Lent 14: So This is Love, 1989, Part 1

For Lent, I'm writing about significant moments from my life in faith.

I was still in my twenties, I was a mom of the sweetest and most energetic toddler ever, and I was in my second year of a graduate program that most people finished in two years, but for which I would take 5.

It all started with that HMO job. For the first 2-1/2 years of that job, I'd worked in a clinical unit, initially, a combined Internal Medicine, Pediatrics and Mental Health Unit. We were a start-up health center in a new town, and the building we inhabited was almost a quonset hut. Tiny, but functional. And then, enrollment exploded, and we watched as they built a real live Health Center across the way, three stories, beautiful on the inside, and outside, that sort of institutional light brown brick facade. Once we moved in there, I'd had a choice of which department I wanted to stay with, and without skipping a beat I chose Mental Health (later re-named, "Behavioral Medicine").

The Toddler

I'd fallen a little in love with the Mental Health department-- the people and the work. And they saw me as someone who was bright, and maybe worth mentoring in various ways. By the time I left that place (with the exception of the year I'd spend in marketing), I was pretty clear that I wanted to go to grad school to be a therapist.

Actually, I wanted to be a Jungian therapist. Knowing nothing more about Jung than what I'd read in an introduction to Social Work class in college, I decided that was the way for me. And there was a place to study this nearby: the Jung Institute in Boston. A person could apply to the institute either as an already licensed clinician, or as a person with a graduate degree(s) in another field, preferably related. Also, you had to have had 400 hours of Jungian analysis yourself.

I had had exactly zero hours of Jungian analysis. So, naturally, my first step was to apply to a graduate program in Pastoral Ministry, with a concentration in Pastoral Care and Counseling (perfect, right?). This was available through Boston College, a school called the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry (later folded together with the Theology department, to become the School for Theology and Ministry).

I began my program and I fell in love with it. I mean, really in love. I was studying the New Testament, and Christology, and Pastoral Care... And I was plunged into a peer group consisting entirely of church nerds, which, as we have established, I'd been since about age five. There were diocesan priests, there were nuns, and there were lots and lots of women. Some men, too. But lots of women.

It wasn't long before I realized: I didn't want to be a therapist. I wanted to do ministry.

As a Catholic woman, there were some opportunities opening up. There were women who were administrators of parishes now, with pastoral care components to their work; there were women in chaplaincy-- I'd known a bunch of them at Boston College since I'd begun my undergrad studies in 1978. There were schools, there were hospitals. There was work that could be done.

I was fired up. I was on fire. I had finally found what I wanted to do with my life, for real. I wanted to do ministry.