FALL 2017
After Class Ecumenical friendships blossom in the GTU
The Church in the West CDSP nurtures a region with much to teach
A Leading Liturgist Louis Weil takes a long look back
Letter from the Dean
Front cover photo: Jed Dearing, a first-year student at CDSP, takes his shot. Photo by Thomas Minczeski
I grew up and went to college in Oregon, moved east to attend seminary and begin my ministry, and I enjoyed a bi-coastal career before returning to California in 2010 to become president and dean of CDSP. I’ve had an opportunity to immerse myself in Episcopal churches and other institutions both east and west, and to experience what makes the church in the western United States distinctive. On page 2, we explore CDSP’s relationship with the church in the West, how it has shaped us, and how we have helped to shape it. We’ve spoken with alumni from Nebraska to Navajoland and current students from southern California to eastern Oregon to hear their perspectives and learn about their challenges. The experience of the church in the West has never been as relevant to the wider church as it is right now. As the spiritual and religious culture in America shifts, as parishes and their clergy and lay leaders prepare for a future of changing contexts in which they minister, and as bishops seek new ways to form clergy, Episcopalians are recognizing that we have long faced these challenges in the West, and that the attitudes we have adopted and the lessons we have learned may be valuable to the church in other parts of the country. One of the great advantages we enjoy on our campus in Berkeley is the proximity of the other member schools of the Graduate Theological Union. CDSP alums know how enriching it is to take courses with members of other denominations and other faiths. What may be less obvious is that relationships begun in classroom discussions can blossom into lasting friendships. On page 10, we explore the social side of life in the GTU: how basketball games, pizza nights and other interactions become a source of support for students as they pursue their studies, and
how CDSP is taking the lead in bringing GTU students closer together. A seminary is only as good as its faculty. Now and throughout our history we have been blessed to have excellent teachers and scholars at CDSP. Few have made a deeper mark than the Rev. Dr. Louis Weil, who has taught generations of Episcopal priests and shaped the prayer life of our whole church through his teaching, writing and his contributions to the 1979 Prayer Book. The profile on page 15, reflects on a long and, as he tells it, unlikely ministry influenced by events he never saw coming. As you may have heard, earlier this year Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, an alumna and former staff member of CDSP, became the first black woman in the Episcopal Church’s history to become a diocesan bishop. My wife Brenda and I were delighted to be among the large contingent of CDSP alums and friends who attended her festive consecration on the Butler University campus in April as she became the eleventh bishop of the Diocese of Indianapolis. You will find a photo of Bishop Jennifer and Bishop Gayle Harris ’81 ’02 and Bishop Barbara Harris in the Alumni News section, along with other news from alums around the church. In June, the Rev. Richard Hogue ’16 took part in a two-week conference for seminarians and new clergy at Canterbury Cathedral. On page 21, he offers an insightful reflection on the similarities he discerned between his pilgrimage to England and his years at CDSP. Finally, I want to mention that CDSP received an award this early fall season from Interfaith Power and Light for our initiatives as a seminary responding to climate change. The award acknowledges our large installation of solar energy panels, and courses and conferences we have held to highlight the importance of climate change and justice. I hope you enjoy this issue of Crossings.
— T HE V ERY R EV . W. M ARK R ICHARDSON , P H D Dean and President
Photo by Thomas Minczeski
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Eyes on the West
An Unlikely Pioneer Louis Weil took a winding path to become a preeminent liturgist
The Episcopal Church in the West has been dealing for decades with challenges now facing the entire church. CDSP and the region it serves have hard-won wisdom to share
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Invigorating the Church
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Books, papers and an historic consecration lead the news
Friends on Holy Hill The relationships CDSP students form with colleagues in the Graduate Theological Union may start in the classroom, but they often go deeper
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Crossings FALL 2017
Common Threads Lessons learned in Berkeley are reinforced in Canterbury
Isaiah Brokenleg listens to a presentation at Community Night.
The Very Rev. W. Mark Richardson, Dean and President Editorial: Canticle Communications Photography: Bailey Lankford, Thomas Minczeski, Ryan Sam, Ryan Soderlin, Carol Waller, Richard Wheeler Design: Barbara Nishi Graphic Design Crossings is published by Church Divinity School of the Pacific 2451 Ridge Road, Berkeley, CA 94709-1211 Š Church Divinity School of the Pacific, all rights reserved. For additional print copies, e-mail communications@cdsp.edu. Crossings also is published as a pdf online, at www.cdsp.edu/news/crossings, with archive copies available. We want to know what you think of our magazine. Please send your comments, story ideas and suggestions to communications@cdsp.edu
Go Green with CDSP: Email communications@cdsp.edu to subscribe to our monthly email newsletter, and stay connected on Facebook at /cdspfans, on Twitter @cdsptweets, and on Instagram @cdspstudent. PRINTED ON RECYCLED PAPER
At Home in the
The Episcopal Church in the western United States is ‌
Photo by Bailey Lankford
BY
JIM NAUGHTON
CDSP shapes a church that shapes the future 3
Sunday night compline at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle, which draws hundreds of unchurched young people who drape themselves over the backs of pews and the steps of the altar to listen to sublime Anglican choral music.
The Rev. Canon Cathlena Plummer ’14 postponing an appointment to deal with unusual flash flooding that inundated the basement of All Saints in Farmington, New Mexico, a part of the Diocese of Navajoland.
A tiny church in Taft, California, in the Diocese of San Joaquin, that draws half a dozen people on a Sunday but feeds 50 people dinner every night of the week. Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, where 400 people turn out to do yoga on the labyrinth, even though there are numerous yoga studios nearby.
St. James Church in Oakland, the church of Gold Rush era railroad magnates and Wells Fargo executives, which now tends a community garden and offers a bilingual service on Sunday morning.
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“The church in the West” is as complex an entity as “the West” itself. Yet there is no question that the Episcopal Church looks and thinks and breathes and moves a little differently in the vast and sometimes sparsely settled land that stretches between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean. Geological realities, patterns of conquest and migration, clashes of cultures, an ethos of second chances and a passion for self-invention have shaped the western church into a distinctive whole. And as churches around the country contemplate a future in which they may be smaller, poorer and less culturally influential, the experience of churches in the West that have met these challenges since their foundation have become increasingly relevant to the wider church. “When the rubber meets the road, the institutions that were created and developed in the past and primarily in the eastern and southern parts of the country don’t always translate very well to the West,” says the Rev. 4
Photo by Ryan Sam
The Rev. Canon Cathlena Plummer stands before a painting of a NavajoChristian healing ceremony in All Saints Church, Farmington, New Mexico.
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Anna Carmichael ’08, canon to the ordinary in the Diocese of San Joaquin. “While we may not be able to check the boxes in the same ways, we are creating whole new boxes to be checked.” Church Divinity School of the Pacific, the only Episcopal seminary on the West Coast, has both shaped and been shaped by the Episcopal Church in the West. It forms leaders from dioceses as different as Los Angeles and Spokane; attracts students from across the church with an appetite for creating new ways of forming Christian communities and sharing God’s love with those who find the church uncongenial, unresponsive, or unnecessary; and maintains an ongoing dialog with bishops and grassroots church leaders who understand the ways in which traditional means of shaping clergy must be supplemented by new approaches. “The church in the West is continuously recreating itself,” says the Very Rev. W. Mark Richardson, a native of Oregon. “There is a continual conversation about the tradition as we have received it and the incredibly varied context in which our students will minister. And there is a second conversation about how we can best prepare church leaders when traditional methods are impractical. I am impressed with the resilience here among the student body, and with the eagerness to explore new ways of meeting classic aspects of being the gathered community.”
A Smaller Footprint As the church looks west for answers and inspiration, Episcopalians in the region are eager to have their experiences properly understood. In October, Ann Marie Hardin, who is in her third year of the fouryear low-residency Master of Divinity program, drove five hours through mostly unsettled country from her home outside Pendleton, Oregon, to the Diocese of Eastern Oregon’s annual convention in Bend. Distance and isolation are defining aspects of life in
Photo by Ryan Soderlin
much of the western church, she says. “It is not unusual to have 60 miles between churches and those churches will be fairly small,” says Hardin, who teaches at a local community college. “An average Sunday attendance of 60 is considered large in this part of the country.” In dioceses of small and scattered churches, ecumenical cooperation is essential, and clergy salaries tend to be small, she says. But the challenge to Christians goes deeper. “In the West, you have to depend on your neighbors whether you like them or not,” says Bishop Brian Thom ’87 of Idaho. “And you have to keep a shovel in your car, because you never know when you might have to dig them out.” Even in most large western cities, the church’s footprint is small, and its influence sometimes slight. “We lack the whole apparatus of establishment,” says the Rev. Susanna Singer, associate professor of ministry development. “And not just building and endowments. We lack the psychological apparatus of establishment as well. “It’s the kind of sense of the ‘of courseness.’ Well of course the church is an integral part of every community. Of course the church is a natural collaborator. Of course the church is the right place for all right-thinking middle
class people to want to go. The West never had that.” The church in the West had people who were “spiritual but not religious” before that phrase was coined. “Quite often, people in the community that I served would talk about how a hiking trail or a river or a mountain were their cathedral,” Carmichael says. “Living on the Plains, in the mountains or on the coast, you have a sense of your smallness compared to the grandeur of creation, and that inspires humility and awe,” says the Rev. Liz Easton ’09, canon to the ordinary in the Diocese of Nebraska. “The attitude in much of the West is not ‘I hate the church,’ but ‘I don’t care,’” Richardson says. “And yet there is a real longing for a spiritual aspect of self and culture, what we might call the depth dimension of being human, the quest for meaning and integrity of life. Here in the West, this often takes various forms of personal enhancement. The contribution we can make is to raise up the social dimension of the spiritual life, and the service dimension, which claims ‘You aren’t fully yourself until your community around you is fed and clothed and educated. Your spirituality isn’t complete until you find fulfillment in that.’”
5 The Rev. Liz Easton ’09, canon to the ordinary in the Diocese of Nebraska, takes a walk in downtown Omaha.
“Living on the Plains, in the mountains or on the coast, you have a sense of your smallness compared to the grandeur of creation, and that inspires humility and awe …” —THE REV. LIZ EASTON ’09
Photo by Ryan Sam
The Lord’s Prayer in Navajo hangs in All Saints Church, Farmington, New Mexico.
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The church in the West ministers largely to people who came west “and brought with them a penchant for self-invention,” says the Rev. Eric Metoyer ’11, associate for congregational ministries and canon to the ordinary pro tem for the Diocese of California “And that is true whether you are talking about the first white settlers or the Summer of Love.” The Rev. Ricardo Avila ’10, rector at St. Luke’s in Las Gatos, California, moved to the Bay Area from the upper Midwest. “I lived in San Francisco for 18 years,” he says, “and it is definitely a place people come to from other places so they can be more openly themselves. “I came to be more gay and more Latino. That’s what I told people.” Yet, Avila says, despite a reputation for improvisation, the Episcopal Church in the West has not adapted well to most minority populations. “It is still a white church,” he says, “and you shouldn’t pretend to be something you’re not. That said, we have to get beyond lip service.” Some dioceses are beginning to heed that call. “The church in Los Angeles operated in a few different ways than my home church in Tennessee,” says
Joey Courtney, a third-year MDiv student at CDSP. “For one, I felt that there is more of an emphasis on enculturation. I attended St. Mary’s, Mariposa, in Koreatown and we sang songs in Japanese, Spanish and English. This was my first time ever hearing the Eucharistic prayer in a language other than English.” For all its distinctiveness, the western church has captured the interest of many who had once overlooked it not because it is tenacious and inventive, but because its experience doing more with less, working for change from the margins and sustaining itself in the face of hardships is suddenly relevant to the larger church.
“I attended St. Mary’s, Mariposa, in Koreatown and we sang songs in Japanese, Spanish and English. This was my first time ever hearing the Eucharistic prayer in a language
The Rev. Eric Metoyer ’11, canon to the ordinary pro tempore in the Diocese of California, participated in San Francisco’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day March.
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other than English.” — JOEY COURTNEY
“The churches in the West have long been living within a reality that the rest of the church is only now coming to terms with,” says Easton, who grew up in Seattle. “Fewer people, fewer resources, churches struggling to keep their doors open, clergy struggling to put together a living from their ministry. These aren’t new challenges in the West.”
Understanding the Context Many of the leaders of the western church are CDSP alums. Thom remembers showing up in Berkeley as “a kid from a white bread suburb of Portland who had eaten Chinese food maybe five times.” His experience there “broke things open,” he says of being immersed in a cosmopolitan city, in a neighborhood at the gates of a major university, in a seminary community of students from around the country and from the Anglican provinces on the Pacific Rim. “I learned that it wasn’t just about my little parish church down the street,” he says. CDSP also introduced the Rev. Merry Chan Ong, now rector at the Church of Our Saviour in Oakland, to
Photo by Bailey Lankford
the wider church in ways she still appreciates. Chan Ong arrived at CDSP with an MDiv from a seminary in the Philippines, but needed grounding in Anglican worship before she could begin her ministry. “Most of the time, I was the only Chinese person in a class, she says. “But because of the way the courses were taught, with more group work, and more sharing in the classroom than I was used to, it was very inclusive. The faculty didn’t say, ‘You should go this way, the right path,’ but instead encouraged us to apply what we were learning to our own cultures and contexts.” CDSP’s pedagogical approach is grounded in the realization that after seminary, clergy and lay leaders will be immersed in the shifting realities of the American religious landscape, and will constantly be learning new things—whether they want to or not. “I am trying to continue to adapt my courses to the reality that I see every time I go out and meet with people,” Singer says. “I am adding a module called The Difficult Call on just how hard to do this ministry effectively, how it is to be church in such a secular atmosphere.” Three years ago, CDSP began offering low-residency programs for the Master of Divinity and the Certificate in Anglican Studies. “The entire low-residence program is truly an inspired blessing, I would even say godsend, to the western church,” Hardin says. “They put in a lot of time and effort and passion in figuring out how to do this new thing and that really tells me that they understand the context of the western church in a way that is unique. I really think they understand the context in which we live.” Two years ago, the Center for Anglican Learning and Leadership (CALL) under the direction of Jennifer Snow, director of extended learning and assistant professor in practical theology, began tailoring more of its offerings to the needs of candidates in local formation and initiated training partnerships with dioceses as diverse as Minnesota, Nevada and Washington, D.C. “Thanks to CDSP, we are not giving up on educated clergy just because we are doing local formation,” says Bishop Gretchen Rehberg of the Diocese of Spokane, which has numerous students in CDSP’s programs. “The CALL program that you can get online, frankly, doesn’t assume you have a college degree. I have people who don’t have college
“In dioceses of small and scattered churches, ecumenical cooperation is essential …” — ANN MARIE HARDIN 7
degrees who are being formed for ministry. I need something that isn’t a flat MDiv online program. “We can’t say one size fits all in the West. With CDSP, I know we can get what we need. I feel like the CDSP faculty and staff are responsive. I sometimes hear that seminaries aren’t listening to us, I never felt like that when I called up CDSP.” In 2016, CDSP revised its curriculum to focus on what the Rev. Dr. Ruth Meyers, academic dean, describes as “the core Christian concepts of mission, discipleship and evangelism,” and “the core leadership skills of contextual awareness, critical reflection and public conversation.” The curriculum now
Ann Marie Hardin, a thirdyear student in the lowresidence MDiv program, teaches at a community college near Pendleton, Oregon.
For all its distinctiveness, the western church has captured the interest of many … its experience doing more with less, working for change from the margins and sustaining itself in the face of hardships is suddenly relevant to the larger church.
Church Divinity School of the Pacific s Fall 2017 C R O S S I N G S
They are learning ways that our own piety as Christians communicates in a generously interactive attitude toward surrounding communities.”
complicated. Clergy and lay ministers have to figure out how to cross those boundaries in a way that is really thoughtful, really prayerful and really engaging.”
Lessons Learned What, then, are some of the lessons CDSP has learned and that the church in the West has to teach to a church laboring to be reborn? Here are a few:
Jamie Nelson MTS ’15, a native of Washington who attended college in Idaho and studied theology in Oregon, is CDSP’s admissions manager.
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includes a required course on community organizing so that students will graduate with the tools necessary to learn about any context into which God might call them. The results of these initiatives in the classroom, in the curriculum and in delivery systems are already making themselves felt. “I really do sense a shift among our students,” Richardson says. “There is a much greater mission-conscious understanding of the role of the clergy in congregations, and an openness to what they are hearing and seeing and participating in outside the walls of the seminary. Their preaching is pointed toward facilitating the mission of the congregation in the neighborhood.
Attitude is important. “Embedded in DNA of those who came west is that you can put things down and move on,” Rehberg says. “You try what works and if it doesn’t work you move on. “There is that sense as well that small doesn’t mean bad. Small town, small village, small rural congregations. Small has a sense of grit to it, a little bit of spunk and a willingness to say you don’t have to be a church of 200, you can be a church of 15 and do amazing missional work.” Ecumenism is not just a concept. “In rural communities in particular, we do mission and ministry and sometimes even worship in a multidenominational context,” Carmichael says. “In one location where I ministered, none of us had enough kids to do any youth ministry on our own, but if we combined suddenly we had 15 or 20. Then the challenge was, ‘How do we find appropriate curriculum and resources?’ “If you add interfaith communities into the group, it gets more
Bivocational ministry is not the future, but the present. “It’s the reality of the West for many of our students,” says Jamie Nelson MTS ’15, CDSP’s admissions manager. “If we are to maintain a spiritual community in many places, the reality is we cannot sustain a salary for a fulltime priest. So the question is, ‘What is the best way to do that?’ In the town where I grew up, the priest was a commercial fisherwoman from the community. The deacon lived on a boat. They already understood the economics and the culture.” Local knowledge and cultural sensitivity is essential. “The ways in which we’ve had success have involved a hyper focus on their context,” says Metoyer of his work in the Diocese of California. “It has taken the church a long time to recognize that plain stained glass and white walls are an uneasy fit with ethnic communities,” he says. At Our Saviour, Oakland, for example, Chan Ong ministers to Chinese people from all over the world, and has to tailor her approach accordingly. “The British influence is still felt in Hong Kong. Their
“In the West, you have to depend on your neighbors whether you like them or not. And you have to keep a shovel in your car, because you never know when you might have to dig them out.” — BISHOP BRIAN THOM ’87
Photo by Carol Waller
thinking is western. I have Chinese from provinces. I have to approach them differently,” she says. “Also, Americans married to Chinese. Or American-born Chinese. That’s another approach. In this kind of ministry, the key thing is to know and understand the culture of the individual; then you know how to approach them.” The church has sins to repent. “In middle school, I realized that most of my friends were from different denominations and some were not going to church,” says Plummer, whose father, Steven, was the first Navajo bishop of the Church in Navajoland until his death in 2005. “I learned that in the past my church had some aspects of pushing away Navajo culture, of not accepting us. They pushed us out of our land, sent our kids to boarding schools, tried to wipe out our language.” Plummer is canon for communications for the Church in Navajoland and recently became vicar of Good Shepherd Mission in Fort Defiance, Arizona. “At CDSP I had to explain the history we went through with colonialisms,” she says. “I was always called on to explain our spirituality. I think we are slowly getting on track with the wider church now. But for all these years we were trying to explain who we are as Navajo people.”
Cathlamet, Washington, his mother worked for the only licensed child care provider in the county. The center was founded by St. James Episcopal Church in Cathlamet, a congregation that, in Nelson’s youth, drew perhaps 15 people on a Sunday. “They knew they were too small to operate it themselves,” Nelson says. “But they had the facility and they got it started.” The effort is emblematic of the spirit of the western church, he says. “It wasn’t a production, just humble people getting together and making church happen.” Don’t forget who this is about. “We really are in a very unchurched area, so you need to be able to clearly articulate, ‘Why Jesus?’” Rehberg says. “And since people here often prefer to meet God in nature by themselves, you need to be able to articulate ‘Why the church?’ Our people need to be able to say ‘Why does a community of faith really matter?’” This is still possible. “The truth that where two or three are gathered, Jesus is present, is known in a really deep way in a lot of our small communities,” Easton says. “Following Jesus and making him known doesn’t take a lot of money.”
Bishop Brian Thom of Idaho ’87 stands his ground during the Trailing of the Sheep Festival in Ketchum. Photo by Carol Waller
A savvy, spirit-led church can still have an outsized impact. When Nelson was growing up in the small town of
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There’s a social side to life in the GTU
Extra
Kelly Miguens drives on Shantharaj Thomas. Both are students at the Jesuit School of Theology.
Photo by Thomas Minczeski
JIM NAUGHTON
acurricular BY
It would be a bit of a stretch to say that Aaron Klinefelter, a third-year student from the Diocese of Southern Ohio, came to CDSP for the basketball. He came, in large part, because CDSP’s membership in the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) offered him an opportunity to form relationships with students from other faiths. Those relationships led him to basketball.
“I got to know a Jesuit seminarian in my New Testament class,” says Klinefelter, who recently became associate for children and family ministries at Trinity Church in Menlo Park. “They have a Saturday basketball game up the street, and he said that I was welcome to join them.” The game, held at Codornices Park, includes players from GTU schools, mostly Jesuits, students from the University of California and people from the neighborhood. “It is by far the most international basketball game I have ever played,” Klinefelter says. “People from Korea, Singapore, various countries in Africa. It’s this really funky mix of people at all kinds of skill levels who play a pretty competitive game of basketball, but also one in which my 10-year-old son can play and not feel he is going to get run over by a bunch of big guys. Plus, you get to have interesting conversations on the sidelines about the kind of work people are doing.” The academic advantages of CDSP’s membership in the GTU are numerous, obvious and articulated in many a recruitment brochure. What might be less obvious is that the way in which students from the eight member schools of the GTU become part of one another’s lives during their years in Berkeley. “They are the people I pass on the street,” Klinefelter says. “I run into them when I am walking my dog, taking my kids to school, and it extends into worship. Last year I did
my field education at All Souls Parish, which is just down the hill, and it was not uncommon to look out on a Sunday and see friends from Pacific Lutheran [Theological Seminary] and Starr King [Unitarian Universalist School for the Ministry] sitting out there on a regular basis, and occasionally some Jesuits [from the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University] or PSR [Pacific School of Religion].” Many seminaries belong to consortiums, says the Rev. Andrew Hybl CAS ’12, CDSP’s dean of students, “but often those are maybe six schools spread out across a city, not across the street from each other as we are here. “That’s a big draw. It’s why some people come to school here to begin with.” Claire Atkins, for instance. “I am passionate about interfaith studies,” says Atkins, a second-year student from the Diocese of Nebraska. “And I wanted that to be part of my everyday life. Here, I have the opportunity to explore other faiths academically, to spend the day in the GTU library, to have friends from other traditions, and that is all right here within walking distance. These are some of the reasons I chose CDSP.” Students in CDSP’s Master of Divinity program are required to take ministry, theology and liturgy courses at the seminary to prepare them for the General Ordination Exams and ministry in the Episcopal Church. But through a faculty sharing
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Photo by Thomas Minczeski
“The atmosphere here is one that tries to remind us 12
that whatever denomination we are in, there is a bigger world around us.”
arrangement, almost every CDSP student takes classes with students from Pacific Lutheran (PLTS), and the curriculum requires each MDiv student to take at least one course in another faith tradition. The GTU also facilitates cross-registration among its member schools, so CDSP students have access to hundreds of course offerings each semester. “The classroom is sort of the initial point of departure for your relationships,” says Ed Stewart, who hopes to complete his MDiv at CDSP in the spring. “It serves as sort of a launching pad for other types of interpersonal experiences across the denominational lines. The atmosphere here is one that tries to remind us that whatever denomination we are in, there is a bigger world around us.” Stewart may be more aware than most students of the importance of learning from Y JIM NAUGHTON multiple traditions. AfterBtwo decades of working on transportation and education issues in government relations and legislative affairs jobs, he enrolled at the Pacific School of Religion (PSR) because he wanted to stop “counting votes and counting dollars and find ways to think about the moral and ethical dimensions of the work I’d been doing.” While at PSR, Stewart had been attending a Methodist church in Oakland “not because I had a Wesleyan orientation, but because it
— E D S T E WA R T The Rev. Randal Gardner, dean of chapel, (rear, right) joins “staff meeting” at La Val’s Pizza.
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“It’s unique to come into this little GTU bubble where you can put aside all of the preconceptions that you have about people’s religions and really learn from them.” — CLAIRE ATKINS
was diverse.” But then a series of events—the departure of a pastor whom he admired, a field education assignment at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland, an experience of transcendence during compline at St. Paul’s, Oakland, and a liturgics class taught by CDSP’s academic dean, the Rev. Dr. Ruth Meyers—led him to enter the catechumenate and join the Episcopal Church. “You will get a diversity of people and diversity of perspective here that you wouldn’t get if CDSP were completely isolated from the other seminaries in our community,” Stewart says. Students say courses on the Bible and preaching are particularly fertile ground for ecumenical relationships. “Where I see the most crossover has been in scripture classes,” says Lisa Cathelyn, a Catholic lay woman studying at the Jesuit School of Theology who has taken classes with students from CDSP. “What has been interesting about that is certain people will really emphasize how they would approach a text if you were going to preach it, and others who might be doing chaplaincy work talk about how they would use it as a form of prayer, and maybe someone who is doing academic research will talk about it in relationship to the Hebrew bible. That can begin some really rich conversations.” “I come from a low church tradition and the classes I have taken at CDSP have given
me much more love and respect for high church traditions, and maybe how I can draw on that,” says Courtney Geibert of PLTS. “I had amazing classmates and I really valued their insights in the classroom and those classmates are now friends who I can meet for ice cream or coffee.” Perhaps the primary opportunity for CDSP students to meet peers from other GTU schools outside of the classroom occurs on Thursday nights at “staff meeting.” The “staff” involved in this longstanding CDSP tradition consists of whomever show up at La Val’s Pizza, which is just around the corner from CDSP, and the “meeting” consists of eating, drinking and socializing. Students from CDSP, JST, PSR and PLTS are the most frequent attendees. “I have made a lot of friends there,” Atkins says. “People are very open to conversation, and I hop from table to table.” When seminarians from different traditions are getting to know one another, the conversation focuses most “on stories, on our individual journeys,” she says. “It’s unique to come into this little GTU bubble where you can put aside all of the preconceptions that you have about people’s religions and really learn from them.” Hybl says the desire among CDSP students for relationships with others in the GTU has been especially high in the last two years, and the seminary is responding. Each CDSP
PLTS students Caitlyn Melillo and Courtney Geibert flank Claire Atkins.
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that we could be the ones to show hospitality. CDSP has physical assets to host these things thanks to Denniston Refectory and the St. Margaret’s Courtyard. It really is a community organizing effort to get people together in one space.” Some students, meanwhile, have made maintaining the friendships that began in class a part of their everyday life. Cathelyn lives across the street from Nichols Hall, an apartment building one block from CDSP’s campus that is owned by the seminary, so she sees her CDSP friends whether she makes it to staff meeting or not. “We talk about everything from
“We talk about … what it is like in a church when women are lifted up and invested in,” she says. “That has been encouraging, but a little bit of
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an internal struggle for me as a Catholic.” — L I S A C AT H E L Y N
Photo by Thomas Minczeski
Aaron Klinefelter of CDSP contests a shot by Joshua Peters of the Jesuit School of Theology in a game at Codornices Park.
class now has a social chair. The seminary hosted a Halloween party (after the Crossings publication deadline, so, alas, no photos) and is working on other ideas including a GTUwide event for students of color. “They were very clear they wanted to deepen the relationships
among students across the GTU on a social level,” Hybl says. “There isn’t too much time for just socializing in class. There’s not much chance to get to know each other on a human level and that is something our students are really wanting right now. So we decided
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how to fund a seminary education— theirs versus mine—to what it is like in a church when women are lifted up and invested in,” she says. “That has been encouraging, but a little bit of an internal struggle for me as a Catholic.” Her CDSP friends have supported her in that struggle. Cathelyn took her preaching class at CDSP, and when it was her turn to preach at a weekly liturgy at the Jesuit School of Theology, “all the CDSP people who were in that class came as a show of support. “That,” she says, “was cool.”
The Professor Of Common Prayer Louis Weil looks back on an unlikely career BY
L U S TA N T O N L E Ó N
The Rev. Dr. Louis Weil, eminent liturgist, scholar and teacher, has been a major influence on how generations of students and clergy understand and practice their Christian faith. He’d be the first to tell you he never intended to be a liturgist. In fact, he never intended to be a Christian. He was a Jew who fell in love with Jesus. “Even as a Jew I was attracted to Jesus because I considered Jesus to be a Jew. I really did not associate Jesus with Christianity,” Weil says. “I know that is hard to believe. I do well with Jesus, but I don’t do well with a lot of Christians. I consider myself a Jew and a Christian.” A lot of Weil’s faith journey has been, well, hard to believe. “Frankly, although I find myself constantly in awe and thankfulness for my journey, I do understand that it has been in many ways remarkable,” Weil says. “For me, it is the foundation of my very strong faith in Providence: God is working in all our lives, often in ways we do not understand at the time, and which, by grace, we come to understand with profound thanksgiving since we know we have not done this ourselves.” Weil taught full time at CDSP from 1988 until 2009, and is the
seminary’s James F. Hodges and Harold and Rita Haynes Professor Emeritus of Liturgics. He continued to teach seminars until about two years ago when he began experiencing a series of serious medical issues. As a show of appreciation to the institution where he has spent so much of his storied career, Weil has faithfully given to CDSP over many years and has become a member of the Gibbs Society, which honors those who have included the seminary in their estate plans. He also has made CDSP the beneficiary of his life insurance policy provided by the Church Pension Fund. “I pray for the seminary every day,” Weil says. “I want them to do well. I want to continue the support because I believe the potential there is enormous, and good things are happening.” Although old age and illness have slowed him, Weil’s sense of humor remains intact. “My usual line with friends here is that when one gets to be 150 years old, one has to expect medical problems,” says Weil, who at 82 is one of the most influential liturgists of our time. A prophetic thinker and
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Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori MDiv ’94 was among Weil’s students.
prolific writer, he was a significant contributor to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and has written more than 100 articles and numerous books, including “Sacraments and Liturgy: The Outward Signs,” “A Theology of Worship,” and “Liturgical Sense.” Clergy all over the country—probably all over the world—still read and refer to dogeared copies of “Liturgy for Living,” a book, still in print, that Weil co-authored with Charles P. Price in 1979. “We were an unlikely pairing: a well-known and admired Evangelical with a
“I went to church with my aunt and decided I wanted to be baptized. I had no idea that would have any effect on me being a Jew. … My grandfather, who was persecuted in the pogroms of Tzar Alexander III, was deeply saddened.” — THE REV. DR. LOUIS WEIL
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card-carrying Anglo-Catholic,” Weil muses. If his health “doesn’t completely collapse,” Weil will write a third edition of “Liturgy for Living” at the request of Church Publishing with 150 pages on new issues, a project he has already begun. Born in Houston in 1935, Weil was the son of a Jewish father and a non-practicing Christian mother who later followed Weil to the Episcopal Church. Growing up in New Orleans, home to his father’s family, he was taunted in the public schools because he was Jewish. To escape the persecution, his parents enrolled him in Isidore Newman School, a private school that Weil considers “one of the great schools of America. It changed my life. Half of the student body was Jewish, so that was a non-issue.” During the summers, he and his mother would visit her family in Dallas. It was there that, as a high schooler, Weil joined the Baptist Church. “I went to church with my aunt and decided I wanted to be baptized,” Weil says. “I had no idea that would have any effect on
me being a Jew. When I went back to New Orleans, my grandfather, who was persecuted in the pogroms of Tsar Alexander III, was deeply saddened. I never would have done it if I had known it would hurt my grandfather.” Weil quickly discovered that the Baptist Church—at least the one he had joined— wasn’t for him. While a student at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, he was attending a Baptist church service when, “at some point, the preacher was preaching a very fundamentalist sermon. He had bought into the whole literalist thing. He said fossils were put in the ground by the devil to trick people. I realized I had made a mistake. I had a couple of friends who were Episcopalians. One day we passed by Canterbury House (a campus ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas) on the SMU campus and one of them said, ‘The Episcopalians have just finished their new chapel. Why don’t we go see it?’ They had built an incredibly beautiful chapel with the name St. Alban’s. “That was it; that settled it. I’ve always been drawn to beauty,” Weil says. “Later, my parents went on holiday and I decided I’d go visit Canterbury for a Sunday service. I literally hid behind the organ because I did not know what would happen in the service. I came out the door and said, ‘Father Junker, I need to talk to you about becoming an Episcopalian.’ He said, ‘Louis, isn’t this sudden?’ I said, ‘I’m coming home.’ For me, it was literally a life changing event.” He joined the Episcopal Church, but seminary wasn’t part of the picture because “I didn’t want to upset my Jewish family, and my mother thought seminary was a terrible idea.” One Advent Sunday of 1956, during Weil’s first term at Harvard, he decided to go to the Church of the Advent in Boston, where a visiting Franciscan was preaching on the Gospel story of the young rich man who asked Jesus what he must do to gain eternal life. When Jesus said he must give away all his earthly possessions and follow him, the young man went away. The second person cited in the sermon was St. Francis, who did not go away.
Weil says the preacher motioned to the congregation and said, ‘The third person is you,’ meaning all of us. He preached the homily directly to me that day. “I have a passionate belief in Providence. I don’t mean magic; I mean Providence. “This is very powerful stuff for me. I remember all of these incredible experiences. A door opened which I didn’t expect to open, and I just walked through it.” Weil went to General Theological Seminary where, after his middler year, he spent
Weil was considering pursuing a doctorate in the theology of the arts. It was Talley who changed his life by saying, “Why don’t you study the liturgy? Everything you love comes together there.”
a summer working in Puerto Rico. “When I returned for my third year of seminary, I received a letter from the bishop of Puerto Rico asking if I would consider coming back for one year,” he says. “The bishop was building up the clergy there. I thought, ‘what fun, that will be a lark.’ The people (at the Episcopal Church Center) in New York City would only pay for it if I went for three years. So I went, and later presumed I would be there for the rest of my life. I loved Puerto Rico and I loved Puerto Ricans.” Weil spent 10 years in Puerto Rico, serving six small churches and teaching at the newly-established Episcopal Seminary of the Caribbean near San Juan, which closed after about 15 years. While visiting the United States during a vacation, he decided to look into options for graduate study and visited his friend and colleague Dr. Thomas Julian Talley, professor of liturgics at General Seminary. Weil was considering pursuing a doctorate in the theology of the arts. It was Talley who changed his life by saying, “Why don’t you study the liturgy? Everything you love comes
“I’m coming home.” — THE REV. DR. LOUIS WEIL
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together there.” As to where to study, Talley thought the best place in the world was Institut Catholique in Paris. So in 1964, Weil headed to Paris, where he earned his doctorate in sacred theology. He returned to the United States in 1971 to teach liturgics at Nashotah House in Wisconsin, where he remained until 1988, when he joined the CDSP faculty. “CDSP was a gift from God,” Weil says, with some emotion. “I still thank God that I came to CDSP and was able to teach what I wanted to teach.” Weil had resigned from Nashotah House after its board of trustees took a very strong stand against the ordination of women. “This was the trustee meeting in May 1987,” he says. “I went home and poured myself a double scotch, and realized that I could not stay there. The next morning my first phone call was from the dean at CDSP saying, ‘Would you consider 18
“I have enormous gratitude to CDSP. And the students I’m in contact with are grateful for the formation they received there.” — THE REV. DR. LOUIS WEIL
coming here?’ He had no idea what had happened at Nashotah House the night before. I had my world fall apart on Friday evening and suddenly a new door opened.” More than one door opened. A week or two after CDSP called, Yale invited Weil to teach there. “Being a snob, I thought I’d certainly go to Yale,” Weil recalls. I thought, ‘I’ll go to CDSP to interview but I’ll never go there.’ Of course, I loved it. Every interview was collegial, and the weather was beautiful. I went to Yale a few weeks later
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and they had the worst ice storm they had had in 30 years. I found the whole experience at Yale very offputting. A very distinguished Roman Catholic liturgist kept saying, ‘Come to Yale. They will leave you alone. You don’t want to go to California.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to be left alone. I want to work alone, but I want colleagues.’” So he went to CDSP. “Those of us who love the place, and I do love it, have enormous gratitude for CDSP,” Weil says. “They saved my life. I was in despair at Nashotah House, given the stance of trustees against the ordination of women. The very fact that CDSP called me was lifesaving. I have enormous gratitude to CDSP. And the students I’m in contact with are grateful for the formation they received there.” Weil is a founding member of Societas Liturgica, the International Anglican Liturgical Consultation, and the North American Academy of Liturgy, of which he is a past president. He has served four terms as a member of the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music of the Episcopal Church since 1985. In 2012, he was awarded the North American Academy of Liturgy’s highest honor, the Berakah Award. The citation read, in part: “Relishing the Feast, you know the taste and fragrance of Christ in many cultures, sounding the deep waters of Baptism. The world has been your classroom, the ecumenical Church your care, the surprise of God your idiom, the gracious cadence of prayer your music, wit and good theology for worshipping assemblies your style.… For your life and work, this Academy gives thanks and praise.” “By the grace of God,” Weil says, “I’ve had doors opened I never dreamed of.”
Community News
Photo by Thomas Minczeski
Faculty News Dean and President W. Mark Richardson gave a presentation titled “CRISPR and the Condition of Public Moral Discourse” at the 2017 Faith and Science Workshop in Salt Lake City on October 7. Academic Dean Ruth Meyers and Professor Emeritus Louis Weil talked with Assistant Professor Scott MacDougall about proposals to revise the Book of Common Prayer in the summer 2017 issue of the Anglican Theological Review. Professor Meyers gave a presentation on “The Future of Pastoral Offices” at a conference titled “The Once and Future Prayer Book” held at the School of Theology of the University of the South on October 9-10. Assistant Professor Julián González’s first book, “Cain, Abel, and the Politics of God,” was published in July by Routledge. He presented a book talk to the CDSP community in September. Professor Cynthia Moe-Lobeda published “From Climate Debt to Climate Justice: God’s Love Embodied in Garden Earth” in The Wiley
Blackwell Companion to Religion and Ecology, published by John Wiley and Sons, Ltd. Assistant Professor Scott MacDougall presented a paper titled “Sacrificing for Communion” at a conference titled “Living Sacrifices: Repentance, Reconciliation and Renewal,” held at Nashotah House Seminary in June. MacDougall, who was visiting assistant professor at CDSP from 20152017, became assistant professor of theology in August. He was named co-editor of the Anglican Theological Review in July. Assistant Professor Jennifer Snow secured a Stewardship of Creation grant for CDSP from the Episcopal Church to develop an intensive immersion class on climate justice and form a regional network to connect the students who are participants in the program.
Student News Phil Hooper ’19 received a SIM/ Carpenter Scholarship from the Society for Increase in Ministry. He is a second-year MDiv student and a postulant in the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada.
Debbi Rhodes ’21, a first-year lowresidence MDiv student and a postulant from the Diocese of Southern Ohio, received a SIM/Carpenter Scholarship. Isaiah Brokenleg ’18 received a Cobell Scholarship from Indigenous Education, Inc.
Alumni News The Rt. Rev. Jennifer BaskervilleBurrows ’97 became the first black woman to lead a diocese in the Episcopal Church when she was ordained and consecrated bishop of Indianapolis on April 29. The Rev. John Day ’91 became priest-in-charge at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Ukiah, California. Jack Dison ’03 published “Overdose: Letters from Dad,” about his experience of his son’s death from heroin overdose. The Rev. Mark R. Parker CAS ’16 was ordained to the priesthood by Bishop Barry Beisner in April. Parker is an associate at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Grass City, California.
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Christopher Putnam, MTS ’11, conducted the premiere of his “Song of the Three” at the closing Eucharist of the EcoJustice conference at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco on May 19. Former Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori ’94 ’01 was included in Time Magazine’s “Firsts: Women Who are Changing the World.”
IN MEMORIAM The Rt. Rev. Frederick H. Borsch, retired bishop of Los Angeles, who served as dean and president of CDSP from 1972-80, died on April 11. An evensong memorial, at which Professor Emeritus Donn Morgan preached, was held in All Saints Chapel on May 17. The Rt. Rev. Richard S. O. Chang ’66, retired bishop of Hawai’i, died on August 31. 20
The Episcopal Church’s three black female bishops—Bishop Barbara Harris, Bishop Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows ’97 and Bishop Gayle Harris ’81, ’02—together at Baskerville-Burrows’s consecration in April.
The Rev. Canon Lisa Eunson ’01 died on June 17. She served in the Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney at the time of her death. The Rev. Thomas K. McCart ’79, founder of the Anglican Musicians Foundation, died on May 27.
at
The Rev. Thomas Murdock ’62, a former trustee of CDSP, died on May 17. The Rev. Canon Stefani Schatz, canon to the ordinary in the Diocese of California and a beloved friend of CDSP, died on July 12. Leonard Sive ’84 died on December 29. The Rev. David W. Steadman ’02 died on March 11.
Easton Hall is a unique guest house with a serene retreat-like environment.
The Rev. Edwin Sunderland ’57 died on May 12. The Rev. Harold Hastings Weicker ’65 died on February 1.
May light perpetual shine upon them. C R O S S I N G S Fall 2017 s #HURCH $IVINITY 3CHOOL OF THE 0ACIlC
One block from the UC Berkeley north gate, you can walk to nearby arts district, shopping, restaurants and cafes and BART. Views of San Francisco and Berkeley hills Complimentary Wi-Fi, coffee & parking Computer and printer in lobby Full kitchen on main floor Wood paneled Great Hall with lodge-style fireplace Historic building with modern renovations Conference center
2401 Ridge Road, Berkeley, CA 94709 510.204.0732 | Web: eastonhall.cdsp.edu | Email: eastonhall@cdsp.edu
Parallel Transformations BY
THE REV. RICHARD R. HOGUE, JR. ’16
In June I had the immense privilege of being invited as a pilgrim to Canterbury Cathedral. A group of us, representing a broad swath of the Anglican Communion, came to participate in the daily life of the Mother Church, in prayer, study and fellowship. This has become an annual event, bringing in seminarians and priests within the first five years of the ministry in order to bring the communion closer together. Cognitively, it was two weeks, spiritually, it was a lifetime, and a grand one. In many ways, it reflected my time at our seminary, which while only three years, permanently changed me in parallel ways. Being exposed to the life of a place like Canterbury or CDSP involves intersecting with people who are drawn from backgrounds unlike your own, but intertwined by the power of the Spirit, and so wisdom passes from life to life in ways that both challenge and delight the heart. Much like a classroom discussion, sitting next to an Anglican sibling discussing marriage practices in Zimbabwe in tension with Western concepts of sexuality was frustrating and broadening. Had I not had that rigorous intellectual debate nurtured in the hills of Berkeley, I may not have been as open or patient to hear a voice other than my own. Without the shared communal prayer life of chapel in seminary and daily prayer in Canterbury it would have been difficult to see Christ in a totally unfamiliar setting. Yet everyone you meet is on the same journey, or pilgrimage, whether there for a fortnight, or for years. Those intersections touch the holy
in each of our lives, and I continue to learn and relearn with each of these new experiences. Between the mundane and the deeply profound we find all people, whirling back and forth, trying to find or make meaning each day. I think part of what I began to be inculcated with at CDSP was reinforced in Canterbury: places cannot be holy without the people who make them so. As Christians, and particularly as Anglicans, the lines that connect us to the divine are always through relationship. We are the body of Christ because we choose holiness in baptism, Eucharist, and the myriad ways in which we interact with and pray for the world. It seems an innate and human thing, and indeed it is, because it is what the Incarnation is all about. Divinity and humanity, the mundane and the profound, linked bodily and spiritually in the person of Jesus. CDSP gave me the language to speak about this in greater detail. Canterbury reinforced this in the form of a fourteen-hundred-year-old cathedral; and both continue to provide me with ideas and conversations to carry out into my daily parish ministry. Those conversations over dinner, forums, and at La Val’s both refined and expanded my understanding of how we are the Incarnation as the body of Christ presently. This was brought home in a new way in Canterbury, because while
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CDSP does have a global feel, Canterbury Cathedral in some ways is the globe. People from every corner of the planet make the pilgrims’ journey there, just as our little group did. And we engaged in our own conversations over dinner, learning session, and drinks at the pub (check out the Parrot if you are ever in town). We brought the body of Christ that much closer together. Then we went home, to make those bonds closer still, with the presence of more linked souls from across the world being brought to our local parishes. In all of this and more, CDSP played the role of preparer of this pilgrim. The Rev. Richard R. Hogue, Jr. is associate rector at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Encinitas, California.
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