A New Chaplain at Yale, cont.
Linda Koch Lorimer
For President Levin and me, the journey to this day starts about five years ago, when we asked why we should not aspire to have Yale’s programs of religious life be the best of any university in the nation. We expect that of our curriculum for undergraduates, and for so much of the extracurricular activity for students.
We say regularly that Yale provides as rich and rewarding an educational experience as is available anywhere. Why not aspire to say the same for students’ religious life?
These thoughts were followed by President Levin’s actions. In 2003, he assembled a University Council committee of religious leaders from around the nation to advise us on what Yale should do to support and encourage the full range of religious beliefs on campus. I am particularly thrilled that Rabbi Susan Laemmle, who was one of our wise counselors on that Committee, turns out to be one of Sharon’s dear friends and is here to celebrate her--and to usher us into the future she helped to describe in the University Council report. Parenthetically, I hope that she might also be applauding (at least, a little) how this institution took her Committee’s concluding challenge to heart. The closing sentences of the 2004 report of the University Council Committee on Religious Life offered this exciting call to Yale:
“In a changing religious culture, colleges and universities seek evolving and innovative models for serving the spiritual needs of campus communities. Many look to places like Yale for ideas and inspiration. As one of the nation’s oldest colleges and one grounded in a three-hundred-year history…, Yale has a special calling to align the quality of its religious ministries with its recognized excellence in nearly every other area. This is a significant, yet attainable, vocation.”
This is to be the vocation of our seventh chaplain of Yale University.
We hold the hope that in your tenure and with your leadership, Sharon, we can envision and then create as successful and superb a set of campus ministry programs as found anywhere.
Charge
This brings me to the formal Charge to the Seventh Chaplain of Yale University, which I offer with great pride in you--and also in our University in arriving at this moment when we install our first female chaplain and the first one called intentionally to serve those of all faiths as the Chaplain’s primary duty.
Sharon,
We look to you to provide ecumenical and interfaith leadership to the Yale community honoring its treasured Christian history, while embracing the expanding religious and spiritual composition of our campus community.
We need your help in supporting the spiritual journeys for all of our faculty, staff, students and their families.
We count on you to give conspicuous leadership to the Yale Religious Ministry and to bring together individuals from the rich array of student religious organizations. We need you to give our students (indeed, all of us) opportunities to engage with one another, to encounter a stranger who might then become a friend and to foster greater understanding and true appreciation across and among religious and spiritual traditions.
We look to you to provide pastoral leadership to the Yale community in times of deep sorrow and in times of joyful celebration. Already in your first year we have seen how blessed we are to have you here--how you can be the ear that hears our deep longings and our gnawing questions and can help us weather difficult passages in the life of a school or individual.
We want you to be the voice that articulates religious values in ways that compel and challenge us to be our best selves, and that regularly remind us that the world beyond this campus is in great need of our contributions.
We need you to guide us on the next leg of the journey of this University as you shape a new chaplaincy that will honor what has come before, that will preserve--indeed strengthen--the Christian traditions on which this institution was founded, and that will create new traditions, programs, and structures for the many other faiths that animate our world and will increasingly energize this campus.
This is our Charge to you, and with it goes our commitment to support this noble set of ambitions and to support you as colleague, leader and friend.
~~~
Linda Koch Lorimer is vice president of the University. She co-chaired the search committee to call the seventh chaplain.
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The Chaplain's response
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