River Olsen, MDiv ‘17

“I didn’t know what community meant until I came out and allowed myself to be vulnerable, to be authentic. I’ve found that other people have responded to that in a positive way—in a way that has been loving and accepting and embracing.”

River Olsen is a third-year MDiv candidate who came to HDS from Flagstaff, Arizona, with her wife Katie and daughter Lisbeth. She graduated with a BA in religious studies from Northern Arizona University, where she studied gender, sexuality, and transgression in South Asian religions. River has worked variously as a radio broadcaster, landscaper, AmeriCorps volunteer, camp counselor, massage therapist, chaplain intern, and most recently in LGBTQIA advocacy and education.

Family

My partner and I are having a baby, and I just got a text before I walked in here that the due date is December 13. I’m so excited! I also have a daughter who is two and a half. I love spending time with her—she is so much fun. Spending time with my family is number one.

Before Boston, we lived in Flagstaff, Arizona. My family and my partner Katie’s family are all from that area. I did my undergraduate at Northern Arizona University, where I studied Hinduism and Buddhism, particularly gender and the divine feminine in tantric traditions. At the end of my program, I decided I didn’t want to do academic work because I was burnt out. So I went to massage school and became a massage therapist. I really liked that work, but I had some difficulty making enough money because it was a small town with a saturation of massage therapists already. So I was a stay-at-home parent and worked a series of part-time jobs before deciding to return to academics. The whole experience of moving across the country with an infant has been very humbling.

Coming Out

I originally came to HDS because I wanted to do pre-doctoral work. At first, I was in the MTS program, and knew almost nothing about ministry, but once I arrived here, I quickly fell in love with the community at HDS and changed to the MDiv program.

I came out (as queer/trans/MDiv) to my friends and family that fall, and decided to explore chaplaincy. The next semester I took more pastoral counseling courses, and then I did a chaplaincy internship at Spaulding Hospital in Cambridge. That was beyond challenging but very rewarding in the end. I realized I didn’t necessarily need to be a chaplain to minister to others. Before Spaulding, I had this image in my mind of this particular Buddha who is reborn into hell in order to care for those who are suffering most. And so, somewhere in the back of my mind,  I had come to idealize this Buddha, thinking, “I have to go to the places where people are suffering the most and do everything that I can possibly do there,” which I later realized was not the best practice for me.

Right after my summer internship ended at Spaulding is when I really began my gender transition in a public way, and so this past year has been a really strange and  interesting period at div school where I have really no idea what I’m doing. I’m not doing preparation for PhD work. I’m also not preparing for ordination or institutional ministry. I’m in this floating, liminal space somewhere in between.

The past year, I’ve worked with SpeakOUT Boston, an LGBTQIA speakers bureau. I did a lot of speaking to high school students there and discovered just how spontaneous those “chaplaincy moments” can really be. Ultimately, I don’t know if I’m going to end up doing non-profit work either. Even after two years, I still don’t know, and actually that’s something that I think is really beautiful.

Identity

I had been struggling with this for a long time—how to put my understanding of my identity into words—and I went to talk with Kerry Maloney. She said something really beautiful to me—that liminality has no language. Something I’ve been delving into and also struggling with since I’ve been here is that I feel like there’s so much of who I am that is between categories. Physically, in terms of my gender/sexuality, but also spiritually. I’ve called myself Buddhist for the past 10 years or so, but that category doesn’t describe me as a whole person. I also identify as pagan. My partner is pagan and most of our family traditions are in that context. A lot of the language that I use tends to be Buddhist when I’m talking about my spirituality. But I don’t exactly have the right language to talk about what that means to me, because I either have to use pagan language or I have to use Buddhist language, and neither of those feel adequate or complete.

For me, HDS has been a kind of snow globe. What I mean by that is that there were all these pieces of myself that were there, but they were configured in such a way that did not represent who I really was. Coming here became this sort of container for me to shake everything up. And so, right now all these little pieces of myself are floating around—unsettled, adrift—and I don’t know exactly how those pieces are going to settle back down. Div school is a supportive space for me to explore what that means, what it means for me to be authentically who I am, which I wasn’t able to do until I came here. And the thing that’s always been surprising to me is that I didn’t know that was going to happen at all before I came here.

At first it was more terror when I got here—and before I got here, too—because I was moving across the country for the first time with my family, who have never been outside of Arizona. My partner and I were moving with a six-month-old to a place where we had no support network. I had never seen my apartment before I moved here, which was a little terrifying. It was mostly fear for me until I came out, until I decided to change my program, and that’s when, for me, that fear of the unknown started to turn into, “Okay, there’s something huge happening here. I don’t know what this is, but let’s see what happens.” I fully see what’s happening to me right now. It’s some kind of metamorphosis for me, and I’m okay with that.  I don’t know what’s coming for me, but I’m going to follow my heart and see what happens. I’ve had to put a lot of trust out into the universe.

Community

I didn’t know what community meant until I came out and allowed myself to be vulnerable, to be authentic. I’ve found that other people have responded to that in a positive way—in a way that has been loving and accepting and embracing. Certainly not everybody, of course, and I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting the opposite, actually. I’m grateful for how everything ended up, for being here at this time in my life, and I couldn’t imagine it otherwise. It kind of sounds hokey, I guess, but being here at HDS has given me so much, and touched the depths of my heart in ways I didn’t think possible.

I think the most important thing is to remember that everyone is beautiful. If I were going to give any advice to someone who’s considering coming out, I would say, "Remember you are beautiful.” This thing that’s welling up in me right now is Toni Morrison’s Beloved. You have to love your own flesh because you can’t necessarily count on others to do that for you.

Find community with other queer people, with other trans people, with people who are going to love you. And allow yourself to be loved in turn, because I think that’s another part of it that has been hard for me: allowing myself to be loved, allowing myself to be vulnerable enough to let other people in. Because I’ve spent so much of my life putting up walls to people and saying, "This is who I am,” when it really wasn't—because that’s what other people expected me to be. Once I finally recognized my true face, and found the strength to be just as I am, and that was the scariest thing. The people here are the ones who showed me that it was possible to be myself and not be afraid to be loved.