Glen Robert Gill

Let me just say that it is an honor to be asked to say something on the subject of stewardship to the church. My wife Beth and I have only been members of the church for a few years now, and while we have been pledging members for all that time, I know that there are many longstanding members of the church that could be heard from. But, then again, maybe recent experiences are good ones to hear.

My experience of coming to this church, this kind of church, is probably a little different than most of you here. I grew up in Canada, in an area that never got past its colonial stage and was intensely proud of its British heritage. Where I grew up, your family was either Irish and you were Catholic, Scottish and you were Presbyterian, or English and you were Anglican; and if you were Irish and Scottish and bucking for promotion, you became Anglican. To say I was “raised” Anglican would be an understatement: I was baptized an Anglican at three months, and confirmed an Anglican at 12, in a church where they called the Doxology “the Old Hundreth,” where the Prayers of the People mentioned the Queen, and where you used phrases like “the hanging of the greens” or talked about “what Canterbury was doing,” and people knew what you were talking about. You wore your kilt for weddings and funerals, and maybe for Easter. At fifteen, I was sent off to an Anglican boarding school, and after that to an Anglican university college. When I went in for a doctorate in literature, I realized that being part of the church of Donne, Milton, Blake and T.S. Eliot meant that I must have been doing something right. Beyond that, I didn’t think about it much. Church was like air: as long as it allowed you to breathe freely and clearly see the things around you, you took it for granted. Naturally, that’s when the trouble usually starts.

It started for me when, mostly out of ignorance, I took a teaching job in a small town in the deep south. Without exaggeration, I can say it was the most isolating experience of my life; a total deprivation of any social or religious norms that I understood. Many people here, I know, have had the experience of finding their way to this church home after long periods on the margins. I can tell you that it is just as difficult to have a church home and lose it, leaving a gaping hole in your life through which find yourself hemorrhaging, spiritually and socially. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t subsist on the southern staples of country music and conformity. There was racism, mostly latent but some overt; and there was homophobia, mostly overt. But above all, there was no religious vision, no social vision, that made sense to me. I still remember what one of my students said when I asked about his faith background or denomination: “I’m a Baptist, ya’ll,” he declared. “But a southern Baptist. I ain’t one of these primitive Baptists. They all just crazy.” The distinction, however great, was of course lost on me. And as for me, I was worse than crazy: I was alone in that small town, a religion, apparently, of one. I did eventually make some connections: Methodist students liked to visit me, but they treated me like a quaint antique, a relic from some theological Jurassic period. The few Roman Catholics around tried to convince me that I was really one of them. It was very kind in a way, but there was no fellowship to it, and the longest two years of my life crept on at a miserable, glacial pace.

One day, an older lady I eventually came to see as a sort of fairy godmother, put a little card, with nothing but an address, in my mailbox. Having nothing better to do, I drove past it one Saturday, and saw a small brick church I hadn’t known existed among all the big, white, clapboard ones. In front was a sign with a shield on it, made up of the cross of St. Andrew and the cross of St. George. It was nice to see the former on something other than the confederate flag, but it was the latter that caught my eye. It was, of course, an Episcopal church. It belonged to this American Anglican province I had heard about. I had absent-mindedly looked up Anglican church in the phonebook, and found nothing. But it turned out that there was a community of about 40 Episcopalians in this little town, with a thriving little church, which almost no one knew about. The church was open that day, so I went in: there was a prayer book in the pew, not the 1927 one I was used to (it said 1982,) but all the stuff was the same. There was service bulletin, with our yea-verily-and-forsooth dialect, and all the sit-stand aerobics we Anglicans enjoy. For the first time in two years, I felt at home. They’d just got a new rector. When I came to church the next morning, he greeted me at the door: “Have you ever been to a church like this?” he asked. “I’m an Anglican,” I said. “Well!” he said, “The Lord be with you!” Needless to say, I joined that busy little church and they welcomed me like the prodigal. I’d found a tribe in the wilderness. Like Job, I’d been miraculously restored to abundance in a whirlwind. Although where Job got new daughters, I found a wife. But Mother Church had provided.

When Beth and I moved here to New Jersey, we worried it was another exile, and for a while it felt like one. There are many Episcopal churches around here, but not all of them make welcome a priority. Doors were often locked. Some just cited their parish hours when you called. Of all the rectors I called, Father Poppe was the only one who said “come by at this specific time and we’ll talk.” But what would I find? Would there be another restoration? Would Mother church provide again? I remember sitting and telling Bernie how I appreciate traditional liturgy. He leaned over with wry grin and said, “We’re doing Rite I in Lent.” “Do you have a Bible Study?” I asked. “I think we have two or three,” he said. I loved it; he wasn’t sure how many were going on. Wherever two or three were gathered, presumably. What we found when we joined St. George’s, of course, was the abundant resources and whirlwinds of activity that makes our service bulletins, on average, eighteen pages long (plus inserts). Mother Church had risen to the occasion again, and it was larger than the first time.

Beth and I have been pledging members of St. George’s since the first time we were asked. We pledge because we know what it’s like to not belong, to have no community. We know that a church can’t provide the abundant welcome and restoration that we enjoyed if it is merely subsisting and not thriving. Now our tithe is not always the steady stream we’d like it to be: we’ve had to cut back a bit this year, in fact, because we just bought our first house. But we say frankly what we can do and follow through. It is the least we can do. And if it makes me wince sometimes, I try to remember that there might be, maybe at this very moment, someone passing by this church – maybe an immigrant from some commonwealth country like Canada, or somewhere in Africa or the Caribbean where the Anglican church is more woven into the fabric of society, but who is now here, feeling bereft as I once did – or maybe someone who has always been here and is bereft – and needs the church to be that voice in the wilderness, that voice in the whirlwind, that it was to me. And so we pledge what we can afford, and let that be our voice. And quite frankly, it’s nice to be heard.

Lisa Basile

Good morning. I’m really honored to speak to you this morning about my life and giving at St. George’s.

I was raised in the Catholic Church in the suburbs north of New York City, a kid who asked a lot of God questions. Adult responses to my questions ran the gamut from bemused and bewildered to dare I say angry and annoyed. Sometimes we went to church as a family, sometimes our parents dropped us off, my mom remaining home in her bathrobe to tend to the “tomato sauce” bubbling on the stove for Sunday dinner. By the time I went to college, I stayed in the pew as my family went to communion, the all knowing anthropologist watching this human ritual. Then as a single woman living in NYC in my 20s and early 30s I found myself searching to know who I was and what I believed and even who I wanted to be. In that journey, I somehow dropped the all knowing academic stance and found my way to a Catholic church in the Village more progressive than any I had known, St Francis Xavier. It was not surprisingly a thorn in the side of the NY cardinals and bishops- there was a large gay community there, social justice was at the forefront of their work and divorce was not a dirty word. Many Sundays, I trudged there from my Lower East Side apartment and was filled up by the Word and the sermon and the being “home”, surprised, in part, that church could do that for me.

When I got married to a Jewish guy and moved to Maplewood in 1997, I was a bit lost about church and a church home. The Catholic churches I went to here were not “home” and I wondered if I would find that spiritual community I sought. A number of people suggested I try St George’s, and though hesitant, I did. “I Protestanti!” my Italian grandmother would have said, “Protestants!” speaking of some other world, some other culture, some other people, “Americani” not like “us”. Anne Bolles-Beaven was preaching that Sunday. Other, indeed. A woman leading the procession, a woman’s voice wafting through this place, reading, singing, speaking with authority and intelligence and humility, a mother and wife, the priest. How about that?

At the peace, I shook hands with the red haired woman in front of me -- she was about my age and I cooed over her newborn baby, Georgia. We spoke, she, also a Catholic, looking for a spiritual home more like the church she came from in Minneapolis. She and her family were new to Maplewood as well. We swapped phone numbers. Jane remains one of my closest Maplewood friends, one I can talk to not only of life’s bumps and blips, but a rare friend that I can talk to of the bumps and blips in a spiritual frame.

At coffee hour, I met David Sard. My story was no big deal. He had also found his way to the Episcopal Church from other places. His dad was a scientist and a nonreligious Jew. His mom, a nonpracticing Christian. He was raised without any religious affiliation. He introduced me to his wife, Cheryl, a former Catholic. They had made their spiritual home here. They were nice and smart and easy to talk to.

I was on guard probably for a few years. Could I find a church where I felt my nonreligious Jewish husband was included in God’s blessing? Would I ever feel comfortable saying Our Lord’s Prayer in the slightly different way it was said here? It smelled different here. The prayer books were a confusing jumble and the hymns were impossible to sing on key.

Back and back I came. St George’s was in a period of transition, and there was one interim priest after another. Still I came and I listened and I was moved. I came to know the liturgy in a way I never had before. A rich and diverse community surrounded me -- families came in all shapes and sizes. Women were ordained. Gay men and women spoke up openly. My sense of God and the place of church and religion in my life was growing here.

On an October Sunday in 2000, the birth of our twins, Francesca and Lucia, was announced here at the 10:30 service by my red-haired friend, Jane. It was in that next year or two that I had to do some hard thinking. We were an interfaith family. Was St George’s the place that our kids could grow in the way we wanted? The girls were half Jewish, and while David and I were making the choice to raise them in one faith, the Christian faith, we also wanted them to be raised in a community where Jewish life and history was celebrated and accepted as part of our life and history and not swept under the rug. I had a long talk with the then interim priest, Clark, and decided that, yes, if there was any place we could have this, it was this place, this St George’s.

It was then that I really began to see myself less as an outsider and more of a member of this church, moving from “I go to St George’s” to “I belong to St George’s”. Up until then, I was a person who dropped a 10 into the basket each Sunday. Now, despite the fact that I still felt discomfort at the financial piece of belonging to a spiritual place, I recognized that this place had heating bills and a leaky roof, and people to pay and other stuff that cost money. I filled out a stewardship card and got my envelopes and began to write that weekly check.

Truthfully, I always felt it wasn’t quite enough and I knew that one day I would change that. But good financial times gave way to this recession and our family has been hit along with so many others. We have cut back in many ways, but not here. If it was too little when times were good, it is just enough now, to keep us reminded that this little church on the corner of Ridgewood and Woodland, keeps us and our neighbors held up and belonging each Sunday. With gratitude I have worked on the altar guild, designed and sewn Christmas riddels, hemmed angel choir robes, organized a children’s art show, flown into coffee hour on my broom as La Befana, The Italian Epiphany witch, or just supplied many a coffee hour. And with gratitude I write my check each week.

With gratitude, I stand with Franca and Lucia each Sunday at Children’s Chapel, listening to Jane Cates tell a story that embodies all the goodness and care of Jesus. I send my children off to learn stories with Sunday school teachers whom I trust will teach them about a radical, out-of-the-box man named Jesus, about a Book that holds truths -- truths of faith and belief, of good and evil, of questioning and lapses in faith, of love and of the best of what it means to be Christian. With gratitude I sit in my seat here, always towards the front and left and receive my kids from Sunday school. We go to communion and I hear the words, “All are welcome to receive at God’s table” and I am deeply grateful. Afterwards, my children go back to their seats and sometimes I head for the healing corners. I kneel and share my burden and feel the care and prayer of the men and women who receive me. The minute the service is over, Franca and Lucy beseech me to let them go to their friends and to coffee hour where they eat too many donuts, but where I know they are at home and filled up. And I am grateful.