Maundy Morning

Best and Only Answer

At church last evening we walked Stations of the Cross, a Wednesday in Holy Week custom for several years now. “Custom” is not “Tradition” an oft-casually-tossed word that in Anglicanism is not casual at all but stirs specific theological implications. Our custom in churches I served was often to walk the Stations as the conclusion of the Good Friday liturgy, and then everyone gather round the Altar for Station XV to have Holy Communion from the Reserved Sacrament. 

At Trinity Church, originally Christ Church, we contracted with a gifted parishioner to write is the term, not paint, fifteen Stations of the Cross as exquisite Eastern Orthodox style icons. It was an intentional stirring of East and West, as Stations of the Cross is a Western, Roman devotional exercise, and our parish, community and town was a holy mix of both Western Church and Greek Orthodox people, theology and traditions. I hope those beautiful stations are still there. The fifteenth station was, as I recall, an empty Cross hinting the hope and promise of Easter, and it seems to me that I only mounted it once a year, above the Altar, and only that one time a year, for that Good Friday devotional. Or I may have kept it at the Altar for Easter Day, I’m not sure.

Episcopalians, the artist and her husband and son sailed through Apalachicola one year early in our time there, were so taken with our quaint village that they went no farther, bought a house and settled down. A craftsman, the husband built boats. She, the wife and mother, was a wonderful artist. We have several of her paintings here, a floral, a watercolor of the rectory that was our home for fourteen years, and there may be another; but one is an icon that she wrote for me, a traditional St. Thomas, and gave me as a departing gift. On the back she signed and noted All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Given to me at one of life’s low points, it’s one of my treasures. 

Some years after our departure in 1998, the husband and wife moved back home to Mississippi, a few miles outside of Vicksburg. Driving to Hot Springs a couple years ago, Linda and I stopped briefly in Vicksburg to visit Christ Church, where my great, great grandfather George Weller was the first rector, years before the Civil War and Battle of Vicksburg. Seeing us walking around, the present rector came over from the rectory next door and as we chatted we asked about our artist friend. He said she was in complete dementia, seldom at church. We were so sad to hear that.

But their son Nicholas. I don’t know where he is today or what he’s doing, but I was told that he married, and he would be early thirties now. I think maybe someone told me he’s a teacher. Brilliant, he was a little boy when they arrived in Apalachicola in the 1980s or early 1990s. His brilliance stood out at Apalachicola High School (grades 7-12 at the time) such that he was constantly bullied  by thick and dull boys, those of low mentality never like a spectacularly bright kid; and new and different, Nicholas didn’t have a circle of friends to fall back on. So for high school, he went over to the Christian School in Port St. Joe, Gulf County. A “thing” in such a place is having the ready, self-confident, certain and not to say smug but as-sure-for-heaven-as-if-you-were-already-there answer to the question, “When were you saved?” It’s not an Episcopal question, but Nicholas obviously had listened to at least one of my sermons and was ready for the Christians when they jumped him. The day the teacher asked him in class, “When were you saved?” he replied, “On Good Friday afternoon two thousand years ago.”

It’s the only answer for one who is not Pelagian or semi-Pelagian.

T+ in +Time