Vivian Seegers, March 13th, 1958 – June 2nd, 2021[1]
[1] Vivian was the first indigenous person ordained by our diocese and to date the only one.
As I write her life is already taking on a hagiographic hue – she is being scrubbed clean in memory, her complexity reduced, her flaws flattened, becoming a more two-dimensional figure of ecclesial faithfulness. Yet I hope and pray that the undecidability of Vivian remain. She was one denigrated yet at times admired; one of great anger yet deep love; one who struggled with yet met addiction head on; one exhausted yet always responding as best she could to the next call; one deeply desirous of church recognition, priesthood, yet never fitting in, never quite being heard. She was an exemplar of an impossible person responding to impossible situations at the behest of an insistence of the impossible, this going by a variety of names – creator, great spirit, god, or justice or hospitality or reconciliation. She sought, served, perhaps saved, whatever is stirring within the name of god.
As I write perhaps this is a time of confession except, I’m unsure if I have sinned. Truthfully, if it were not for my involvement, Vivian probably would not have become a priest, not able to survive the institutional processes (obstacles?) leading to ordination. However, as clarity calls me, I am not saying that I alone assisted Vivian, that others did not do necessary work. I am saying she may have given up along the way, or perhaps been forever stalled by bureaucratic deafness posing as hearing. If not for myself and truthfully the community of St Mary Magdalene’s, Vivian’s hope for priesthood would have remained hopeless.
Yet I am haunted…she became a priest but I’m not sure if I, we, did her any favours…
The truth is we needed her more than she needed us. We needed her passion, we needed her insistence that it was to such as these – First Nations peoples, residential school survivors, those bearing the often-insidious marks of centuries of colonialism – that the reign of god belonged. It was to such as these that work of justice, hospitality, inclusion, and love belonged, this, not work done in the dulcet tones of colonial condescension but a work of reciprocal cooperation and respect.
Vivian was angry and we needed her to be for our salvation…
Vivian was passionate and we needed her to be so we could discover again perhaps for the first time – to echo Marcus Borg – our passion, our passion for a reconciliation involving deeds not simply rhetoric…
Vivian pursued a calling in excess of or perhaps deeper than ordination, and we needed her to do so that perhaps we could risk our own excess, taking the chance of mistake, thereby facing our need of confession…
Vivian pursued the harsh of edges of truths too long denied and buried and we needed her to do so in order to break through the sclerotic hardness of our institutional hearts…
Vivian was a pain in the ass, and we needed her to be to disturb our ass out of the trap of being nice…
(Wilful ignorance is not becoming of god’s people…)
Truth to tell, within the complexity of Vivian, the reign of god blinked into existence, the promise of god for brief moments being made real…
Vivian lived all in; the church classified her as part-time but as her son Stephen said, “There was nothing part-time about my mother!”.
Truth to tell, I’m not sure I did Vivian any favours but she sure as hell did me favours…
She was my friend; I hope I was hers…
Vivian lived her faith unto death contracting Covid in the exercise of her work and I pray, I hope and pray, it is not too late for me, for us, to pay her life forward…
As I said, I’m not sure if we did her any favours – she had reasons to expect more of us. We owed her more than she was given. Who are we? We are the church and yes that includes me – we owed Vivian and the people she served more than we gave yet perhaps Vivian in her death will be that spectral presence haunting our days, inviting us to respond…