Ministry
Call and Discernment
Shortly after beginning the Ph.D. program in physics at Princeton in the fall of 1984, I experienced a vision that set me on a path toward ordination in the Episcopal Church. I had not been raised in a religious household, but my parents wanted me to have some exposure to religion in order to make my own decision about it as an adult. Consequently, they sent me to Sunday school at the First Unitarian Church in Portland. At one point, a young Unitarian minister told the gathering of youth — including me — that he was “basically a humanist” and that the “only time he ever called on God was when he needed a parking place.” These comments made me realize that God was far more important to me than to the Unitarian minister. With my parents’ support, I embarked on a process of exploration, reading about and attending services at different houses of worship. I eventually settled on the Episcopal Church, joining the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, receiving the sacrament of baptism at the age of 15, and studying theology under the mentorship of the Dean of the Cathedral, the Very Rev. Robert Greenfield.
Shortly before arriving at Princeton, I had two experiences that raised questions about my life’s trajectory. During a weekend trip with Pomona College friends to Ensenada, Mexico, I witnessed both the poverty with which many of the townspeople struggled and the arrogance with which U.S. tourists often treated them. Subsequently, a series of Saturday mornings volunteering at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker soup kitchen brought me into direct contact with the homeless residents of L.A.’s skid row. These experiences left me wondering: How was it consistent for me, a person of privilege heading toward the rarefied atmosphere of Princeton, to follow Jesus without addressing the poverty and injustice that affects so many of my fellow human beings?
I wrestled with that question until one Sunday morning in the fall of 1984, during the post-communion silent meditation at Trinity Church, Princeton. During that moment, I became vividly aware of a world full of brokenness and hurt and of the risen and present Christ healing and reconciling in its midst. Like St. Paul’s experience of Christ on the road to Damascus, this encounter with Christ stopped me in my tracks. After sharing the experience with the Rev. Jean Smith, Assistant Rector at Trinity Church, and after a period of prayer and discernment, I began the ordination process in the Diocese of New Jersey.
With the consent of the Diocese bishop, the Rt. Rev. G.P. Mellick Belshaw, I delayed my seminary education until completing my Princeton Ph.D. During my remaining years at Princeton, I gained important experience and training for ordained ministry through work with youth at Trinity Church and ministry internships at St. Luke’s, Metuchen; Seaman’s Church Institute in the Port of New York and New Jersey; and the urban team ministry in Camden. Several ordained and lay members of the church blessed me with mentorship, including the Rev. Jean Smith (Trinity); the Rev. E. Walton Zelley, Jr, the Rev. Susan Blue, and Ms. Pearl Gatling (St. Luke’s), a onetime leader of Black Voices of Metuchen; the Rev. Barbara Crafton (Seaman’s Church Institute); the Rev. Martin Gutwein (Camden team ministry); the Rt. Rev. Fredrick Borsch (Princeton Chapel dean at the time), and Canon Barbara Borsch (New Jersey Commission on Ministry). I interwove my ministry internship experiences and Ph.D. research at Princeton, while also completing initial courses in theology and pastoral care at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Theological Education
In the fall of 1989, I enrolled at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while also starting my post-doc in physics at MIT. I was blessed to have the Rev. Suzanne Radley Hiatt, one of the first 11 women ordained priest in the Episcopal Church and a wise, fearless, and intrepid advocate for justice within the church and society, as my advisor. I undertook Clinical Pastoral Education in urban ministry at the Church of the United Community, a multiracial, multidenominational church in the heart of Boston’s Roxbury community. That experience included mentoring youth through an in-school Al-Anon group for teens at the English High School in Jamaica Plain. With the support of my scientific mentors at MIT, I again interwove this theological/pastoral education with my research in theoretical physics.
Ordination, Curacy, and St. Francis
I was ordained deacon at Trinity Cathedral in Trenton, New Jersey in the spring of 1993 and priest at Christ and St. Luke’s Church in Norfolk by the Rt. Rev. Frank Vest in January 1994. I served as Curate at Christ and St. Luke’s at the same time that I assumed my faculty and research duties at Old Dominion University and Jefferson Lab. I was, again, blessed by wise mentorship and role modeling from the Revs. James Sell and Win Lewis, Rector and Associate Rector, respectively, at Christ and St. Luke’s. My ministry at that time focused on work with youth in the primarily Black community of the Park Place, as well as community organizing and advocacy for the Park Place neighborhood. My development as a priest, pastor, and social justice advocate was indelibly shaped by my experience in Park Place and by the close friendships I developed with several adult Park Place residents, including Ms. Inez Combre and Ms. Pat Mabina Wilson. In my youth ministry, I worked closely with Ms. Allison Berry, Ms. Pat King, and the Rev. Julia Tucker from Christ and St. Luke’s. One legacy of that work was the establishment of the Mission of the Holy Spirit, currently under the direction of lay pastor Keith Josey, which has continued to serve youth of color in Norfolk to this day.
Along the way, I also explored the spiritual tradition and ethos of St. Francis, whose commitment to simplicity and joy and kinship with the natural world spoke to my own sensibilities as a young adult. I found a community of kindred spirits in the Third Order of the Society of St. Francis, and I became a professed “Tertiary” in 1994.
Mid 1990’s – today
My subsequent work as priest took me to a variety of parishes, in tandem with the evolution of my scientific career: St. Paul’s in Seattle; St. Peters and St. Andrew’s in Providence, Rhode Island; Iglesia Episcopal Todos Los Santos/All Saints Episcopal Church in the Highland Park Neighborhood of Los Angeles; St. Dunstan’s Church in Madison, Wisconsin; St. John’s Church in Northampton, Massachusetts; and presently at All Saints Episcopal Church in South Hadley, Massachusetts. At All Saints Highland Park, I developed an intergenerational youth ministry with Latinx youth, helping both to engage youth from the community in service, prayer, and community-building and to raise up youth leaders in the church. Most notably, the Rev. Nancy Frausto — the first Latina to have grown up in the Episcopal Church and become a priest — was one of the youth leaders I was blessed to mentor. At All Saints South Hadley, I now serves as a Priest Associate. My early work in Norfolk has recently come full circle, as I have joined a community of ordained and lay Episcopalians providing guidance and support for the Mission of the Holy Spirit.