Beloved in Thomas the Apostle:
God Willing, and the People giving, we are a few days away from retiring the debt to Frost Bank for the Rebuild, Renew, Restore Project on our West Wing, etc. You are to be commended for the manner in which you have done your parts to make this happen. The letter from Joe DeuPree and Shelley Turner, Co-Chairs of our Capital Campaign, which you received earlier in May gave you the details of the payoff. I join them in thanking the members of this parish and its friends who have contributed generously to our West Wing. Retiring the entire debt is only a few days and a few dollars away! For the neophytes among us, this parish will have completed a total make-over of all its buildings and paid off all its debt once Frost Bank gets its last pound of flesh. Every room of every building has been made new.
When I arrived in 1989, St. Thomas the Apostle was worshipping in the parish hall. I recall sitting in the parish hall arranged for worship during my interview process and saying to myself, “Stephen, it is not the building that is the church, but the people.” The church building sat empty save for the altar at one end and an old coke machine at the other.
There were no pews remaining inside. It was a shell of a space…we sometimes used it for “coffee” or “receptions” but little else went on inside it. The West Wing was our “Bates Motel,” complete with a flat and perpetually leaky roof.
The Kitchen was used every day to prepare meals for people living with HIV/AIDS by a local agency…I forget which. What they produced daily in that space to feed people surely had angelic protection given the dilapidated state of the kitchen itself.
We shared the office space with AIDS Interfaith Network…very, very snug as time went by and they increased their staff and wanted more and more room. Finally, they outgrew what we could offer as adequate room for their excellent work and moved out on their own.
The South Room, formerly the Parlor, had been done up to be a “respectable Episcopal parlor space for respectable Episcopalians.” It had overstuffed chairs and sofas, “oriental” rugs and tried to be elegant. Elegant wore out over time.
The North Room, once called the Common Room, served as our main post-Eucharist coffee-hour room…tight but otherwise empty and functional.
We also had a chapel called the Mary Chapel since Our Lord’s Mother was suspended over the altar (she is now in the corner near the aumbry of the church) presiding over our prayers with her foot on the snake’s head and Our Lord in her loving arms. The first sections of the columbarium were located under that altar. Now, those have been moved to the South Wall of the church building.
Another Mary presided over the garden tucked into a hedge where the fountain wall now stands. Having been put back together after she fell apart at some point, she now greets us in the narthex every time we enter. The Church, the Courtyard Garden, the Kitchen, the Parish Hall with its incredible gift of a labyrinth in the floor given to us by the Gilead Society and finally the West Wing are all rebuilt, renewed and restored.
You have done it. For those who come now to find God in these spaces and those who will come in the years ahead, thank you all for the deeply spirit-filled set of buildings and rooms you have created.
While our great God is everywhere and does not require rooms to live in to make the Divine Presence known to the created, you have provided for yourself and for future St. Thomas the Apostle members and friends wonderful, holy and simple spaces where God can be found, known, worshipped, loved, praised and glorified.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
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