Looking Back
Today is the final session of our current Bible Seminar, when we’ll finish reading and discussing The Acts of the Apostles, Luke’s sequel to his gospel. We’ll read Acts chapters 27 and 28, Paul under arrest and boarding a ship for Rome to make his appeal to Caesar. It’s late into the autumn of the year, and the winter storms of the Mediterranean Sea are an ominous danger. Luke tells a great story of Christianity’s beginnings, of which we in our generation are simply another chapter.
Linda, Tass and I arrived in Apalachicola, Florida the last week of July 1984, where I was to be the Vicar of Trinity Episcopal Church for the next fourteen years. It’s an old historic church, in one of Florida’s early towns, with a quaint and interesting history. Our first week there, I read the history of the parish, the church building’s origins in the white pine forests of New York state, being cut and brought down the eastern seaboard in sailing ships, offloaded in what was then the third largest American port on the Gulf of Mexico, assembled, constructed with wooden pegs and no nails. That week I looked over the list of priests who had been there over the years, including a couple whom I had known early in my own life.
Barnum McCarty was my first counselor at Camp Weed, Junior Boys camp when I was ten years old, Barnum was seventeen. That’s a separate story perhaps, but a paragraph will do for now. In 1946 Junior Boys was two weeks, east of Carrabelle in what had been army barracks during World War II, just ended not even a year earlier. It was my first time away from home and I was excruciatingly homesick, looking every day for letters from my mother and Mom, my grandmother, who did not let me down. I was not only excruciatingly homesick, but excruciatingly modest, refusing to take a public shower even Saturday, the one evening of the two weeks that they ran the hot water heater. After all, twice a day we ran down into the Gulf of Mexico for a swim, a hundred boys in bathing suits wading out into the water sliding our feet to scare the stingrays away, and they did scoot ahead of us in hordes.
OK, it’s two paragraphs then, and this part has been told here before. Modestly shunning the public shower, I figured sea bathing was sufficient. That welcome Saturday morning that my parents finally arrived for me in our 1942 Chevrolet Aerosedan, I joyfully climbed into the front seat beside mama, who promptly rolled down all the car windows to let out the permeating fragrance of unwashed boy.
This story does have a closing: that first week in Apalachicola, late July 1984, wandering the premises of Trinity Church, contemplating the names of those who had gone before me, it sank in that I was just one more in a long line of priests serving this parish, and that in due course I also would be gone, added to the list, and others would come and go in the years ahead. It may sound maudlin, but it isn’t at all, because I didn’t really believe the “future” part, that was then, this was now, this was it, and in my heart this long line of priests simply culminated in the present with me here as priest and pastor. Of course, that present was now nearly thirty years ago.
In retrospect, it seems a bit egocentric, but it’s the way we are. We have our being in God’s present and have the sense that this is it. But we are really just moving through. As the psalmist says, “So soon passeth it away and we are gone.”
It’s the same with me here in Alfred’s house a hundred years on.
And from the day Saint Paul boarded ship for his voyage to Rome, it’s the same with each of us in God’s service in the Church. Here today, ...
Peace!
Tom+ in +Time again
this first morning of Spring 2013