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Hello St. Peters! I'm Kat Banakis, your new seminarian. I've met several of you in the last few months while I've been attending St. Peter's as a parishioner, but it's high time we had a formal introduction. I'll start. I'm a second year divinity student at Yale and the Institute of Sacred Music. Typically then, you would ask me a question that I find very hard to answer honestly and succinctly. Where are you from? You probably grew up in a religious household? Kat, is that a nickname? In short, my family lives outside of Chicago. We attended church. Kat is short for Kathryn. But the complete answer is much longer.
My family, half Greek (Orthodox) and half Irish (Catholic), all lives in the Chicago area. When I say all, I mean, all. I have 87 (on last count) blood relatives living within a twenty minute drive of my parents' house, and they all get together on a fairly regular basis. I was born in Chicago and graduated from high school there, but in between and since I've lived here and there.
But let's start at the beginning. I was born in 1980 to Chris, who works in sales for Motorola and Gayle, an advertising executive with Sears who had just begun a 22 year maternity leave. They had met as theater majors at a Chicago city college. Neither liked the other's church. They named me Kathryn but intended that I go by Katie. The name was Greek and Irish enough to pacify both families. They settled on the Lutheran church for child-rearing purposes as a happy medium because it was liturgical but in English and was culturally foreign to both of them. When I was five we moved with my dad's job to Plano, TX where we also found a Lutheran church they liked. To go along with the change of scenery I decided to go by Kathryn.
Motorola then moved us to Hong Kong where the only American-based school was run by the Lutheran church, so we stuck with it, and then back to Texas. At this point I was in junior high and began thinking for the first time about ordained ministry. I found the whole concept odd and frightening and promptly ignored it. When I was entering my sophomore year of high school we were moved back to the Chicago area once again.
I was not happy. The nickname for Kathryn that my parents liked least was Kat, so that was how I introduced myself in my new school.
Making friends as the new kid in a high school where many kids had been classmates since kindergarten was difficult. I became very involved in the Lutheran youth organizations outside of school and spent my other waking hours doing music and theater and speech team. I slept little. I actually started to like the name Kat.
When it came time for college I applied mainly to state schools in the Midwest and, on a whim, to a single reach school on the East Coast, and why not an Ivy. Much to everyone's shock, not the least of which was my parents, I got into Yale. I officially declared a major six times before settling on Religious Studies. Outside of class I did improv comedy and activism and church.
As college drew to a close I had to nail down something, so I decided on place, and moved -- sans job or shelter -- to Washington DC. I landed a job as a lobbyist for the City of New York advocating for their public safety and housing issues. My boss insisted that Kat was a good name for a lobbyist because it was memorable. By this time even my parents rather liked the name. I had the most trouble landing in a Lutheran church I liked, and ended up attending St. Columba's Episcopal, a very large congregation with an active 20s and 30s ministry. I found that I really loved the liturgy, music, services, breadth of beliefs and theological freedom of the Episcopal church. With a few musical friends I co-founded the 18th Street Singers, a secular young professionals' chorus.
Life was full. I lived with my blackberry as my constant companion in a tiny studio apartment in DuPont Circle. I spent far too much money on red leather boots that I wore to walk to a job where I helped craft legislation and public funding. It was thrilling - but ultimately, for me, unfulfilling. Every moment I could escape from work I was doing music or church activities. I couldn't shake the nagging pull I had felt for over a decade, to the ordained ministry. So I applied to two grad programs at once - law school for the sake of prudence and divinity school for the sake of passion, and when the acceptance and rejection letters came back, there was nothing I wanted more than to return to New Haven for divinity school to study religion and the arts.
How do you do? I'm Kat. That's been my name for a while but not forever. I'm an Episcopal seminarian at Yale, which God has been orienting me towards for many years, though I didn't know or acknowledge it at the time. My work day includes studying texts and history and family systems and prayer and writing and figuring out how to better integrate the arts into worship. It is a complete joy. I live in New Haven, which is, for all intents and purposes, home.
I am so very pleased to meet and get to know all of you. I'll be the one with curly brown hair wearing an alb. And sometimes red boots.
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