Alumni Spotlight: Lydia Strand

Name and pronouns: Lydia Strand (she/they)

Cohort years: 2013-2015

Where are you living now? I’ve been in Boston since Life Together and live in Jamaica Plain with my partner, Cicia Lee (2014).

What are you doing now?

I’m working part time with Life Together as the Prayer and Wellness Partner – supporting the fellows and their community as they navigate their lives through the program year! I’ve enjoyed re-steeping in some of the core material and commitments of Life Together’s to a life of community, prayer, and action–and learning about how the program and fellows over the last several years have developed and evolved conversations about each of these pillars.

And, I’m also working with a project born out of the “Nuns & Nones” group that is building an interfaith and interspiritual community of people across the country committed to shared study, prayer, action, and celebration. It draws inspiration from relationships with communities of women religious–nuns in monasteries across the US. In some ways, there are similarities to the Life Together program in that it’s an attempt to build an alternative lifestyle in which spiritual practice, justice, and relationship is at the center.

How has Life Together impacted your life?

The greatest impact that Life Together has had on my life is through the relationships and friendships that have shaped the last decade of my life. I’ve been in community with people who have been so creative with seeking lives of spiritual community, of social change, and of self-knowing. From building various informal intentional communities, to pursuing contemplative retreats, and trying out learning the various crafts of community organizing and political action, the people I’ve met through Life Together have helped me keep open the call and dream of a life full of Spirit-led connectedness and transformation. I’ll soon age out of the identity of ‘young adult,’ but the experience that was seeded in Life Together of a life of prayer and action has been nourished and strengthened through these relationships. I’m not done with the experiment!

And, I hope it is a lifelong one. I was introduced to Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk and Christian meditation teacher, by Ethel Fraga, a mindfulness and contemplative practice teacher who taught with Life Together about a decade ago. He writes:

“It is a real challenge to find a new way to express our Christian life. It is so easy to get into rules and organization and so to narrow the freedom of the Spirit. The essential thing that Jesus left the church was the Spirit. It is by learning really to trust the Spirit, in our prayer and meditation, and to share this trust with one another that a new language will gradually form.” -- Bede Griffiths, from The New Creation in Christ: Christian Meditation and Community.

I hope to keep deepening in awareness of the always-evolving leading of the Spirit–in and through new and old experiments in living into the transformative and redemptive teachings of Jesus.

Alum Profile: Will Harron

Name and pronouns: Will Harron (he/him/his)

Cohort year: 2014-15 Micah; 2015-16 Emmaus, 2020-21 Prayer Partner; trainer in 2019, 2021, and 2022.

Where are you living now? Greenfield, MA, in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts 

What are you doing now? Wearing too many hats - I'm the Province 1 Coordinator and the Network Organizer for the Young Adult Ministry Network in Western Massachusetts, plus I serve in all sorts of volunteer gigs on the topic of formation and young adult and campus ministry. My paid work is basically in planning and running Zoom meetings between people engaged in ministry who want to connect, collaborate, and support each other in that work, and excitingly, I can direct them towards various grants to support that work. I coordinate a provincial (New-England wide) Young Adult and Campus Ministry network, serve on churchwide councils for Young Adult/Campus ministry and Christian formation, and am doing volunteer campus ministry in Amherst MA. Plus, I've gotten involved in the Western Massachusetts Sacred Harp shape-note singing community, which has been a dream.

How has Life Together impacted your life?

In so many ways. LT was a place from which I could spend two years serving in a parish (Saint Mary's in Dorchester) building relationships, being formed by a community, learning how the church functions, and experimenting with how to do ministry as a lay leader and as a young adult in and alongside the church. LT was an incubator that trained me in community organizing and helped give me superpowers like "facilitate a 1 hour zoom call that people leave energized and want to come back to" or "put on a short worship service with no notice and no sweat" or "give a public narrative for something I love" or "run a training that doesn't turn into a grumble-thon." LT was a community where I made dear friends who continue to shape my life. LT is a source of hope and inspiration to me: that these old bones of the church still have life, that an Episcopal organization can thread the needle between being something that's part of a church and something that can serve and resource people who have no desire to be a part of the church, that young adults can be given power and resources and turned loose to experiment and collaborate and make the somethings-new that the world needs. And LT gave me concrete connections that have led me to the career and vocational place I am - from my first job out of LT in the DioMA offices to my M.Div program at the Boston University School of Theology, to my work now in Western Massachusetts and across the Episcopal Province of New England.

Alum Profile: Lib Gatti

Name and pronouns: Lib Gatti (they/them)

Cohort year: 2015-2016

Where are you living now? Mission Hill, Boston MA

What are you doing now? 
After working as a chaplain with my Life Together placement site (The MANNA Community, at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul) for five years, I transitioned into various public health roles. First, with Partners in Health during the initial phase of the COVID-19 crisis, and then Fenway Health, at their Drug User Health Program needle exchange site in Cambridge. I learned to adapt my leadership and chaplaincy skills to a healthcare setting, and was able to keep working with the communities that I love. I took a few months off this spring to rest and support a family member experiencing some deep grief, and just this week I have started a new job as the Manager of Wellness Programs for the New England Culinary Art School. I will be developing and implementing curriculum and programming centered on student wellness, as well as helping the school become more trauma-informed in its approaches to learning and student care. I am extremely excited to be bridging my love for people, community care, and amazing food into what feels like a dream job!

How has LT impacted your life? 
In so many ways! Life Together gave me concrete skills, as well as a network of relationships, that have made my success as a leader possible. Since completing the fellowship in 2016, I have lived in community with friends from Life Together and used many of the tools we were trained in at every job I have had. Working at MANNA completely changed the trajectory of my career, empowering me to go to divinity school and enter the Postulancy for Holy Orders with the Episcopal Church. Both my placement site at MANNA and the monthly trainings with Life Together laid an organized, spiritually grounded, and relationally resourced foundation for my career, and set me on a path to do powerful work rooted in community and oriented around justice. To this day, I reach for the LT network when I am trying to solve complicated problems at work, when I am facing a spiritually challenging situation, or when someone in my community is in need. In so many ways, I am who I am (and where I am!) today thanks to Life Together.

Alumni Profile: Patrick Kangrga

Name and pronouns:  Patrick Christopher Kangrga (he/him)

Cohort year: 2013-2014

Where are you living now? Jackson, Mississippi

What are you doing now? Lay Ministry; Director of Youth Ministries at St. James' Episcopal Church in Jackson, MS. 

How has Life Together impacted your Life?

I participated in two years of Episcopal Service Corps programs. My first year was in Maryland with the Gileads. Life Together followed. If my experience with the Gileads was like opening a door, then my experience with Life Together was like turning on the light switch in the room to which that door led. The Gilead's gave me opportunities and possibilities that, if I am honest, I thought would always be out of my reach. Life Together helped me to discern one of those possibilities as a life calling.  

Before going to Maryland, I had these two wonderings that I had put into the back of my mind, "What would it be like to be a priest or pastor?" and "What would it look like for me to have more meaningful involvement with children or youth in church?" I did not address these questions all that much at the time for two reasons. First, I had attempted a college degree and had failed at it. Second, I could not imagine that someone like myself would ever be acceptable or worthy of being a minister in the eyes of others or God. 

The benefit of my Life Together year was that it gave me more chances to gain experience. I learned from others and I learned about myself. I could try things and fail even miserably, knowing grace was abundant. Ultimately, this gift of failing with an abundance of grace was the true blessing I received from Life Together and the entirety of my ESC experience. I suspect a world without Life Together and ESC would have been far less gracious to me. And I think the old me, the person I was before Life Together and ESC, would have had little grace too. But the person I am today and the person I believe I continue to grow into sees the beauty of the story God was writing. How the chapters that came before gave birth to the chapters that followed and the one I am living now.  

Anything else you'd like to share?

There is no doubt in my mind that my experience in the Episcopal Service Corps and with Life Together has allowed me to live my best life. I have a career that I see as a calling. I love what I do to earn a living. I have been able to become more involved in the wider Episcopal Church. I have been a part of Forma, A Ministry of ECF, the Network for Christian Formation for the Episcopal Church and beyond for some time now. I joined Forma's leadership and recently became the Interim Chair. 

Also, I have been able to do things that I always wanted to do because of my career. I walked the Camino in Spain with some youth. Because I make a decent salary and am given vacation, I have gone to some of my top dream destinations like Florence and Rome, Italy. I learned to scuba dive in the Great Barrier Reef. 

I have even been able to revive one of my earliest passions. I am a published author. Not a book yet but I have several devotionals, meditations and essays published related to my church work and faith life.