Ellen Hill
October 20, 2002

A few weeks ago a member of the Vestry asked me to speak on the theme of continuity, which is why I will let today’s lessons speak for themselves. When I heard the message on the answering machine, I immediately assumed they were calling for my husband, John. My first question was, “Why me?”

The answer, of course, was a simple one: 24 years in one place — this place. The dictionary defines continuity as “to remain in a place, to abide, to stay, to imply duration, existence without break or interruption.”

John and I arrived here as a young couple with our one-year-old, Anne, and expecting Megan. John, a Seattle native and a lifelong Episcopalian, me, a Boston native and a lifelong Catholic. We had met and married in Boston, where together we had found Emmanuel Episcopal Church on Newbury Street — an open, loving church, with amazing music, and with the exuberant Rev. Al Kershaw, known for his warm hugs and thought-provoking sermons.

The deep spirituality of my childhood had fallen away from the Roman Church over the heavy pro-Vietnam War stance of the Boston Archdiocese, the stagnant role of women, and the lack of any humanity for the gay community. Emmanuel Church’s openness, its eagerness to embrace all people was reflected everywhere, especially on the altar. Our wedding reflected both our backgrounds, being co-celebrated by Fr. Kershaw and Fr. Dougherty, a Paulist Father who was so out of favor with the Catholic Archdiocese he probably figured “What the heck?”

We planned to move to Seattle to raise our children, and after a year, we did. Shortly after our arrival we began our search for a spiritual community. Our plan was simple: to find a place with good sermons, excellence in liturgy and music, and an open community incorporating all people. A church similar to what we had known in Boston. We had had a city parish with all the joys and problems that implied, and we wanted that for ourselves and our children.

After one more flat liturgy at another church, someone said, “Well, if it’s ‘smells and bells’ you want, you should try St. Paul’s on Queen Anne Hill.” We did, and felt instantly at home. Fr. Roy Coulter welcomed us, as did the community. And so began 24 years of commuting to church from Mercer Island. Megan was baptized here and was carried aloft in the Coulter style down the aisle. She smiled through her baptism and acknowledged the clapping of the congregation with the proper grace of someone who would choose the stage as her calling.

In those days Fr. Coulter was assisted by Fr. Rogers and Fr. Harriman. Fr. Coulter was a passionate and deeply spiritual homilist, Fr. Rogers was warm and down-to-earth,

Fr. Harriman, cerebral with great historical and liturgical references. We participated in many church activities. We loved the Parish Family retreats — thought-provoking, with communal meals that were a chance to get to know people we had never talked to, and healthy outdoor walks. Meg at two decided that Camp Huston was the perfect place to get to know Fr. Harriman better. For the entire weekend, she held his hand and shared various stuffed bears and games with him.

I asked this scholarly man if my irrepressible toddler was driving him crazy. Fr. Harriman replied that he was honored she had chosen him for this duty, and he was charmed by her. Fr. Harriman and “The Megan”, as she called herself, hand-in-hand, the odd couple, happy and content. Megan had begun the process of reaching out beyond her own defined family, into a larger family.

We had found a place where our children could move with ease among a new and enlarged family. A safe place to learn and trust. We define ourselves by our history, culture, and by our parents. We carry our memories, good and bad, beginnings and endings.

St. Paul’s will never be a suburban parish, and perhaps it will never have its Sunday School or Nursery filled to overflowing with babies and children. Yet, as a parent who has raised three children to adulthood in this place – it can be a wonderful place for children. It honors the children who grow here as individuals. And perhaps because of our small numbers, the distinction of age is not as rigorously enforced as elsewhere. When Anne expressed and interest in parish outreach at 12, her ideas and input were welcomed into the committee by Linda Snyder.

As a parent, you and your children are propelled into school with its various self-contained worlds of sports, sciences, music, theater. It is a completely secular world, deeply uncomfortable with anything spiritual. Only in church will the spiritual life be recognized, defined, re-defined, and leaps of faith be taken. It’s a place outside of school, outside of the hurly-burly world, where God, prayer, and belief are explored. Where the Gospel is spoken, and we are urged not only to learn, but to act. Prayer is viable and faith the most tangible of all. The Christ we know is not some historical lesson, but a living Christ. All relationships are cast in a new light.

The 6th century monk Dorotheus of Gaza imagined a circle with God at the center, and our lives as lines drawn from the circumference to the center. As he relates, “the closer the lines move towards God, the closer they are to one another. And the closer they are to one another, the closer they become to God.”

I think perhaps this is our most valuable legacy to our children. It is the times when we enter the “Valley of the Dry Bones”, bereft of hope. heavy in fear, faced with death, that prayer that will sustain us.

Our third child, Michael, was born in the first days of Fr. Peter Moore’s ministry at St. Paul’s. Michael was born with what was diagnosed as a third degree heart block, a condition which presents as an abnormally low heart rate. A pacemaker needed to be implanted in our ten-day-old baby: at that time, one of the youngest ever to have such an operation. Fr. Moore called on learning of Michael’s complications and asked if he should come to Intensive Care. “No”, we said, “We’re fine, we can handle it.” And for the most part, we were, assisted by John’s parents. But Peter came anyway, and sat with us, and prayed with us, and laid hands on Michael, and was simply a father in all senses of the word.

When Michael was released from Children’s Hospital on a sunny September Sunday, we wrapped him up and came directly to St. Paul’s. Here was our church family, a family who had anticipated his birth, felt the fear of loss, and in the end, rejoiced with us. Four weeks later, Michael was baptized, and a year later I was officially received into the Episcopal Church.

Now here is an added postscript to my story. For the last twenty years we’ve known that the parish had prayed for Michael. But it wasn’t until a month ago, in course of convening the Search Committee, that John learned from Laura Buthorn that the parish had not prayed randomly, as individuals, but had held an organized prayer vigil hour by hour, round the clock in the Chapel, for seven days. Seven days.

When Michael experienced the heartbreaking sudden death of his mentor and trumpet teacher, he instinctively turned to Fr. Hauge for counsel and solace. Morrie gave Michael a perspective and insight that no other person in his life could have given him.

It seems to have made an impact. Michael was walking across the George Washington University campus in D.C. a few weeks ago when his candid picture was taken as he passed in front of Hillel House, the Jewish student center. A few weeks later his picture appeared on the cover of the Hillel House magazine. Maybe it was a mix-up with his last name. His Jewish friend, Sarah, was bemused. She complained to the student editors, “That’s Michael Hill. He’s not even Jewish. He’s Episcopalian. In fact he’s very Episcopalian.”

Now as a parish we move forward just as we do in our worldly lives. We do so in prayers, in thanksgiving, and in recognizing what we have. Beginnings and ending, knowing the past, working for the future. To quote Marian Anderson, “We owe a debt to all who have gone before us, and we only repay that debt by striving for the ones to come.”

Continuum and legacy, the people we love here and now, and those who have died. Often on a Sunday morning I see those remembered faces, sitting in their accustomed places in the pews. A shadow congregation of all the lovely souls who are now gone from this earth, and I hold their memory in my heart. Their legacy is the garden, the nursery and Sunday School, the music, the liturgy, the art, the building. We carry that legacy forward in our stewardship of this place, in our planning for the future, or just in the simple outstretched hand to a visitor on Sunday morning.

Sometimes you have to go away to see clearly what you have close by. Our oldest child, Anne, has been searching for a parish in Manhattan. She reports experiencing beautiful architecture, magnificent music, and even the occasional stirring sermon, but nothing that approximates the unique mix of St. Paul’s. It makes her very homesick.

Anne Lamott, in her book “Traveling Mercies” tells this story: “When she was about seven, her best friend got lost one day. The little girl ran up and down the streets of the big town where they lived, but she couldn't find a single landmark. She was very frightened. Finally a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the passenger seat of his car, and they drove around until she finally saw her church. She pointed it out to the policeman, and then she told him firmly, "You could let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here.'

“And that is why I have stayed so close to mine — because no matter how bad I am feeling, how lost or lonely or frightened, when I see the faces of the people at my church, and hear their tawny voices, I can always find my way home.”