profiles of ministry Wilcox then began working in Tanzania, just a few miles from the Rwandan border, assisting the Anglican Church. It was there that she realized the vague stirrings inside were pulling her to a life in ministry. She had been asked to give a sermon on the Trinity at a small church. Though she was not theologically trained, she was able to demonstrate the sometimecomplex topic using three stones to hold up a cooking pot. Remove one of the stones, and the pot would fall over. As she bicycled home through lush banana fields she knew where her path lay. “All of a sudden it was so clear to me,” she said. “I felt this incredible sense of this is where my calling is. My vocation…is preaching and writing and that’s the part I really thrive on. [A calling] is something that unfolds—most people don’t have that lightning bolt.” When she returned to the United States, Wilcox enrolled in the Virginia Theological Seminary and graduated in May 2001. In July 2001, she married fellow seminarian Adam Kradel and, that September, she became a deacon. In February 2002, she was ordained as an Episcopal priest at the Church of the Holy Comforter in Kenilworth, Ill., outside Chicago, where she now serves as curate.
Wilcox’s calling to the priesthood was not unprecedented in her family. It’s something of a family business. Her father, grandfather and great-grandfather were Episcopal priests. In fact, her grandfather, the late Bradford Hastings, was the Episcopal bishop of Connecticut while Wilcox was a student at Taft. Indeed, during her ordination process, Wilcox had to struggle with her family’s legacy. “Is this something you are called to do, Melissa, or is it something you’re meant to do because of your family?” she remembers being asked. “Is this a calling for me or is it stepping into comfortable shoes?” But the complex process through which Episcopalians become ordained helped refine her vocation. Wilcox continues her outreach work with the elderly and homebound, as well as combining forces with a nearby AfroCaribbean parish, whose pastor, like Wilcox, speaks Swahili. “It’s wonderful,” she said with a laugh. “I get to practice my Swahili!” At 30, Wilcox is a young force in the rapidly aging Episcopalian priesthood, a factor that sometimes disconcerts her parishioners. “I’m young and I look young, it’s assumed that wisdom is associated with age,” she said. “But I can talk of things of life
and death and hope…because of my priesthood, not because of being Melissa.” Yet as she talks with parishioners, prepares her sermons, ministers to the sick and the dying, Wilcox says she knows she is doing what God wants her to do: being a window to the work of God. “It is my work to discern where God is in my life, in the life of the parish, in the world,” she said. “I am with people as they are at the cusp of some of the most significant events in their lives. As I prepare a couple for marriage, I listen to them, to who they are, to what they would like to become, but I also try to help them see God in their relationship and in their upcoming marriage. At death, in the hospital, I am not the focus of the ministry, but it is my office, the priesthood, that allows me to hold hands with the dying and their families and to pray with them. “As priests we have taken vows to live our lives in such a way that people may see us pointing them to God. It is not about seeing God in us, but seeing through us to God.” Bonnie Blackburn Penhollow, class of 1984, is an award-winning journalist who lives in Fort Wayne, Ind. She and her husband Steve are the proud parents of Emma, born in June 2002.
David Brooks ’60 The Holy Ground of Hospice by Bonnie Blackburn Penhollow ’84
A
s a Taft student in the late 1950s, David Brooks planned to follow in the footsteps of his international businessman father. He didn’t envision a life
spent ministering to the dying.
32
Taft Bulletin Winter 2003
He served in the Navy. He worked in hospital administration. But something was missing—the faith he’d lost as a young man. “I think I’ve always had a spiritual sensibility, but it took me a long time…to find my way back,” Brooks said. “That sensibility was dormant.”