A year of transformation.

What I have learned during my first year of seminary

Photo credit: Casey Clough, Standing by the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande in Laredo, Texas.

There are these things we seminarians have to write called “ember day letters”. Ember Days, for those who do not know, occur once every liturgical quarter: Advent, Lent, Pentecost, Ordinary Time. Or, said another way, Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall. These letters are accounts to the bishop of what we are learning, how we are feeling, and what is happening in our lives. Whenever I sat down to think about how to tell you about my first year in seminary, I wanted to figure out how to show you what the experience has been like. I didn’t want to give you a list and description of my classes, or talk about projects I have done, or the grades I’ve made. I wanted to show you the person I am becoming. So in prayerful preparation, I was led to my ember day letters.

I will not read these letters aloud, just a portion here or there. They are tired, heavy, vulnerable, and revealing; all things the bishop did NOT ask for, I must admit, but things which I am nevertheless proud of myself for owning. You see, I have gone through no less than 5 iterations of myself since I left last August. I am not the same woman you saw in March, nor in December, or October. I am not the same woman you saw preach this past Sunday, and I am not the same woman you will see tomorrow.

There is this really beautiful and annoying thing about seminary where you find yourself completely broken, opening up parts of yourself you weren’t aware of. Some of those blossomed and grew into big beautiful beliefs; others revealed biases, prejudices, flaws, needs, and desires. This is not just theologically, but on every level of being. My spirit was being pushed, pulled, prodded, and wrung out. By the end of the first semester, I cried in my professor’s office, not for the first time, and said, “it just feels like there is so much transformation that occurs, there is no time to recover before the next one hits.” It was like one wave, after another, after another, and I could barely get to my feet before the next one was along. Let me tell you, the second semester was no less transformative, but perhaps a little less shocking. Now, as I am midway through my summer CPE unit (praise be to God), I have witnessed a new level to this depth of transformation.

My friends, this is never ending.

When the Holy Spirit gets sassy, I like to call her Sophia. Yes, as Father Raymond once reminded me, Sophia in Greek is “Wisdom”, but it is also argued that divine wisdom is one with the Holy Spirit, is the third person of the Trinity. Therefore, Sophia. Plus, I think it’s funny. Well, Sophia be moving in my life. Everyday something new. If it sounds exhausting, it is. It is disorienting, scary, and super uncomfortable. It is also exhilarating, fulfilling, and I am completely in love with it.

From Ember Day letter, Fall 2024:

The transition to seminary has been challenging. Leaving my husband and daughter, and the community we have purposefully built and the people whom in my heart I believe I have known my whole life (not simply the last few years) has allowed me to learn more about myself. I was surprised by how isolated and lonely I felt in the beginning. However, I gave myself permission to wallow in the first few weeks, and now I have washed my face, put on my big girl pants, and am doing the work that needs to be done. While also enjoying the process…

I drove down to Corpus Christi this past weekend to see some friends and it was a wonderful place to rest my anxious spirit. In the attempt to bond quickly with my fellow juniors, it can be emotionally wringing to constantly be someone who needs to be “known”. I wanted to rest with people who already know me; with whom the activity is just sitting and talking, or not talking, or running errands together. I stayed for just one night, but the experience was life giving. My pup came with me and I could tell he needed the change too. We visited Selena’s grave, and they drove me around showing me where they skateboarded by the beach, or fell in love, or committed some teenaged atrocity. It felt good to be filled with someone-you-love's memories.

As an introvert, I never expected to need people so badly. I love people, I love making connections, and I love spending time completely and utterly by myself. But I learned what being lonely again felt like. I had forgotten over the last several years, and one of the things I have learned during CPE is just what an epidemic loneliness actually is. Every day as I visit patients in the hospital, some with family members far away, some with family estranged, some with family close by, I hear over and over how nice it is just for someone to visit. People rarely actually use the word “lonely” to describe themselves, but it is the feeling they depict. The other day I held the hand of a man who had been away from his family for 3 days, and after we prayed, he flipped his hand over, grabbed mine, and began to cry. I wondered when the last time someone who wasn’t poking his skin or manipulating his body had touched him. Three days doesn’t seem like a long time, but sometimes three days is a very…long…time.

From Ember Day letter, Advent 2024:

I feel more drawn to politics than I ever have before in my life, and I have had a lot of questions about what it means in my ministry. I feel called to the work of social justice, but I want to know how that is meant to show up in my life moving forward. Sometimes I feel like a bad liberal because I don’t share in the outrage of my peers. Yet at the same time, I see systems of oppression and hatred that cannot continue, even if I can still find empathy for the ones who implement them.

In October I went to the Texas State Capitol with a few colleagues to protest the death penalty. The Capitol was abuzz with journalists covering the case against Robert Roberson, and while I wasn’t a source of knowledge about the case, I stood against the death penalty as a whole. Just weeks before, I met Rev. Leyla King, a Palestinian-American who just so happens to be married to my Academic Dean. She is also a writer, an activist, and the Canon for Mission in Small Congregations in the Diocese of West Texas. She came to our Old Testament class to discuss difficult passages of the Hebrew Scriptures, and though we were not at a loss for passages to choose from, she also made time to tell us the story of her family coming over from Palestine before she was born.

During this time, especially leading up to the election, I found myself wondering how I was supposed to show up in the world of advocacy and social justice as an ordained person. As a member of clergy and representative of the church, how was I supposed to stand against policy and culture that I believed went against the Word of God, while not invoking the hatred that divides us as a nation? How was I to remember that Jesus doesn’t just belong to me, but to everyone regardless of political affiliation? Economic status? Profession? I began to work with a spiritual director for the first time in my life, who just so happened to have worked in social justice within the Catholic Church for over 30 years. As I said, Sophia be moving. The more invested I became in changing what I felt was an unjust world, the clearer I needed to become on what I was fighting against. I am not someone who believes in using violence for good, so I hate even using phrases like “fight against” to describe my ministry. And I want to be clear, there is no “but” here. I paid attention to that nudging. I wanted to know why that language made me feel uncomfortable. In prayer and discernment, I ended up coming to a conclusion that I felt sat right, at least for the moment.

Here it is: Love and compassion are acts of resistance.

During the feast of Archbishop Oscar Romero, I heard from the saint the very words I believed God was putting on my heart. Dehumanizing the ones who dehumanize is not love. Do not stand for evil and do not hate. In this time of division that is so prominent, when wars are raging and people are dying, the empath in me wants to give in to the crushing feeling of the weight of the world, but love, and humanity remind me that we are all part of one being. It is my opinion that we are all more alike than we are different, because above all we are first and foremost human beings. We all want to be loved and we all want to feel safe. Those urges drive us to fight for what we believe is right, even when that means killing each other in the process.

Ember day letter, Lent 2025

I continue to feel the tension between how I order my life now, and how I intend to order it after ordination, both in small ways and other more impactful ways. I find myself praying that God will help me to begin aligning now with how I will order and live my days after ordination. One friend in particular who is graduating this year, a DAS student, and I discuss this frequently. As he describes it, the way is not to live one way up until the day of ordination, then shifting your entire way of life after that one moment. I allow myself to wonder how I would handle certain situations, show up at certain events, and advise on certain circumstances as if I were already welcomed into the sacred order of the priesthood. I try to respond with a priestly mindset, make it an intention to pray for situations and people I would not ordinarily have thought to pray for. A postulant friend recently told me how they considered responding to a spring break trope before reminding themselves they were going to be a priest, joking how “that must be why this training takes 3 years.” I responded with “it’s like rumspringa, but for Anglicans.” I joke, of course, but I am consistently grateful for the grace these three years allow.

One of the issues I continue to wrestle with is mental health. I have tools I use to allow me to care for my mental health, and I hesitate to mention it, for fear it will be seen as a barrier to becoming a good priest. I spoke a little bit about this in COMB meetings during discernment weekend, but I believe it is important for others who live with depression and anxiety (and more specifically to myself, obsessive compulsive disorder) to see someone in spiritual authority be open with their relationship to God and mental health. I was able to attend a lecture with Cole Arthur Riley recently where she talked about her own relationship with her body and illness. She described being in Paris with her husband, spending the first three days in bed because she was in too much pain to move due to an illness her physicians had yet to pin down, and taking a rare moment of solitude to speak to her body. She passed the peace to each part of her body, feet to eyelashes, giving herself greater compassion and honor for her body. As she describes it, she was not “cured” immediately, or anything quite so Hollywood, but she did gain a different perspective and way of relating to herself. This came at a time when I was asking myself and spending time in prayer wondering what it would look like for me to develop a relationship with depression, rather than seeing it as an enemy. I wondered what it would look like to live alongside in companionship rather than seeing it as something to be fought, or to overcome. God has called my whole self, I am reminded, even the parts I am still learning to love. I have not yet gotten to a place to pass the peace to my depression, but I do believe it to be an important step on this journey. I have been in discussion with all of my professors, as well as my advisor, who, in addition to being a multi-hyphenated superstar in the Black church, my preaching professor, and all around general badass, is working on her second doctorate. The focus of her dissertation is the link between depression and pastors, particularly in the Black church, however she believes resources and narratives she has come across in her research will be helpful to me. I am looking for more work in the theology of mental health, and even how it might fit under the umbrella of disability theology. I have written to Rev. Madeliene Hawley letting her know of my interest in this topic, should there be other students interested enough to create a more robust teaching than independent study.

In January, we spent two weeks in a J-term called Encuentro. We read books about migrant theology; witnessed people’s stories of immigration and survival; we learned the history of the US’s part in the immigration crisis and influence on foreign governments. Mostly, we learned how complex the issue of immigration was. Months later, our class went to the border town of Laredo, Texas. We joined a man called Father Paul Frey, whose father, oddly enough, was once the rector here at ToTH. Father Paul is the rector of the Episcopal Church in Laredo. Alongside Father Paul, we helped distribute food at the local parish, we visited a shelter for victims of intimate partner violence called Casa de Misericordia, and met a woman who endured so much, the fact that she walked nearly the entire way from Guatemala to Mexico with three children became a footnote in her story. Then we toured a colonia, a tiny community that popped up out of necessity on the border with the Rio Grande.

The morning we were leaving Laredo, we prayed in the park by the port of entry. Across the river we saw a family fishing, and a little further down tents of families waiting for permission to cross into the United States. Again, I couldn’t help but think—what is it really that separates me from that family? From those families? What makes me deserving of being here, standing in this spot, and not someone else?

What is implied, but not explicitly said is it matters who you are and which side you get out on. The water is neutral ground. Well. It’s not really neutral ground. Something happens in the water, where we are all a part of the same people. We each belong. Here in this place where friends gather to fish, to swim, to play, to draw water for planting. This is not only a place that brings us together, but it is a place where we become ONE PEOPLE.

Upon returning home, we were given the opportunity to process our time in Laredo through preaching a homily in class. I preached from Mark 1:4-8, John baptising people in the River Jordan to prepare for Jesus’ coming. Here is an excerpt from that homily.

Reflection Homily from Laredo trip:

“Are the River Jordan and the Rio Grande so different? Each river used as a source of water, to fish, gather in community, and travel. Are those who attempt to cross the Rio Grande not dying to their old life, hoping to be born into a new life on the other side, just as those who John called into the River Jordan?

I do not believe the answer of immigration has a straightforward, open/closed, yes/no, one size fits all answer. But I do hope, while we seek the counsel and guidance of the Holy Spirit, in a holy matter which impacts every person on each side of the river, we will allow ourselves to wrestle with the question- Is this water meant to separate us? Or is it meant to draw us into communion with God and one another?”

The journey from the beginning of my first year to the beginning of my second year has felt both incomprehensibly fast and almost imagined. I can’t exactly put my finger on who I am now compared to who I was then, but I hope this short talk has helped show it in a small way.

As I close I want to leave you with this last excerpt and idea for the next semester:

Ember day letter, Pentecost 2025:

The end of the semester was like rushing toward a fire covered in accelerant, but in the best possible way. All grades were great, and praise God for being able to get each assignment completed and turned in. Reflecting on the last semester, taking on sacristan duties and looking forward to next semester’s classes, I am so excited for August to begin. I truly am so in love with my studies and have great appreciation for my professors. Middler year is apparently the most difficult, and I believe it. I will be taking both Theology 1 and Church History 1 next semester, along with seminar, Pastoral Education, field ed, and Advanced Preaching. The parish I will be working with in Austin is Good Shepherd on the Hill (the remote campus of Good Shepherd, Windsor campus). They have a burgeoning Deaf community there, are smaller in number, and their rector is a remarkable woman. I am so excited about working with them.

I remain deeply honored and excited to be here.

Blessings,

-Sam McRae

If you would like to see photos from this past year, please follow the Google Photos link Year One, SSW.