# To Listen the Way God Listens November 06, 2017 Sometimes the Rev. Katherine Buechner Arthaud, MDiv ’86, wonders if she’s making a difference. The crowd in the pews on Sundays can be small in the rural Vermont churches she serves. She’s not sure that her sermons always resonate with parishioners. A woman with Alzheimer’s disease might not remember that Arthaud sat with and comforted her. Then she gets a call from a grief-stricken woman who doesn’t even attend Arthaud’s church. Her mother is dying. “Can you come over and do something or say something—anything—to help?” she pleads. Arthaud visits, leads a short bedside service, and bears witness to the love and the deep power of the transition. “Rural ministry is not about winning prizes or having things published or being at HDS where there’s an exciting conversation every five minutes,” she says of her work. “I would say that there’s a slow healing evolution. I’m there to help facilitate it, mostly through listening.” For nearly two decades, Katherine Arthaud has used the skills, knowledge, and pastoral agility she developed at HDS to serve a small rural community in her home state of Vermont. She never sees her name in the headlines of a national newspaper. She makes a modest living at best. But, like so many of her fellow HDS alumni/ae around the country, she helps facilitate the connection, compassion, and care that binds communities together and enables people to live meaningful lives. **A winding path to ministry** It’s tempting to say that Arthaud was destined for religious leadership. After all, her father, [Frederick Buechner](http://www.frederickbuechner.com/), was a Presbyterian minister and the founder of the Department of Religion at the prestigious preparatory school Phillips Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. But Arthaud’s path to ministry was hardly a straight line. The family moved to Vermont when she was in third grade so that her father could concentrate on his writing. (An acclaimed author, Buechner had already won the O Henry Award for his 1955 *New Yorker* short story, “[The Tiger](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1953/11/21/the-tiger)” and would go on to be a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.) During these years, Arthaud says that her family was not religious. “We didn’t go to church,” she says. “And we didn’t talk about God, really. At one point in ninth grade, some of my friends joined a local Episcopal youth group. I wanted to join, but my father said it was too far to travel. I think part of the issue was that he was annoyed with the organized church.” Frederick Buechner’s hands-off approach to religion enabled his daughter to discover it for herself. As part of the first class to graduate girls at Groton School, Arthaud felt grounded and uplifted by the daily services in chapel and sang in the choir there. She also took courses in theology but says she had no plans to pursue a career in ministry. She graduated from Groton and enrolled at Princeton, her father’s alma mater. The years that followed were tumultuous. Arthaud fell in love and married at the age of 20. She dropped out of Princeton, moved west to Washington, and enrolled at Evergreen State College for a couple of years. The marriage broke up, though, and Arthaud struggled with alcoholism and an eating disorder. (“I hit a really scary bottom.”) She says that the development of her spiritual life was central to recovery from addiction. “A higher power really did save my life,” she says. “I found a deep appreciation and understanding that there’s something out there bigger than me—something loving and healing. If not for it, I believe I’d be dead.” Newly sober, Arthaud returned to Vermont and finished her undergraduate education at Bennington College. She studied creative writing with her an eye on a career as a poet, attended the prestigious [Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference](http://www.middlebury.edu/bread-loaf-conferences/bl_writers) at Middlebury College, and even won a few prizes for her work. She soon discovered, though, that the creative community contained many of the unhealthy behaviors she was trying to leave behind. “At Bread Loaf I saw really good writers, but things got crazy, and there was tons of partying,” she says. “I knew this path was dangerous for me. It wasn’t grounding.” **“The best years of my life”** Arthaud’s minister father influenced her decision to come to HDS—albeit in a backhanded way. A teacher at the School in 1982, Frederick Buechner “sputtered with rage” at the [in-class activism](http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/04/10/harvard_that_time_the_linguistics_department_accused_female_students_at.html) of some of his feminist students. “’I try to teach *Hamlet* and a woman stands up and says, ‘What does this book have to do with me?’ ” he thundered according to Arthaud. “I say ‘God the father’ and someone rings a bell!” But where Buechner saw obstruction and frustration, his daughter saw liberation. “I listened to him and thought, ‘Oh my God! This place would be great for me!’ ” she remembers. “All the things he hated sounded really exciting. What better place than Harvard to study God?” At the age of 24, Arthaud enrolled at HDS—still with no intention of becoming a minister. She continued writing while exploring the study of religion and theology as a student in the MTS program. When a relative of her mother’s underwent liver transplant surgery at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Arthaud came into contact with Rev. Diana Phillips, MDiv ’82, one of the chaplains there. Impressed by the woman’s warmth and enthusiasm, Arthaud decided to do a summer internship at BWH under Phillips’ supervision. That’s when she felt the call to ministry and decided to switch to the MDiv program. “Never before had everything that I had hitherto studied or done been useful in a context,” she says. “Everything I was—all that I had studied, all that I had been through—was of use in this job. It was the best feeling I’d ever had.” Back on campus, Arthaud was enthralled with her classes. At HDS she first encountered liberation theology and engaged with the religious perspectives of feminists, African Americans, gays, and lesbians. She also made lifelong friends like classmates [Andrea Ruehrwein Raynor](http://revandrearaynor.com/) and Timothy Kane, both MDiv ’86. “I think in some ways they really were the best years of my life,” she says. “We were trying to dialogue with and be there for each other. Some people found it difficult and divisive. I found it the opposite. The community was so exciting, challenging, and joyful for me.” After graduation, Arthaud continued with clinical pastoral education at Boston City Hospital, the Framingham Women’s Correctional Facility, and Cambridge’s North Prospect Street Church. She loved the work, but felt hungry for a new adventure. A friend she met in class at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts moved to Miami Beach and suggested she come, too. Arthaud made the leap. “It was like a calling to go there,” she says. “At one point I was walking along and suddenly realized I was saying goodbye to Boston. My spirit was leaving and I saw that.” In Florida, Arthaud initially continued to work with churches—serving at-risk youth, and teaching Sunday school to young teens—but soon gravitated to her creative side. With her friend and soon-to-be husband Paul Arthaud, she started *South Beach* magazine, which focused on fashion, art, literature, and the rising fortunes of Miami’s hottest neighborhood. “This was a really exciting time, a really exciting lifestyle,” Arthaud says. But when she and Paul had their first child, Dylan, they decided that it was time to move north. “I always knew I’d come back some day,” she says. “When I became a mother, I knew it was time. I wanted nurturing, wonderful Vermont around me and my children.” ![Arthaud and Raynor with kids](/sites/g/files/omnuum3891/files/hds/files/arthaud-raynor-kids-news.jpg) **“Kind of like the early Christians”** In the years ahead there would be two more children and, sadly, the end of her second marriage. As the relationship faltered, however, Arthaud rediscovered her call to the church and resumed her path to ordination. She became a minister of the United Church of Christ in 2000 and was installed shortly thereafter at a congregation in rural Westford, Vermont. “We were kind of like the early Christians,” she says of the Westford UCC community. “Very little money. Not a lot of structure. I was responding to the needs of the community. I tried to create a really loving, inclusive, nonjudgmental environment where you could go and feel grounded and restored. We were a real church family.” There were challenges in Westford, too, and Arthaud faced the first not long after her installation. “I’d barely gotten there when 9/11 hit,” Arthaud says. “There was this visceral need we had to gather and pray and be silent together—to hold on. I remember going to church in the morning and realizing that the building itself had such a healing energy. It was the accumulated prayers and love.” Arthaud also continued working as a Guardian Ad Litem of the Family Court of Chittenden County, Vermont. “I’m basically an advocate for anyone in court who can’t advocate for him/herself,” she says. “It’s mostly children in need of care and supervision, as well as delinquency cases. I have been a guardian for 22 years. I don’t have as many cases now as I used to, but I love the work.” In 2014, Arthaud took on another rural congregation when she became pastor of the [United Church of Fairfax](https://sites.google.com/site/ucfvermont/home), Vermont. Stretched thin, she reluctantly left Westford in 2016. She says that she sees her role now not as leader as much as facilitator. “Fairfax is not *my* church,” she says. “It’s *our* church, with its own organic being and growth. I’m there to facilitate. My agenda—to the extent that I have one—is that we will heal and evolve and follow Jesus together, whatever that means to us.” Arthaud also continues to promote the kind of inclusiveness that she first encountered at HDS, and to encourage her parishioners to listen for voices that are often marginalized in our society. “One thing that came through almost every day at HDS was that God is a God of everybody,” she says. “If somebody isn’t feeling it, we’ve got to listen to that person, because our conception of God isn’t big enough. We’ve got to listen for the voice of the abused woman, the gay man, the African American. We have to listen the way God listens.” *—by Paul Massari* See also:- [ Alumni News and Activities ](/news-category/alumni-news-and-activities) - [ Christianity ](/topic-tags/christianity) - [ Ministry ](/topic-tags/ministry) - [ Public Service ](/topic-tags/public-service) - [ Serve ](/topic-tags/serve)