We are excited to introduce you to our Intern for Fall 2021- Spring 2022 Torie Pilkington! And what better way than by letting them do it in their own words.
Hello to all the wonderful people of Echoes!
I have met some of you already and look forward to meeting more of you as time goes on, but I’d love to introduce myself in the meantime. I am Torie Pilkington, the new intern. I am agender and use they/them pronouns or my name. I’m also proudly autistic and ADHD. I live on the border between Marysville and Arlington and go to the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. I am in my third year of four working towards a Master of Divinity degree and am blessed to be completing my field experience with you all. If you’re willing, I’d love to explain more about the journey that led me to you all and some of my motivations behind choosing Echoes as a place to learn this year.
I started to look at internship possibilities around April of this year. I was unsure about what exactly I was looking for. I was starting from scratch because the church community that my husband and I were part of since we moved here in February of 2016 had ceased to be a safe place for me. I was immediately overwhelmed. How was I to find a safe place when my experience of church has been an overall negative one? There were many hard conversations with my advisor about church and the negative presence that it has been in my life. I had almost given up hope on a healthy church. I remember questioning whether the church was a redeemable institution. I thought a healthy community might be out there, but I was exhausted and honestly angry that it was so hard to find a space I was welcome in without having to hide who I was.
*A fun little aside – my legal name is Victoria Hope. My parents named all four of their children to mean something specific, praying over what that might be. My name means “conquering hope”. I always tease them and say that they essentially named me “stubborn”.*
Stubbornness characterized my continued search. I started looking at what my advisor called “parachurch organizations”. These are faith-based organizations that gather around a specific need that they wish to meet in a community. None of the organizations that I reached out to replied. I had about three weeks until school started and I was still at square one. I started looking up anything near me and digging through their website. I had almost decided to wait to take the class that requires a field experience. Then, someone posted about Victoria Loorz and wild church on our class Facebook page. I find the church has a tendency to sterilize and tame the beauty and danger of nature, so I went searching for a place that held wild church and I found you. Immediately upon looking at the website, I had a sense that this community was a sacred one. Echoes was a queer affirming church that experimented with what it meant to do church, finding God in things that others might see as mundane or less sacred. Echoes feels like a place that I will be safe in my questioning. I feel invited into experimentation and I appreciate the culture that you all have cultivated.
The timeline in which I established an internship has made it a bit interesting to figure out exactly what this might look like - for you and for me. I’ve never been what people might call “goal-oriented”. I dreaded the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”. Even now, people ask me why I am in school. I try to find a professional way to say that I’m here because it felt like I needed to be. I’ve been trying to embrace the answer that sometimes, our bodies, spirits, and souls just know things. It’s how I felt when I started my MDiv journey and it is how I felt when I found Echoes. As I step into the journey that Echoes is already on with each of you, what I most desire to learn is how you hold your stories. What has drawn you to a church like Echoes? Why have you not given up on the idea of church? What are you all building together?
In the same way that I knew Echoes is where I was supposed to be, I know that Echoes has people from which I will learn. There is something sacred about a community in which each person is seen and accepted for who they are. When I say that I want to learn from you, I don’t mean to put responsibility on you. Learning happens in community. When we feel safe with other people, we can be our true selves. We can experiment and grow. It will be impossible not to learn from you as we share our lives with one another. I know that I must prove myself trustworthy. Even the description of intern can be off-putting if the structures of your past have been harmful. However, I ask that you give me a chance to do that work as I come alongside you in these next few months. I look forward to knowing each of you. To me, we find the sacred in other people. I do wish to learn about the practical running of a church – the liturgies, rhythms, and practices that facilitate a positive experience.
In order to form a community, there must be something that draws people in and makes them feel safe and able to grow. I am especially excited to enter into the advent season with you. I grew up non-denominational, so I missed out on some of the beauty that can exist in ritual. I invite each of you to find the sacred all around us with me and the others at Echoes. Blessings to each of you on your journey. I hope that I might be invited alongside for a little while, but blessings all the same.
Torie