The previous post is a link to an essay by The Rev’d Dr. David Stokes. Herewith, a story that involves him.

When we met, David was the Rector of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Providence, Rhode Island, an Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement parish around which Brown University arranges itself. The God who rescued Israel from bondage in Egypt and raised Jesus from the dead, the Anglican divines, Karl Barth, Jane Austen, Walker Percy, Jaroslav Pelikan, Brevard Childs — I would go to Saturday morning mass at Smokey Steve’s and afterward over coffee David and I cosseted ourselves in all of the above. With encouragement from him and from George Hunt, the Bishop of Rhode Island, I resigned my Christian & Missionary Alliance pastorate to seek holy orders in the Episcopal Church.

It was the spring of 1993. I was at the Diocesan House in Providence waiting for my initial interview with the commission on ministry. David was already in the room with the commission. I was sitting in another room waiting for the signal to join them.

Kierkegaard was right. It’s dreadful to sit quietly in a room alone with nothing to do. I am neurotic about keeping a book on me to fortify myself against that circumstance. So when I opened my satchel and discovered that my book wasn’t there, anxious I scanned the room for something to read. It was lined with bookshelves empty but for two derelict loose leaf binders. Pushing them aside revealed a book: The 1992 Journal of the Diocese of Rhode Island.

A diocesan journal publishes everything a diocese formally considers in its annual convention. Nobody would ever confuse one with Barchester Towers or the novels of Susan Howatch. Still, it had a front and back cover, a binding, and sentences. Anodyne. I decided to let the book fall open and read whatever presented itself. It fell open at the section that records affirmations. The first words to shine upon my retinae were these, “We affirm the election of the Rev. William W. Wiedrich as Suffragan Bishop of the Diocese of Chicago.”

I wasn’t raised in the Church. I started going to church, Grace Baptist in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, as a sophomore in high school. The first Episcopal priest I knew was William Wiedrich. His son Tom was a friend and classmate at Sault High. We played varsity basketball together. Tom was a natural, beautiful jump shooter. Father Wiedrich came to our practices in his clericals. He’d shoot around with us. He rooted for us at games. He preached at my high school baccalaureate. I remember that at the baccalaureate each of us was given a round laminated button on which TUIT was typed. So many people told him they didn’t go to church because they didn’t get around to it, he said. He didn’t want us to ever have that as an excuse.

But back to the diocesan journal. The odds that I would be caught without a book are very small. The odds that the one book in that room would be the Diocesan Journal can’t be much better. Add that to the odds that the book would fall open to that page and that the first words to shine on my eyes would be about the first Episcopal priest I knew and tally it up with the odds that this would happen as I’m waiting to meet the committee that decides if I’ll make any progress toward being priested — it seemed to me then as it seems to me now that the odds against what happened have to be astronomical.

You don’t have to invoke the supernatural to account for any of it. Each of those things could have been just a coincidence, as could all of them added up together. A reasonable person could shrug it off as a fluke. Maybe it was. But it is also possible that it wasn’t a fluke, that it was providence, that the Most High was treating me to a drink on the house, letting me peek around the corner into the frontier between the seen and the unseen. I don’t know what you make of it, but I am the world’s leading authority on what I made of it. God was whispering from the wings. What I heard him saying was this. You have been expected. You are on schedule. You are taking the correct turn at the right time.

David Stokes and I talked about it. A woman at the Diocesan House gave me the telephone number of the Diocese of Chicago. When I got back to my study, it didn’t take me a minute to get around to it. I spoke with Bishop Wiedrich.

As so many things do, all of this relates to football. The Chicago Bears’ linebacker Brian Urlacher suffered a completely dislocated wrist in Lambeau Field the first Sunday of the NFL season. The Green Bay Packers beat the Bears that night, 21 – 15. When Urlacher got back to Chicago, he went directly to the team’s hand and wrist surgeon for an operation, an all night affair early that Monday morning. How do I know? The surgeon, Tom Wiedrich, told me.

Today at Saint Francis I officiated the Burial Office for Barbara Reeder, the wife of Maurice Reeder. After the committal at Druid Ridge Cemetery in Baltimore, I told Dr. Reeder that one of the things we have in common is William Beaumont General Hospital in Fort Bliss, Texas. I’d read that he had interned there.

“When were you there?” I asked him. “1958 and 1959,” he said. “Ha. We were there at the same time. I was born in 1959.” “What month were you born?” “May.” “I was there from June of 1958 to June of 1959. At the end of my internship, I concentrated on obstetrics and delivered 150 to 200 babies,” he said. “There’s a good chance that I delivered you.”

So it may be that today I helped a man commend his wife out of this world who fifty years ago brought me into it.