Brethren Priestess & Ejoye Interview

Audrey’s Interview with
Emily Joye McGaughy
LOGOS May 2008

Ad: Thanks for talking with me today. First, I have to ask, what has stood out for you about doing the interviews for LOGOS for three years?

EJ: The way people’s personalities shape how the interview happens. How absolutely different the experience can be depending on who I’m interviewing. How my interviewing style has drastically transformed from when I started. Form, content—everything is different! I learned a lot along the way and tried to integrate those lessons in the way I went about the process each time.

Ad: As editor of LOGOS, I’ve found I have a special access into people, through the writing and art they submit to be edited and printed. Have you found that to be true of your interviews?

EJ: I wouldn’t say that I’ve had greater “access” but I do think that I’ve learned about the power of questions in directing where people go. There are some people who would allow my questions to take them wherever I wanted to go; there were people who had a very clear idea of where they wanted to go, and if my questioning didn’t fit with that they’d make it clear. The word “access” in your question is interesting because I think the level of access that I have to a person’s story can be determined before they even step into the room, in some cases, and in other cases, the level of access we have to each other develops based on the interaction itself. It’s largely dependent on the combination of persons in the room. It’s like dancing. And I think you can measure (maybe not completely) the person’s level of flexibility by watching the way they interact with questions posed to them.

Ad: What has been your most memorable interview?

EJ: With Professor Mayra Rivera Rivera, I asked her about the role of music in her life, she ended up answering the question by giving me the name of a song called “Leonora’s Love Theme” by Astor Piazzolla. I wrote it down and forgot about it. Six months ago I pulled that interview out, read it and bought the song on iTunes, just to see what it was like. Lucky for me, it was a beautiful song! I often reflect on that—the power of associating a person with a piece of art, phrase, historical moment—when I think about the interviewing process because those associations get set up when you sit down and ask people about their lives. The love I have for “Leonora’s Love Theme” gets associated with the great admiration and respect I have for Mayra, and the novelties of both build on each other, so that the song is in the room when I’m with Mayra, and Mayra is in the room when I’m with the song. Who knows if I ever would have heard about Astor Piazzolla without that interview? Now I’m intoxicated by his music on a regular basis! Interviews allow you to probe and make connections in deeply personal and contained ways. I love it.

Can I carry that somewhere?

When I extend that phenomenon of associative relating and the building of novelty into the realm of religion, I’m struck by how deeply such experiences can inform our understanding of resurrection and the way we keep things alive. Just like reading/hearing the prophecy of Jeremiah will always remind me of my undergrad bible professor, the Rev. Dr. Barry Sang, I will always remember Dr. Rivera and feel close to her every time I listen to Leonora’s Love Theme. Likewise, I will always remember Anna Blaedel and PSR when I hear Erik Satie and Yann Tiersen because she played their music in our Arch apartment almost everyday during my first year in seminary. There are tangible ways to connect and make meaning. We can find people by going into the things we have shared with them, no matter how near or far we may be at any given moment.

Ad: You mention that you may no longer be near some people, in part because you are graduating soon. What reflections do you have on your time here at PSR as you start looking at it as a past-tense experience?

EJ: I’ll start with regrets: I regret not taking more classes at CAL and other GTU schools. I regret not participating more fully in the worship life of this campus until my 2nd & 3rd years. I regret the way some of the broader patterns that I brought to seminary affected my time here, patterns that were harmful to other people. I think we all bring dense histories and patterns with us that, though we may give lip service to them in the classroom, we don’t always see because they play themselves out in largely unconscious or subconscious ways. So I have regret about the way misplaced silence and voice, overall lack of cultural competence (to use PSR’s phraseology) on my part—especially in Senior Seminar and the trip to Southeast Asia—played a role in my time at seminary.



Ad: Any fond memories?

EJ: The good news that is I have about 50 million more good memories than I have regrets – but I’ll try to keep it to a limit. My first year in OTNT while lecturing on Job, Jeffrey Kuan went on a tangent about how important it is for ministers to keep their mouths shut in pastoral care situations where life is crashing down in ways that aren’t explainable. When I was in Viet Nam, I was able to watch him put that theory into praxis with me, and it was a powerful testament to the way a person can live what they teach and teach what they live—and in that integration model for others what’s possible. He is a teacher with a capital T for me.
My experience doing worship with Adriene Thorne, Anna Blaedel, Richard Ward, Laura Engelken, and Gayle Basten during Lent was something I will never forget. I have loved talking The Wire and NBA basketball with Rev. Essex. (Go Lakers!) I would say that the other thing I want to lift up is the story circle Seminarians for Choice organized my second year. I was astounded by the level of honesty and the integrity of the witnessing in that room. I also have met people at/through PSR who incarnate God’s wisdom for me. Though the book learning, theory and research have been crucial to my development, encountering people like Marjorie Wilkes, Glenda Hope, Courtney Gulden, Wade Meyer and Michael Campos (just to name a few!) have played an equal if not bigger role in helping me understand what the love of God is all about.

Ad: What legacy would you hope you leave here? (Besides a considerable endowment to OIA, of course.)

EJ: Legacies are interesting. There’s a part of me that’s rebelling against answering that question because I know the way memory works. No one is ever remembered in the ways they would wish (I think Jesus is a prime example of that). The human memory and its lover, the imagination, are capable of all kinds of distortions. Sometimes people distort a person’s ordinariness to make them seem great; other times people distort ordinariness in order to demonize. It’s all about what you’re trying to remember and where you’re trying to go with that memory. We are constantly remembering things in order to move forward. The most important pericope of the entire biblical text for me is in Song of Solomon 8:6a-b: “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is as strong as death, passion as fierce as the grave.” We want the strength of the people we love to accompany us along the way. Something I learned early in life, through the death of my father, is that bodies cannot always come along. Our memories are part of the love that is stronger than death—a love that the early church embodied by keeping Jesus alive among them. We can keep things alive, “hang on to the good of what was lived” (to quote Laura Engelken) among us by tangibly remembering it and keeping it current. What I hope for all of us who are graduating is to keep in mind that the memorialization process is as important as the content of the memory itself. Religion has done some beautifully brilliant and horrifically stupid stuff by acknowledging this or not.

Ad: To move away from the PSR world – what is your most important or meaningful distraction from seminary?

EJ: I have two: art and physical disciplines like exercise and Tai Chi.

Ad: Not the tv show, “The Wire?”

EJ: Let me clarify. Having things like “The Wire” (best television show of all time) and “The Sopranos” and Radiohead and the NBA playoffs (and I think sports are an art, let me be specific about that) to immerse myself in was critical to my survival during seminary. Such a huge part of my theology and life-work is making the body and relationality central in conversations about God, Earth and morality. Clearly that translates into me wanting integration of those things in my own life.

Ad: Closing question: Having been interviewed yourself now, what kind of an interviewee are you?

EJ: I feel as interested in the potential directions of the questions as in the possibilities for the answer. I also want to connect any of the personal dimensions to my answer to broader ideas and issues – that’s really important to me: to not stay stuck in Emily’s life but to see how Emily’s life intersects with other people, other relationships, other cultures - or doesn’t connect to those things and why. It’s such a different experience from this side!

I feel happy that you, Audrey, are asking the questions because I trust your intelligence and your ability to make things relevant. I’ve learned that about you over time, which I think greatly impacts the way I answer and my level of openness to the questions themselves (to quote Rilke). I desperately want my loved ones to know, and consider my answering a way to show them, that they were important to me and I am grateful to them for the ways they touched my seminary experience.