Guest Voices: Once a victim, St. Thomas' Parish rebuilds

Once a victim, St. Thomas' Parish rebuilds

By Richard Morgan

Many churches sit next to graveyards; in that way, St. Thomas' Episcopal Parish in Dupont Circle isn't special. But it's not former parishioners that haunt the space, rather the grand Gothic wonder that existed there from 1893 until arson in 1970.

The first alarm came at 3:26 a.m., the next at 3:29, then 3:33. Henry Breul, the priest and former Army ambulance driver in far-flung war zones, raced in his blue ragtop Mustang to be there, to witness it, even if he was helpless. He was joined by 125 firemen and 20 pieces of equipment from 13 engine companies and 6 truck companies, blocking Massachusetts Avenue between 17th and 18th Streets. It smelled like campfire ash, wet hymnals burning so smoky with molten stained glass. By 8 a.m., it was doused. That hot August 24 morning, the building that The Washington Star in 1923 called "one of the most beautiful edifices in the country" was ordered razed. The next day the church paid $50,000 to demolish itself. Only a social hall and part of the sacrificial altar remained; the rest was converted to a private-but-open park in 1974.

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Now, 40 years later, St. Thomas' is in the throes of a decision that will change it and its congregation forever: It is rebuilding to accommodate its growing congregation, hoping to raise $5.72 million.

The transformative stories of Washington's revival are cliché at this point -- Marvin! Busboys & Poets! U St! H St! -- but those markers are always commercial: bars, condos, restaurants, galleries, shops.

Churches are different.

People can go from their baptism to their funeral in an unchanging church. So for St. Thomas' to be in such transition offers a rare glimpse into a hinge moment in its life.

The drama isn't the will-they-or-won't-they of the rebuilding, but rather the deeper psychological issues spilling around them as they challenge the 40-year status quo. Having been victimized by the fire, the church has for decades had great sympathy for the wounded of its community: funerals for AIDS victims even if they weren't congregants, a drug rehab center, a thrift store, English lessons for refugee children, advocacy of gay marriage. Would they be this way if the fire hadn't shaken them out of their stodgy history? It used to be FDR's church -- the ushers wore tails in those days -- the church of Maj. Walter Reed's funeral, of Pat Nixon's flower shows, where Eleanor Roosevelt gave the first lay-person homily and where Washington's only Titanic survivor, Col. Archibald Grace, regaled fellow parishioners.

Now, congregants are realizing they don't all share the same views on what a church -- their church -- should look like, should be or should do ("A church should look like the National Cathedral," said one prominent congregant, "not something Mike Brady designed"). The congregation is a motley crew -- former Catholics, Lutherans, Evangelicals, Quakers, families from Silver Spring and Alexandria, African-Americans, Asians, Latinos, and a pride parade's worth of gays ("a He-Man Woman Haters' Club for Jesus," said one, "except we actually do have female members, and they're pretty cool too"). There's enough trusting fellowship that weekly bulletins list, by name, unemployed parishioners seeking prayers and jobs. Still, there are only 150-ish congregants and they're not rich; what does a zero-budgeted church look like? And, as Christians, how do they wrestle with the very act of building -- the selfishness and vanity and audacity of it, so counter to their values?

Any church has only one story to tell: the gospel. Not the life of Jesus so much as the 2,000-year-long epilogue, the story of how to be a church, to be in this world but not of it, what it means to be part of the community that Christians call "the body of Christ." That storytelling often takes an heirloom approach; unchanging churches tell unchanging stories. St. Thomas' flux, though, is palpable.

Ultimately, St. Thomas' story is not one of resurrection or redemption or revival. It's a story of uncertainty, of the moment in the beginning -- in all beginnings -- when everything is possible, including every fear, every anxiety, every misstep. By existing beyond the scope of our fleeting lives -- all the more fleeting in transient Washington -- churches touch upon the eternal grandeur of God. But St. Thomas' is a church at its most human, its most tender and frail and vulnerable, asking questions of itself and of its past and future -- and, toughest of all, its present -- that it never imagined.

Akin to a 40-year-old leaving his hometown for the first time, the personal sense of identity here asks a secret, taboo question: What does church mean to you? And what would you do -- how would you handle it? -- if you could rebuild yours?

The whole congregation is involved, of course, but a few characters have been driving forward the effort.

There's Matthew Jarvis, 33, the soft-spoken, doe-eyed architect who has lived almost his whole life in the Washington area, deeply deliberate and introspective (he has 3,000 pages of journal notes he's kept since 1998, often spending weekends in contemplative silence at a nearby Trappist monastery). He quit his job of six years, a good job, for St. Thomas' and has leveraged his life on this project.

There's Nancy Lee Jose, 61, the fourth-generation Washingtonian who is a priest of equal parts Geraldine Ferraro and Mary Lou Retton -- petite, joking, gentle, bold -- a confection of a woman topped with a whipped-cream dollop of Miranda Priestly hair. She maintains a sunny-but-stern demeanor towards the hopheads who flop in St. Thomas' park even though they sometimes urinate on her.

And there's Jason Walmsley Rios, 27, the Ivy League Texan with the breezy sophistication of someone who was schooled in Austin and Manhattan, a man of goofy voices and elastic expressions who also served as the parish administrator when fundraising started in March. He moved to Washington in 2005, jobless and aimless after churchless college years, to be with his Muslim then-boyfriend.

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Here are snapshots in their journeys.

***

Sometimes Jarvis craves escape; the day before Easter, in early April, for example. Hopping into his Skittle of a Yaris, he drove to Great Falls Park, found a secluded crag of rock, and sat in silence, staring at the water.

"Imagine walking for days and days on dry land, becoming confident you knew the laws of the universe were solid beneath your feet, and then you come to a river. Like the Mississippi. All of a sudden all the laws of nature are different," he said in a homily he gave in January. "If you came upon it for the first time it is a place to question everything you know. If knowledge is solid ground, a question is a river, tumult and torrent."

After 47 minutes of silence along the Potomac, he said, "This business is hard." Then walked back to his car and attended Easter Vigil. "You have to will it," he said suddenly during the drive back to the District. "But if you will it too much, you ruin it."

A few weeks later, he was putting the finishing touches on a meringue-colored physical model of the church he designed; this iteration was capped by a sloped triangular roof, like a palatial Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It took 70 hours over 8 days. He finished at 1 a.m. on a Sunday and stared at it for 45 minutes. "Everything is ordered to the Nth degree," he said at church that morning, standing next to his display with all the giddy anxiety of a third-grader manning his baking-soda volcano at a science fair, pencil tucked behind his ear and everything.

His design fits 272 seats; the current church fits 153, although Easter saw 262 (a fire-code violation). The old church seated 850. There were swatches of porcelain laid out next to the model, as if the task were as easy as remodeling kitchen countertops. Jarvis glowed with ambition; the rendered drawings running on a computer screen's slideshow had the church's lobby filled with an architecture favorite: ivory Mies van der Rohe Barcelona pavilion chairs.

Congregants swarmed. Could we put solar panels on top? Could we have grass growing across the roof? Is this part a lawn? Can we have picnics there? What's this wall? Where's the old altar? What's that? What's this? And this and this and this?

When a woman approached the model, she pointed to a window and asked, "Is this clear or stained glass?" Jarvis took a moment to respond. "That," he said, "is a gifting opportunity."

***

Jose stuttered as a child, except when she was in church. She sneaked into the vesting room, donned robes and twirled in them. But the Church did not welcome female leadership. So she focused on getting a doctorate in health science.

In grad school, her nickname was "Dr. Solid"; it was not a compliment. Fierce, disciplined, athletic, she was set on becoming president of a small college and maybe also an Olympian. She was invited to Olympic training in 1978, but was sidetracked when she got run-over by a truck and left to die in the snow. Clinically dead three times in surgery, she awoke scarred and traumatized, a feeble 87 pounds. Her students and professors bathed her for months.

She was recently sitting in her backyard at her 16th Street Heights home, amid her rosemary bush, fig tree, hydrangeas and peonies. She was clutching her lawn chair's armrests so tight her knuckles whitened. She was crying. "My life has been much richer and deeper since then," she said. "It changes your insides to have been so broken and put back together. You realize that life is so real, such a pure gift; we never know what the next 15 minutes will bring."

Jose feels St. Thomas' is stronger since the fire, but it may spend millions rebuilding only to be burned down by arsonists again in a few years ("Oh, golly day! I hope not!" she said).

***

Rios came to St. Thomas' in the summer, when the congregation is smaller and the choir is gone, to a stripped-bare service in an unadorned worship space. "It was the essential church," he said over coffee off 14th St. He embraced it in degrees: a priest asking about his boyfriend, his leading a twentysomething-thirtysomething social group, singing in the choir at an Easter sunrise service, playing his clarinet, performing homilies. Now he tithes.

"An integral part of St. Thomas' goes with being gay, the hard-fought sense of identity that resonates," he said. "The fire was a coming out with years of rebuilding a representation of ourselves as a realer community, realer individuals -- not the gothic cartoon of expectations that people have of church and churchgoers."

He took off his thin glasses, stroked his cropped beard and absent-mindedly scratched the tattoo on his bicep of his own handwriting: "(I am large. I contain multitudes.)" He exhaled: "It's not a best-face-forward church. It's honest, treating people as valued, as good, as loved. God, gays, education, equality. They're all so strong here and all about the same thing: understatement that's both powerful and radical."

***

Mayor Walter Washington and his wife attended St. Thomas' first Sunday service after the fire, in 1970, on the front row of folding-chair pews in the parking lot. TV crews arrived. An alley cat darted through old blue-haired ladies in their hats and gloves. The congregation had gone from 550 to 200 in the space of a week.

St. Thomas' had been sympathetic before. In 1941, Sundays were so crowded that the then-priest paid out of pocket for people to use a parking lot on Connecticut Avenue. At the first Sunday after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the choir was excused when it burst into tears. And Breul, the priest, had filled every cup and bowl in the church with water to wash tear gas from Vietnam War protesters' eyes. Now St. Thomas' was the object of pity.

"We have no church," Breul said that first new Sunday, wearing a new robe of bright blue with red and yellow flowers exploding across it (it was the Seventies), "but we still have people. We have had a revelation through fire: that people make the church. Out of that kind of problem comes truth."

Almost every Sunday since then, St. Thomas' congregants gather and begin their Confession of Sin in the same way, word for word: "Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone." For 40 years after the arson, they have left undone the task of rebuilding. No longer. At a recent unveiling of a new church banner, stitched by a volunteer congregant, Jose pointed out that the man St. Thomas, who is widely regarded as the only of Jesus' disciples who spread the gospel beyond the Roman Empire -- through Persia and as far as India -- has a different role in modern life: he is the patron saint of architects.

By Richard Morgan | August 24, 2010; 12:06 PM ET Save & Share:
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