Working From Christ
This year’s Christian Community Interns
Having completed two very different internships, I was curious to learn about this year’s interns, and to encourage them. For my second internship, I worked in my home community, like all five of this year’s interns. Being at home has some advantages; you know the people, you know the joys and sorrows, you can help more. But also being at home means you have to work hard to carve out time and energy for this new work. Family and perhaps another work situation are still expecting much from you. Like all five of these people, I found great support from the Distance Learning Program to cultivate the life of study and prayer.
In the Christian Community in North America, more people are becoming priests than existing congregations can support. A new era is coming which invites new models of congregation founding. Some pioneers in this work are helping to build up their home affiliates, some as seminary interns. What are affiliates? They are communities where no priest lives, but which a priest visits regularly. Three of this year’s five seminary interns fall into this category. I will introduce them first:
Meet Silvia Rodriguez, co-founder of Colegio Inlakesh, a Mexico City Waldorf school. She works there now as Pedagogical Leader and handwork teacher. She has been participating in the seminary’s Distance Learning Program for several years. This year she will work as an intern to start an affiliate in Mexico. Silvia is working with German mentor priest in Cali, Colombia, Andreas Loos. They meet every month. In the meantime, five or six people (from a total of ten) meet every other week to read the gospel and a sermon which Andreas sends each week from Colombia.
First Gathering in Mexico City with Rev. Andreas Loos
Silvia hopes to start a study group around the Christian Community Creed
https://www.thechristiancommunity.org/the-creed/. She also hopes for the community to visit the homeless or the elderly, create toys to raise money for two priest visits per year, and collect the objects for use at the altar. She will visit the congregation in Colombia for two weeks at Easter time to help, learn, and attend a priest garment sewing workshop. Silvia will organize the priest visits, which includes finding a venue.
Instructions for assembling the antique altar in the Montreal Affiliate
Marc Delannoy, who completed his first on-site seminary year in 2022, is also a Waldorf teacher. He writes from Canada:
I am participating in the Ottawa Christian Community (a Toronto affiliate) through the organization of monthly devotional gatherings. The hope is to build up the community through regular devotion and other events. I am also involved with the Montreal Christian Community, about two hours east by car (also a Toronto affiliate). So just like I navigate between English and French in my teaching capacity at two different Waldorf schools, I navigate between two different Christian communities.
For both, I prepare a monthly newsletter, the one for Montreal, bilingual - English and French.
In Ottawa, I offered a talk as part of a Michaelmas conference to answer the following question given by the local Anthroposophical branch leadership: “What does it mean to become human in the Earth phase of evolution in connection with the Christ being?”
Still, my most consequential undertaking is the guidance of a study group both live and virtual every two weeks, essentially (but not exclusively) on Genesis. I cross the river to go to Gatineau, Quebec to a member’s apartment who hosts some of us as I discuss on zoom various topics related to a given theme. What is new is that it is virtual, but also, in French. On any given evening some 6 to 8 people attend.
Altar Painting brought from Germany to Montreal in the 1950’s
Genesis offers the meditative reader an abundant picture language (Heaven and Earth, the waters and the dry land, darkness and light, human and animals, the garden and the wilderness, etc.) that each function as seeds, growing with us, giving root to our understanding of Him, who is the meaning of the Earth and humanity’s goal.
Sean Waters, a dairy farmer at Remembrance Farm near Ithaca, NY, will also be planting the seeds of a new affiliate this year. Like Silvia, Sean has been participating in the Distance Learning Program for some time. His community has been gathering since May when Rev. Robert Bower from Hillsdale, NY, gave a talk. They hold a weekly devotional gathering which once a month expands to include a meal and shapenote singing. Sean is also gathering altar objects; Ithaca’s first Consecration of the Human Being was celebrated on November 11. Additional services are planned for February and May. The service will be held on the farm, as are the devotional gatherings.
The two remaining seminary interns are working to support and deepen the work of existing congregations.
Camilla Lake is serving the Greater Washington-Baltimore Congregation in College Park, Maryland this year. She is living in the apartment on the church property and is involved in supporting many aspects of community life. Camilla’s internship project specifically focuses on how to best provide children and families with the spiritual nourishment needed today. She and her mentor priests Emma Heirman and Matthias Giles have begun their studies on this question with an early book by Evelyn Francis Derry (Capel), the first woman Christian Community priest ordained in England, called Growing Up in Religion. Together, they continue to experiment and adapt the Children’s Program in ways that encourage the children to feel connected to the altar, to the priests and to the life of the congregation. Camilla will continue her part-time administrative work for the seminary around outreach, admissions and the Distance Learning Program. You might also recognize her as the writer of the weekly notes for The Light in Every Thing podcast.
Some of the initiatives that have taken root so far are establishing the ‘Garden House’ as the new children care space. Work is about to start on a path connecting the Garden House, which is deeper on the property, to the Parish House, which houses the chapel. Also in development are new landscaping and play areas to clearly establish a “home” for the children on the land. Currently, there are seven families with eleven young people, ranging in age from 5 - 15. When it’s feasible the older girls watch the younger ones during the adult service, otherwise Camilla steps in. Slowly, the children have bridged the span of their ages and are now often deeply engaged with chalkboard games of Pictionary, learning magic tricks from each other, or sharing their stories or drawings. A balance has been struck between the sacred mood of the Children’s service, story and singing with the energetic, creative hilarity of healthy children.
Naomi Mattana will serve in the San Francisco congregation. She has been supporting the community in myriad ways since the Covid pandemic began. She serves as treasurer and bookkeeper and contributed to organizing the return of priest visits to the two affiliates, Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa. Rev. Michael Latham now visits each of these communities once a month from Friday through Saturday. For the additional work of her internship this year, she hopes to add to her current work a series of talks. Her internship will begin officially later in 2023.
Back row: Damian Gilroy (newly ordained priest, Adelaide, Australia) Sean Waters, intern in Ithaca NY, Silvia Rodriguez, intern in Mexico City, Claire Jerram on-site student, author of this article, Patrick Kennedy, Jonah Evans, Camilla Lake, intern in College Park, MD. Front row: Mary Jane Little, Wang Peng, Min Wang de Jong, Melanie Nason, Silvia Lissett, Naomi Mattana, intern in San Francisco, CA, Nicole Reinhart, Marc Delannoy, intern in Ottawa, ON.
Our author and the interns (in bold) at the seminary in June for the Distance Learning Program retreat/open course, “In the Image of God”.