Dear Friends,

I’ve been thinking a lot about rootedness this week.

This past weekend, Emma, Magdalene, and I travelled to Virginia to attend the wedding of two dear friends. The service took place in a charming country parish. It was not a particularly grand place—it barely sat a hundred people and there were 106 of us there—but it felt wonderfully lived in. As we sat, cheek-to-jowl, I trained my eyes for all the small brass memorials, charting two hundred years of other marriages like this one. Baptisms. Confirmations. Burials and memorials. The names on the walls were the same names of half the people in the room. It was a definitional family parish.

And when the service ended, we made our way just five minutes down the road to the bride’s family home, a place they have lived for eight generations, since at least the 1820s.

Talk about deep roots.

Few of us this side of the Atlantic can claim family homes with that depth of history.

But many of us can claim family churches like that. Places where generations of our loved ones and ancestors have been baptized, married, and buried.

Places that feel like home, long after the children and grandchildren have left to make lives elsewhere. But places to which we still return to celebrate and to grieve. Places that become repositories for our memories and for our prayers.

For my family, that is a little parish in Seguin, Texas called Saint Andrew’s. Almost none of my aunts or uncles or cousins still live there, but from time to time, we all descend on that little church because it is home.

Saint Philip’s is certainly a place like that. A place where families still have deep roots, long after the grandparents have passed and the children have all flown the coop. Many of our parishioners today have worshipped here for two or three generations.

But such rootedness is not accidental. We must nurture it, tend to it, invest in it.

Laying down roots requires our attention and our intention. It requires that we keep the long view in our eyes. That we remember that everything we build and tend is to the greater glory of God and for the benefit of those who come after us.

As we enter this season of stewardship, I encourage you to think about your roots in this place. How are you laying them down in the season? Where are they leading? What is God working with and through you for our benefit and that of all his Holy Church?

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Matthew