May 5, Easter 6
(1 John 5:1–6; John 15:9–17)
The Christian faith often gives friendship short shrift.
On the first day of the first seminar of my doctor of ministry program, Holy Presence: Eugene Peterson and the Pastoral Imagination, I felt ill at ease during morning prayer. I was thrilled to be there. But having spent the entirety of my life in relatively progressive mainline Christian communities, I had never before had the experience of being the sole woman in an ecclesiastical space. The only other woman in the program, a faculty mentor from Australia, hadn’t been able to make the pilgrimage on account of ongoing COVID restrictions. So there I was, surrounded by male classmates—a symptom, I suspect, of my anecdotal observation that Peterson’s work just doesn’t seem to resonate as deeply with my clergy sisters.
To begin our time, the faculty adviser delivered a lecture that set the tone for the three years to follow. I’d have to refer back to my notes to recollect most of what Winn Collier said in that opening address, but a few points burned into my permanent consciousness. He speculated that most of us weren’t really motivated by a doctoral degree and affirmed that the academic trappings were merely justification for the true purpose of our convocation: soul work. This checked out for me; I’d totally surprised myself by reversing a previous decision not to pursue a DMin. Winn went on to name one of his central hopes for the cohort: that we would find “providential friendships.” I side-eyed my classmates as I wondered which, if any, of these gentlemen would become my friends, providential or otherwise.
On the final day of the final seminar of the program, I wept through our closing circle as Winn reflected on our new vocation as “doctors of the church,” a reframing of the degree that felt redemptive and healing. I was not the only one in need of tissues. The experiences we shared on this journey were profound. Alongside these men—and Mandy, who finally made it from Brisbane—I immersed myself in books like Peterson’s The Contemplative Pastor, sang and prayed and laughed by Flathead Lake in Montana, and grieved the death of my father on the Isle of Iona. We also completed and defended dissertations and absorbed the wisdom of one another’s research. But when Winn asked us what gifts we would carry with us from the program, I piped up first: friends.
