Email Link
Facebook
Twitter
DiggA Little Rest Before Changing the World
Why is the Trinity Grants Program funding people to take time off work? Because people who change lives need their rest, too.
This article appears in the Sabbath edition of Trinity News. To receive a free subscription to the print edition of Trinity News, send your mailing address to news@trinitywallstreet.org. (Please note that in doing so, we may use your email and mailing addresses to inform you of special parish events and resources available on this website).
By Retta Blaney
At the end of his sabbatical, the Rev. Bertram G. Bennett Jr.’s passport held three more rubber stamps than when it began: South Africa, England, China. It was hard work traveling the globe, but it was also restful and inspiring, and that’s just what the founders of the Trinity Transformational Fellows program had in mind.
Bennett was in the first class of Trinity Fellows, chosen in 2004. As the priest-in-charge of St. David’s, located in the South Bronx, he led efforts to create a thousand units of public housing, establish two alternative public high schools, and carve out 80 housing units for senior citizens.
The Fellows program offers renewal for visionary members of the Diocese of New York, like Bennett, who are engaged in efforts to change the structures that cause society’s ills. The idea is that the well-deserved time off will create a ripple effect back to New York communities. In Bennett’s case, the ripples were global. “In South Africa, the sense of hope was so enriching,” he says, mentioning the spirit of children orphaned by AIDS. “To see them in church and witnessing to their faith has been a sense of hope for me.”
With his experience of eight years in the coalition of South Bronx churches, he had much to offer in London, where clergy were hoping to unite with urban parishes in New York to share problems and seek solutions.
His trip to China was different. In the black and Hispanic South Bronx community, Bennett hadn’t experienced Asian culture. But when Asians began moving into the elderly housing he had established, he was grateful for the opportunity to visit China. He was impressed with the small groups formed there within the larger parish communities, ones that are agerelated or with themes, such as those for mothers. He vowed to establish similar inner circles in his own parish.
These encounters are exactly what Trinity’s Grants Program had in mind in creating the fellowships. “We’re looking at how the Episcopal Church responds not just in hospitality to people in need, but how we look at the underlying needs, such as why is there a need for housing,” says the Rev. Canon James G. Callaway Jr., Trinity’s Deputy for Faith Formation and Development. “Our Fellows are the face of this work. We wanted to see if Trinity could serve as support for these remarkable leaders who are taking risks, and transformation always involves risk.”
An anonymous committee chooses the Fellows, who are awarded $20,000 for a six-week leave from their ministry, either ordained or lay. The fellowships are not applied for and candidates are not told they are under consideration. For the Rev. Dr. Earl Kooperkamp, rector of St. Mary’s in Harlem, sabbatical allowed him time to prepare a course in church history to teach at Sing Sing prison and one on liberation theology for The General Theological Seminary. He spent four weeks at Holy Cross Monastery in New York. Besides having a prayerful place in which to prepare, he also reflected on his parish ministry.
“It gave me a little bit of perspective on what St. Mary’s is and where we can go,” he says. “The day is structured around prayer and that enabled me to get an incredible amount of work done. Parish life is almost totally unstructured You work a few hours Sunday morning and make the rest up as you go along.”
It also was a time to reflect on the Sabbath Commandment. “‘Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.’ Remembering means not only doing so in the part of your mind you keep conscious, but remember as in rejoining the Sabbath rhythm and Sabbath wisdom. God made the Sabbath part of the fabric of the universe, according to Genesis. It’s so easy to lose that and not join in with that rhythm. That puts us out of kilter with all creation, ourselves and ultimately God.”
In his five years at St. Mary’s, Dr. Kooperkamp has brought about much transformation, advocating for prison reform and the rights of restaurant workers, but the effect of teaching in prison surprised him. Recidivism rates are 60 to 70 percent, but for prisoners exposed to higher education, the rate plummets to 5 percent.
“In parish ministry we don’t always see results like that,” he says. “It makes a difference somewhere. That’s why I’m doing it. I’m blown away. No matter how much I put into it, I always get much more back.”
Callaway says giving these people a chance to get away and renew their spirits honors them over and beyond the ongoing monetary support Trinity awards them for their work.
“There aren’t any Oscars or Pulitzers for what these people do. It’s the busiest people who most need the Sabbath. We want to help them to step back so they can step forward.”
Retta Blaney’s latest book,Working on the Inside:The Spiritual Life through the Eyes of Actors, features interviews with Kristin Chenoweth, Edward
Herrmann, Liam Neeson, Phylicia Rashad, and Vanessa Williams, as well as
20 clergy members including the Rt. Rev. Catherine S. Roskam and the
Rev. William A. Doubleday.
