Biography

When I was fifteen years old I wanted to marry a priest. Naively, I thought it would ensure a good marriage! However, I suspect I unconsciously wanted to be a priest, and given that women could not be ordained in the Anglican Church at that time, marrying a priest was as close as I could get. That unarticulated desire at age 15 took me through undergraduate and graduate degrees in fields related to writing until I could claim my vocation after the church changed its position on ordained women.

I do not come from a family of clergy and was not close to clergy or clergy families growing up. I was an ordinary child in an ordinary family in the pews of an ordinary neighborhood church. But through the ordinary means of grace of worship, the sacraments, Sunday School, church summer camps, mentors and friends, God touched me and claimed me. Even as a child. It is this—the reach of the Holy Spirit to touch and transform even the most unremarkable of us through the ordinary means God has provided in the church—which I want to be able to pass on, as it was passed onto me.

In 1987, after graduating from General Theological Seminary in New York City, I began over twenty years of parish ministry, the weekly round of binding myself to God’s people and God’s Word for the sake of God’s world. I served churches in inner-city Cleveland, a reboot in Stamford, Connecticut (a blue collar town, with escalating housing prices due to its proximity to New York City), and in Pueblo, Colorado, in the American west. I was involved in mission work in Haiti and Burundi. While in seminary I met my husband (who, ironically, is an Anglican priest).

In 2007 I moved to Toronto to take the position as Chaplain at Wycliffe College. I am currently Chaplain and Director of Field Education, and I teach in the Pastoral Theology Department. I also assist at St. Paul’s L’Amoreaux.