For most of a year, the holiest thing I did each day was put on a pair of headphones and listen to a woman tell me the truth.
I would sit at my desk, often late at night, with a transcript open on one side of the screen and her voice in my ears, and I would play the same three minutes over and over until I could hear not only her words but the breath underneath them, the pause where she decided whether to say the next thing, the place where a sentence changed direction because the memory still had a thorn in it.
I was supposed to be coding qualitative data. What I was actually doing felt much closer to what I do when I sit with someone at a hospital bedside. I was keeping watch over something fragile that had been handed to me. I did not expect research to feel like that. Like ministry.
I recently defended that research and finished my doctorate, an Ed.D. in Interdisciplinary Leadership, and the word doctor still feels a little borrowed when I say it out loud. It’s something I’d wanted for most of my life, and something I never quite let myself believe would happen. I felt it asked for a different kind of mind than the one I’d always relied on, and for a long time I assumed a dissertation would belong to someone else.
I have spent my life trusting the things that resist measurement. I’m a pastor and a poet. I believe in metaphor and presence, in the slow grammar of grief. When I started my doctoral work, the whole apparatus of social science felt like a language invented to keep people like me out, all instruments and inter-rater reliability. I was sure I had wandered into the wrong room and that at any moment someone would notice. Worse than the imposter feeling was a quieter dread underneath it. I worried that the method itself was a kind of betrayal, that to take a living woman’s account of her calling and break it into codes and categories was to do violence to something sacred, to press a wildflower flat between two glass slides and call it knowledge.
My dissertation is a hermeneutic phenomenological study of how women clergy in the United Methodist Church experience mentorship. The words are heavy, but the work underneath them is almost embarrassingly simple. I asked eleven women to tell me the truth about their lives in ministry, and then I tried, with everything I had, to understand what they said. More than five hundred minutes of testimony. Hours of listening, and re-listening, and listening again.
And somewhere in the middle of all that listening, the thing turned over in my hands, and I saw that I had been wrong about social science all along.
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