Portland Seminary Alumni Address
April 27, 2018
Welcome George Fox and Portland Seminary Alumni (and guests),
Welcome home. Welcome to your place here in the sacred embrace of academic excellence, nurture, vision, and celebration.
While listening in to conversations tonight, I am reminded that we are Nomads, or Threshold People, in not of, often finding ourselves in “neither here nor there” spaces…[1] but when we gather to eat and drink, to remember, we give witness to our citizenship in the Upside Down Kingdom, this Kingdom that is visible when high powered attorneys and garbage collectors, when acclaimed scholars and those barely literate, sit down at the table of grace and talk about how much we have in common.[2]
Rather than successes and failures, in ourcollective tales of how we arrived or returned here tonight, we hear about a season of mystery, a path riddled with shadowed ambiguities and bright victories. We find ourselves living in the tension between pilgrimage and home.
When we open the cargo hold, we know the contents may have shifted … And yet, we find stories of Gospel. Good news.
“…In the crucible of story,” Sue Monk Kidd writes “we become artists of meaning.”[3] Our job has been to chisel and craft meaning from ministry problems, proposed solutions, premises, artifacts, ways of changing the world…
but perhaps we do so now more out of a sense of gratitude, rather than duty. In reflection, we know and (are still learning) that “we were loved long before we set foot in our places of study or vocation, before receiving good marks or man-made titles.”[4]
God has run to us, embraced us, named us, thrown us a party.
For those of us fortunate to attend this ceremony tonight, we snap back together: some arriving, some leaving, some of us reluctant pilgrims, some rediscovering mercy,all with holy longing.We are magnets in the Spirit enjoying another moment of life together.[5] We are granted the rare pleasure of physically experiencing what we know as our ongoing spiritual reality in Christ. And we are thankful.
Whether on a blustery seaside, a subway, classroom, or global city… in spite of, and along with our diversity of faith traditions and cultures—when we are together as one—we are glorious.[6]
Anthropologist, Jamie Huff suggests:
We are communitas. Stemming from Latin roots of “com” and “muni,” which show up in familiar words like: composition or communion—municipal and munificent (bountiful, open-handed). One root connotes being together with another; the other signifies a gift or service.
Communitas brings to mind deep and enduring ties of friendship formed in shared rhythm, ritual, rule, but also designed in the crucible of seclusion, and in the corresponding experience of social ambiguity—of what it means to be a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ…
Communitas, then, is deeper and broader than the clichéd, warm and fuzzy sense of cohorts, clubs, or even communities.[7]
From university, to seminary, to the sometimes enduring loneliness of ministry, we Portland Seminary alums share timeless ways of being together, and we are not willing to let one another go.
Therefore, may our journey continue to be one of kindness and gentle presence, in the giving and receiving and of the unsparing gift of simple availability[8]to one another.
While praying our goodbyes and saying clumsy hellos, while living into this story of home and pilgrimage, may we remain communitas. Welcome.
[2]A description shared with me by Dr. Jerry Camery-Hoggatt during an April conversation while I was preparing this Welcome.
[3]Sue Monk Kidd, First Light, pp13-21.
[5]Underlined denote book titles from my library.
[6] Jesus’ prayer for unity in John 17:11-23. Also the premise of my dissertation, “This Glory You Gave Us.”
[7]Credited to Dr. Jamie Huff, previous Chair of the Department of Anthropology & Sociology at Vanguard University of Southern California College, in an article titled Communitas, wherein Huff describes the work of 1950’s anthropologist, Victor Turner, who coined the term after observing the religious life of the Ndembu people of northwestern Zambia. Writes Huff, “…[Turner] opted for the Latin term communitas because he felt it better conveyed the sacred and essential kind of human relationship that emerged spontaneously during the course of the rituals he observed.
[8]Also the topic of graduate, Dr. Chuck Coward’s Work in Progress.