Dear friends,
Although I am a familiar face to a few of you, most of you don’t know me and may wonder who is this new person. After all you’ve had a lot of transition lately with your rector of 10 years leaving and other changes in clergy leadership. And of course all of that has come at a time when the world is still dealing with the effects of an unprecedented pandemic that brought grief over the loss of life, and jobs, limited our human interaction and profoundly affected our ability to live our lives in the usual ways. So who is this new face among you and what can you expect of me?
Starting with a bit of biographical information: my name is Claudia Wyatt Smith but please feel free to call me Claudia. My journey to ordination was a later-in-life one, having held a number of executive positions in healthcare before answering God’s call to ordained ministry. I received my M.Div. from the School of Theology at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, in 2005 and upon ordination, immediately took a position as Vicar of a mission church in a small mountain town in Colorado. In 2007, I moved to Maine, accepting a call to become the 3rd Rector of St. Francis by the Sea in Blue Hill. During my nearly 12-year tenure at St. Francis we grew our ministry as a spiritual life and learning center, even putting on four nationally attended Downeast Spiritual Life Conferences, bringing such well-known speakers as Richard Rohr, Phyllis Tickle and John Philip Newell, to Maine. I retired in 2019 and now reside in South Portland, less than 10 minutes from St. Alban’s.
So enough about me, I look forward to learning more about all of you and finding out how I can best support your ministries. I have witnessed from afar, your resiliency in adapting to the challenges of the past year. And although, thanks be to God, the pandemic seems to be lessening its grip on our lives, it continues to be a time of change both in adapting parish life to reopening as well as preparing to welcome a new Rector in the months ahead. My job will be to support you in this time of transition so once I begin on Sunday, May 23rd, I’ll look forward to meeting with many of you to discuss how best I can do that.
I confess that I feel very connected to springtime this year. With each fresh green shoot emerging from its winter sleep, it’s as though we’re all coming back to life after the grief and loss of these past twelve months – truly living into our own Easter resurrection. I look forward to taking this next part of the journey with you as God breathes new life and energy into us all.
Peace and blessings,
Claudia+