Midway on the long drive to Yale Divinity School from her home in Los Angeles, Melinda Worth Popham ‘02 M.A.R. made a stopover in Kansas City to visit an uncle terminally ill with lung cancer. Popham, 56, divorced, and with no plans of entering the ministry, had answered an urging to study theology at an Ivy League school 2,800 miles away for reasons she could only vaguely account for. When she divulged her plans to attend YDS, the trainer at her gym assumed she was becoming a nun, and her deli guy thought she was off to massage school. Their baffled disconnect will be familiar to any divvie who has announced an educational choice that to him or her has the force of an imperative, but to family and friends is as inscrutable as it is unlikely. 
As Popham (who attended YDS under her married name, Melinda Benton) recalls in her memoir Grace Period: My Ordination to the Ordinary, her Uncle Bud sat across from his middle-aged niece and regarded her with a no-nonsense gaze. “Now tell me, hon,” he said, “why is it you want to go off and do this whole divinity school thing?” After listening to her stammered reply, Uncle Bud slapped the arm of his red leather chair and summed up her intentions better than she could.
“Probing the mystery!” her uncle whooped. “Yessiree Bob! Probing the mystery.”
One could say the same of Popham’s memoir about the events that led her to Yale and what she learned while she was here. The mystery-probing tale took more than 12 years and a dozen drafts to complete. Popham, a fastidious writer and critically praised novelist, penned and scrapped two alternate versions of her story before writing the account published last December. The lengthy process speaks of how difficult it can be to make meaning of an experience as intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually intense and layered as divinity school. The YDS take-away can be particularly complex for students over 50, who arrive here generally not to prepare for the ministry or a Ph.D., but in search of less tangible, if no less real, outcomes.
Completing the memoir became for Popham a way both to understand her time in New Haven and articulate her experience of God.
“What kept me writing—and revising—and re-visioning—Grace Period for 13 years was my determination to express my gratitude, in book form, to that God who had shown up so indubitably for me,” the author explained in a recent interview. “I think of my book as an act of bearing witness in the guise of a spiritual memoir.”
Raised in the Disciples of Christ tradition at the Church of the Country Club in Kansas City, Popham drifted away from religion for decades until, in her 50s, a series of domestic crises compelled her to seek solace in Centering Prayer. Her memoir relates how her study of the technique with Fr. Thomas Keating, and subsequent practice, turned her awareness to “the divine presence as a pilot light deep within me.” In the span of five years, Popham’s marriage failed, her ex-husband died, and her teen-age daughter suffered and surmounted repeated cycles of clinical depression. To endure, she writes, “I … anchored—no, lashed—myself to God.” The flame grew larger, and the book recreates the moment it flared to its fullest in the midst of a dark night when, distraught and desperate about her daughter, she begged for holy guidance. The memoir recounts:
“My prayer of sheer despair had made room for God’s presence, and now God filled the space I had created. My awareness of his presence was in the words uttered—not spoken but somehow uttered—into my consciousness….
“The words were like two small objects—two pebbles—that I could pick up and stick in my pocket. I did not manufacture them. They were not of my mind’s making. They were instilled, implanted, introjected, blended into my mind. I don’t know how—that is the divine mystery—but I heard words within my mind that did not come from my mind. I had no doubt as to their source.
“Show faith, God said.”
“I didn’t plan on revealing the compelling of God that sent me off to divinity school,” Popham said recently on the phone from her Brentwood home. At first, that mystical flare seemed too intimate, too revealing, or perhaps too, well, mystical, to admit. But as she wrote and rewrote her story, she realized she was pulling her punch by leaving it out. That brief union with God intensified her spiritual life more than even she knew until one Sunday during coffee hour after church, when Popham met a fellow parishioner holding a brochure from Yale Divinity School. Two alumni had just given a brief presentation about YDS to church-members, she was told. A kind of panic rippled through her at the news of what she had missed.
“Those two guys from Yale blindsided me,” Popham said during our interview. “I had no thought of going to divinity school before that. It was the magnitude of my despair [at missing the presentation] that gave me to know it was what I deeply wanted to do. The sense of having missed the boat to my new life. It was undreamt of, and then it was utterly desired.”
Utterly desired, but why? Not out of a vocation or calling, Popham insists, nor to deepen her religious beliefs. “I envisioned Yale Divinity School as a Juilliard for the soul,” she writes, evoking poet William Butler Yeats’ notion of compelling the spirit “to study / In a learned school… .” Later, the memoir repeats an observation by Margot Fassler, former director of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, that students in theological studies are “in training to be nothing less than wise.”
Still, “strict theology was not where it was for me,” Popham admits. Much of her “wisdom training” was gleaned from the riches of the downtown campus—including a seminar with fabled literary critic Harold Bloom that earned her High Honors and a warm note from the master. But it’s the lessons learned outside classrooms that get the most ink: reverential moments in nature, exchanges with bad neighbors, humbling bouts of loneliness, the companionship of her poodle, Quita. And one particularly chastening episode, “when I got mugged by my own shadow,” as Popham puts it, making a Jungian reference to an angry encounter in East Rock Park that revealed an ugly side of her personality, and gave her deeper insight into Christ’s charity and salvation.
Such experiences ushered in Popham’s “ordination into the ordinary,” as her book’s subtitle expresses. They persuaded her that her time at YDS was not so much about her study of God, “but God’s study of me.”
In our interview, Popham insisted she has “a specifically non-theological relation to the holy spirit” and her experience of the sacred. “Divinity school and my spirituality are very distinct.” But really, are they? Her theological training enriches her memoir with references to enough sacred sources—including the Psalms, St. Paul, Julian of Norwich, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Merton, and many others—to give any seminarian a knowing smile.
“I can articulate things better by having read what I read and studied what I studied,” Popham allowed.
As Popham reveals in her memoir, the influence of divinity school is pervasive. “Probing the mystery” and “showing faith”—the twin pillars of Grace Period—are also the elements of a full life.
Timothy Cahill was also in his fifties when he enrolled in Yale Divinity School. Having completed his course of study at the Institute of Sacred Music, he graduated from YDS in 2016 with an M.A.R. in Religion and the Arts.