Thanks, Amy. I completely identify with your reflections. I guess I have less of an empty spot at the moment because we just had reunion. But good-byes are good-byes and the community dies and is reborn every year.

(Editor's note: Thanks for the comment. We need your full name next time.)

Amy,

This is wonderful. It's been thirty-three years since I was a college chaplain at the Episcopal Church at Yale, but the feelings, the joys, and the ongoing sense of loss you describe are still fresh. Thank you for your witness to this invaluable work.

Too many dioceses dismiss on-campus ministry and a worshiping community of students as wasteful or competition with the parishes near a college or university campus.

My thirty-three years since serving as a college chaplain have given me lots of opportunities to hear from lay leaders and clergy who were formed in our Episcopal Church at Yale congregation, during years we raised support year by year to keep the congregation going. (And I'm grateful it's still there, still managing to do good work - http://www.episcopalchurchatyale.org/)

I can feel in your stories how solidly you've rooted your work at M.I.T. in your Lutheran-Episcopal student congregation's ongoing worship and working together to build community and serve others. With an open-hearted, flexible chaplain, such community shapes itself around the urgent evangelical dilemmas of speaking Gospel in a setting steeped in skepticism, irony, and sometimes even mannered or bored cynicism. Critical means eager to learn make university a place of conversion, as you show us in these rich moments you've shared.

Chaplaincy also offers extraordinary opportunities for leadership formation. The leaders you as a chaplain must lament as they move on had taken up key roles and major responsibility in your student congregation. If any of them had attended a neighboring parish church instead, they'd likelier have been welcomed to responsibility and decision-making only occasionally as the interesting voice with a label like 'the student perspective.' Parishes are looking for leaders among those who are most likely to stay on. It makes good sense, but the profile doesn't fit a parish's college and university student participants. For some students, simply attending a parish church week by week, hearing good preaching and having a sacramental life may be just right - typically for ones who've already shaped a role for themselves in their parish back home.

But for students who are newly testing faith or newly energized to deeper community accountability and leadership, chaplaincy can be life-changing.

Remembering Episcopal Church at Yale 1970-1976, I'm also delighted at the serendipity of the video piece the Cafe has posted currently on St. Gregory's food pantry. The foundation for St. Gregory's community-based, traditionally rich, highly participatory liturgy and St. Gregory's practice of welcoming all to communion began in the kind of missionary worship setting college work offered. Using what was for us a daily sung liturgy to engage and work with students hungry for challenge and shared religious experience started our work on a path that led to founding St. Gregory's, a missionary outreach to people in San Francisco who didn't know the church had anything to offer them, and in the unfolding of that evangelical mission to a lovely crisis, a hungry atheist meeting God and speaking God's vision to share groceries with the hungry poor from the same altar where she first felt the depths of her spiritual hunger and was offered and received the Body and Blood of Christ.

With somewhat less baggage from long-term survival and no history or mores held by old-timers, college chaplaincies and start-up congregations both help us see that the public work of liturgy and the public work of feeding the poor are inseparable. In the Spirit, liturgy generates mission and mission generates liturgy, the pairing you and other council members of Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Mission (http://associatedparishes.org/) now articulate as "Worship Doing Justice Doing Worship."

Sometimes our Episcopal church (more from convenience and complacency than real reflection, I think) regards college chaplaincy as an unfortunate concession to young adults who are not disciplined enough to get to their nearest parish church on Sunday morning. In fact, good chaplaincy like you are leading with the students at M.I.T. is boldly missionary, profoundly formational, and provatively engaged in service and sowing astonishing seeds for future service and justice-making.

I hope all of us who have ever had the privilege of serving as you do now and even more, all who have been evangelized, formed, and inspired by a college chaplaincy will speak up in support of those ministries in our own dioceses and support those working to keep the ministries thriving in hard times.

Dear Amy,

What a beautiful piece you've offered here. Your words and Donald's have me wondering about the experience of students who have been highly engaged in a wonderful chaplaincy such as yours, and then find themselves in the "real world" looking for their next faith community.

My guess is that they're likely to find themselves encoutering churches that treat them not as leaders the community might learn from, but as anomalies to be conformed to an existing tradition! Quite a few of the folks attending St. Lydias (www.stlydias.org) are younger people who were engaged in a college ministry, but never found a church that "worked" or "felt right" after they left college.

How can our parishes seek to reach out to the class of 2009, and then the class of 2010, and craft a community that places their expereince and hunger at the center?

Amy, my wife shocked me when she held our first child in her arms. She said, "You know, we're only going to have her for a little while. She's wonderful, but it's all about getting her ready to move on, about getting ourselves ready to let her go." I wasn't ready for this kind of perspective, but she was right. Our daughters are very much in our lives 40 years later, but still they are gone too. living their own lives somewhere else, and it's incredibly bitter-sweet. The patients we work so hard to help come and go too. I know a woman who works with trauma victims in a hospital. She's at the center of what is often the greatest drama of their lives, and then they are gone. It feels very cruel. My favorite fantasy is that I am living in a small town in which everyone I've ever known is still there. I hate every ounce of loss; each one is like a small death. At the same time, knowing that one day my daughter would be gone made her almost unbearably precious to me, "unbearably" in a good way, because it drove home to me in a way that nothing else could, no amount of abundance, the value of the gift I'd gotten. It's as if this possibility of loss is a kind of scale God gives us, the only kind we can understand, in which to weigh the full value of His gift. And if Augustine is right in saying that every person spends his life searching for God, perhaps that too is a gift contained in all our experience of loss, the gift of knowing that at the end of that search there is a place in which we will find that nothing has been lost and that in God, one way or another, we will all brought back together, redeemed, transformed, made whole.

Thanks for this -- I did my field work at the Lut-episc chaplaincy (as we called it then) at MIT. Great memories.

Amy - what you say speaks to all of us whose ministry is in academic life. There is, every year, that happy-sad grieving time, bidding farewell to people we've watched grow and are sending out to serve (at the seminary, to serve the church; at U of Maryland, to all kinds of different ways to touch the life of the world. But the grief is part of the "cost" of ministry in academic life, I guess -- We consent to live through emptying the nest all over again, every year, and preparing to receive new ones -- you've expressed it so well. -- I know a lot of my faculty colleagues share that same wistfulness -- we've watched them grow, helped to form them (particularly at the seminary) and now they're on their own.

I should also say (as a product of campus ministry, including Don's ministry at Yale in 1975-6)-- that yours is a hugely important ministry -- laying foundations that God uses in all kinds of ways. I don't think you ever can duplicate the experience of a college chaplaincy in parish life, but it sure does lay a good foundation for Christian community and the effort to live faithfully.

But you know that. Thanks for expressing so well that feeling so many of us have at "commencement" time.