Katherine Partridge Earle (Babson)

FAVORITE MEMORIES OF WILLIAMS

Mughal Painting with Milo C. Beach Williams-in-India II, inspired by Bob Gaudino.

WILLIAMS CLUBS / ACTIVITIES

Williams-in-India II

CURRENT INTERESTS, PASSIONS, AND ORGANIZATIONS

All things Burma/Myanmar; The Karen Episcopal Ministry Formation Program (KEMF); Midcoast Maine Hospital Chaplaincy; Virginia Theological Seminary; The Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust; Reading, cooking, gardening, and garden design; Grandmothering

LIFE SINCE GRADUATION

My major takeaway from Williams was surprise. While I had chosen to go to Williams, initially as an exchange student, it was only after I arrived there that surprise began to temper choice. Ever since, my expectation has been of a life of surprise; and my watch for its agency has colored many of the choices I have made and the risks I am willing to take when making them.

Surprise happened on Day One, when I discovered I didn’t have a place in the Shakespeare course I wanted to take. Instead, I chose an Art History seminar on Mughal painting, and borrowed necessary texts from Brad Babson, who had just returned from his Williams-in-India I course. Moving away from Western-steeped studies by stepping through that window into Indian culture was transformational, tilting my worldview and wooing me to apply to Williams in India II, the second Gaudino-inspired educational experiment.

Before settling my application for India, I sat for my Williams transfer interview. The last question: “Kitty, what do you think you might do after Williams?” My response: “The Episcopal Church does not ordain women now, but when it does, I believe I am called to be a priest.” Surprised. An eternity of mutual wordlessness. I left tripping over the office rug. I was ordained 20 years later.

India proved indelibly formative, inspiring me to chart my life committed to intellectual, spiritual, and interfaith dialogue across boundaries of difference. The one formidable constraint India holds is that single, unchaperoned women drive popular presumption, judgment—and desire. Alone and delirious with dengue fever in a Rajasthani guesthouse, I survived a nighttime rape attempt, and later, suffered painful facial shingles. Both drove lessons in mortality and time available to live according to my own choices and compass. Sharing lessons out of India, Brad Babson and I married in August 1972 and set off to build our life together as parents and engaged internationalists working in East Asia: Brad as a World Banker and myself as an Episcopal priest.

I arrived in Bangkok in 1993; my ministry was soon savaged by the Bishop of Singapore, who evicted me from my position because I am a woman. So I pivoted to non-parochial service. Relocating to Hanoi in 1994, I became the English teacher to the Vietnamese staff in Hanoi’s surgical hospital, where my students, once Vietcong medics, became friends and windows into the heart and soul of Vietnam. Another surprise was becoming chair of the board of trustees of the fledgling United Nations International School of Hanoi, with primary responsibility for negotiating receipt of a government land grant and for fund-raising for the construction of a purpose-built campus to serve internationals arriving to reconstruct Vietnam after the “American War.” I also honed my ecumenism by founding a nondenominational church for expatriates in Hanoi. I also discovered a new vocation in Myanmar/Burma, where, since 1993, I’ve worked to mitigate its people’s deprivations and isolation; and as adjunct faculty at Virginia Seminary, where I’ve taught a Williams-in-Indiainspired immersion for Virginia seminarians. Now restricted by the junta and Covid, I direct a program to educate immigrant Kayin for leadership in American Episcopal churches.

The steadfast surprise of my life has been the love I’ve enjoyed with my best friend, Brad Babson, and the wonder I feel when watching our children and grandchildren, all so different, as they meet their world and encounter its surprises. To encourage them to test and risk themselves more than I believe one can do as richly from within a singular cultural framework of experience; to reach for the wisdom otherness offers, and in every way possible, to choose to build similar opportunities for others is to reach for the stars.