I add my voice to the chorus of gratitude for this opportunity to take part in a venture which, we must hope, will prove to have been a gift, not only to particular souls reading and writing in this community, colloquium, coprecum (to coin a word) – but also a small gift to TEC, the Anglican Communion, and the Church Catholic. In a spirit of gratitude and generosity, therefore, I come.

Introductions! I grew up in Georgia, the only child of very loving and devout parents. I was baptized on Easter Eve, 1979, at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Griffin, Georgia. Years later, when I finally came to understand and recognize such distinctions, I realized that St. George’s was a high-church place, and that my home was a charismatic place. As a child, it was all of a piece: my world was Christian, and beyond that I knew little. Again retrospectively, it is interesting to discern that perhaps one of the most formative experiences of my childhood was Sunday by Sunday pondering the meaning of the priest’s injunction, “Lift up your hearts.” I never asked my elders what it meant, but for years my consciousness percolated through the potential significance of that dialog at the beginning of the Anaphora.

I also benefited from (and inherited) the wanderlust of my parents. Almost every year, from an early age, I was with them in the Holy Land or Europe – but mostly the Holy Land. It is to this that I attribute my abiding love for souks, bazaars, Nutella, hot tea, train travel, kibbutzim, and things ancient and dark.

My high school years were spent in Virginia. My parochial home was again a high-church place under the rectorship of a very competent, urbane and slightly irreverent priest. I attended a small private school the founders of which embraced a kind of diffuse evangelicalism which, practically translated, meant that my education consisted of very little math or science, but close and repeated readings of the Federalist Papers, English novels, and a tendentious scrutiny of history since the Reformation, in which the significance of England and America was played up, and that of France played down. The study of Catholic and heathen parts of the world was neglected; their boundaries and genealogy were insinuated to be coterminous. That William Bradford and Jonathan Edwards picked up where Paul and Barnabas left off rang hollow even on a tabula as rasa as mine.

I went to college at Sewanee and there fell in love with Philosophy and Poetry. Philosophy got the upper hand in my psyche, and my declaration of a major reflected that fact. Within Philosophy, I concentrated on Metaphysics and formal logic, mainly through the lens of British Empiricism and 20th century analytic philosophy. My senior essay was about metaphysical issues underlying the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Likewise during my senior year I read Wittgenstein for the first time: sparks flew, and an ongoing liaison was inaugurated.

It was also at Sewanee that Catholicism burgeoned within me, thanks to a nexus of historical reflections, friends, and earnest considerations about what was REALLY going on in the universe. Also urging me on were the Sewanee chaplain at the time, Fr Tom Ward, and a dedicated and generous group of Catholics of the Roman Communion who tolerated my presence at their daily recitation of the Angelus.

After college I took a gap year (thanks to the generosity of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation) during which I circumnavigated the globe, staying in Christian religious communities whenever possible. I began on the island of Patmos and went from there to Athens, Mount Athos, Rome, Norcia, Oxford, Alnmouth, Grahamstown South Africa, Johannesburg, Cape Town, the Solomon Islands, and finally back home. That year is dear to me, as are the myriad people I met along the way. Particularly dear to me was my time in the Solomon Islands with the Melanesian Brothers and Sisters, the Society of St. Francis, and the Sisters of the Church. If one is looking for Anglican Catholicism, one finds it in the Province of Melanesia. There men and women live lives of radical and conspicuous fidelity to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They heal the sick, they teach the Catholic faith, they go out discalced, two by two, they lay down their lives for their friends. Indeed shortly after I left the Solomon Islands, seven of the brothers bore witness to the lordship of Jesus Christ in the shedding of their blood. The story of the Seven Martyrs of the Melanesian Brotherhood is proclaimed now in all the world.

Returning to the U.S., I settled down in New Haven to begin seminary. Four years (and four advisors) later, I left New Haven a Master of Divinity and a Master of Sacred Theology, according to my exit visa. My final year was dedicated in large part to a thesis, advised by Denys Turner, on the connection, drawn by some of the fathers, between dogma and mysticism, theology and theurgy, doxa and praxis, all read through the lens of certain continuities between my old friend Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early and late philosophies of language.

In 2005, on the feast of Constance and her Companions, I was made a priest by Bishop Henry Louttit of Georgia, at St. George’s Church, where I had spent so many Sundays as a child contemplating what it meant to lift up one’s heart to the Lord. Prior to my ordination I had to fight the urge to leave Anglicanism altogether (the current bishop of New Hampshire was consecrated the summer after my first year of seminary, and I could see the hand of acrimony and dissension writing on the wall). But I was graced with a conviction that the essence of priesthood is the offering of sacrifice, and that HERE, within North American Anglicanism I would be closest to the sacrifice of my Lord. HERE the axe could be laid to the root of the do-ut-des religiosity persistently latent in my conscience. On the advice of the late great Archbishop Michael Ramsey, I began to pray that the Lord would “take my heart and break itâ€? – not in the way I would like, but in the way he knows to be best.

Back in New Haven, I was for two years a chaplain (the junior of two) for the Episcopal Church at Yale. Bible studies, screenings of tedious but profound films (Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, etc.), and friendship with a bunch of very bright and open-hearted students was the order of the day.

In 2006 I accepted a post as curate at a Catholic parish in the Diocese of Dallas. Three months into my two-year term, the parish decided to leave the jurisdiction of the Episcopal Church and enter the jurisdiction of another province of the Communion. Suddenly and unexpectedly I was faced with the necessity of choosing between my parish and my diocese. I chose the diocese, firstly because I believe myself to serve at the pleasure of my bishop; and Bishop Stanton’s “yoke is easy“; and secondly because of a positive conviction that I am called now to serve here, within TEC. To borrow the attitude of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta: within TEC the Catholic priest has an opportunity to live into the significance of our Lord’s mysterious words: “I thirst.”

After several months of unemployment, I found myself in Lent of 2007 serving as Priest-in-Charge at the Church of the Holy Cross in Dallas. At the beginning of September, I became the rector of Holy Cross. It’s a small parish, old by Texas standards, and both fundamentally and ritually catholic. My life is somewhat eremitical. I learn and practice what was once called priestcraft, I study the Bible and the fathers, I marinade in the daily rhythms of Office-and-Mass Catholicism; and I daily renew in myself the conviction that North American Anglicanism has a telos, that it is perfected in the providence of God, and that the foundation of my particular joy and service must be in waning that Christ may wax within me: “For your servants love her very rubble, and are moved to pity even for her dust” (Psalm 102.14).

Its good to be here.