hit over the head with a realization about my long-pondered call to ministry. 

Growing up Roman Catholic, I’d felt called from an early age to serve God through music. My journey as a pianist and community musician landed me as a religious studies and piano major at Lawrence University, where I found my passion in making connections between spirituality and the arts. My growing sense of a call to ministry flourished as I connected with diverse peers over the sacredness of sounds and texts from various faith (and non-faith) traditions. Mysticism became my passion, academically and personally. 

As I prepared for my senior capstone on ecumenical Christian community, a powerful experience at Taize in France ignited a desire to live in community after college. I came to my “year in God’s time” with the Community of St Anselm in London harboring a hope that I would discern a call to ordained ministry within a denomination. I dreamed that my interior battle between my Catholic identity and my resonance with more progressive denominations could come to an end, and I would have the courage to break from the Roman rules and structures that I felt constrictive and antithetical to the gospel. 

Instead, I felt a deeper pull to reconciliation, to “living between” the traditions. There was no easy answer, just a lot of learning from life in religious community, and so I packed for my next adventure at Hautecombe Abbey in France. I was still in flux about my belonging to the Roman Catholic church, with all its flaws, all its hierarchy, and yet all its beauty and its mystical heritage. I would spend time in France living among celibate sisters whose Catholic vocation called them to ecumenism, and see if this was a life that drew me in. 

After a five month baptism-by-fire-French-immersion with the Chemin Neuf Community at the abbey, I realized it was time to come back Stateside. The death of a friend at the community had shocked me, the grief taking a toll on my mind, body and spirit. As much as I’d learned from the charismatic, ecumenically-minded community of Chemin Neuf, it was not “chez-moi,” and it was not the place for me to heal. I had been met with kindness and wisdom among my peers and mentors, but I lived with an uneasiness at the assimilation I witnessed as people seemed to adopt a common vocabulary and understanding of God and spirit. I wanted a contemplative spirituality. I wanted interfaith dialogue. I wanted a sense of evangelism that was not prescriptive, but a witnessing to the giftedness at the heart of all things. 

And so after I hit my head on the bedpost a few days ago, I realized that I am called to be a pastor. I am called to live and create at this intersection of spirituality and the arts that I began discovering at Lawrence. It’s in this way, through music and poetry and contemplative prayer, that I want to bear witness to the essential giftedness at the heart of all things. 

I used to think that a call to be a pastor put me in opposition to my Roman Catholic heritage, but now I see things differently. I am not called to be a priest, to administer the sacraments. I am called to reveal the sacramentality of daily living. I’m embraced by my mother church in the rites and rituals that underpin my understanding of reality. I just also believe that the veil of the temple was torn in two at the death of Christ, the membrane between “sacred” and “profane” ripped wide open. My space is calling attention to the sacredness of the everyday, which I can do pastorally– through music, chaplaincy, art, conversation, etc.– within the broader Catholic church, and beyond it.  

As I apply to divinity school, I am working on a five to six month pilgrimage of song that will prepare me experientially. I’m planning to travel the country and Western Europe, with grant money and my own funds, to explore people and communities who use sound in contemplative and community-building ways. I’ll be staying at Christian and Buddhist monasteries, visiting gospel choirs, chanting and who knows what else. My hope is for this pilgrimage to launch me into my studies.

I’ll close with the lyrics of a song by the dearly beloved Van Morrison:

And all I ever wanted was simply just to be me

All you ever need is the truth

And the truth will set you free

I’m not feelin’ it no more, I’m not feelin’ it anymore…

The false dichotomies taking up precious energy/ the fear that there’s no space at the Catholic table when I can just pull up a chair/ the judgments I make of others who I worry won’t accept me for bringing all I am, all my feminine energy to my vocation of “word becoming flesh”…

I’m not feelin’ it no more.