times of my life involved being part of a eucharistic community
engaged in social change. I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri in
the era of segregation. We were members of Trinity Church,
an inner city inter-racial Episcopal Church where, among other
things, I experienced the tragedy of seeing a black child die
after being hit by a car, because the hospital where the poor
were treated was thirteen miles away.
Martin Luther King's vision of the beloved community profoundly spoke to us and my older sister and other members of the church went to Selma and Montgomery to help overthrow segregation.
In high school, I was a member of another inner city Episcopal
Church in Rochester, New York. There, I became a member of
a Diocesan Youth group that helped organize the anti-war
movement in the city. I went to the University of Michigan
where I majored in English Literature but also spent a good
amount of my time working with different social change
groups including the United Farmworkers, the Catholic Worker
Movement, and the movement for Human Rights in Latin
America. During this time Dorothy Day and Paulo Freire
became two of my important mentors.
I went to graduate school in American Studies so that I could
understand more about the relationship between culture and
social change in the United States. I ended up dropping out
when it felt like I was getting farther and farther away from
any community base which could make use of what I was
learning. It was in this period that, inspired by the work of my
local parish priest at St. Andrew's church, the Rev. Jim Lewis,
and by the challenges of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, I
came to conclude that the place I could contribute most to
social change was through the church. This decision led me
to Yale Divinity School where a lot of my time was spent trying to understand what a liberation theology for middle class people might look like.
After seminary I came to the Church of the Incarnation which had been organized by members of St. Andrew's Church the same year I went off to seminary, because they wanted a church where lay people were more engaged in ministry. I've now been at the Church of the Incarnation for over 18 years. Here I've found a place where people take seriously the attempt to discern where and how the Holy Spirit is speaking to us individually and collectively. Here I experience the fullness of life that comes with living in community, going through all of life with a group of people sharing our lives and struggles. Here I've found a place from which I can continue to work to realize the beloved community in the broader world. I'm very, very grateful.
