The Reverend Melanie Calabrigo serves the Cathedral in Indigenous Relations, identifying and developing opportunities for learning and relationship building. Together with Indigenous elder and designer, Rikki Kooy, (Spirit Elk Woman) she coordinates the Feather Dance Reconciliation project. Feather Dance is an Indigenous-led, Indigenous/settler/refugee collaboration in textile art and includes learning and relationship-building through storytelling, wisdom sharing, and community hand work. It is an embodied act of reconciliation in keeping with the call to build relationships of respect, authenticity, and transformation.
Melanie is a graduate of the Vancouver School of Theology, Pacific Jubilee Program for Spiritual Direction, and Pacific Coast Family Therapy Training Institute. Her background is in spiritual formation and creative practice, family systems, pastoral care, and expressive arts. She has accompanied diverse life journeys in a variety of settings. She is the visionary and gathering priest for St. Hildegard’s Sanctuary, an affirming, arts-based, contemplative community, within the parish of St. Faith in Vancouver (sthildegards.ca). She is also the abbess for the Sanctuary of the Arts, an online affirming, intersectional, arts-based community that offers accessible resources for soulful connection and creative expression (sanctuaryofthearts.ca). Her own spiritual practice is grounded in a theology of aesthetics, noting that throughout time the arts have offered hope through beauty and imagination, and a spacious invitation to embody faith through diverse expressions. She is always wondering about new ways to extend the invitational, radically inclusive love of Christ. Melanie also serves as chaplain to Cathedral staff.
