Fr Ben Garren

Dear Siblings in Christ,

Benjamin and Sarah were neighbors who attended their local Episcopal Church. There, Benjamin was on the Vestry while Sarah was a member in good standing.

As the years went by they would become entangled in a love story and be witnesses to one of the marked events of history—but not one of their own making. The love story, the history, would be made by those they enslaved.

The money for a woman Sarah enslaved would be raised first. Sarah had been merciful enough to allow the woman she enslaved, Mary, to wed the man she loved. But unless Mary was freed her children would be born enslaved to Sarah.

With loans from the Quakers, Mary and her husband were able to free her before their first child was born—a child born free. Her husband knew the Quakers because Benjamin was merciful enough to let him go to a Quaker night school for enslaved men. In this, Benjamin followed the mercy of his father, into whose house Absalom had been born enslaved.

It would be years of pleading, while Benjamin and Sarah went regularly to worship, before Benjamin manumitted Absalom.

At this point Absalom took on a new last name: Jones. Twenty years later he would be ordained as the first black priest of the Episcopal Church.

For me the question of this story is, “Where am I like Benjamin or Sarah? Where am I engaging merciful and good Christian practices of my day… that still fall so far short of respecting the basic dignity of every human being?”

Pax,

— Ben