A successful career means different things to different people. Quite a few University of Miami alumni, in fact, have traded business suits and briefcases for prayer shawls and scripture. Some entered the clergy many years after graduating, like Mark Reeves, B. Arch. ’78, M.Arch. ’80, J.D. ’84, who became a priest after practicing both architecture and law. Others discovered their calling while still in school.

Each of the five University of Miami alumni profiled here defies the traditional concept of the clergy. One, a 29-year-old woman, holds the distinction of being the first Cuban-American female priest. Another is a retired distinguished doctor and bacteriologist who traveled the world before becoming ordained. Still another is a priest who cherishes his fraternity days, swears like a sailor, and laughs like Santa Claus at his own anecdotes. And yet they all have one thing in common: they heed a personal call to serve the public in a most profound way.

Young lady with her own mind

From the time she was a 9-year-old growing up in Coral Gables, Christina Encinosa, A.B. ’99, knew she wanted to attend the University of Miami. “My parents both went there,” she says, “so that may have had something to do with it.”

Or maybe not. Even then, Encinosa was a young lady with her own mind. “I grew up Roman Catholic, but when I was 8, right after I made my communion, I told my parents I didn’t want to be confirmed,” she says. “I wanted to wait until I was old enough for it to be my choice.”

Encinosa, an art history and psychology major, decided that her confirmation should take place at the end of her freshman year. The Catholic church she was visiting was always locked when she wanted to go in, but the Chapel of the Venerable Bede at the Episcopal Church Center was open 24 hours. Christina decided to make her confirmation there instead of in a Catholic church.

“Right after that, I said to myself, ‘I think I can really do something in the church,’” Encinosa says. “Then the deacon came to me and said he thought I was meant to be a priest.”

Encinosa began the lengthy process of applying to seminary. “You have to go through psychological testing, then a committee of laypeople helps decide if it’s really your calling,” she says. “There are a bunch of hoops to jump through, but it’s definitely worth it.”

At 26 she was the youngest in her class, and when ordained, she became the first Cuban-American woman in the priesthood. “I didn’t realize what a big deal that was, until Telemundo and Univision showed up with their cameras,” she laughs.

Three years later, she’s lived through experiences she could never have expected, including a year aiding workers at Ground Zero following 9/11, an undertaking she calls “baptism by fire.”

“I’ve realized by some of the things I’ve experienced that there must be something special about me, that God wanted me to do this,” she says. “I feel very blessed, and I hope the rest of my years will be the same.”

An instrument of peace

Skipper Flynn, A.B. ’67, isn’t like most priests. Ask him what he studied at UM, and he replies, “Political science, but my family insists I studied having a good time.”

After college, Flynn attended law school for one year, during which time one of his Sigma Chi brothers was killed in Vietnam. “The prayer of St. Francis of Assisi—‘Lord, make me an instrument of your peace’—haunted me,” he says. “I didn’t get struck by lightning, I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night to find the room filled with bright light and hearing heavenly choirs. It just became the right thing for me to do to become a priest.”

Flynn’s journey since then has been anything but completely peaceful. There was the time he was at a seminary in Chile and was arrested andsentenced to death (“I guess I pissed somebody off,” he roars). He was released after the State Department and the White House applied political pressure to let him go.

From there he spent time in Caracas, Venezuela, then headed back to South Florida, where he earned his doctorate degree in clinical psychology from Nova University. Why? “Priests are asked to deal with the most vulnerable part of the human being—their soul. I thought it was immoral not to know as much about it as I could.”

Flynn first put his new insights to use as a chaplain in the prison system, where he spent 11 years. “People ask me how I got through it, and I say, ‘Well, I survived initiation in Sigma Chi at UM; I can survive anything.’”

Clearly, Flynn maintains his devotion to his alma mater, where he provides on-campus student counseling services. “My will says that some of my ashes are supposed to be scattered over the campus. When I say that I’m a different kind of priest, yeah I am! Because of my UM experiences, I see the world differently.” He adds, “The most rewarding part of my work is being an instrument of peace and hope.”

The can-do cantor

Music and Judaism are in cantor Rachelle Nelson’s blood. “My great grandfather was a cantor, and my father’s mother taught piano until she was 89,” explains the Miami Beach native. “She was an incredible singer, too, who used to sit in the window at Steinway singing Dixieland to advertise the piano.” Nelson’s parents met while singing in a B’nai B’rith choir, and every Friday night during Nelson’s childhood, the family would sing around the piano.

In high school Nelson joined the choir, where she was spotted by UM music professors Lee Kjelson and Larry Lapin. They urged her to audition for the University.

“In my third year at UM I heard that the reform movement, which is the most liberal, had opened its doors to women, so I applied to cantorial school. I went to Hebrew Union College in New York City, the only program in the U.S. for women and the foremost seminary for cantors.”

After completing her studies, Nelson returned to Miami and joined Temple Israel of Greater Miami as their second cantor. As the first woman to serve in this capacity in both Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, Nelson was interviewed by “every magazine and newspaper,” she says. “A lot of people were happy and excited for me, but then I had some who said, ‘I can’t imagine you singing the high holy days and the famous old songs that have for centuries been sung by men.”

For the past 17 years Nelson has been at Temple Beth Am in Kendall. With her colleague, Rabbi TerryBookman, she has released two CDs, as well as songbooks and sheet music. She credits Kjelson, who is now retired, and Lapin as her greatest inspiration.

“I was in a group of singers at UM called the Sunshine Celebration, and we traveled all over Europe, singing in churches and synagogues. We traveled together to the poorest parts of Romania and Poland, and they would teach us to focus on what we have in common with these people. We touched people’s lives with music, and it was healing to so many. Those two men inspired me to want to become the finest human being and the finest musician I could possibly be.”

From body to soul

The academic portion of Willa Dean Lowery’s résumé alone takes up nearly a page. Besides her medical degree from the University of Miami, she has a bachelor’s in chemistry from Stetson, a master’s in bacteriology from the University of Florida, and a master’s in public health from the University of Pittsburgh.

Despite spending so much time on college campuses, Lowery, M.D. ’59, does not wax nostalgic. “There was no participation in campus life,” Lowery says of her days at UM. “I had to work for additional money while I was there, when I wasn’t studying. But it was challenging and satisfying and complete. I think I got a very good medical education there, even though at the time it was a very young medical school.”

After teaching obstetrics and gynecology, working as a public health officer for the Florida State Board of Health, and spending three years as a research bacteriologist for the government, Lowery changed course.

“When I retired from medicine, a few years passed, and I knew some people who were going to the local seminary in Pittsburgh,” she recalls. “They were talking about the study of theology and Hebrew, and I had always been interested in church history. So I decided to take a few courses. As things developed, I decided it was important for me to become ordained.”

That addition to her substantial list of accomplishments didn’t change much about her life. “I’ve gotten older, more arthritis, and more gray hair,” she says. “But it’s not like I get any great flashes or revelations.”

Lowery says her role as a spiritual advisor for a Christian group in Pittsburgh, where she lives, is as significant to her as her years in medicine. She says that the most important service any pastor can provide is to help people understand spirituality, to let them know there is a relationship beyond the physical world. “Some of us need direction, and we all need something in our life that gives meaning to it.”

Taking Zen off the shelf

Born in Vienna, Austria, in the early 1940s, Sensei Kshantin Joern Curtiss, M.F.A. ’71, immigrated to the United States as a young child. His father was Lutheran and his mother was Catholic, but the only sponsors the family could find were Mennonites. “So we had to live in Illinois, where the Mennonites were,” Curtiss explains. “That meant my father, a fine artist who had lived in major cities like Paris and Berlin, had to get used to living in Eureka, where he worked at the Libby pumpkin-canning factory,” Curtiss laughs. “A year or two later we went to Florida.”

Growing up in Miami Beach,Curtiss felt uncomfortable with many of the basic tenets of Christianity. After serving three years in the Army, he enrolled in the University as an art history major with a sculpture minor. During that time he worked in the campus bookstore, which is where he purchased the book that would eventually change his life. “I purchased The Buddhist Bible and The Three Pillars of Zen. I never read them; I just thought they looked good on my shelf,” he admits.

A series of experiences—lifeguarding on Hollywood Beach, landscape architecture, and sailboat racing among them—followed graduation beforeCurtiss decided he would return to school for a doctorate. While studying psychology and psychotherapy, it occurred to him that there was much talk about “the mind,” but no one knew what the mind really was.

“That’s when I suddenly remembered The Three Pillars of Zen, and I decided to read it,” he says. “It was amazing. Zen Buddhism deals in facts, actuality. It teaches you that no one can save you; you have to do the work to save yourself and understand basic fundamentals, like why we live and die, what happens when we die, who we really are. Buddhism is a non-dualistic religion—there’s no right or wrong, no bad or good. When you transcend these concepts, you are fundamentally free.”

For the last 20 years Curtiss has run the Zen Life Meditation Center in Hollywood. “Zen is a very difficult practice. You have to be serious about wanting an awakening, or a kensho,” he says. “And everyone who applies has to read The Three Pillars of Zen. I put them through the grinder.”

Lori Capullo is a freelance writer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida