Elaine Silverstrim: (1988-1991): Father Elaine goes to General
It was a clear and sunny day in late August. A newly minted candidate for Holy Orders had just been moved into the basement apartment that she would affectionately refer to as “Corney's Bottom". Of course, the Rev. Dr. Richard Corney would never hesitate to remind her it used to house the servants to the main house. That would come later.
In that moment of waving her spouse on his way back home, she sat on a bench facing through the glass doors to the lobby and cried.
That was my first memory of arriving at General for orientation in August of 1988. Did I cry from a sense of abandonment? A bit like that first day of school for a kindergartener? Partly, I'm sure. But I was 42. I was a mother to five and already a grandmother three times over. No. I think I was simply overcome with emotion and in that precise moment all the efforts and prayers and dreams of seven and a half years of “process" crashed over me.
As with so many of the incredible people in my class, I was considered “second career". I came with a BA in EC Ed from an HBCU, Albany State in Albany, GA, where I had also briefly taught. Other career paths led to that August day, in Data Processing at MetLife, Emery Airfreight and the USPS. During that time, I fed the other side of my brain with an MA in History from the University of Scranton. But my path to ordination was no more crooked than that of my contemporaries.
I always considered my journey to be a First Career, long delayed, with a desire streaming back through my life to my teen years. The amazing men and women of my class of ’91 were an odd lot of gay and lesbian men and women, a former surgeon, several college professors, all of us representing a broad range of life experiences in business and education and caring fields. I rather thought of us as the flotsam and jetsam of the First Wave following the opening of the hallowed gates for “the later arriving laborers to the vineyard “.
I was convener to the Women's Caucus, director to the after school for children of seminarians and, for a time on the seminary basketball team. I really enjoyed my time off campus. I learned how to write grants, but still left seminary nearly $42,000 in debt.
Margaret Guenther helped me find a lovely spiritual director nearby. I often took the subway to friends on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, walking through the Brooklyn Gardens for green therapy. In my senior year I was able to get a one day/week job in the Interfaith Office at 915.
By far, the most memorable experience was my senior year internship at Brotherhood Synagogue in Gramercy Park. The junior Rabbi and co-mentor to my time there, Rabbi Daniel Alder, is now the Senior Rabbi. A singular benefit of COVID is being able to join them after all these years in zoom classes!
To borrow from a better writer than myself, “It was the best of times and worst of times.”
I choose to remember the best. Without question the entire experience shaped and formed me in ways that are now fully woven into the tapestry of my life, and I am grateful.