Answering the Call

For a long time, I thought calling was something you answered once, in a singular brave moment of certainty. But the longer I live, the more I suspect vocation unfolds slowly across a lifetime, through a thousand quiet acts of saying yes long before we fully understand what we are becoming.

I wrote about that long and winding journey toward priesthood, toward inhabiting a call I spent years trying not to want and could not ultimately outrun.

On June 20, I will be ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church, and I would love for you to join me in person or online as I take this next trembling step of saying yes.

Still Answering the Call

“How exactly did you answer this call?”

A woman asked me this recently after church. She was visiting for the first time and had heard the announcement that I had accepted my first call as a priest and would begin serving as Associate Rector at a nearby parish this fall. When she asked the question, I found myself pausing, not because I did not know how to answer her, but because I had discovered over the years that when people ask about calling, they are usually hoping for a story with clean edges, some singular moment where God speaks unmistakably, and the rest of your life unfolds neatly behind it.

But vocation has never felt that way to me. Even now, after years of discernment and seminary and formation and all the winding steps that eventually led me here, I still cannot point to one definitive beginning because the truth is this call did not arrive suddenly so much as slowly reveal itself inside a life I was already living.

When I began the process of exploring vocational ministry, I joked with my husband that I felt like I was accidentally becoming a priest. The whole thing seemed so improbable to me, so entirely outside the realm of what I had imagined for myself, and yet the longer I live, the less I believe vocation appears out of nowhere.

Instead, I suspect it is something we have been moving toward our whole lives, something quietly unfolding underneath us long before we have language or the courage to name it.

That woman’s question echoed through my mind a few days later when a close friend asked me if I finally feel like I have arrived at the end of my discernment journey now that I have this position lined up. "Or will it be the day you are ordained or your first Mass? When will you feel like you’re finally there?” she asked.

And so, when I try to answer the question of when this call began or when it will finally be complete, I find myself circling not toward one moment but toward many moments, moments that only now in retrospect seem connected by the same thread.

I could speak about the first time I stood on a church stage on a Sunday morning and spoke in front of hundreds of people. I felt something inside me come startlingly alive. At the time, I was serving in all the acceptable ways women could serve within the Baptist world that had formed me — leading children’s ministry, teaching women’s Bible studies, doing all the nurturing and organizing work women were permitted to do, so long as they never crossed the invisible boundary into proclamation or authority. Women could teach children. Women could teach women. But not men. Never men.

That morning, my parents and I had been invited to share our stories of faith, to talk about how each of us had eventually found God in that church across different seasons of our lives. I still remember the way my heartbeat thundered in my chest when I stepped onto that stage and looked out at the congregation.

I remember the strange collision of exhilaration and shame rising together inside me because I loved it immediately, loved holding the room and feeling words move through me in real time. Yet at the very same moment, I felt ashamed for loving it because some part of me already understood that what I felt standing there was dangerously close to wanting something I had been taught did not belong to me.

Afterwards, several people told me I was a natural speaker, and I brushed them off quickly, insisting, “No, no, I’m a writer, not a speaker,” but even as I said it, I knew something inside me was resisting the truth. Not because I wasn’t a writer — I was and always will be — but because somewhere beneath all the conditioning and fear I sensed there was more in me than I had permission to want.

And because I had been raised in the church to believe holiness often looked like self-denial, especially for women, I became very skilled at burying desires before they could fully emerge. I would not let myself imagine a life outside the boundaries I had inherited. I would not allow myself to want what had already been declared out of bounds. So, I folded those feelings inward and carried on, though I think now perhaps something had already begun unfolding in me even then.

I could say the call began to bubble up during the long years of wrestling with the evangelical church I loved but could no longer fully inhabit. I stayed because leaving never felt simple to me, because the church was not merely a set of theological propositions I could intellectually discard once they no longer fit, but a community of people who had loved our children and us well, people who had brought meals in difficult seasons and prayed for us and held our stories.

Even as parts of me were suffocating there, I could not imagine what it would mean to walk away from a world that had shaped my entire understanding of God and belonging.

But over time, something inside me kept stretching beyond the confines of the faith tradition I had always known. For years, I sought God quietly in contemplative spaces, in monastery retreats and spiritual direction, and long afternoons of writing where I tried to untangle what was happening inside me.

I found myself drawn toward mystery and sacrament and silence because increasingly I was no longer encountering the presence of God in the loud church services and small groups where I had once felt so at home. And still I stayed because I did not yet know what it would mean to leave or whether there was another place for me on the other side of that leaving.

Maybe I heard the call from God while sitting in the corner of a hallway at a writing festival with a former Baptist who had become an Anglican priest, asking him quietly if he would spare a few minutes to talk with me. He gave me an hour. I can still picture us huddled there while he told me the truth about what it had cost him to leave, about the grief and disorientation and difficulty of leading his family into unfamiliar territory. I remember listening with tears in my eyes, thinking I could never do that to my children, could never take them away from everything they had known and loved. So again, I stayed, even while something in me kept unraveling. Until eventually I couldn’t.

I could share about the church service forever burned into my memory. There are sermons we forget by Monday morning, and then there are the ones that divide your life quietly into before and after.

For me, it was Advent I of 2019. That summer, we returned to the United States after two years living in South Asia. I already knew in my bones that I could not return unchanged to the version of faith I had inhabited before we left. Something in me had expanded too much.

I had encountered Christ in noisy Bengali churches overflowing with joy and contradiction and beauty, in international congregations where Christians from radically different traditions worshipped together without demanding sameness from one another.

I had experienced Jesus in contemplative prayer and spiritual practices that had opened me to a God far larger than the narrow framework I had known. Once you have experienced that kind of expansiveness, it becomes impossible to willingly shrink yourself again.

When we returned to our old church in Georgia, hoping familiarity might still feel like home, I sat in the pew gripping a rosary in my hand while tears streamed silently down my face through the entire service. I wanted desperately for it to work because my children had already endured so much transition. I longed to give them something familiar again, but it hurt too much to continue pretending to be someone I was not anymore. Or perhaps she was someone I had never fully been at all but had learned how to perform convincingly enough to survive inside the evangelical subculture that had shaped me.

For so many years, I truly believed it was the only faithful way to be Christian because it was the only world I had known growing up in the Bible Belt South. But then life and travel and prayer and relationships with other Christians revealed to me how vast and varied the body of Christ truly is.

I could no longer inhabit a space that insisted it alone possessed the fullness of truth while making no room for the beauty and faithfulness I had witnessed in Catholic and Orthodox believers, in women and people of color who would not feel welcome in that room, and in queer Christians whose lives bore unmistakable fruit of the Spirit. I could no longer remain in spaces that required me to cut pieces of myself away in order to belong.

So, our family began visiting churches during those tender and disorienting months after our return, and one brisk Advent morning, we walked into an Episcopal church where I sat completely mesmerized by the embodied honesty and theological depth of the first female priest I had ever truly known.

I still remember the sermon she preached and the way it moved through me, remember my shaky steps toward the altar rail and the taste of the wine and the strange sense that something in me was exhaling for the first time in years. Afterwards, we spoke briefly, and I told her a little about my writing and nonprofit work and my desire to return to seminary, and then she said something that even now I cannot fully explain. “I have a feeling I’m going to share this pulpit with you one day.”

By then, I knew there were women priests, knew there were traditions that honored the voices and callings of women, but somewhere deep inside me, I still believed that reality belonged to other women, women holier or wiser or somehow more worthy than I was. So, when she spoke those words, I felt that old collision of excitement and shame rise in me all over again. Surely not me, I thought. And yet something in me had already begun saying yes.

The truth is, there was never one singular moment when I answered the call. There were hundreds of moments. I answered it when I joined that little Episcopal church, even while my family remained elsewhere and we tried to navigate the uncertainty of worshipping in different traditions.

I answered it when I reenrolled in seminary after seventeen years away, unable to fully explain why except that I knew with absolute clarity it was time to return and finish what I had begun.

I answered it every time someone named gifts in me, which I could not yet see in myself, every time a priest encouraged me to preach or serve at the altar or step more fully into leadership, even while old fears still clung tightly to me.

And then there was the evening with the Commission on Ministry when everything shifted. We had spent weeks together discussing theology and vocation and discernment. I kept talking about all the people who believed in me: the priest who first told me I would preach one day, the mentors and spiritual directors and parishioners who had encouraged me toward this path. Then one of the priests on the panel looked at me with a kind of gentleness that made it impossible to hide and asked, “They believe in you. But do you believe in you?”

I remember trying to answer and discovering I suddenly could not speak at all because beneath all the theology and formation and careful language about vocation, that was the truest thing anyone had said to me yet. I did not believe in myself. Or perhaps more honestly, I had never fully allowed myself to.

I had spent so many years learning not to trust my own desires, not to imagine myself in places I had been taught women did not belong, that even standing there at the threshold of priesthood, I was still waiting for someone to tell me I had misunderstood everything.

Something shifted in me after that night. Not all at once, not perfectly, but enough that I finally began trying to inhabit this calling instead of apologizing for it.

I entered an Anglican studies seminary program. I served in every capacity I could. I became a lay preacher and chaplain and kept placing myself in the very spaces I had once believed were forbidden to me, and every single time I stood at the altar and placed the bread into someone’s open hands, saying, “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven,” I answered the call again.

For the next four years, I answered the call through every trembling sermon, every pastoral conversation. In every late night spent researching and writing theology while trying to believe I belonged in those conversations too, I answered.

Now, every time I put on my deacon’s stole and carry the Gospel down the aisle to boldly proclaim, it becomes another act of saying yes.

In less than a month, I will stand before the Bishop and hundreds of others and answer the question, “Do you believe that you are truly called by God and his Church to this priesthood?” I will answer by making vows to minister the Word of God and the sacraments, to undertake the life and work of a faithful pastor, to pattern my life in accordance with the teachings of Christ, and to persevere in prayer.

And the next morning, I will walk toward the altar where I have assisted for three years, only this time as the priest standing behind it, the one who, with trembling hands, will lift the bread and wine and speak the ancient words that Christians before me have spoken for centuries.

And still, even then, the call will not be complete.

Because I am beginning to suspect that vocation is not something we answer once and for all but something we keep consenting to over and over again across the course of a lifetime, something we answer at altars and hospital bedsides and gravesides, in moments of holy certainty and deep inadequacy alike, in sermons that come easily and in the ones we wrestle onto the page at midnight, in the quiet unseen faithfulness of prayer and in the terrifying vulnerability of loving people well.

And so I take yet another step toward answering the call today, toward inhabiting the life I was once too afraid to imagine for myself, toward becoming the person God has been slowly unfolding all along, this thing I was born to do and denied for so long, this self I am still learning to fully inhabit, this lifelong becoming in Christ.