Requiem for a Theological Dream

Thursday, October 1, a 133-year-old dream of theological education in the Episcopal Church was buried. The Church Divinity School of the Pacific has closed its doors to seminarians and the beautiful red brick campus on the edge of the University of California Berkeley will be sold.

That news breaks my heart.

 

The seminary had been struggling to keep the lights on for several years now. Entering residential classes had gradually shrunk and dropped precipitously when online programs began to be offered. At the same time, CDSP ended its graduate programs (Masters of Theological Studies, Masters of Arts, Doctorates of Philosophy) it had offered in conjunction with the Graduate Theological Union and eventually withdrew from the GTU. With no students on campus and no students using the world class GTU library, there was no reason to continue to maintain its physical campus. It closed October 1 and is already up for sale.

Asynchronous Courses from the Comforts of Home

The new self-described “hybrid” program will offer asynchronous online courses over a four-year period with periodic on-site gatherings. This will allow credentials seeking M.Div. students to remain home and gain their degree almost completely on a virtual basis. It will no doubt be much less expensive, but it will also clearly demand much less of the student in terms of sacrifice.

In my experience, the value of any endeavor is measured in the amount of sacrifice it requires.

 

 

This move to online course “delivery” is consistent with a pattern we are seeing around the church of reducing the demands on theological education with its often gut wrenching existential dimensions while focusing on vocational aspects of the priesthood. It is also a pattern that I observed in higher education two decades ago when I was one of the guinea pigs in the shift to asynchronous online degree production that increasingly focused on grades, credit hours and ease in attaining them. The very use of the term “delivery” evidences the shift from a student who must engage the process of becoming educated, not the least of which means attending classes, to the consumer who is paying for credit hours and grades attained by the least demanding manner possible.  

In the diocese where I live, would-be priests are able to gain M.Div. degrees from local theology schools, one of which is hard core Calvinist and the other a branch of the formerly United Methodist seminary Asbury that has broken with the church over LBGTQ+ issues. In both cases, the admissions process guarantees admission only of like-minded students willing to buy into dogmatic conclusions up front.

Much of such degree pursuit occurs online. Seminarians then gain Anglican studies certificates through the Anglo-Catholic Nashotah House seminary, either one year residential or 14 months online, or through the evangelical Trinity Anglican Seminary through asynchronous or Zoom-based online classes paired with intensive, brief residential blocks (often 48-hour weekends or one-week intensives on a seminary campus).

What that means is that the road to priesthood increasingly goes through an online process with little face-to-face engagement with other seminarians or professors. It also means that a comprehensive Anglican education formerly offered by actual Episcopal seminaries like CDSP are largely things of the past. The result is the once highly touted Anglican via media, where high, low and middling churchmen and later women all studied together in seminary and thereafter accepted that via media as the norm in church praxis, is becoming a thing of the past, particularly in dioceses now dominated by those ordained out of non-Episcopal seminaries and online processes.

 

“You will be part of the rock but the rock will crush you…”

Of course, this is personal for me. I was clear I was called to exercise priestly duties even when the local diocese would not even consider me for the ordination process because I was partnered with another man. I resisted the call to priesthood for as long as I could. I struggled with my sense of worthiness and, truth be told, sometimes still do. But when I finally decided I would go to seminary on my own, I did so knowing I would foot the bill. I also knew I would have to find a diocese that would accept me as an ordinand.

Those were pretty formidable odds. But I could not get this crazy idea out of my head that I was called to be a priest, despite the homophobia of the church (not to mention my own internalized homophobia whose demons whispered in my hear “You couldn’t possibly be a priest…”) and the resistance to people like me who questioned constructs like “orthodoxy” and the Bible as somehow “the word of God.”

 

As is my custom, I took this soul wrestling with me on a retreat, this one a visit to Italy with my family. Our first night in Rome I snuck out of the hotel room and walked down to the Piazza di Pietro in front of the Vatican, sat down on the curb below the colonnade amidst the bird shit, and began to pray. “St. Peter, I feel I am called to be a part of the rock. Please speak to me.” The response I soon heard was a very somber male voice which said, “Oh, you will be part of the rock, Harry. But know this: the rock will crush you.”

I came home and began sending out letters to seminaries, applied at five, was accepted at all five and then had to choose. Yale, Sewanee and Episcopal Divinity School offered major aid packages and pressed me on my decision-making process. General offered me an M.A. program with the potential to move into an M.Div. program, no funding, no guarantees. Of the five, C.D.S.P. offered the least financial aid but promised that between loans and work study, they’d help me find enough money to get through. In the end, my work study would be at the GTU Library. It was a great fit.

 

I Came Gladly But at Great Personal Cost

 

In the end, I chose C.D.S.P. for a number of reasons. First, I felt I needed to get out of the South and off the East Coast. I knew what they were all about, the South with all its focus on a largely romanticized and uncritically constructed heritage and the East Coast with its focus on hierarchy and power. I was pretty clear the west coast would be different. I had no idea how different it would be.

Second, Andy wanted to be in California. While he always supported my priestly vocation, his time with the Southern Baptists in his childhood in Augusta, Georgia, had convinced him that Christianity needed to be kept at arm’s length at best. He wanted to be where the Buddhists were. And, truth be told, I wanted to hear what they had to say as well. And in the end, we would sit in a sangha of the New Kadampa Tibetan tradition for two years in San Jose and my Buddhist nun would attend my ordination to the diaconate. I told her she had made me a better Christian than I was before.

Third, while I felt called to be a priest, I also knew from the beginning that I was not destined to run a parish. If I had any doubts about my lack of managerial skills and desire to be in charge, my eight-month internship in my sponsoring parish in San Jose convinced me that I should take my intuitions seriously.

As I began learning in the interfaith colloquium at the GTU while working at the GTU Library, I recognized that my desires to complete my education with a Ph.D. were increasingly shaping up as my end goal. While stand alone seminaries offered narrowly tailored programs that were designed to produce parish priests, the GTU offered the opportunity for a broad theological and religious studies education. And it became clear to me that was where I needed to be.

So CDSP provided me with the opportunity to meet two goals. The first was to become an ordained priest with the hopes of working on a parish staff though not directing it. The second was to provide the beginning place for my doctoral work. In the end, I was able to meet both goals. But, more importantly, CDSP and the GTU would change my life forever.

 

I knew I had made the right choice my first day of classes. We were in an Introduction to the New Testament course and a seminarian from one of the other schools at the GTU began his remarks with the words, “Well, as we all know, St. Paul said….” He was cut off in mid-sentence by the woman seminarian sitting next to me. “No, we don’t all know. Explain what you mean by that.” A wave of exhilaration swept over me. I was definitely in the right place.

 

That Sunday, I attended St. Mark’s Episcopal on the edge of the Cal campus. As is the case in some parishes, the same person read the Hebrew Scripture, led the responsive Psalm and then read the Epistle. An elderly woman with a big purple hat was the lector that morning. She had read the Hebrew Scripture ending with the customary response, “The Word of the Lord,” to which the parishioners responded “Thanks be to God.” She then led the psalm and proceeded to the Epistle.

The lesson that day was from 1 Corinthians 14:33–35 which directs women to "remain silent in the churches," stating they are not permitted to speak and should ask their husbands at home if they want to learn anything. The woman lector read the lesson which was followed by a long pause. At that point she shook her head “No” and simply said, “Here ends the reading.” That in itself was striking. But what was more striking was the parish response. They burst into applause. And I thought to myself, Toto, you’re definitely not in Orlando anymore.

 

It was never easy….

 

My time at CDSP was tough. The first year I was alone, living in the dorms. I had beg un making the 50 mile drive to San Jose to the parish that would eventually sponsor me for ordination. I was enroute back to Berkeley the day the Oakland Hills caught fire and returned to be told to have my worldly possessions loaded in my car and ready to leave when ordered to do so. Fortunately the four story wall of fire headed toward the Cal campus and beyond was blown back into itself by a shift in the prevailing winds and we were saved.

Later that year Berkeley would erupt in rioting in the wake of the Rodney King verdict. In all honesty, I was having some serious second thoughts about this move.

Andy would eventually sell our house in Orlando and move to the Bay Area. We lived in Fremont in the East Bay. I could take the BART to the seminary and Andy commuted across the Bay to Sunnyvale to his job with AT&T. My parish in San Jose was a 20 mile hike and on occasion I used the local bus system to make the commute.

 

But my life was expanding well beyond my wildest dreams at this point. I was part of a seminarian pilgrimage to El Salvador at the end of its civil war. We were there with the World Council of Churches and served as observers of the fragile cease fire in place there. The next year we’d return as international election observers.

 

I fell in love with Latin America in the process and would spend a summer in the countryside of Panama an hour north of Panama City and the Canal as an exchange seminarian. My life changed as a result of what I saw and experienced there beginning with my understanding of my own country and its role in the developing world.

At the end of my four years, I would be ordained deacon in a multicultural liturgy at St. Phillips which ranged from an honor song from a descendant of Crazy Horse to the Gospel being read in five languages that night. My bishop would call my then-partner now husband to the front to recognize his role in my getting to that night. We got a standing ovation from the congregation. That was such a different reality from the homophobia driven eviction from the Cathedral in Orlando we had endured before leaving.

 

 

Six months later I would be ordained a priest. But when my application for the doctoral program at the GTU was declined, I knew I needed another option. I discovered Florida State had just begun its religion doctoral program, applied, was accepted and prepared to move home. At this point, my parents were both being treated for their cancers and I felt the need to be closer to them than three time zones away. I would graduate from CDSP just before leaving and would depart with a world of memories.

 

Who’s Buying the First Pitcher?

 

 

Much of the education I attained at CDSP did not occur in the classroom even as it often began there. From the classroom we headed to what was then called the Coffee Connection down Euclid Avenue from the seminary. Our discussions were animated and provocative. Hearing how others were processing the same information I’d just heard was always interesting. In the afternoons we headed to LaVal’s Pizza where the question was who would buy the first pitcher of Anchor Steam, the famed Bay Area beer. We would sit in the courtyard outside the pub and argue theology. Our professors would pass through, many taking a seat and a role in our discussions, and then move on to their duties.

I never felt completely a part of the community at CDSP, perhaps in part because I lived an hour away by BART my last three years, but more likely because I knew my destination, unlike that of many of my classmates, was not in running a parish. But I managed to develope deep friendships with my fellow seminarians that have endured over the years. I cherish them and the memories I have of my time at seminary. And I feel very sad that the new online credentialism of the CDSP 2.0 will probably not provide its customers that option.

I do not want to suggest that seminary was a joy ride. Most of my classmates, including myself, ended in therapy by the end of the first year. Having your existential foundation jerked out from beneath you has that effect. But there was also a sense of belonging in that suffering. We were all wrestling with our souls. And we did so together. That made all the difference.  

 

The closing of CDSP in its incarnate form comes at a time in my life as a priest that it feels like simply one more closing door in a long chapter of my life. With the revocation of my license to officiate and preach in this diocese, I am clearly outside the walls of the institutional church. I call myself a post-institutional priest. And I am only beginning to discern what that means.

But what is clear is that the seminary I sacrificed so much to attend (I would pay my student loans off four months before I retired), the seminary that permanently changed my life, the seminary whose teaching and experiences I draw on every day in all of the work I do, that seminary is gone.

I cherish the memories I hold of it. And on the coming Celtic Triduum of All Hallows Eve, All Saints and All Souls Days, the ofrenda I learned to create during my time studying Spanish in Mexico will include the photo of my graduating class at CDSP above. It will be a way to express my broken heart’s sad goodbye as I let go of that chapter of life. But I do so with the deepest of gratitude for the opportunity I had to be there. I am very clear that I was very fortunate. And I thank G-d for that.

 

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frharry@cfl.rr.com

hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d?  - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

 

© Harry Scott Coverston, 2026

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