Marci Weis
January 10, 2010

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It was about two years ago that I sat in that small room behind you all, telling Pastor Tom that I thought that I was perhaps going a bit crazy. I told him that I was coming to the realization that I felt a call to go to seminary and pursue ministry. I told him that this was perhaps the most inconvenient call that I could imagine and had no basis in logic or sanity. He answered me with two points. First he reassured me that if I didn't question my sanity a bit, he would be nervous. Second, he told me that this would be a journey that would involve our entire congregation. As with most bits of wisdom that Pastor Tom passes on, I found that I took in only a small bit (though the rest stayed with me in some dark recess of my mind). I nodded my head politely when he told me that my going into seminary was a journey for our whole congregation though I had neither any sense of what he was talking about nor quite frankly any interest in what he was saying....this to me was a personal journey and not a journey of a faith community, regardless of how important this particular faith community is in my life. Let me pause here and say simply that this particular faith community is incredibly beloved to me and honored by me. Who each of you are as members of this community has been and is an incredible blessing in both my own life and the life of my family. That being said, I simply did not see what Pastor Tom meant when he said to me that you all were a part of this journey.

When I found out that Pastor Tom was going to be out for some well deserved rest, he encouraged me to speak to you all about this journey into seminary. "Just tell them about how you came to be in this place, tell them your story" he encouraged. 'Just tell them your story.'

So I find myself here, telling you my story but also telling you all that I finally understand what he was saying to me in that back room and I will tell you now that I do not trust myself to pull this off without becoming emotional because what I have realized is raw and powerful and a bit overwhelming...but first I will tell you my story, well the 'reader's digest' approach to my story, some of it may be familiar to you all, some not so much.

I am the seventh of eight children, raised in a very Catholic family, in rural Michigan. I am a nurse by training and an executive by chance. I have nursed in a high-paced intensive care center where I was more likely to give chest compressions than to talk to my patients and I have nursed in Nepal where I ran a community health center and cleaned wounds at a Tibetan Refugee camp. I have been a hospice nurse and a case manager, coordinating care for patients with AIDS, at the height of the AIDS crisis where there were no treatment options and little hope. I have loved and lost and loved and lost again and again and again until I happened upon what my children call, 'my true love'. For close to eighteen years I have shared my heart and my home with this blessed woman. I am the mother to two girls, Frances and Dianna. I tell them each night that Dianna is my breath and Frances is my heart. Jasper, well I tell her that she is my everything. The four of us struggle and sometimes fight but I end each day thanking God for the blessing of the deep and true love that we share for each other in our family. They are my greatest gift.

By day I am an executive. I am the Chief Operating Officer of a non-profit healthcare quality improvement company. I oversee operations both at our headquarters in Seattle and across our five regional offices, ranging from South Carolina to Alaska. I negotiate and oversee multimillion dollar contracts. When things go awry, I am the one that goes in and 'makes it all right'. I am the one that typically steps in to take care of budget deficits, layoffs, complex personnel issues and a variety of other challenges. I never aspired to be an executive, I simply seemed to need new challenges and frequently just found myself with a new title. I am the accidental executive.

For many years now I have felt a pull, a tug, a call towards the divine in general, to ministry in particular. For most of those years I ignored that call with a passion and focused my life's energy on my family, my career and a varied list of other pursuits. The call however never went away, it lingered, it beckoned, it sometimes screamed and it finally burst through my fear, my feelings of resistance, my other priorities. It is what I describe as 'a most inconvenient call'. It doesn't fit neatly into anything in my life but for some indescribable reason, it feels right to be going down this path, going on this journey, being in seminary. It feels true and honest and that is a pretty amazing feeling.

Something else you may or may not know about me, in both my personal life and in my professional life, I handle things. That is just what I do and who I assumed I am. Ask Jasper, with the exception of all things plumbing, mechanical and electric, I tend to be pretty self-sufficient, often to a fault. I assumed that seminary would be no different, I would handle things and figure it out, on my own. Thus my confusion with Pastor Tom's statement that this journey into seminary was not just mine but involved all of you.

So here is what I have learned just one quarter into seminary....I can't do it on my own. When I step out of my familiar as an executive, a mother, a partner, a friend.... into the realm of the spiritual and theological, I find that I am not that strong woman who 'handles everything'. This past quarter I have depended upon the support and encouragement of my family when I have felt like a failure in my classes. It was the wisdom of my daughters who encouraged me to 'keep trying' and reinforced that I 'wasn't dumb, I just had a lot to learn'. It was the support and encouragement from Pastor Tom when I struggled with Isaac and Abraham. It was Manny's insights and counseling on Job when I was faced with a final paper that befuddled and intimidated me. It was the love, support and encouragement from all of you that helped me make it through my first quarter.

This journey that I am on is going to take many years. If I finish seminary in five years, it will be ambitious. My hope is to continue to work full-time while balancing school, parenting, partnering, and all of the other commitments of a blessed life. It is going to continue to be a challenge not only for my head but also for my heart. And it is perhaps the journey of my heart that is the harder work. I am starting to realize that I am on a journey that what Marcus Borg calls 'the hatching of the heart'. It is the opening of my soul, my heart, my being to the presence of the divine with the ultimate goal of using that open heart not only for my own relationship with God but also to bring to ministry. It is probably a journey not unlike many of you find yourselves on. That's why we are all here, today, right?

I am also coming to learn that this journey that I am on into seminary, into the 'hatching of my heart' would probably not be a worthwhile journey if traveled alone, it would in fact be a lonely journey if traveled alone, and it probably cannot and for that matter, should not be traveled alone. I'm not sure if this is the case for all of you but I find that my moments of raw and true insight into the divine come not when I feel strong and capable but when I feel fragile, weak, fearful, open. It is a frightening and incredibly vulnerable place to be....and I cannot imagine being in that place, with any other community of faith than with all of you.

Simply put, I need you all. I need your wisdom, your comfort, your insights, your support, your sometimes irreverent humor, your questioning spirit, your presence. In the spirit of true balance though, I also commit that I will give as well as attempt to freely and graciously accept. I will try to live this journey with all of its aching highs and lows, its blazing insights and dead ends with you all in relationship, in balance, in community, in love.

So I say simply that I think that I get what Tom was saying, I can't do this alone and I don't want to do this alone. My guess is that we need each other as we each hatch our own hearts, move along own journeys and feel the divine in ways unimaginable. The thought of opening my heart in community with you all is raw and powerful and a bit overwhelming but I am learning that it is also okay and that it is also blessed and that it is also beautiful and that is also divine. Amen