A weekly inside look at the unique faces and personalities that make up The College of Wooster community.
Sally Kershner
Features Editor
What is your role at Wooster?
One of the hats I wear as Chaplain is helping to oversee religious and spiritual life. Supporting our faith-based student organizations, helping them in their programmatic vision and helping students think about, discover and live out what it means to be sacred. Another kind of hat I wear is that I get to be a resource to students and faculty — life doesn’t stop when you come to Wooster, and we each bring part of, well, all of ourselves to this place. One of the gifts of my job is to journey with people in the joyous times but also in the hard times. I’m also a confidential resource for all students.
How has your past experience informed the work you’re doing now?
So, my journey has been kind of a circuitous one. In undergrad, I was like, “Yes, college chaplain, this is where I’m going to end up.” I was an urban studies major, and was (and still am) really passionate about issues like just use of public space, poverty and homelessness and educational inequality. In a previous vocational life, I was actually a middle school science teacher in center-city San Antonio, thinking about the way high-quality public education can help be a transformative piece in students’ lives. But if I think back upon what drew me to that and what drew me to seminary and eventually here was thinking, “How do one’s spiritual, ethical, faith-based traditions inform what one studies, and how does that intersect with how one engages with the community, with work, with vocation? How can contemplative practice lead to social justice and action?” There’s something really neat about the way all those pieces weave together.
Can you pinpoint a particularly formative experience that inspired or reaffirmed your drive to work in the ministry?
One was while we were living in San Antonio, working with brothers and sisters and friends experiencing homelessness. One individual, Andy Thorton was his name, had been wrestling with homelessness for about thirty years, and the opportunity arose for him to come live with us. He was a poet, and he had this one poem called “The Bother.” I won’t try to recite it for you now, but every time I think about it, it does make me tear up a little bit. It’s a poem about an oyster under the sea, and tiny grains of sand really deeply being a bother, but within that, the sand then becomes this beautiful pearl — there’s this sort of sense that those things that are unknown, that are tiny, those moments that seem bad or out of place can actually have a lot of deep purpose, or can be formed into beautiful opportunities. So something I think about often is how the experiences that are hard or challenging, or beautiful or joyous — those individual moments are shaping us in really hard but also really wonderful ways.
What would you like your influence at Wooster to be?
In two words: radical hospitality. I would love my influence to be one that helps students create welcoming spaces for others, welcoming spaces for themselves and fosters compassion for others — that as individuals journey through these four years, they find a place of belonging both in their own being and in the community.
Anything you’d like students to know about you?
I am here for each and every student on this campus. This office is meant — if you identify with a faith tradition, if you identify with a spiritual tradition, if you are just on a path of uncertainty or questioning, or seeking out purpose — that’s what this office is all about.