About

This is My Story – My Song

“When you’re out hiking in the woods, do you stop and notice the trees that look like they’re hugging each other because they’ve grown so closely together? I love those trees and am convinced they survive because they have each other, and their root systems sustain one another.”

In the beginning, the spark of the Divine took root in me in the southern soil of the United States, and the seed of my life burst forth in Charleston, South Carolina. I came into this world with a deep love of the God of My Understanding, of Nature, and an adventurous spirit that longed to be outdoors and connected to everything and everyone around me. And oh, was I loved! By my granny and papa, my mom and dad, and my older sister, who helped name me. I couldn’t have known at that time of the complicated family system that I was born into, which later came to include a younger sister and brother, and how this foundation would shape the tree of my life.

What I knew was church and singing, prayer, and community. These nourished my young fledgling roots. Family lore has it, and so does my baby book, that I was singing my bedtime prayers by age two, and by age five, I was singing in front of the entire church, accompanied by my Granny Ethel on the organ.

I inherited a Christian faith from my family of origin that was lived out in the tiny Southern Baptist church we attended. When I say “we attended,” I mean that my father was a deacon, my granny was the organist, and my mother was the church secretary. It seemed I was always at church, and I honored my ancestors and these experiences that supported the young green shoot of my life as I began to grow. 

From as early as I can remember, I had a deep love of God and an unquenchable thirst for Spirit. I can recall being outside, hearing the rush of the wind and watching the leaves blow on the trees, knowing that whatever power was behind all that was also in me. My Christian faith gave me language for what I felt, but there was always a part of me that knew it could not be contained in those words or any words. They were a good starting point, but they were not the end game for me. Early on, I recognized the spiritual quest would take my entire life.

Over the years, I grew and matured and began trying to understand the complexities of my family and the complexities of the white supremacist culture into which I was born, both of which I have been on a journey to reckon with, to tell the truth about, and to heal.

The tree of my life was firmly rooted by this point, and I began to branch out. I had a love for knowledge and learning, and so the first branch I grew was education. I always excelled at school, and even after I completed a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the College of Charleston, I knew I’d go on to learn more and would grow into a lifelong learner.   

During college and as I began my first career as a counselor, I experienced the first of two foundation-shifting experiences that ultimately reshaped the tree of my life. Have you ever been hiking in the forest when you stopped and notice a tree that didn’t grow straight towards the sky but instead seemed to grow around something in its path? That’s how I’ve come to understand what I will tell you next. There are things we grow around because they are immovable; they are a part of us, so we stretch around them to survive and keep growing.

From as early as I can remember, I had a deep love of God and an unquenchable thirst for Spirit. I can recall being outside, hearing the rush of the wind, and watching the leaves blow on the trees, knowing that whatever power was behind all that was also in me.

You might find it surprising to learn that even though my Southern Baptist Church was quite conservative, I left it when I was 18 years old because I managed to find an even more conservative group.  Amazing, right?!  It turns out this group that I was drawn to because of their close ties to one another, like a family, was in fact a religious cult where I spent the next seven years of my life.

I began having inclinations that I would grow differently when I understood that I could no longer presume I was heterosexual. In fact, I was quite lesbian, and still am, and as you can imagine, this created shall we say, “a little bit of tension” in the cult and in my family of origin.  As a result, I ended up leaving both, and while I never returned to the cult, I eventually reconciled with my family.  

In this year’s long process, which took me from South Carolina to San Francisco, CA, I had to grow around some significant and painful obstacles, but even more so, I had to pull up those early roots of bad theology that said I could not be gay and Christian.  Thankfully I had help with that when a new branch of my life began to form called Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC).  MCC is a Christian denomination that ministers primarily to the LGBTQI communities. MCC helped me find my faith again, helped me reconcile my spirituality and sexuality, and affirmed my call to ministry that I knew I had as far back as my childhood days.  I will always be grateful to MCC.

The second foundation-shifting experience that almost uprooted me completely was the death of my little brother by gun violence. I wasn’t sure I would ever grow again, let alone have the desire, energy, or resources to grow around something so monumental, and for a while, I didn’t.  I was mute for six months.  I was still.  Simultaneously, I was held by my beloved queer MCC community, which is no stranger to death and dying, especially because of the devastation our churches endured during the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  In their own DNA, MCC knows grief and loss, healing and resurrection. 

When you’re out hiking in the woods, do you stop and notice the trees that look like they’re hugging each other because they’ve grown so close together? I love those trees, and I am convinced that they survive because they have each other and their root systems sustain one another. 

MCC helped me find my faith again, helped me reconcile my spirituality and sexuality, and affirmed my call to ministry that I knew I had as far back as my childhood days.  I will always be grateful to MCC.

MCC helped me survive and was there when my voice was restored.  In fact, once my voice returned, I began singing from a place deep within my body and soul and found myself singing in a choir again.  How fortuitous for me because that is where I met my beloved partner, Lisa, and we’ve been singing together for over twenty years.  

Rooted in Lisa’s and MCC’s love, I completed the Master of Divinity degree at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, and was ordained twenty years ago.  Lisa and I have served MCC congregations throughout the United States. Always striving to bloom where we are planted, we aimed to send out seeds of love, justice, peace, healing, and reconciliation for LGBTQI people and our allies.

Eventually, it became time for me to branch out again, so I completed a year-long residency in Clinical Pastoral Education and became a hospital chaplain with a specialty in labor and delivery, all things heart, and palliative care.  One of the things I loved about hospital chaplaincy is its multi-faith environment, and though I didn’t know it at the time of my residency, I would return to this environment in another decade or so.  

I loved congregational ministry and still do, but there came a season when I realized that a new branch was again forming. Though it was inclusive of the progressive Christianity I was practicing then, it grew into one inspired by all spiritual traditions.  I began to understand that Christianity was not my only path anymore.  It remains a deep root in my tree of life, but I have found that I am sustained by all spiritual paths and religious traditions that bring about healing and wholeness, work for justice and peace, and embody liberation and love. 

As the Universe would have it, I left the congregational ministry in a specific Christian context and returned to the multi-faith hospital environment. Over time I focused my ministry, especially in palliative care, a specialty medicine that alleviates pain and suffering caused by life-limiting illnesses. I don’t think that it’s an accident for one minute that I work closely with people facing their mortality.  In the Great Mystery of life and death, I feel that any healing word or touch I provide my patients returns manifold healing to my heart and my little brother, Richard.  And again, what I couldn’t have known when I started specializing in palliative care, was that I would receive my life-limiting diagnosis.  Over the last decade, I have come face-to-face with my own personal limitations, and I am learning to love my simpler life and once again accepting that the tree of my life is being reshaped and growing around a chronic illness and disability that invites me to accept and love my life as it is. 

And I do!  I love my life in all its richness and texture.  In all its layers, some of which I haven’t even pulled back for you to see yet, such as the “family of choice” we’ve grown over the years with many friends and pets and the fact that Lisa and I are foster parents and have some wonderful children and young adults in our lives!  I think of them as smaller trees in our family forest, being nourished by our roots and shaded from the heat, so they also get the chance to grow and thrive. 

In an earlier part of my story, I talked about being a lifelong learner, but it’s also true that I am a lifelong grower.  And isn’t that a beautiful thing?!  As long as we’re growing, we’re living! And wouldn’t you know it?  In the last decade, I started growing yet another new branch, and this one is called Unitarian Universalism.  It’s a non-creedal, non-dogmatic religion, allowing me and my theology room to breathe! I say this with all the love in my heart—I’ve had enough creed and dogma to last me the rest of my life! Unitarian Universalism makes room for all my identities, welcomes my questioning spirit, enjoys my warm heart, and encourages me to keep seeking and finding.  I completed their path to ministerial fellowship in 2015.  I find that Metropolitan Community Churches, the Association of Professional Chaplains, and the Unitarian Universalist Association authentically represent the theological and professional pluralities of who I am.  None of them could do it alone; we are grafted together. 

But guess what?  My story doesn’t end here!  My most recent adventure in branch expansion was getting certified as an Interfaith Spiritual Director through the Chaplaincy Institute in Berkeley, California. 

The tree of my life is magnificently textured, wizened, knotty, a little unruly, and strong. It is enjoying putting down roots in the beautiful, forested Pacific Northwest where it would be my joy to companion you in the deep forest of your own life, to listen attentively to what is growing and moving in you, to what you’re rooting out and grafting in, and to what sustains you through it all. 

I’d love to hear your story and song.  

In the meantime, may the forest be with you.