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(The
Rev.) Lauren [Dreeland] Ackland
A.K.A.
Lackland@Gracemadison.org
At college (Radcliffe/Harvard)
I majored in Fine Arts, with a specialty in medieval art history. I was married
(at Cambridge City Hall) shortly after graduation to Donald Ackland, who had
been a “section man” (teaching assistant — and even the rare female ones
were called section men in those days!) in one of my classes, and we went to
Berkeley to graduate school, where I had planned to get a doctorate in Art
History. I ran out of money during the first year and dropped out, going to work
for an insurance company in Oakland, but within a few months Donald’s daughter
by his first marriage developed leukemia and we moved back to Cambridge to help
care for her and her brother. After her death several years later we moved to
Greenwich, Connecticut, where Donald had gotten a job in art book publishing. I
had worked as a course assistant at Harvard Business School our first year back,
but I realized I needed to get a job that paid better than that. In those days
of gender-segregated want ads, I noticed that something called a
“programmer” got paid the same amount whether male or female, so I went to
an employment agency, aced an aptitude test they gave me (see, all that
mathematical ability paid off after all!) and went to work for a company that
had a training program. I worked for two large companies in Boston and one in
Greenwich, and did some work toward an MBA at UConn, but didn’t finish. Not
long after I had begun working for a small consulting company in Manhattan in
1976, Donald and I separated. The marriage had been a mistake from the
beginning, but my stepdaughter’s illness and then a kind of inertia that set
in after her death held it together until then. I moved to the city and began
going back to church. I had barely attended since college, but it began to play
a larger and larger role in my life. Meanwhile, I lost my job at the consulting
company in the aftermath of a tragedy — the owner’s wife was murdered in
their Westchester home. I took four months off to try to get some perspective on
what direction my life should go. I eventually took another corporate job, but I
think the handwriting was already on the wall — I chose the less lucrative of
two job offers because that company was across the street from my parish, St.
Bartholomew’s, and the other was downtown, a long subway ride away. Indeed, I
became ever more involved in lay ministry and increasingly disturbed by the
kinds of ethical compromises I found were often expected of those at my level
and above in the corporate world. (And this was twenty years before we began to
find out just how corrupt some big businesses are — my former company is one
of the ones recently in the news.) So in 1979 I approached my rector and offered
to work for the church — I thought St. Bart’s might benefit from my
management skills. I joined the staff as communications director (at a 65%
salary cut) in a move that, it became clear to me in retrospect, was meant to
test the vocation to ordained ministry that I was still afraid to acknowledge.
Sure enough, by 1980 I was beginning the pre-ordination process and in 1981 I
became a postulant for holy orders and a full-time student at the General
Theological Seminary, the oldest seminary of the Episcopal Church, located in
Chelsea. I also began to date George Hayman, whom I had met (of course) at
church. George and I were married in June of 1982, after I completed my first
year of seminary. (I kept the name “Ackland” because it had been my name my
whole adult and professional life, and it just felt right.) After graduation and
ordination in 1984 I became curate at Church of the Ascension in Greenwich
Village. AIDS hit our parish and our community very hard, and I spent most of my
pastoral time there dealing with its effects. I left Ascension in 1987 to become
vicar of St. Alban’s in Oakland/Franklin Lakes NJ, in the Diocese of Newark.
My father had died in 1986, and this Bergen County church was only about 20
miles from Congers, where my mother was still living. As an only child, I
thought it was important for me to live close to her now that she was a widow.
Within two years she had bought an apartment in a retirement community in
Annapolis, Maryland, and moved 250 miles away! George and I put a lot of mileage
on our cars in the following years. Mother died in 1995. In 1996 I was called to
be rector of Grace Church in Madison, NJ. It’s a wonderful parish in a great
town and we’ve been very happy here. This past year has been difficult because
of 9/11 — two of our parishioners were killed in the WTC (both of them men in
their thirties, each with three children under 9) and numerous others were
traumatized in one way or another, but the congregation has been wonderfully
resilient and supportive. In 2000 George was elected to the Borough Council, the
first Democrat elected to the council in Madison in sixteen years, and he was
also champion of the Madison Golf Club the first year we belonged (I still
don’t play). I serve on a number of boards and committees and am active in the
diocese. We have no children, but we do have four cats, and we’re celebrating
our twentieth anniversary year by going to Italy five days after the reunion.
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