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A Lovely Year
St. Martin’s friends, as we journey through Lent, I want to thank you for a wonderful year serving alongside you. I am grateful for the warm welcome, enthusiastic support and faithful ministries in which so many of you serve. Most of all, I want to share my appreciation for all of you for reminding me, in a multitude of ways, what the Episcopal Church means to me.
When I left for college in 1984, my mother slipped an article into my trunk titled, “I Love the Episcopal Church,” from "The Episcopal Churchman." I would like to share some of it with you:
“I love the Episcopal Church, and in spite of the desirability of the onrushing ecumenism, perhaps I secretly hope that I may die in her arms. I love her, not with careful reservations, but freely, joyfully, wholeheartedly.
I love her doctrine, her emphasis on sound learning, her devotion to scripture and tradition, and the glorious Elizabethan periods of her language. But I love too the freedom which she grants her children, her openness to the new, her breadth of humanity.
I love the bright young families proudly ranged in their pews on Sunday morning, and the sparse little congregations on weekdays whose hushed devotion to their Lord is an almost palpable radiance. And I love her old priests whose eyes show the compassion taught them in a lifetime, and her young priests who are so sure the world can be won in five years at the outside.
I love the names of her heroes – Laud, Hooker, Pusey, King, Gore, Weston, Seabury, Breck, DeKoven, Kemper, Rowe. And a hundred others, including private ones of my own.
I love the hands of young and old reverently raised to receive the sacrament. I even love the battered prayer books in the pews that so often turn out to be hymnals.
I love the eccentric ladies in city parishes who dress in liturgical colors. And the uproarious stories about departed dignitaries that are told whenever priests gather and have time for small talk.
I really can’t help it. I don’t know if everybody ought to be an Episcopalian; it may be that other people feel as strongly about their churches as I do about mine. I do know that I love the Episcopal Church, that I am sworn to her, forsaking all others. I’m glad of it. And it isn’t denominational loyalty or sectarian spirit or party fervor, it’s love.”[1]
I am touched by the ongoing work to spread the Good News from St. Martin’s; what a blessing it is to be part of our community for Christ here.
[1] Taken from The Episcopal Churchman, Nov.-Dec. 1979. Written by the Rev. James Pearson and the Rev. Don Henning.
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