Frances S. Lee
To write about the spiritual legacies I bring to spiritual direction, I have to back up a few generations. My paternal grandparents were Chinese refugees who fled to Taiwan during the Chinese Communist Revolution. After completely starting their lives over in a new country, my grandmother became a seminary teacher and my grandfather became a minister in Taipei. My grandfather passed away early, and my grandmother raised my father and his siblings at the seminary, working three jobs to make ends meet. A generation later, my parents immigrated separately to the United States, met in college, and married.
Unable to access social support through existing churches, they planted a church in Dallas for other Chinese immigrants like themselves. This beloved community raised me. Church gave me shared meaning with others and a conduit for revering holy mystery. Eventually, my father went to seminary and returned to our church serve as a minister.
However, not all was right. As a child I was preoccupied with being good and my comportment was shaped by ever-present fear of punishment, a product of guilt-based theology. When I came out as queer in my late twenties, many of my family members and my church family rejected me. I left Christianity and religion altogether, completely heartbroken. Since then, I’ve been understanding and healing from evangelicalism harmed me through teaching white cultural supremacy, patriarchal theologies, and purity culture. Leaving a dogmatic religious community taught me how to stay wide open to receiving wisdom and spiritual guidance from all traditions, especially non-dominant or subjugated ones.
I dove headfirst into social justice activism in the Seattle area where my queerness was affirmed and celebrated. I came into my transgender non-binary identity and was welcomed into a fierce activist QTBIPOC (queer and trans, Black, Indigenous, or people of color) community. However, I didn’t expect to find similar elements of dogmatism and discipline in these places. Again, I became obsessed with being seen as good, my behavior shaped by the guilt of privilege and a fear of judgment.
In 2017, I put two and two together and I wrote a pleading letter to my activist peers and leaders, “Excommunicate Me From the Church of Social Justice.” The essay went viral, igniting a national conversation on how humility and grace are needed in healthy movement building. My subsequent essays, syllabus, and anthology continue to resist dogma and teach people how to foreground everyone’s humanity and redemptive possibilities at home, work, school and out in the world.
In 2021, I was awarded a Ministry Fellowship at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) to continue my work of bridging the sacred wisdoms of the past and the needs of modern leaders manifesting justice in their respective sectors. At HDS, I completed two field educations in spiritual care: I served as the Interfaith Chaplain Intern (Unit 1 CPE) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in 2022-23 and the Interfaith Chaplain Intern at Tufts University in 2023-24. These training experiences unearthed in me a love for interfaith/multifaith engagement, while strengthening the commitment I have for companioning ‘religious nones’ and ‘seekers’ on their journeys.
I am also the co-founder of The Greenhouse, a healing sanctuary and ritual lab for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) students. In spring 2023, the Greenhouse was awarded a Harvard Culture Lab grant for advancing inclusion, belonging, and engagement across the Harvard community. In the winter of 2023, I won a research grant from the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies to travel to Taiwan and conduct interviews at my grandparents’ seminary. I heard from past presidents and professors so many stories about my grandmother’s generous spirit of caring for the downtrodden. This heritage trip solidified that I belong to my family’s Christian lineage, and that I can rely on this inherited spirit of universal love beyond religious affiliation to care for others.
EDUCATION
Harvard Divinity School — MDiv, 2024
University of Washington, Bothell — M.A. in Cultural Studies, 2018
University of Texas, Austin — B.A. in Sociology
FELLOWSHIPS
2023-24 Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund Recipient, The Greenhouse
2021-24 Ministry Fellowship, Harvard Divinity School
2020-21 Writing Fellow, Hugo House
2020 Bainbridge Writer Resident, Seventh Wave
2019-20 Environmental Justice Investigative Journalism Fellow, The Seattle Globalist
2017-18 Imagining America PAGE (Publicly Active Graduate Education) Fellow
FRANCES S. LEE 