My father was a good storyteller. He was good enough that it was sometimes hard to tell when he left off the facts and went to embroidering for the sake of a good story, so any of his favorite stories get treated as suspect if they can’t be verified elsewhere. This week, my mother and brother were emailing one another about something else and one of Dad’s stories, the one about the senior warden and the holy water, came up. They didn’t remember the story properly, but I did.
The Episcopal Parish of St. Luke in Stephenville, Texas got started on about half a shoestring after World War II by a dedicated priest, Fr. Minter Terrell, and some of the Episcopalian veterans at John Tarleton Agricultural College (part of the Texas A&M system) on the GI bill. The veterans and a few other students got to plotting with Fr. Terrell, made a concerted run and got themselves elected to the vestry, and launched a campaign to grow a church. This being the end of the war and a college town, NObody on that part of the frontier had any loose cash, so finding a building presented a problem at first—but not for a bunch of former GIs. Someone heard that Camp Bowie in Brownwood was selling off a bunch of the wartime barracks and other buildings, so they scraped together just enough money to buy the chapel for pennies on the dollar as war surplus and finagled the job of getting it moved sixty miles from Brownwood to Stephenville somehow.
The building they bought was used, according to some sources, as a chapel by German POWs as well as by Army trainees. A contemporary German inscription in the narthex cloakroom, “Hans was here,” is still preserved.
Of course, in the Episcopal church you don’t just stick up a building and announce one day that you’re going to start having services there. The church has to be properly consecrated by the bishop of the diocese, and of course there’s a liturgical celebration for doing this, which can be dressed up or down according to the tastes of the priest and the parish. Fr. Terrell, being VERY High Church, laid on a big shindig with “smells, bells and yells.” The building was to be consecrated by C. Avery Mason, then the diocesan in Dallas, to which Stephenville belonged, the dean of the cathedral, one of the canons, and everyone else they could dig up to make an impressive ceremony. (Dad said he was a subdeacon, which sounds about right. This is one reason I tend to believe the story. Mother says she has a photograph of the procession, with Dad looking like “a beanpole” in cassock, cotte and biretta.) The script went that the bishop was supposed to bless the church door, shaking holy water onto it from his aspergillum. Then he would knock on the door with the head of his crozier and the senior warden (the president of the vestry), standing inside, would open the door and welcome the bishop into his new house.
That’s how it was supposed to go. However, the building, as buildings will that are newly moved onto a site, settled unevenly and was prone to sticky doors and windows. The procession reached the door, the bishop blessed and sprinkled it, knocked with his crozier—and the door stuck. The poor senior warden was tugging away from his side, trying to get the @!#*! door to move, and the bishop was left trying to stall for time until the door opened. Just for something to do, he asperged the door again—at the same second the senior warden finally yanked it open, just in time to get a faceful of holy water! He was so startled by the unscripted shower bath that he slammed the door, which then stuck. Again.
The bishop eventually did get in, and the building was consecrated, but it was one of those OMG kind of moments.
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