Grace Cathedral

I was sitting in a pew near the south transept the other week before the service. The choir had just burst out in rehearsal when the sun broke through the clouds and the light torched the pillars through the windows. I had found myself in a celestial palace. My convalescence was over. And while I may not have developed any particular psychic power after the operation, my brain has felt, figuratively at least, more open.

It was not a change we had expected. We had planned for change when Lisa and I moved here from Boston in 2018. For us, it was a leap of faith that we would find a community in San Francisco that would help make this city our home. Lisa and I started our church shopping here at Grace six years ago, and our search ended quickly. We were welcomed aboard the Stewardship Committee not long thereafter.

What we found here at Grace was a place and a community dedicated to loving constancy. These people aren’t joking when we say all are welcome and come as you are. And that measure of acceptance from you helped me live with a chronic condition called benign essential tremor. Thank you for helping mop up all the coffee I spilt at coffee hour.

But that welcoming thing? Come as you are doesn’t mean you have to stay that way. Through Grace, I became aware that I might be able to do something about the trembling and the falling before anything terrible happened. I needed brain surgery, as they say, like a hole in the head.

It’s been a year since I got the implant. The payoff has not been immediate. I am still very conscious — literally — about standing on my own two feet. And the gastric ulcer that I had nurtured for years brought forth a lymphoma that was zapped with 19 doses of radiation. As a consequence, sadly, I am no longer able to give blood.

But what Lisa and I can and do is support the cathedral as generously as we can because we can testify to its capacity for healing. The signs are subtle, but there — who thought you’d find a labyrinth outside a radiation clinic, for example? And the not-so-subtle, like a visit from former Vice Dean Greg Kimura when I was in hospital, and like running into Steph McNally when I was getting my rads. Healing prayers have helped me with suffering and illness over the past two years in ways I couldn’t have ever imagined.

Lisa and I are here not only because we are members of this congregation, but also because we are proud citizens of San Francisco. Grace is more than just a loving parish, it is a vital organ in the city’s neural network, with an entire chapel devoted to healing. Healing wounds and hearts and minds, healing in the light.

You all know that. As stewards, as members of our cathedral’s congregation, when we give to Grace, we also give to our city. There is a reason why we have a place in the San Francisco skyline. These spires did not build themselves on their own.

All of which is by way of saying, the cathedral is constantly giving us what we need, even when we don’t know it. Our pledges to stewardship offer an important and tangible way of participating in the community, the cathedral, and social force that is Grace Cathedral. Please join us this Stewardship-tide to keep our spires standing tall for years to come.

Consider Pledging to Grace Cathedral

Spoken at the 11/21/21 Choral Eucharist

Almost two months ago, Bishop Marc asked me and my class of confirmands why we had chosen to take confirmation that day. My fellows on the occasion were in their early teens, so, in their responses, they spoke of their faith and the encouragement they had received from their parents and godparents. But as for me, more than half-a-century their senior, the closest I had previously ever come to conceiving of confirmation as life state had occurred on a second date with a lovely woman named Lisa, when I, then in my early forties, felt obliged to confess to her that I was “a confirmed bachelor.” 

But it was in response to Bishop Marc’s question, that started me, as the old Phil Ochs folk song goes, to think of confirmation as “a lesson too late for the learning.” It had not occurred to me until Lisa — now my wife for these past two score years and more (so much for confirmed bachelorhood!) — and I fell into the embrace of Grace Cathedral some three years ago.  

But back in 1957, my father was hired to be the French teacher at a small church school in Danbury, CT, and that Christmas Eve, I was baptized by Bishop Aldrich in the chapel of the Wooster School with the Reverend John Duane Verdery, the school’s headmaster, becoming my godfather that night.  

63+ years later, I had to admit that I was not only not a confirmed bachelor, it had also come time for me to become a confirmed Episcopalian.  

All this had root in the Wooster School’s motto that the Reverend Coburn had conjured up at the height of the roaring twenties, when he founded the school in one of the wealthiest counties in the US: 

Ex Quoque Potestate, Cuique Pro Necessitate 

In the original 1920’s English translation, totally appropriate for what was then an Episcopalian boys’ boarding school: 

From each according to his ability; to each according to his need 

This motto now bears an updated translation for the modern-day school, which, like Grace, has adopted more inclusive terms:  

From each according to their/his/her ability; to each according to their/her/his need.  

I wonder how many of those students’ parents knew that Aaron Coburn had dressed up Karl Marx in a Roman toga. Imagine: Liberation theology nestled in the foothills of the Berkshires. 

So, first as a faculty brat and later as a student, I was marinaded in Wooster tradition. After school and university, I played folk masses in New York City, but I never felt much about things like ability and need. Church was nice, Episcopalians were nice people to hang out with. 

But then Lisa and I moved here in July 2018, and suddenly, somehow, the people, the institution, and the missions of Grace Cathedral revealed to us what the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss might describe as the dynamic relationship between ability and need. We need to give because our ability empowers us to. Likewise, the thoughtfulness, intelligence and love that the clergy and staff reflect the skills, heart, and talents they bring both to Grace and to the greater communities whose needs they serve.  

Stewardship is what makes this a well-regulated dynamic relationship between the congregation, the cathedral, the city, and beyond. 

I am standing here today reading from a music stand because I have something called a benign essential tremor. It’s a condition that can turn a still-life photo into a live-action frame. Standing here holding a plain script would drive me nuts. The tremor also makes rough work of handwriting.  

Pre-covid, I would think calm thoughts as I resolutely scratched the pen across the check. During Covid so much has moved online, so I’m spared me check writing now, but stewardship goes on. Giving online makes supporting Grace even easier.  

Please join Lisa and me with equal determination and resolution to advance forward the dynamic relationship between the cathedral, the city, and beyond.