A Healing Grace

If you read carefully, says The Reverend Janet Cooper Nelson ’71, Jonathan Edwards’ sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is about spiders. Theologian Edwards—the focus of Janet’s thesis at Wellesley—arrived in New England in the 1700s associating the wilderness with danger and banishment. But after years spent traversing the region to deliver sermons—in a boat “probably full of spiders,” Janet says—he came to see the wild places, with all their fearsomeness, as a gift.

Janet, too, has found reward working amidst peril. “I never stopped being interested in healing,” she says. After quitting the premed track, she was still drawn to medical spaces, and, eventually, to hospital chaplaincy. Now, as the Chaplain of the University at Brown, Janet continues to find meaning in the body. She rejects the idea that “your life as a human body should be discerned by anyone else,” observing that “there’s a certain amount of space in your body where everything has to fit.” Choosing what to make space for is its own sort of healing, and, for Janet, being “in the human rank that witnesses human healing … is close enough to faith.”

A Harvard Divinity School graduate, Janet was ordained in 1980 by the United Church of Christ and held appointments at Vassar, Mount Holyoke, and the Church of Christ at Dartmouth College before coming to Brown in 1990.

Healing is only one of Janet’s guides. “Grief is my greatest teacher,” she notes, offering Mary Oliver’s words from “In Blackwater Woods” as explanation:

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

“I don’t think you would hold mortal life against your bones,” Janet says, “if you didn’t do the first step of loving what is mortal.” So, onward she paddles in the spider-filled boat, holding on—and letting go.