The Lilly Summer Discernment Institute
at Sewanee:
Lessons Learned, 2002 – 2006
The Lilly Summer Discernment Institute (LSDI) at the University of the South will reconvene for its 2006 chapter on June 5 th . For a preview of this summer's speakers, go to www.sewanee.edu/lillyproj/lsdi.html . We are pleased to offer the fifth year of this program of vocational exploration for 16 undergraduates. These sixteen students (from eight institutions, six of them new participating institutions) are added to the already long list of 114 students from 29 colleges and universities in the United States. Below is a recap of some of the lessons learned through this program.
- Two vocational tracks faithfully kept together. From its inception, LSDI has been intent on fostering a conversation about vocational exploration among those interested in ordained ministry and service to the Church and those whose sense of calling is more secularly defined. We have learned that solidarity in discernment of calling is not something that emerges from a sense of similarly identified vocational paths but from a willingness to make one's experiences and stories of call available to others. Week #1 of the program is specifically intent on fostering inter-group identity in a way that reduces, even eliminates, any sense of competition. While debate and discussion among students is robust, the overall tone of conversation is a consistently expansive and inclusive one. Routines of small-group discussion, large group presentations, worship and recreation enable the formation of a community of discernment. Images vary with the day and the place of group development. On some days it is “as iron sharpens iron” (Proverbs 27:17); on other days, the image from St. John of the Cross about community is more than adequate: members are like rough stones tossed into a bag to rub each other smooth. By the final on-campus week (Week #8), the measure of mutual appreciation for each other's sense of calling is well established.
- LSDI is a countersign to largely accepted notions about discerning career choice. Much of the pitch to undergraduates today has to do with enticing them to find something that will make practical, even lucrative sense in the world and will not leave them behind (yes, they too are the objects of engineering for success). What is perhaps counter-productive is the degree to which this talk appeals more to students' anxiety than to their creativity and ingenuity, much less to their curiosity and passionate interest in the world. Our advertisement of the Institute calls for replac[ing] anxiety with careful thinking about [students'] lives and futures…which takes into account aptitudes, gifts, and the call of the human community as well as the call of the Spirit.” This process encourages careful thinking and generous experimentation. It is also an approach to identifying a sense of calling and purpose that strives to integrate the trial and error, the winding paths, and even false starts that are a part of finding a place in the world
The program also brings for many the joy of unexpected fulfillment and invitations to even deeper explorations of a vocational path. LSDI invites students to accept the complexity of the world and of the complexity of the self, as we name this exploration “the spiritual journey” or “an invitation to live courageously.” We feel that to acquaint one with his or her inner mystery does not handicap them but enables each one's sense of compassion and serviceability in the world, as well as an expanded sense of possibility. Not least important for many is an expanded notion of who God is and how God is active in their lives.
- The variety in placements testifies to the growing strength of the program. Variety in internship placements has been slowly expanding and their complexion changes with each year. There is a consistent interest in the contemplative life with three students in three successive years being placed with the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, MA, an Episcopal religious order for men. Also since 2003, there has been a pattern of heavy student initiative in finding placements. The Grameen Bank (2003 and 2005) and Children's Defense Fund (2004) are examples of where students have nominated placements and have carried out highly successful internships. There has also been an expansion of the kinds of internships beyond the original expectation: medical research (2002 and 2004); animal rights and protection (2003); and artistic internships (two in 2004). Additional internships include those dealing with domestic violence and conservation. With each of these, it is the students who have shown the initiative. Parish placements in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, and Florence, Italy have introduced ordination aspirants to the Church's diversity and to a greater sense of how the priesthoods of altar and sacrament and that of the everyday fruitfully interact. One student participant of 2002 was placed at a Lishmah in Southern California. He is currently a rabbinical student at Vanderbilt.
- Small-er is Beautiful. Our original class of 2002 had thirty-one students. Attrition left it at thirty, the same number for the year following. For 2004 and 2005 we were at 26 each. The program's coherence both for mentors and student participants increased. Fewer participants enabled a greater level of cooperation and receptivity. While we continue to work on the intensity of both weeks of the program (fewer days for each of the on-campus weeks this year), we are gratified that a sense of community is enabled through a realistic number of participants. That theory is being further put to the test this summer when we will have 16 students and three mentors for the program. We will report on how that has worked.
- Speakers have consistently provided the appropriate consolations, challenges, and discomforts. Our guest speakers – those involved in ordained ministry, in non-profits, in peace-making, journalism, and entertainment – have given students both inspiration and irritation. There has been a generous mixture of being elated by a Colman McCarthy's crusading education for peace and also being less than enthusiastic about his advocacy of animal rights and vegetarianism. Nora Gallagher challenged some students' idea of church and asked them to consider a more complex idea of the priesthood, i.e., in a way that honors the priesthood of all believers, ordained and lay. John Squires of the Community Resource Group gave a special challenge to the group in 2003 with his gift, for each, of thirty pieces of silver (lit. $30 in silver coins for each student, a share of his honorarium). He asked students to consider the possible fruitfulness of that image in their use of that gift to help others. With each year, our near neighbor and perennial guest, the Rev. Rebecca Stevens of Magdalene House of Nashville, has challenged students to engage kindness when standing for justice, live with tenderness toward themselves in order to mediate it to others and believe in the presence of God to show in unexpected places. Our guest speakers have been critical ingredients to creating expectations among students that their internship experience will be worthwhile, even transforming.
- Re-entry is best accompanied by silence. When students return to Sewanee for their final week of reflection and de-briefing, we hold a 24-hour retreat that is accompanied by silence, or in the “spirit of silence” that one sees observed in monastic houses. Silence is a primary aid to the reflective atmosphere of the week. Students consistently report that it has helped them to develop a perspective on all the activity of the six weeks prior. In previous years, the retreat has been delivered by brothers from the Society of St. John the Evangelist (SSJE) and the Canon of the San Diego Cathedral. For 2006, the retreat will be led by two brothers of the Order of the Holy Cross (OHC). Leaders often stay on for few days to listen to students report on their internships and also to call the group together again in a spirit of silence punctuated by theirs and the students' reflections.
- Newer frontiers. Students who undergo an intensive vocational exploration are predisposed for further exploration. For students compelled toward ordained ministry, there are growing networks within several denominations under the PLSE initiative (Pastoral Leadership Search Effort) sponsored by the Fund for Theological Education and the United Methodist, United Church of Christ, Presbyterian and Episcopal churches (see www.theplse.org - currently featuring LSDI 2005 alum Jacob Wood). This fortunate development enables students who engage pastoral internships to network with other students undergoing similar discernment and with mentors, many of whom entered the ordained ministry at a relatively young age. The remaining challenge for these students is the bridge between these experiences and the more formal processes of their respective denominations. We are hoping that an influx of younger candidates for ministry changes the complexion of discernment within each of these denominations. In the meanwhile, the task for our program and those of other institutions is to help students live in the necessary state of suspense between their own discernment of call and the discernment that goes on with them within each of their churches.
The success of the Lilly Summer Discernment Institute is, we believe, the program's integration of the experiential and reflective components and from students and mentors working with the complexities that surround vocational discernment rather than seeking their reduction. As our own program statement of purpose relates, Anglicanism's sense of time and truth, its employment of reflection and fruitful doubt is, we understand, at odds with the unhealthy demands for immediate certitude on the one hand, and relativistic satisfaction of choices, on the other. Yet these aspects of our life, conjoined with the values of worship, conversation and service, lead to the formation of students who are primed to lead by way of example and service to others. Building a culture of reflection around an intensive internship experience – within which there is an additional component of reflection with one's supervisor – has enabled students to taste the world of work as something other than a bridge to leisure. They are introduced to the rich garden of life that is the world and called to be one of its cultivators (John XXIII, nee Roncalli), “We are not on earth to guard a museum but to cultivate a flourishing garden of life.”
-Jim Goodmann
