A Deep Spiritual Search

I am thinking of Advent, 1978. In preparation for my second Christmas as Rector of St. Paul’s, Harris Hill, outside Buffalo NY. Our son was 19 months old.

On October 30, 1978, my mentor in the ministry Fr. Harris Collingwood, Rector of Church of the Advent Botson, died suddenly of a heart attack at age 51. Harris had given the sermon at my “institution” as rector in Spring of 1977. The text was Ecclesiasticus 2:1-13, which begins: “My son, if you aspire to serve the Lord, prepare for an ordeal.”

Harris had been my family’s pastor at St Paul’s Kansas City, Kansas when I was in middle school. At the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. 1969-1972, my field work with Fr. Collingwood was at Advent for two years. We are talking “smells and bells” every Sunday, in the dim nave, with the indescribable responsive a cappella chanting in the solemn opening procession, and the thurible’s clanking chain. While there I was given part of the library of one Helen Freeman, who had died before I came, including a full set of the Tracts for the Times, Liddon’s four-volume biography (1893-97) of E.B. Pusey, and More and Crosse’s rich anthology of Anglican Caroline Divines, entitled Anglicanism.   

I flew to Boston for the funeral, where I heard his son read the last stanzas of T.S. Eliot’s poem East Coker, which I had never known before. You can perhaps imagine the state of my soul that Advent. It was the beginning of, shall we say, a deep spiritual search, now that I was a mentor-less young rector. (Hymn 56) My sister gave me a book of Eliot’s poems for Christmas that year.

In April of 1979 I had what I call an “annunciation” dream, the night before I went to my first retreat with Morton Kelsey at Rochester NY. (It was Kelsey who directed me to the Pecos Monastery, where Abbot David Geraets became a new mentor in 1981.) The night after I came back from the Kelsey retreat, I participated in a joint healing service with several Episcopal congregations, sponsored by the Society of St Luke the Physician. As I continued, along with several clergy at the altar rail, to lay hands upon those who came to receive healing prayer, I began to notice a remarkable heat in my hands, something I had never heard of, which continues today. (See Agnes Sanford’s spiritual autobiography Sealed Orders.)

Advent 1978, 46 years ago, after a death, became the advent, the inbreaking, of new realms of Christian revelation. And yes, Fr. Collingwood appeared in a prayer many years later, years after Jesus Christ appeared to me at a renewal of Baptism service at Pecos. And no, Communion of the Saints is not a metaphor.

From East Coker:

    But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.   . . .

    We must be still and still moving

    Into another intensity

    For a further union, a deeper communion

    The Rev. Clyde Glandon, Retired priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma