Katherine Callison and Frank Niesen
Profile
Katherine and Frank have attended Sunday services in our chapel for more than a year now. This profile is in honour of their wedding, planned for 31st May 2008.
Katherine was born in 1981 in Bloomington, Indiana, where she was raised in a Unitarian Universalist family. Her father is the Dean of Continuing Studies at Indiana University, and her mother is a retired librarian and professional storyteller. Perhaps it was the latter fact which influenced Katherine’s choice of university course: she graduated in 2004 in Theatre Performance and English. (She has acted in amateur and professional productions since she was in high school. Her favourite roles have included Olivia in Twelfth Night, Johanna in Sweeney Todd, and Gherardino in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi.) But, finding the theatrical world distastefully competitive, Katherine took a one-year crash course in teacher training in 2006. Then she did an incredibly brave thing: she moved to the UK for her first job: teaching English and Drama in a secondary school in Woodcote, Oxfordshire.
To embark on a teaching career in a foreign country with an unfamiliar education system, at a relatively young age, must require great courage and inner resources. Katherine admits that the first year was extremely stressful – she found her Year Nine classes particularly challenging, especially in a system which (unlike the US school system) is not geared to developing a disciplined work ethic. But, now in her second year, she is more self-confident and able to spare some time for amateur theatre projects, which she finds very fulfilling: she is associated with the Oxford Theatre Guild, for whom she acted in Plaza Suite at The Playhouse in April this year, and with the Sinodun Players, for whom she appeared last year in Inspector Hound. She also designed the make-up for the Players’ pantomime.
I asked Katherine about the differences that she perceives between Unitarianism in the UK and Unitarian Universalism in the USA. She said that, for a start, her church in Bloomington has many more members than ours: at least 300, many of them children and young people. There is a choir and a big Religious Education programme. The services are less formal in style, and less overtly Christian in content. Katherine says that she did not expect to feel comfortable with our manner of worship. However, she discovered that – despite the apparent differences – the two congregations are inspired by a very similar spirit. Asked for a quotation that expresses her own religious faith, she offered this, from the Revd Forrest Church, a UU minister: “The same light shines through all our windows, but each window is different. The windows modify the light, refracting it in myriad ways, shaping it in different patterns, suggesting different meanings.” She feels that it is important for everyone to learn, teach about, or experience God (or whatever “God” is) in his or her own peaceful manner. As the Buddha said: “Be ye lamps unto yourselves.”
Katherine and Frank met in 2004, when they were living in a shared house in Cowley, Oxford. Frank was born in 1969 in Bochum, north Germany, where he graduated in Biology. After a compulsory year spent working in the ambulance service (as a pacifist’s alternative to military service), he moved to Humboldt University to study for a PhD in Biophysics. A post-doctoral position at the Charité Medical School in Berlin led to his present post as Team Leader in the Structural Genomics Consortium at the University of Oxford. Genomics is the study of the function of the genes and of the interaction between their products, the proteins; determining the structures of the proteins forms the groundwork for developing new drugs for conditions such as cancer. The Oxford project is a world leader in the field.
Frank is still a keen biologist, with a special interest in the behaviour of birds: he enjoys watching Red Kites in the sky above the home in south Oxfordshire that he now shares with Katherine. He enjoys cycling and is a serious runner, having completed marathons in Berlin, Essen, Hamburg, London, Munich, and Vienna. He enjoys reading, especially science fiction. Asked to quote a motto by which he lives his life, he offers this from Douglas Adams: “Arthur had almost given up. That is to say, he was not going to give up. He was absolutely not going to give up. Not now. Not ever. But if he had been the sort of person who was going to give up, this was probably the time he would have done it” (from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the second book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series – a quotation that Frank inscribed on the first page of his PhD thesis).
As a scientist, Frank has this to say about religious faith: “I have an intrinsic problem with belief that cannot be proved. One always seems to be expected to share the common beliefs; and frequent repetition in church services gives a strong impression of indoctrination.” But he began attending our Unitarian services with Katherine and now says: “I never thought that I would feel comfortable in any religious organisation. It was amazing to find a space where I don’t feel uneasy to voice my views, and where all points of view – including those of other faiths – are respected.”
Katherine and Frank will be married in the Unitarian Universalist Church in Bloomington, Indiana on 31st May, with a reception in her parents’ garden afterwards. Frank’s parents will travel from Germany for the occasion, and a second reception will be held in Germany in August. On behalf of our congregation, I wish Frank and Katherine a long and happy life together. In the words of Theodore Parker (1810–1860), a Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist in Boston: “It takes years to marry completely two hearts, even of the most loving and well assorted. A happy wedlock is a long falling in love.” Catherine Robinson May 2008