J. Carr Holland - 'The Discerner'

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J. CARR HOLLAND: The Discerner

“Ordained ministry is at its heart about the formation of character: i.e. whatever function and prerogative is laid upon us must rest side by side with the spirit and heart, a way of seeing, a way of being, which we bear for the whole community of the Baptized.”

The Rev. J. Carr Holland delivered those in 2003 during the ordination of five deacons at Trinity and St. Phillip’s Cathedral in Newark, New Jersey.

At the time, Carr Holland was the rector of St. Grace Church in Newark, New Jersey.  He was also in transition into the role of President on the Commission on Ministry for the Diocese of Newark.  In his latter role, he served on the commission that oversaw the church’s process for evaluating candidates for ordination. 

The Episcopal Church has a comprehensive process for discernment, or evaluating an individual’s call to serve the church.  The process has evolved over the past several decades from a fairly informal process to one that is structurally codified in the canons of each diocese.  Prior to the 1970s, the typical path was that a candidate for ministry was recommended by his or her home vestry and priest to the bishop, who would then make a determination as to whether or not the path to ministry would continue.  The ‘70s saw the rise of the Commissions on Ministry and the formalization of the prescriptions for discernment.  The commissions would still make the recommendations to the bishop, but because of the scrutiny of the process, their recommendations were very loudly listened to.  The process, once begun, takes several years to complete and moves candidates through a series of interviews with clergy and lay councils, a psychological examination, seminary, ordination as a deacon, and then, if it is deemed to be the proper move for the individual and the church, ordination into priesthood.

Holland understands well the serious personal and institutional vetting involved in evaluating a call to ministry.  As he pointed out in his remarks, the vocation must be for the balanced good of the individual’s “spirit and heart,” as well as being compatible for the good of the church as a whole.

As a member of the Commission on Ministry, he is quick to point out that not everyone who feels he or she has a vocation actually has one, and that the commission’s responsibility is not to herd ministers into the church, but to protect the institution of the church from people who may not be truly be called to serve.  Perhaps the greatest challenge to his own sense of calling came from within when, as a student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in the early 1970s, he had to sort out a personal crisis of faith.  But after considerable self- examination and spiritual guidance from friends and mentors, he recognized that he was experiencing a genuine call to serve. 

After graduating from UNCG in 1972 with a Bachelors of Science in Sociology, he earned his Masters of Divinity from the General Seminary in New York.  He served parishes in New Jersey for more than three decades, before returning to his native North Carolina in 2010 where he now serves as an interim priest.

In the following excerpt, he describes how incidents late in his college years helped answer questions he had concerning faith and vocation.

CHANGING DIRECTION

By the second semester of my freshman year I had taken a fairly significant number of art courses.  You were expected to do mostly academic things.  I done a little more than dabbling and I realized that as much as I loved art, it probably wasn’t going to be a place I’d want to spend my life.  I had this other value in my life that began to shift in.  I wanted to do something with my life that helped people.  I thought about teaching, and I settled into sociology, thinking it might be the right thing.  I was doing social welfare concentration.  And that just settled in more and more and felt that it might be the right thing to do.  And by my senior year, I was concentrated in services to children.  I was given a field placement in a children’s home for two semesters.  That was what I chose to do and I had a sense there might be something more. 

In my junior year I made an appointment with Father James Hindle to talk about whether I had a vocation to the priesthood.  I wasn’t clear.  It was just a conversation and I didn’t have a follow-up conversation.  I was given books to read and that didn’t help me in the slightest.

Looking back on it, I’m not sure if Father Hindle could have done more for me in that moment than he did.  But there was one phrase he used with me back then that has always stayed.  He told me I should prepare for a career outside the ministry and only when I felt like I had no alternative but to be ordained should I seek ordination.  That was a curious phrase that I played with for the next several years, because I felt like there were other things I could do since I thought that’s what I would do.

But at the time, I was left with what I would say is I had a confusion, and I wasn’t sure whether it was a direction or whether it was a desire on my part.  I couldn’t sort out where it emanated from.  By my senior year I was afraid it was other peoples’ pressure and not really a calling. Katherine and Frank Whaley I think recognized what were the possible signs of a vocation and so they encouraged me.  And you know, encouragement, when you’re not there, can feel like pressure.  I wouldn’t say they pressured me, but I experienced it as pressure.  I think maybe I pressured myself from the time I first had the conversation about a vocation.  I wasn’t sure what it meant but I didn’t want to be unfaithful, so there was a kind of inner pressure.  Some of my peers certainly saw the possibility there.   And of course, in your college years you’re so desperate to sort our what it is you’re to do for life that that’s it’s own kind of funny thing.  So, I was a little bit confused whether it was other people pressuring me or if it was something I felt genuinely called to, and so I just pushed away.

The other curious chapter was that in my junior or senior year, sometime around Christmas time or thereafter I had a real crisis of faith.  I don’t remember the chronology of these two things – the conversation with Father Hindle and the crisis – but I had a moment of crisis when I suddenly felt, “What if none of this is true and I’m making my life on it?” I resigned from teaching Sunday school and from everything at that point and I told Father Hindle that I would not be coming to church for a while.  He didn’t push me.  It was a deeper conversation, so there were questions.  But I recall that he said, “When it’s right for you, you’ll be back.”  I only stayed away two weeks.  And then it was like, “This is the answer.”  So I began to continue to go to church, but with this puzzle in my brain.  I think it was my junior year, because I remember I decided to take a course in religion, but it was a course in the phenomenon of religion.  The very first book we were assigned was a book by Elizabeth Sewell called, “The Orphic Voice.” (cq, cq).  In the introduction to that book she used the phrase, “I’m going to take you on a journey, but to take you I must use the myth of Orpheus.  You must trust the myth to bear truth to make the journey.”  I remember it was like I got slapped in the back of the head and I said, “There’s my problem. I have to trust the biblical story to bear truth, and then I’ll know where I am to go.” It was like turning the light on.  It sprang forth and it was that phrase that caught me.

There is another moment that’s critical in all this.  I mentioned that I had a fieldwork placement in a children’s home.  I had two afternoons a week from noon to five, and I had three specific people on my caseload plus other kinds of training going on.  One of those people was a teenage girl.  All three were siblings and all three had been severely abused in the home of their origin. I would meet with them regularly.  I don’t remember the rotation exactly, but I think it was once every two weeks.  The teenage girl had these questions, and we would talk.  But as a social worker you have very defined areas of what you can respond to and how you respond.  You’re essentially trying to assess the needs of this individual and where the system can reach in to meet those needs.  This girl’s questions struck me.  By my second semester, they were all religious questions, and because it was a Methodist children’s home we couldn’t deal with those questions, we could simply forward them to the chaplain.  But I had a real sense that because they were so profound and came out of her very abused childhood and this was a pretty fundamentalist Methodist home, that the last person she could talk to was the chaplain.  The questions were about why things happen and about meaning. They were about what her life means now.  She was trying to finish high school and figure out what was next.  And I don’t remember them except there was a sense that they were really more religious than social work and they were the questions I really wanted to deal with in life.  That was a push-pull.  I could sense the vocation again, but was I deluding myself?  What’s going on here?  So while I credit her with that moment of sparking that question in me, I don’t even remember her questions, and I certainly didn’t deal with it by saying, “Oh, this is what I’m called to.”  But it was just one more question inside myself.