Unsung Saints
by Curt Asher, Interim Dean, University Library, CSU, Bakersfield
Generations come and go and the people in them are forgotten. I am going to talk for a minute about one of those people, a person whose life affected ours, even though most of us have never heard of him before. One of those in the great cloud of witnesses that we’re told in Hebrews 16 surrounds us and gives us the strength to persevere in the race marked out for us.
I walked into this church about 100 years after Edward Morgan did, but his presence was still here. I didn’t know it then, but I could see it when the evening light hit that window behind me, and when the processional marched toward the altar.
In 1898, it was hard to live in Bakersfield. There wasn’t air conditioning. In most places, there wasn’t even electricity or indoor plumbing. The air was thick with flies and gnats and mosquitoes, and the fetid smell of animal waste. It was so dusty that the city would pay a man to drive a team of horses back and forth through town pulling a water wagon to dampen the main streets in an effort to keep the dust down. Ice was hard to get and meat that was slaughtered in the morning for market had to be sold or smoked by sundown or it would spoil. People who could afford to leave town went away in the summer and people who couldn’t nailed sheets to their walls and over their windows in a failing effort to keep out the brutal heat and the constant dust. There was a rail station on the east side, serving this area’s permanent population of mostly farmers and merchants and ranchers, and those who worked for them. There were lots of bars. Brothels lined L Street.
Saint Paul’s had been here for 12 years in 1898. In those days it was located on 17th and I. It had had parish status since 1891 and the church itself had survived a fire that destroyed most of downtown.
1898 was the year Edward Morgan came to town. He was an Irish Episcopal priest and Saint Paul’s was his first church. He wasn’t bound for the priesthood when he crossed the ocean to come here. He had come to America from Ireland to ride the range and chase cows across unfenced expanses of Texas and California, which he did until he had some kind of religious experience in his late 20s that called him to the priesthood and caused him to leave the cowboy life behind. He was ordained at the age of 31 in San Mateo.
Bakersfield struck it rich a year after Father Morgan arrived, in the 1899 oil boom. The oil boom would exponentially expand Bakersfield’s population over the next decades. Saint Paul’s grew so fast that those who came to worship couldn’t fit in the church, and a new Saint Paul’s church was built on the same I Street location, which would last until it was knocked down by an earthquake in 1952 and this church was built.
The community’s wealthiest families attended St. Paul’s, so the church got wealthy too, while Father Morgan was priest. During his time here, the Ascension Window behind me, the baptismal fount and the Italian marble altar were given to the church by one of its wealthy parishioners, William Tevis, in honor of his father-in-law, who was the 12th governor of California and, by the way, the only Hispanic ever to be elected governor of this state.
Father Morgan struck it rich in 1899 too by way of an inheritance from his aunt, Midy Morgan, a then well-known New York newspaperwoman. Famously eccentric, and over six feet tall, she was so masculine looking that, in that far less tolerant era, she was once falsely arrested for transvestitism on a streetcar by New York police. Midy Morgan made her fortune trading Irish horses in Europe, earning vast sums from European royalty, particularly Italian King Victor Emmanuel. After she died, her money went to her nephew.
So it was like winning the lottery, right? Father Morgan found himself, suddenly, with wealth in a church that was full of wealthy parishioners in a town that was being built on a scramble for oil wealth. So how did he react to that?
He continued to sleep on a cot in the church study and he returned the entire salary he earned each month to the church. He lived the ascetic life of a monk amid wealth.
And he brought about change. He brought new religious practices to the church. He instituted the processional march, led by the cross, that opens our service; he started the first robed choir. He put a stop to some of the cliquish practices and efforts to control things that the Church Guild, a fund raising group made up largely of the wives of rich men, had been using to dominate the direction the church was going.
When the new church was built, he had the old church building physically moved to a donated lot in East Bakersfield and established Saint Barnabus mission there to serve the transient railroad workers who inhabited that side of town. It was a rough neighborhood around the east side rail station, even then, but the Sunday night service at St. Barnabus was so well attended that he had to hire an assistant priest to help manage it. He also set up Episcopal missions in Greenfield and the Rio Bravo area.
In 1905, when someone tried to open a saloon near Saint Paul’s, Father Morgan, who was sympathetic to the temperance movement, blocked it by buying the building with his own money. He then turned it into offices.
A lifelong bachelor, Father Morgan left Bakersfield to become parish priest at St. Luke’s in San Francisco and his tireless work after the 1907 fire and earthquake led to his earning the title Canon. Later, he was noted among a group of clerics in London who spoke out and preached against World War I.
He wrote novels, all of them on religious themes, which never made him famous, but his many travels to remote and distant places led to his being named a member of the Royal Geographic Society.
When he was called to the chaplaincy, he served as chaplain at the state’s toughest prison, San Quentin. He was also chaplain at a church facility for elderly women on Lombard Street in San Francisco and later he was a chaplain at Grace Cathedral.
In his 70s, during World War II, he escorted children who had been orphaned by the Nazi bombings of London from England to Canada, where he helped them find new lives and escape the horror of war.
He had quite a life. He had a big impact on this church and he touched a lot of people. One of his novels— I think the only one that’s still around— puts a different spin on the story of Judas. A few years ago, I managed to locate a copy and read it. The title makes it clear how he thought. It was called Abundantly Pardoned. If it’s about Judas and it’s called Abundantly Pardoned, you have a pretty good idea how he felt about forgiveness, and I imagine that that quality of mercy was a help when he was working at San Quentin, among men who had done horrific things to other people.
To some other Christians in other churches, today’s reading about the Holy Spirit descending and filling the apostles means being so powerfully touched by the Spirit of God--baptized in the fire of the Holy Spirit--that they are sent into ecstasy and, like the apostles, given words that are incomprehensible to everyone around them. They believe that the language of heaven is being channeled through them by the Holy Spirit. I love that idea and for many people, especially those who have long been oppressed because of their race or their class, the enthusiasm of holiness Pentecostalism is a place to encounter God.
Like most things Episcopalian, our understanding of today’s reading is less dramatic, although no less meaningful or profound. The apostles had come to Jerusalem to celebrate Shavuot, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, a celebration of God’s revelation of the law to Moses. People came from distant places, and as they gathered and encountered the Holy Spirit many languages were heard. The Pentecost story has often been interpreted to mean that Christ’s salvation was opened to all people of every language and it was a call to take Christ’s redeeming message out into the world. When Jesus was baptized, the Holy Spirit descended upon him like a dove, and his mission to the world began. At Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles, the church’s mission to take Christ’s light out to the world began.
So Pentecost reveals to us each year that the Holy Spirit is alive in unexpected places ; alive in our works of forgiveness and mercy and charity; alive in times of private prayer; alive in our encounters with one another; alive in the bread, wine, and water of our sacraments; and alive in the words of our Scriptures.
A belief I share with our brothers and sisters in the Holiness churches is that the experience of the Holy Spirit can lead people into worlds of wild uncertainty, thwart their personal ambition, and overwhelm them. Like a young Irishman who crossed an ocean to chase romantic cowboy notions and ended up a priest building a church in Bakersfield and touching thousands of lives in ways that can’t be measured or known, bringing Christ’s light to dark hate-filled places, where men in prison awaited death on gallows and where children suffered in war.
Edward Morgan had a big life. But it isn’t just big lives that bring insight and Christ’s light to the world. Years ago I was having a bout of self-pity thinking about the lack of bigness in my own life, while working mind-numbing nights sorting heart defibrillator parts in a factory outside Seattle and wondering how I was ever going to dig myself out of the hole I’d fallen into. Someone gave me an insight that day that I needed to hear. He said that the big picture isn’t so important. What’s important, are the details of your life.
That goes against everything we’re raised to believe, right? Aren’t we here to strive and win and achieve and make as big a splash as we can in the years we have on earth? Of course we all want to do well and achieve success, but I don’t think that’s where the Holy Spirit is. It certainly isn’t what Jesus cared about, because success to Jesus was the inverse of worldly fame and wealth. He just wanted us to love one another and to follow him and his Father’s commandments and the rest didn’t really matter.
I think the Holy Spirit lives outside our ambitions and in the circumstances that surround us. The Holy Spirit can make even the mundane details of our lives holy, and bring together the trillions of coincidences and circumstances that give us this moment.
If you look around this room, you may see people who have prayed for you when the circumstances of living overwhelmed you or when you were you sick or worn by grief. Or maybe you see someone who touched you when you needed to be touched or accepted you when you needed acceptance or offered a kind word at the right time or provided you with a place and an opportunity to show that you care. That’s where the Holy Spirit is. That’s where the Holy Spirit lives. The Holy Spirit lives in each moment of good that we share together. That’s what Pentecost is about to me. It’s about recognizing that the Holy Spirit is here in this world, speaking thousands of different tongues, and reaching out to us through the lives of unsung and unremembered saints like Edward Morgan, and in this room in every gesture of acceptance and love that we share.
Amen
by Curt Asher, Interim Dean, University Library, CSU, Bakersfield
Generations come and go and the people in them are forgotten. I am going to talk for a minute about one of those people, a person whose life affected ours, even though most of us have never heard of him before. One of those in the great cloud of witnesses that we’re told in Hebrews 16 surrounds us and gives us the strength to persevere in the race marked out for us.
I walked into this church about 100 years after Edward Morgan did, but his presence was still here. I didn’t know it then, but I could see it when the evening light hit that window behind me, and when the processional marched toward the altar.
In 1898, it was hard to live in Bakersfield. There wasn’t air conditioning. In most places, there wasn’t even electricity or indoor plumbing. The air was thick with flies and gnats and mosquitoes, and the fetid smell of animal waste. It was so dusty that the city would pay a man to drive a team of horses back and forth through town pulling a water wagon to dampen the main streets in an effort to keep the dust down. Ice was hard to get and meat that was slaughtered in the morning for market had to be sold or smoked by sundown or it would spoil. People who could afford to leave town went away in the summer and people who couldn’t nailed sheets to their walls and over their windows in a failing effort to keep out the brutal heat and the constant dust. There was a rail station on the east side, serving this area’s permanent population of mostly farmers and merchants and ranchers, and those who worked for them. There were lots of bars. Brothels lined L Street.
Saint Paul’s had been here for 12 years in 1898. In those days it was located on 17th and I. It had had parish status since 1891 and the church itself had survived a fire that destroyed most of downtown.
1898 was the year Edward Morgan came to town. He was an Irish Episcopal priest and Saint Paul’s was his first church. He wasn’t bound for the priesthood when he crossed the ocean to come here. He had come to America from Ireland to ride the range and chase cows across unfenced expanses of Texas and California, which he did until he had some kind of religious experience in his late 20s that called him to the priesthood and caused him to leave the cowboy life behind. He was ordained at the age of 31 in San Mateo.
Bakersfield struck it rich a year after Father Morgan arrived, in the 1899 oil boom. The oil boom would exponentially expand Bakersfield’s population over the next decades. Saint Paul’s grew so fast that those who came to worship couldn’t fit in the church, and a new Saint Paul’s church was built on the same I Street location, which would last until it was knocked down by an earthquake in 1952 and this church was built.
The community’s wealthiest families attended St. Paul’s, so the church got wealthy too, while Father Morgan was priest. During his time here, the Ascension Window behind me, the baptismal fount and the Italian marble altar were given to the church by one of its wealthy parishioners, William Tevis, in honor of his father-in-law, who was the 12th governor of California and, by the way, the only Hispanic ever to be elected governor of this state.
Father Morgan struck it rich in 1899 too by way of an inheritance from his aunt, Midy Morgan, a then well-known New York newspaperwoman. Famously eccentric, and over six feet tall, she was so masculine looking that, in that far less tolerant era, she was once falsely arrested for transvestitism on a streetcar by New York police. Midy Morgan made her fortune trading Irish horses in Europe, earning vast sums from European royalty, particularly Italian King Victor Emmanuel. After she died, her money went to her nephew.
So it was like winning the lottery, right? Father Morgan found himself, suddenly, with wealth in a church that was full of wealthy parishioners in a town that was being built on a scramble for oil wealth. So how did he react to that?
He continued to sleep on a cot in the church study and he returned the entire salary he earned each month to the church. He lived the ascetic life of a monk amid wealth.
And he brought about change. He brought new religious practices to the church. He instituted the processional march, led by the cross, that opens our service; he started the first robed choir. He put a stop to some of the cliquish practices and efforts to control things that the Church Guild, a fund raising group made up largely of the wives of rich men, had been using to dominate the direction the church was going.
When the new church was built, he had the old church building physically moved to a donated lot in East Bakersfield and established Saint Barnabus mission there to serve the transient railroad workers who inhabited that side of town. It was a rough neighborhood around the east side rail station, even then, but the Sunday night service at St. Barnabus was so well attended that he had to hire an assistant priest to help manage it. He also set up Episcopal missions in Greenfield and the Rio Bravo area.
In 1905, when someone tried to open a saloon near Saint Paul’s, Father Morgan, who was sympathetic to the temperance movement, blocked it by buying the building with his own money. He then turned it into offices.
A lifelong bachelor, Father Morgan left Bakersfield to become parish priest at St. Luke’s in San Francisco and his tireless work after the 1907 fire and earthquake led to his earning the title Canon. Later, he was noted among a group of clerics in London who spoke out and preached against World War I.
He wrote novels, all of them on religious themes, which never made him famous, but his many travels to remote and distant places led to his being named a member of the Royal Geographic Society.
When he was called to the chaplaincy, he served as chaplain at the state’s toughest prison, San Quentin. He was also chaplain at a church facility for elderly women on Lombard Street in San Francisco and later he was a chaplain at Grace Cathedral.
In his 70s, during World War II, he escorted children who had been orphaned by the Nazi bombings of London from England to Canada, where he helped them find new lives and escape the horror of war.
He had quite a life. He had a big impact on this church and he touched a lot of people. One of his novels— I think the only one that’s still around— puts a different spin on the story of Judas. A few years ago, I managed to locate a copy and read it. The title makes it clear how he thought. It was called Abundantly Pardoned. If it’s about Judas and it’s called Abundantly Pardoned, you have a pretty good idea how he felt about forgiveness, and I imagine that that quality of mercy was a help when he was working at San Quentin, among men who had done horrific things to other people.
To some other Christians in other churches, today’s reading about the Holy Spirit descending and filling the apostles means being so powerfully touched by the Spirit of God--baptized in the fire of the Holy Spirit--that they are sent into ecstasy and, like the apostles, given words that are incomprehensible to everyone around them. They believe that the language of heaven is being channeled through them by the Holy Spirit. I love that idea and for many people, especially those who have long been oppressed because of their race or their class, the enthusiasm of holiness Pentecostalism is a place to encounter God.
Like most things Episcopalian, our understanding of today’s reading is less dramatic, although no less meaningful or profound. The apostles had come to Jerusalem to celebrate Shavuot, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, a celebration of God’s revelation of the law to Moses. People came from distant places, and as they gathered and encountered the Holy Spirit many languages were heard. The Pentecost story has often been interpreted to mean that Christ’s salvation was opened to all people of every language and it was a call to take Christ’s redeeming message out into the world. When Jesus was baptized, the Holy Spirit descended upon him like a dove, and his mission to the world began. At Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles, the church’s mission to take Christ’s light out to the world began.
So Pentecost reveals to us each year that the Holy Spirit is alive in unexpected places ; alive in our works of forgiveness and mercy and charity; alive in times of private prayer; alive in our encounters with one another; alive in the bread, wine, and water of our sacraments; and alive in the words of our Scriptures.
A belief I share with our brothers and sisters in the Holiness churches is that the experience of the Holy Spirit can lead people into worlds of wild uncertainty, thwart their personal ambition, and overwhelm them. Like a young Irishman who crossed an ocean to chase romantic cowboy notions and ended up a priest building a church in Bakersfield and touching thousands of lives in ways that can’t be measured or known, bringing Christ’s light to dark hate-filled places, where men in prison awaited death on gallows and where children suffered in war.
Edward Morgan had a big life. But it isn’t just big lives that bring insight and Christ’s light to the world. Years ago I was having a bout of self-pity thinking about the lack of bigness in my own life, while working mind-numbing nights sorting heart defibrillator parts in a factory outside Seattle and wondering how I was ever going to dig myself out of the hole I’d fallen into. Someone gave me an insight that day that I needed to hear. He said that the big picture isn’t so important. What’s important, are the details of your life.
That goes against everything we’re raised to believe, right? Aren’t we here to strive and win and achieve and make as big a splash as we can in the years we have on earth? Of course we all want to do well and achieve success, but I don’t think that’s where the Holy Spirit is. It certainly isn’t what Jesus cared about, because success to Jesus was the inverse of worldly fame and wealth. He just wanted us to love one another and to follow him and his Father’s commandments and the rest didn’t really matter.
I think the Holy Spirit lives outside our ambitions and in the circumstances that surround us. The Holy Spirit can make even the mundane details of our lives holy, and bring together the trillions of coincidences and circumstances that give us this moment.
If you look around this room, you may see people who have prayed for you when the circumstances of living overwhelmed you or when you were you sick or worn by grief. Or maybe you see someone who touched you when you needed to be touched or accepted you when you needed acceptance or offered a kind word at the right time or provided you with a place and an opportunity to show that you care. That’s where the Holy Spirit is. That’s where the Holy Spirit lives. The Holy Spirit lives in each moment of good that we share together. That’s what Pentecost is about to me. It’s about recognizing that the Holy Spirit is here in this world, speaking thousands of different tongues, and reaching out to us through the lives of unsung and unremembered saints like Edward Morgan, and in this room in every gesture of acceptance and love that we share.
Amen
