CHRIST CHURCH CATHEDRAL An Episcopal Community in the Heart of Houston, Texas
SEPTEMBER 2022 CHRISTCHURCHCATHEDRAL.ORG
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Responding to change
Celebrating the past, with an eye to the future
Dean Barkley Thompson’s departure from Christ Church Cathedral after a very successful decade has caused both fond reflection and hopeful expectation about the Cathedral’s future. “He is a priest with superb gifts in preaching and teaching and I’ll miss his leadership in both those capacities,” said Linnet Deily. “Barkley is a warm and outgoing priest who just builds friends wherever he is. He is really beloved at the Cathedral.” “It is really hard to know that he is leaving,”
said Consuelo Bravo, who is co-chair of the Latino congregation. “Every time I go to Mexico, I tell my mom all the things the church does, especially to help the homeless. My mom is 90 years old, and she would say, ‘I really love your church because everything you tell me, everything they do, that’s what God wants us to do.’” Member Fredricka Brecht remembers sitting with Dean Thompson at a board meeting at Seminary of the Southwest when two clergy members told him about the open position at
Mes de la Herencia Latina/Hispana During National Hispanic Heritage Month, across North America (from mid-September to mid-October,) Christ Church Cathedral will proudly celebrate the diversity of Latino/Hispanic culture on September 25 and October 9. All Cathedral members and friends are welcome to get to know the vast diversity of culture through dance, singing, and fellowship. It is an annual tradition on the part of the Cathedral’s Latino/Hispanic congregation,
HERENCIA, page 8
CELEBRATING, page 6
The church where I preached for the first time, was ordained to the priesthood, and baptized my own child is now condos. I can never return to that cozy church in the round, the cross I looked at so often, the ambo, the altar. I can’t kneel in the chairs; I can’t hide in the sacristy, or look forward to the magnificent spread put out in our own “upper room” each Maundy Thursday, an altar overflowing with grapes and stalks of wheat, beautiful loaves and jars full THE REV. CANON BECKY of oil. ZARTMAN I loved that church. And I’m really happy it’s gone. St. Thomas’ Dupont Circle was a place that taught me the possibilities of change. Not only on a personal level — first a seminarian, then a deacon, then a priest, then a mother — but also what can happen within the community when everyone says, “Yes, let’s do this.” St. Thomas’ first major change was thrust upon them. Once a high society church, Eleanor Roosevelt was the first lay preacher in their pulpit. The neogothic building stood until 1970, when the place was arsoned. They found five gallons of fire accelerant and matches but never knew who did it, or why. The church had a choice: rebuild a cathedral-style church that was dwindling in numbers, or move into the parish hall? They turned the ruins of the church into a park for the neighborhood, and moved into an upper room. In that upper room, something about that community changed. The new worship space, being roughly the dimensions of a shoebox, found itself using chairs instead of pews and worshiping
CHANGE, page 3