Former League President Rev. Sage Serene Currie

We continue our profile on former SCYL Presidents ~ Where are they now?

This month's featured former League President:

Rev. Sage Serene Currie
Served 1995

It was a sunny day in May when I naively hopped into a car headed for the Blairhaven retreat center with Rev. Jim Lawrence and three teens from Fryeburg, Maine. A few weeks earlier my mom had seen a flyer for an SCYL Memorial Day retreat and asked me if I'd wanted to go. The only teen in the Portland New Church at the time it must have been an angelic influence that led me to say "Sure," and to get into that car with that strange bunch of characters I'd never met before in my life. I should have been scared, or at least tentative about the whole thing but somehow I wasn't, and I went, and my life has never been the same since.

I spent that first retreat mostly as a quiet observer, watching the kids around me, and the ministers, and the way they all related to each other. Everyone was so loving towards each other, and open with how they felt, this was so different from the way my friends at school seemed to relate with each other. People were odd, and creative, and fun, and I fell in love with them all.

Now this is perhaps where my story gets a little weird. After I returned from that first retreat my parents got a call from my homeroom teacher at school. "Mr. and Mrs. Currie, um, I don't know exactly how to ask this but, did something happen to Sage? She's going around and telling all of her classmates that she loves them?"

It was true. I returned home from that retreat in a kind of blissful state and tried to spread that joy and love to my school community. I have memories of that week and they're pretty funny now. I remember my joy was a bit contagious to some of my classmates and we all got a little bit closer, and some people thought I was a freak. Maybe I was a freak, and maybe I was just doing my best to share the Good News of Swedenborgian Community to my 7th grade classmates!

Well, I'm still sharing that Good News 20 years later, as a minister in the Swedenborgian Church, and pastor now in Fryeburg, Maine. Funny how that circle has some how become complete as it was those Fryeburg teens so long ago that first introduced me to this church that I love.

I went on to go to every Memorial Day and Winter Retreat that happened between my 13th and 18th birthday, attended every session of the Fryeburg New Church Assembly, Convention in St. Louis and San Francisco, and at 18 served as the President of the SCYL.

When I was 23 I was hired by Convention to serve as the SCYL Coordinator and organized and led teen retreats until entering seminary in 2002. Being a part of the SCYL has had a huge impact on my life. Having a place where I could be fully myself, where there were adults who cared about and respected me, and being in an environment where I could ask big questions about why we are here and what God is all about gave me a grounding that helped me through the challenges of coming of age, and finding my place in the world.

My biggest learning from the SCYL, was that there was a place for me that would always be there, that I was loved, by God and by the church. And that the angels would keep guiding me along the path, just as they did that sunny day in May.