In one-on-one conversations, Multifaith Chaplain Brittany Longsdorf has helped many �ֲ���ý students, as well as faculty and staff, navigate complicated emotions during the coronavirus pandemic. 

“It feels hard to speak to your own personal woe amidst such collective distress,” Longsdorf says. “Right after �ֲ���ý made the call to send students home, there were so many students who were really sad to miss those last few months together, to not feel like they had the time to say goodbye — but they felt really guilty voicing those things amidst universal sickness and death.”

For other students, it’s also hard to speak to their own happiness, says Longsdorf, whether it stems from being home with family or continued, purposeful engagement with their coursework.

“That’s a new complexity of my work, affirming that, yes, there is immense universal anxiety, and we should all care and be concerned about that. But we’re allowed to have our own personal difficulties and to process those — and also have joy.” 

Brittany Longsdorf, second from right, sits with students during a 2017 spring-break gathering. Though students are no longer able to gather as closely as they’re doing here, Longsdorf and the rest of the Multifaith Chaplaincy are committed to maintaining a close, connected community. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

�ֲ���ý was one of the first among its peers to adopt the multifaith model for its chaplaincy, and today’s Multifaith Chaplaincy supports all religious practices and individual spiritual journeys.

Among its central goals is giving the �ֲ���ý community space to feel, reflect, and connect with each other. As the pandemic has forced most students to go home, employees to work remotely, and religious services to move online, that mission hasn’t changed. 

“I describe my chaplaincy as one of warmth and hospitality, creating inviting spaces and then being a companion for whatever journey the person I’m sharing with is on,” says Longsdorf, an ordained Community of Christ minister who holds a doctorate of ministry. “I don’t think those elements have changed too much.” 

In the past few weeks, some of the chaplaincy’s regular programs have gone online and even expanded. Hearth, a regular guided conversation previously for students only, has moved from Longsdorf’s house to Zoom and is now open to faculty and staff. A Wednesday-evening fixture, the art-based secular service called {Pause}, is also online. 

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“We want to provide something familiar wherever people are,” says Associate Multifaith Chaplain Raymond Clothier, also an ordained minister, in the United Church of Christ. 

Supported in their work by faith-based spiritual advisers, the chaplaincy staff, as well as �ֲ���ý students, have created opportunities to pray, reflect, and connect from afar. The chaplaincy has gathered resources for virtual religious services, particularly as major holidays and observances approach — Passover began on Wednesday, Easter is on Sunday, and Ramadan begins April 23.  

Student religious groups are still active, emailing quotes and videos to each other, as well as questions for reflection. Longsdorf and Clothier say �ֲ���ý community members have not come to them with pandemic-related theological questions, but they’ve been encouraged by the way many faiths have embraced virtual worship. 

One Sunday, Clothier attended four different Christian services, each led by one of his former students. “The ones that are working the best are using Zoom webinars, a mix between pre-recorded elements and live. The pastor is sitting at a desk, not standing behind a pulpit in an empty church.” 

Associate Multifaith Chaplain Raymond Clothier lights candles during a 2015 Veterans’ Day remembrance in the Peter J. Gomes Chapel. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Virtual worship, Clothier says, could join much older means of connecting with the divine as “a new way of mediating the tradition.” 

For instance, more than 70 people have joined a virtual retreat this month and are completing daily writings, art, and spiritual practices based on the Celtic myth of the Buried Moon. 

“The places you miss, miss you too.”

“We’re in this time and place where everything feels very restrictive, and there’s not a lot we can access in the outside world,” Longsdorf says. “But there are these complex and beautiful worlds within us that we can dive very deeply into during this time, and find sources of wonder and exploration within ourselves.” 

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Through old and new experiences, and through Longsdorf and Clothier’s continued availability for one-on-one conversations, the chaplaincy hopes to “continue a spirit of connection at this time when everything feels so isolated,” Longsdorf says. 

It’s helped her to think of lines from “The Moon” by poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “And the astonished places you inhabited and left / Ache more clearly for you.” 

“The places you miss, miss you too,” Longsdorf says. “It’s not just that you might miss �ֲ���ý, but these places feel your absence.

“We want to remind �ֲ���ý people that they’re still a part of this place.”

The students who gathered at Multifaith Chaplain Brittany Longsdorf’s home on Sept. 12 found commonality in different experiences: Whether they had studied abroad or somewhere else, worked or interned for a semester, or taken leaves of absences, they had all returned to �ֲ���ý after time away.

To address that often-challenging transition, the Chaplaincy and Multifaith Fellows Keenan Shields ’18 and Haley Crim ’19 organized “Feeling Weird Back at �ֲ���ý,” an event held each semester to help students reflect on returning and to express feelings and experiences that they feel others might not understand.

“I see it as really giving a space for students to not only say the things that they’re not able to say, but also to be around other people who are feeling weird coming back to �ֲ���ý,” Shields said.

As the event — which is part of programming �ֲ���ý offers for returning students — began, the students formed a circle in Longsdorf’s backyard.

Shields asked them to introduce themselves and make a “meter” by putting one arm on top of the other. In this way they checked in. A right angle — arm pointed upward — meant they felt good. Arms kept close together meant not-so good. Most were somewhere in the middle.

One word in particular seemed to reverberate: “Alone.”

Shields and Crim then brought out a ball of yarn and asked the returnees to think of a word to describe their feelings of being back. If another person felt the same way, they’d pass the ball while holding onto the end of the yarn, creating a link from student to student.

As the words tumbled out — “uncomfortable,” “grateful,” “awkward” — the yarn went around and across the circle. One word in particular seemed to reverberate: “Alone.”

“Students do feel alone and do feel lonely,” said Raymond Clothier, associate multifaith chaplain. “That’s partly because they develop new selves or new parts of themselves and aren’t sure where those connect when they come back.”

“I hope that’s one thing that they are able to do — to connect with other students and feel like there are other people who can understand or share similar experiences.”

Multifaith Fellow Keenan Shields ’18 co-organized “Feeling Weird Back at �ֲ���ý” to help fellow students re-join �ֲ���ý after spending time away. He’s shown working with schoolchildren in the college’s Wood Street Garden in July, under a program of St. Mary’s Nutrition Center funded by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

At the end of the exercise, the yarn became a web of common emotions. The students were then invited to further reflect in small-group discussions.

“Maybe we just need to take those fleeting moments and take the risk and open up.”

Themes emerged: Many are now seniors, about to start their theses. Some were processing loss, having left behind friends or host families in other countries, or feared losing what they had learned through immersion in another culture. Others felt a sense of shock coming back to a residential campus after working or living on their own.

In addition to organizing the event, Shields was a participant. An anthropology major from Pittsford, N.Y., he had spent part of the spring semester doing research in Puerto Rico. He said while his experience was valuable, he came back feeling unsettled and sometimes unable to talk about his time away.

Shields said he found others who felt similarly.

“I think that what we arrived at in our group was, maybe we just need to take those fleeting moments and take the risk and open up in those spaces,” he said.

By providing a space where they could talk to others who felt the same way, Longsdorf’s home was a place of reassurance, direction to other resources, or simply understanding.

“It’s a gift the students give to one another to open this kind of space, to be honest with each other and be vulnerable,” Clothier said. “I always feel a sense of gratitude that they’re able to be there in the room with each other.”