Welcome. Nourish. Love

BY AMY FRYKHOLM

When I had first arrived at St. George Episcopal Mission in Leadville, I was a desperately spiritually hungry person. I didn’t walk around saying to myself, “I think I might be spiritually hungry,” but whenever I walked into the church and sat down in a pew, I started to weep. I had this sensation of reaching toward something for which I had no name, and, whenever I reached, I cried. Gradually, I felt calmed by the recitation of ancient poems: the Psalms, the Canticles. Those words entered my body, somehow, like an IV drip into my veins, allowing me to slow down, stop crying, look around, and take things in.

Everywhere I looked someone was being fed. There were canned goods given out from the Sunday School room and meals steaming in the dining room. There was communion. There were psalms (more nourishment). Music. Snacks. There was soup. It was like every space inside the church had been turned into food of one kind of another—and not just to feed other people. The food was there to feed ourselves too.

This appears to be one of the many paradoxes of spiritual life: in order to be fed, we feed. In feeding, we are fed.

But in the summer of 2020, all of the following things happened at once to St. George’s:

1. Our small community meal, along with the sanctuary, was transformed into a 200-person-aday food pantry.

2. A refugee family being threatened by ICE asked for sanctuary (asylum) in the church.

3. A man moved into the church parking lot and wondered if he could speak with a priest. He was contemplating suicide.

In the tumult, I turned to Luz Escalara. Luz has been running things around the place for a decade. “Where is this going?” I asked. “What does it mean?” Luz shrugged and smiled. All we knew was that it was all bigger than we were, that it was demanding something new of us, and that we didn’t have a plan for it. But we did what we knew how to do: we showed the family how to use the kitchen and the food pantry. We showed the man the parking lot how much he could help us, if he wanted to lend a hand, and he did.

There was something exhilarating in the atmosphere, like a sense of adventure or the presence of an intriguing new scent. What would happen next? Who would come? What would they say or need or do? The building was bursting with the energy and questions and strangeness.

Almost a year to the day after we first saw what was happening around us, we gathered for a retreat. It had been a year of radical change. We’d lost our beloved priest, hired a mobile food pantry coordinator, tripled our church budget, and handed out hundreds of thousands of pounds of food. We stepped back to articulate our mission. What did we want to say about who we were? Our working mission during the pandemic had been, “If we have food, by God, we’ll share it.” Our official mission was, “To seek and serve Christ in all persons.”

But what did we want to say now? We spent an hour playing with words, all the while knowing that everything we did had to do with feeding and being fed. Finally, the words came clear: “We welcome, nourish, and love our neighbors as ourselves.”

AMY FRYKHOLM is a community meal supervisor at St. George Church in Leadville and a senior editor at The Christian Century. Her most recent book is Wild Woman: A Footnote, the Desert, and My Search for an Elusive Saint.

St. George’s Episcopal Church, Leadville, provides a food

bank for local residents. Photos courtesy the Rev. Ali Lufkin