Dear Friends in Christ,

Monday morning, I happened to wake up quite early as the thunder rolled in. We have a beautiful picture window in our living room, and so I sat in a dark and quiet house, cradling my coffee, watching the lighting flash in a dawn sky, and the rain pouring down, and I though—naïvely—“oh how cozy is this!”

Well, when I arrived on campus, it was an altogether different scene.

That severe monsoon early Monday morning undermined the roofers’ temporary protection and tarping, flooding all of the sacristies, the Murphey Galleries, and a significant portion of the offices. Water poured in through the joints at the roof and parapets. Vestments were soaked, ceiling tiles buckled and crashed to the floors a sodden mess, water dripped out of vents onto carpet and tables and anything below.

Our Director of Facilities, Mike Italiano, our head Facilities Staff member, James Clarke, and many other parishioners and staff—Dcn Beth Clarke, Renée Clift, Ken Hinkle, Justin and Kate Appel, to name a few—sprang into action, hauling everything out that they could. Mike, James, and I have emptied the sacristies and vestries of all of their furniture and art.

Our most precious possessions came out unscathed. But I had to whisk almost every one of the parish’s vestments to a specialty dry cleaner. Dye from the orphrey in the white set has bled into the beautiful silk damask. It is probably ruined.

The first two nights after this deluge, the fire alarm—inundated with water—malfunctioned constantly. Ayden Carrell, our sacristan and night porter, spent most of the night silencing alarms and going on fire watch. We are lucky that Ayden is not only a faithful son of this parish, but also a retired fireman.

None of this misfortune is our fault, but it has fallen in our laps, and it is ours to now deal with. We have been blessed with an extraordinarily smooth set of construction projects the last eighteen months. We have replaced—almost without issue—the roofs on the entirety of the school, the church itself, all of the tile in the cloisters, and on the Chapel of the Nativity.

Now as we arrive at the very end of these projects, we have this.

Service will look a little different on Sunday. Older members will remember the priests of their youth in cassock, surplice, and tippet (the black preaching scarf). We will be thus habited on Sunday—in part, because we will have no other vestments at our disposal!

Godly, righteous, and sober, nonetheless.

The entrance back into the church on Sunday, September 20, is unaltered. We will, in short order, clean and renovate the many damaged spaces. Life will return to normal—perhaps sooner than we might expect.

But such experiences remind us that—as the poet Robert Burns has it—“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft agley” [go oft awry].

Our beautiful buildings shelter us, they inspire us, and they serve as a constant reminder of that heavenly kingdom which is to come. But they are not, in the truest sense, the Church. We, we are the Church. And we would still be so even if we worshipped in the open air, under an open sky, or in the torrents of an Arizona monsoon.

Yours, faithfully,

—Fr Matthew