minister

**// Autobiographical Sketch //** I am a preacher’s kid, a “p.k”. My Dad was a UCC (United Church of Christ) minister, though he also starred in some major commercials when we were kids. It helped pay the bills. My mom worked in the home raising four kids born within six years, and says she loved it. I have my doubts about that but both she and my Dad are healthy and vital at eighty, so I guess they survived us pretty well.
 * // Sections from Maj-Britt Johnson’s Ministerial Search Packet //**

I would describe my childhood as rollicking, as in a wild white water rafting trip, stage four to five rapids, meaning some surfing, lots of survival skills and roll-over training necessary. We moved a lot which sometimes made life confusing and even sad, but in retrospect, fun, interesting, and eye-opening. Here is my litany of places in which we packed and unpacked boxes: Wayne Illinois, Tokyo Japan, Los Angeles California, (my Mom would argue that we didn’t really //live// there, we just “stayed” there for three months, I say we lived there because they didn’t know where we were headed next), the Bronx N.Y., Greenwich CT., Westport CT., Peterborough N.H. and finally El Paso TX., where I graduated from High School.

My siblings, two younger brothers and an older sister, and I had a blast together, when we weren’t fighting. Each summer we went on a five week camping trip in a pop-up Apache camper, all six of us and by the time I went to college we had traveled to every state but Alaska and Hawaii. The fact that we all still love each other and talk to each other regularly (though we are scattered all over the country) says something positive about my parents’ child-raising abilities I would imagine.

I have few memories of Tokyo or L.A. (too young), it is New York that sits like a rock in the river of memory, perhaps because we stayed there the longest period of time, six years. The church was at the center of our life: Pot luck suppers, weekends on the picket lines protesting segregationist housing practices in our neighborhood and elsewhere, attending “Freedom School” (my sister and I the only white kids there), Sunday school and Junior Choir, the Tiffany stained glass window showing Jesus holding a lamb. And this was the sixties. It was a heady period for my parents who were active in the great events of those times, and we rode in their wake like elated dolphins, eager to feed on the joy it tossed up. I remember them coming into our bedroom to wake us up, my sister and I, to celebrate yet another Supreme Court decision in favor of de-segregation. I thought justice would always roll down like a mighty stream. I thought the adults, well the liberal ones anyway, would somehow make all the wrongs into rights by the time I was old enough to enjoy them.

In N.Y. my father managed to talk the Principal of the Fieldston Ethical Culture School (who happened to be Pete Seeger’s brother, John) into giving all four of us full scholarships to his school. So we transferred over from P.S. 81 and what a privilege that was. Fieldston was an amazing place in which to learn, and learning there was fun. There were no grades, girls could wear pants (remember this was the mid-sixties, girls were still wearing gloves to church) and were as free as the boys to do or learn anything; we could move at our own pace and were encouraged to be creative.

It was a terrible loss to move to CT., like going back in time a generation. In the wider society it was of course a time of retrenchment socially and politically, one might say back-sliding. With the Civil Rights Movement grinding to a halt, and the war in Viet Nam just gearing up, many people seemed lost. Moving was only bearable because we went on to another warm church community which made us feel welcome, and in many ways immediately felt like home.

My first two years of H.S. were spent in the small N.H. town of Peterborough, my last two at Loretto Academy, in El Paso, where Spanish, or something more like Spanglish, was spoken in the cafeteria. I learned it passably well from my friends; but unfortunately have lost much of it through disuse. My childhood and youth were well seasoned with diverse experiences peoples and cultures, so it is no accident that I went into either Cross-Cultural studies or ministry. I am a product of my upbringing.

I have told you something of my post-high school years in my ministerial record sheet, which is included in this packet, but I will add some pieces that are left out of the story. I had a first partner, whom I met in Divinity School. Her name was Lisa, and we were together for ten years, splitting due to, what else, “irreconcilable differences” in 1999. Michael and I met in 2002, and married in 2006. This is also his second marriage. I would sum Michael up in a few words: Kind, incredible razor wit, possessing deep integrity. **Q & A From Maj-Britt’s “Ministerial Record Sheet”**

**From your late teens forward, describe your higher education, the three or four most important events in your life experience, the context in which you felt called to ministry, and your professional development, continuing education, and work history; include every ministry (include dates by month/year) and what you bring from it and your other work to a new ministry:**

My college career began with the study of the Great Books, at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This was an intensive education in the western classics. St. John’s has a set curriculum, and no electives. It was an incredible, super-rational, education which helped me to learn how to read, think and argue critically. It also felt stultifying to a seventeen year old and by the age of nineteen my spirit rebelled. It said: I want some fun, I want creativity, I want choices, and hey what about women’s writing and thinking? And what about eastern thought?

I left St. Johns and spent a year living and working in Santa Fe, making friends with an eclectic group of artists, and plotting a new direction for myself. The next year I transferred to Warren Wilson College in Ashville N.C.from which I graduated with a B.A. in Cross Cultural Studies, with an emphasis on African History and Cultures.

Warren Wilson College is a unique, egalitarian college which requires all students to do an extended service project, as well as work for their room and board even if their parents can afford to pay for it. Students in the Cross Cultural studies major were required to spend some time living and studying independently in another country. W.W.C. had many students from the so-called “third world” and one of my friends from helped me line up a position teaching English there. I was supposed to go for a semester; I ended up staying nearly a year. After a few months I was asked to start a Village Polytechnic, which I did: recruiting teachers and students, applying for government certification, raising money and building a classroom. In my spare time I helped the mother of the family I lived with, who was also a nurse midwife, to deliver babies. We brought children into the world by the light of a kerosene lamp, and boiled that proverbial water on a propane stove after carrying it on our heads from a nearby river. OK, I confess, I made it about 100 yards with the water on my head, then one of the young girls took over.

That year was undoubtedly the first, and probably most, pivotal experience in my life. There is nothing like living in a totally different culture to strip the veils off one’s eyes, mind and heart. Of course the film grows back, but one never forgets the possibility for radical transformation that comes from losing one’s cultural center of gravity. I experienced joy, terror, freedom and an acute awareness of my limitations from the resulting “vertigo”. This was in the days before cell phones and e-mail, and as the village had no phone lines either, I had no contact with family or friends for the entire year. That obviously contributed to the intensity of the experience and the year in Kenya often seems like "a wrinkle in time" to me now. The return culture shock was jarring, and I both appreciate what we have in this country, and am acutely aware of our American excesses. That year also shook up my racial identity and contributed to my interest in dismantling racism in my adult life.

After returning from Kenya and graduating from W.W.C. I taught Adult Basic Education and job preparedness, with a government program called “The Manpower Development Program”, in the “coves” of southern Appalachia. Later, after moving to Chapel Hill, I worked in middle management in a small publishing corporation for five years. In my off hours I was an activist and community organizer on the Working Committee of the War Resisters League and on the Board of Women’s Pentagon Action, both peace groups.

Eventually I felt the need for a spiritual life to sustain my activism, and began studying yoga and doing some creative writing. I moved from Chapel Hill to Provincetown in my late twenties, where I attended a writing program called “Freehand”, founded by the poet Olga Broumas. Olga had us doing drama, photography, and dance as ways to access the writing muse. This was a second pivotal year. As did the year in Kenya, that year woke me up to new ways of thinking and being, which continue to inform my life and my work.

It was in Provincetown that I first attended a UU congregation and found my new religious home. My call to ministry was re-awakened and I spent the next several years becoming a Unitarian Universalist, both in Provincetown and, following that, in Olympia Washington. I had a job there as Assistant to the Director of the Thurston County Public Works Department, and mostly wrote annual reports, PR releases and newsletters.

I say my call was “re”-awakened when I became a Unitarian Universalist because my first call had come at the age of 12, re-appeared at the age of 24, then submerged itself, and now, in Provincetown and Olympia would not let me alone. The call at twelve was, chronologically speaking, the first important life “event”. Here’s what happened: I’m sitting in the back seat of our old gray ‘56 Chevy, the kind with deep foam seats that tend to swallow up little kids and make them feel even smaller. My three siblings, two brothers and a sister are back there with me. My parents are in the front seat talking about my father’s work as a minister in the Civil Rights movement. Actually, only he is talking, more like preaching, and my mother is listening. (This tended to be their pattern way back then.

I wonder if something about that dynamic strikes me as unjust because…) A voice rises up from deep within me, from some place I had never known existed, and says to the front seat: “Dad, Black people have been put down for hundreds of years, but women forever.” My father laughs warmly, as in: what an interesting thing to say, how smart my daughter is, and, I wonder where that came from. I’m not laughing; because I hear that same voice say, this time silently, but with complete, unshakeable certainty: “I’m going to be a minister some day.” This is followed by an expletive.

As an adult I experience a degree of awe in looking back on that day. That commanding inner voice (not at all “still and small”) was mine, but had a certainty and wisdom I did not possess, nor understand. I wonder if spiritual life is about remembering something we already know, but don’t know we know. Or is knowledge, as Plato said, actually “re-collection”?

Whatever that experience was about, I argued with it, and then buried it, until one day, years later, when I was living in Chapel Hill.I have no memory of a context, but came a day when I knew with certainty that one day I would be a minister, and not just a minister, but a Unitarian Universalist minister. I had limited knowledge of Unitarian Universalism at that point but I felt a warm sense of happiness pervade my whole being. It stayed with me for two weeks, and then it abruptly went away. What remained was a memory of an abiding and all pervasive grace. Yet, I could not understand the call at 24 anymore than at twelve, and could envision no place in which to live it out. So with some bewilderment I shrugged and let it go again. When I found Unitarian Universalism four or five years later I said: here’s the place where I can follow that call. After a couple more years learning how to be a UU, I applied to Harvard Divinity School and began there at the age of 32. I received my M.Div. from Harvard in 1992.

**Theological orientation: What is your dominant theology, and how do you deal with other Unitarian Universalist theologies with which you may not be in sympathy?** Theology takes second place in my ministerial life. In fact I see it as a second language. Religion too is a second language. Spirituality, I believe, is our native, first language. Theology and religion, each in their own way, take on the project of organizing and translating the spiritual life, and so are essential. If I am coming to the U.S. from another country I learn English in order to talk to others. Theology is “God-talk”. We humans are well served if we learn theological language so we can converse intelligently and peacefully in a religiously diverse world.

If we want to find guides (people who have been down a road or two) along our spiritual path we choose a religious home. Choosing a religion we (hopefully) find a place to not only talk about Ultimate Reality, but to explore it experientially. That is spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is where we test out, and verify, deepen and ultimately abide within, the faith toward which religion and theology can only point.

Spiritual practice, not theology, has become the organizing principle in my life, personally and professionally. My own spiritual practice involves daily meditation, contemplation, prayer and then applied practice in daily life. I study and practice weekly with a Buddhist group, and also draw deeply on what I believe are the central spiritual lessons in Christianity, as well as archetypal themes in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.

Christianity, I have come to realize, is in a sense, my “culture”, in much the same way Judaism is my husband’s culture. Though I am more religious than he is I too can not dismiss the awareness that I was raised with very profound, deeply moving, beautiful, gentle, kind, helpful, teachings and traditions for which I am deeply grateful. They continue to inform me in new ways. I only wish my culture of origin had as many good jokes about itself as his does…It could stand to laugh at itself a little more.

Through the practice of self-awareness, in meditation and contemplation I am, paradoxically, learning that self-centeredness (what the Mahayana Buddhists call self-cherishing) appears to be the primary root of suffering. They teach that when we worry, get irritated with others, fear loss, argue with what is, want to position everything in life to suit our own needs, want material things to bring happiness, that is when we create suffering; for ourselves and others. Through my spiritual practice I am verifying for myself another Buddhist teaching: that universal love is protection from suffering. So I am studying about, and practicing, methods which teach me how to cherish others, more than myself. Having said this I must add that the phrase “progress not perfection” is key.

With faith in the reality of universal love as both Source and method I suppose I could then say that my dominant theology is: Unitarian Universalism. It could also make me a Buddhist, a Christian, a Jew and I suspect a Muslim, and who knows what else. I don’t however any longer call myself a “hyphenated UU” as I once did. Each of those is a religion which seeks to guide and organize a person’s faith within its organized communities, and deserves a full commitment. Unitarian Universalism has my full commitment, so it is my religion.