College Chaplain Laurie Jordan '79 Announces Plans to Step Down
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – After 22 years of service as the College chaplain, Laurel Macaulay Jordan ’79 will retire on June 30, 2018. A religious mentor and spiritual guide, Jordan –
Reflecting on his friendship with Jordan, Owais Gilani ’08 wrote, “Her sense of openness and coexistence helped me learn from and develop lifelong friendships with people from different faiths… I have sought her help and counsel on numerous occasions since leaving Middlebury almost 10 years ago, which is a testament to the genuine care she fostered towards an 18-year-old student from Pakistan who practiced a faith different than her’s.”
Similarly, Jordan’s frequent winter-term course Voices of Nonviolence highlighted the world-changing significance that arises from a free and un-corerced individual conscience. One alumna who studied with Jordan, Kya Adetoro ’13, said, “As a teacher, I saw her brilliance and was privileged to glean from it.”
Originally from the town of Oneida, N.Y., Jordan was in eighth grade on a family camping trip when she first set eyes on Middlebury College. In a social studies class one year later, she had to select three career paths and choose where she might attend college to pursue those goals. Naturally, she picked Middlebury. Jordan requested a catalog and received a bonus, the college calendar that has adorned her wall ever since.
During her first semester at Middlebury, thinking she was headed into politics, Jordan was faced with questions that are still explored in Introduction to Political Philosophy: What is justice? What is the good life? By her sophomore year, that line of investigation brought her back to her core beliefs and she started to feel the pull of the ministry.
In a religion course with Professor Robert Ferm, she wrote a paper about women who had been ordained in the Episcopal Church. She even interviewed one of them. “Up to that point,” she said sipping a cup of mint tea in Wilson Café, “I had hardly ever seen any women at all in the ministry. That’s when I decided what to do with the rest of my life.”
Jordan, a Methodist, also admired the late Chaplain Charles P. Scott, for whom the Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life is named. And just like Scott, she will miss the day-to-day contact with Middlebury students. “Chaplain Scott always wore his blue and white seersucker jacket and we could easily pick him out of a crowd. I need to find something distinctive like that so the alumni can find me at reunions.”
With the encouragement of Prof. Ferm and Middlebury’s 15th president, John M. McCardell Jr., Jordan returned to Middlebury as College chaplain in 1996 after she had earned her M.Div. from Yale in 1983, served churches in New York State, and done advanced graduate work at Notre Dame
It can be difficult to select a few highlights of your career when you have touched the lives of so many people during times of joy, grief, contemplation, questioning, or wonderment. For Jordan, she points to the success of the Religious Life Council, the interfaith student leadership council she formed just one year after her appointment that has met continuously for more than two decades. She proposed the hiring of a College rabbi to serve as associate chaplain, a post that she filled in 2001 with Ira Schiffer. Planning the three-week student trip to flood-stricken areas of Mozambique and Zimbabwe to deliver clothing and medical supplies was another highpoint of her career.
The 2004 opening of the Scott Center in the former Hathaway House gave students from multiple faiths a dedicated space for meetings, meditation, lectures, meals, and social gatherings. Two years of effort by Jordan and others culminated in the 2012 visit by the Dalai Lama to Middlebury, a landmark occurrence that included two lectures in Nelson Arena (attended by an estimated 5,000 people) and a special audience in Mead Chapel for about 200 members of the Vermont Tibetan community.
The hiring of the College’s first Muslim chaplains in 2014, an advance championed by Jordan, was another important accomplishment during her tenure.
“Laurie has shaped spiritual and religious life at Middlebury since her appointment in 1996,” said Mark Orten, the director of the Scott Center and dean of spiritual and religious life. “Our community has benefited from her calming presence in times of stress, her rich command of language during grand events such as Commencement and Convocation, and her dedication to supporting others in the quiet of her office.”
Jordan, 60, and her husband, Gus, the executive director of health and counseling services at the College, recently built a new home in the South Ridge community of Middlebury where she expects to pursue her passion for gardening, family, and other interests.
The youngest of the Jordans’ three children is expecting her first child later this year. “I didn’t know Lindsay was pregnant when I made the decision to retire,” Jordan explains, “but now it is like God was saying to me, ‘Good plan, good plan.’ I feel good about the career I have had and know the time is right.”
– Written by Robert Keren