On a bright cool evening in late April, the parishioners of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church gathered to formally celebrate the ministry of their new priest, Jennie McIntosh Anderson.
The pews were filled from end to end, and the church bell rang out. The children who were there — not many in a largely older congregation —ran down the front aisle with arms outstretched.
After Thomas C. Ely, bishop of the Episcopal Church in Vermont, had presided over the rituals of induction, Anderson stepped forward.
Beaming, Anderson waved to the congregation, palm flat and fully opened, as if she were scrubbing a window clean.
Her brownish-blond hair, normally worn up in a ponytail or bun, was down to her shoulders. Her round glasses echoed the roundness of her face. There was joy in her every gesture, word and smile.
But make no mistake. When she took to the pulpit, she said in a clarion voice to the congregation, “May God bless you with anger at injustice and the exploitation of people. May God bless you with enough foolishness so you think you can make change in this world.”
The route that Anderson had taken to the priesthood, and eventually to the pulpit at St. Barnabas, had been anything but orthodox.
Anderson graduated in 1988 from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with an applied engineering degree in the field of wood science and technology, which looks at the uses for wood in a variety of industries. She then headed west to Washington, where she helped build hiking trails in the Cascades for the U.S. Forest Service, and worked “driving pies” as a delivery person for Godfather’s Pizza.
She then inched her way into the unions in Bellingham, joining the Laborers’ International Union there, and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters in 1988.
Anderson returned to Boston in 1996, and was hired a year later to work as a pile driver on the Big Dig, the rerouting of Interstate 93 through the Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. Tunnel. She was the only woman in her crew, just as she’d been the only woman, or one of a handful of women, on union jobs in Washington.
From the outside, her roundabout path to the priesthood might seem unusual, but not to Anderson. “People get their calling in all kinds of ways,” she said.
Anderson, who is 51, has thought hard about how God works in the world.
Her beliefs are these: God is mystery. As soon as you try to define or describe God’s power, you limit it. God isn’t found necessarily in the answers, but in the questions. In an examined life it’s imperative to ask continually of oneself, and others, how one can be useful, and then to get that work done.
Anderson recalled the words of a former Massachusetts bishop who talked about how manual labor could bring one closer to God.
This made sense to Anderson, who, as a child, was always interested in making things, and digging and excavating. She had a story to illustrate her point.
In the sultry humidity of summers spent working outside on the Big Dig, Anderson looked forward to her days off, when she took the bus to visit her mother at her home in Bourne, on Cape Cod. Winds came off the Atlantic, and it was usually at least 10 degrees cooler there.
Anderson’s parents separated when she was going into first grade, and her mother remarried in 1973. Anderson and her two brothers had grown up dividing their time between Bourne and Boston, where their father, Jay Anderson, an architect, lived.
During the trip, Anderson would nod off to the droning of the wheels on the highway. “I was in that fabulous, semi-conscious state, not quite awake, not quite asleep,” she said.
In that state of suspended animation, where inchoate thoughts float in a dark sea, she intuited that the Christian precept of a triune God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — was not so far removed from welding three different metals into one essential thing that had meaning, and would last.
“We hope what our religious institutions stand for is what our pile drivers do: to provide stable foundations in a shifting or unstable ground,” Anderson said.
Anderson loved the church. It held her up. But she didn’t think about an Episcopal priesthood until 1997, after she’d returned to Boston and joined Christ Church Cambridge, near Harvard Square.
Anderson worked with the church on various projects, including Habitat for Humanity. Still, she was surprised when then-associate rector Louise Conant approached her at a church coffee hour and asked Anderson whether she’d ever considered going into the church in a formal role.
“Jennie was clearly a devout person, but with such good cheer and energy and the capacity to go into areas where church doesn’t ordinarily go, like the construction industry,” Conant said in a phone interview.
Anderson, by then a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, Local 40, in Cambridge, told Conant that she would pray on it.
She’d been thinking about working her way up in the union, but after Conant’s inquiry, she began to think more seriously about a religious vocation — which didn’t seem to be as great a leap as it first might have appeared.
It was Anderson’s faith that had sustained her through probably the most difficult period of her life, when she became pregnant her junior year of high school at Northfield Mount Hermon in Gill, Mass.
“There I am, 16, and not knowing what’s going on,” Anderson recalled. “This is a very simple diagnosis, but it’s not easy.”
She called her mother from school, in tears and unable to summon the words. Her mother carefully navigated the possibilities.
“Did your teacher fail you?” was the first question. “Was she mean to you?” was the second. “Are you pregnant?” was the last.
Anderson’s father urged her to go to Planned Parenthood to explore all the options, including abortion, because he did not want her to have to deal with that monumental responsibility when she was still a teenager. But Anderson knew she would bring the baby to term.
“All of my faith pointed to placing my baby for adoption as the best thing for me and for my baby,” she said. “My clear belief is, and was, that God is love and if we act in love, God is there.”
After giving birth to a boy in June 1982, Anderson relinquished her son with the expectation that she would not see him again: At the time, adoptions in Massachusetts were closed — adopted children were not provided information about their birth parents. That decision visited Anderson every spring when she felt deep sadness in the period between Mother’s Day and her son’s birthday.
“It was one of the most pivotal faith-formation parts of my life,” Anderson said. “I made adult decisions about very adult matters as a young adult.”
She’d found comfort in the unwavering support of her mother, and in her faith. A priest at the family’s church in Sandwich, Mass., recommended counseling and helped her sort out her academic situation, as well as confirming her in the Episcopal Church.
More to the point, “it was that my experience in living this life was calling me to be more faithful,” she said.
When Conant spoke with Anderson many years later, Anderson had already made a spiritual connection between her work and her religious faith. But the jobs were discrete, tied to one goal in the here and now. And Anderson had always been drawn to the larger cosmological debates.
During college, Anderson had found herself one day in an elevator with one of her math professors and they’d gotten onto the subject of knowledge.
The professor had told her that if you thought of knowledge as a sphere that continually increases, the most interesting place to be was at the edges of the sphere, where knowledge was continually expanding. But it also was a place of great unknowns, because we don’t know what we don’t know. And this was where the really critical work was to be done.
Recalling this, Anderson threw her hands up in a gesture that mimed both bafflement and, “Eureka!” “Are you ready for ambiguity?” she cried out.
“I like to live in that question; there’s something attractive about it. Not to say there isn’t pain and hard times, I get that, but keeping a mystery in your faith practices is key. It helps you stay healthy.
“It would be so much simpler if I could just go, bollocks,” she said.
The church offered a way to dig more deeply into what she already was doing. It provided a structure to minister to the suffering, the impoverished, the disenfranchised. She could wade in where others might hang back, and go beyond what was expected.
“It had glorious potential and greater challenges,” Anderson said.
The Episcopal Church’s willingness to accept ambiguity, rather than dealing only in dogma, was one of the aspects of the church that Anderson most respected. It delved into the gray areas and applied a “high standard of skepticism around the Scripture,” she said. “If God can’t stand up to skepticism, then what value are the Scriptures?”
The Episcopal Church, like other churches, also worked on social issues about which Anderson cared deeply, such as the fight for racial and gender equality, and the inequities of class. The more she entertained the idea of the priesthood, the more sense it made.
“I kept coming back and coming back, and I made the decision to follow the next step. That’s all it took, being open to the next step,” she said.
Seven years would pass between Anderson’s conversation with Conant and her entrance into seminary. During that period Anderson continued in the construction trade.
As a member of Pile Drivers Local Union 56, working under foreman Vincent Scalisi, Anderson helped to build the slurry walls for the I-93 tunnel, as well as build the tunnel vent, which used jet engines to move the air around.
Anderson also worked to reinforce the buildings in the area around the Big Dig on a crew that numbered from three to 15 people. The work was all-consuming, and it paid well.
On any job, Scalisi said, there are workers who leave or are let go first — and those who stay to the end.
“There’s no seniority on pile-driving jobs; you’re only as good as your last job. She was always one of the last to go,” said Scalisi, who attended both her ordination as a priest, and the celebration at St. Barnabas.
Finally, in 2004, Anderson moved to Austin, Texas, entering the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest, one of 11 American Episcopal seminaries, which is known for its mission education and work.
After graduating in 2007, Anderson began the process of discernment, the church’s term for undergoing the formal interviews and psychological vetting that leads, if the candidate is not rejected, to the priesthood.
She was ordained in January 2008 in the diocese of Massachusetts and celebrated her first Mass that month at the Church of St. Andrew in Marblehead.
From there Anderson went to Pennsylvania, where she served in a number of different churches in suburban Philadelphia as both a rector and as supply clergy —the term for a clergy person who officiates when the church’s regular priest is unable to. She also worked as a custodian at the faith-based St. James School in Philadelphia, which educates students from lower-income communities in the city.
Philadelphia didn’t feel like a natural fit to Anderson, though. She was entering middle age, taking on a leadership role in the church, and New England beckoned.
“I go out like a yo-yo, and yo-yo back to New England,” she said.
In July 2015, Anderson approached the canon for transitional ministry in the diocese of Pennsylvania, and told her that she wanted to find a position in New England.
But Anderson had her eye, really, on Vermont because she’d finally reconnected with her son, Dylan Desaubies, who lives in Moretown with his wife and two young sons.
In the years since giving up her son, Anderson had made the decision not to marry.
“I’m grateful to be single in this time, and female in this time. I don’t have to be a spinster and I can support myself,” she said. (Her companion is a silver Labrador retriever named Elafris, from the Greek for “lightness of being.”)
Anderson had found that engaging with parishioners or others who might seek her out was as challenging in its way as having a family. But one uncertainty remained: Where was her son?
In 2001, after the death of her father, Anderson began the process of trying to find out what had happened to her son around the same time that he began trying to find out who his biological parents were.
Desaubies had been adopted by a couple living in the U.S. in 1982, but grew up in France because his father, a Belgian, was a naturalized Frenchman. Desaubies had long had an intense curiosity about his biological parents. Who was he? Why had he turned out the way he did?
After both Anderson and Desaubies went through the state channels that assure that parents and children want to be found, they eventually made contact with each other.
Mother and son met each other for the first time as adults in August 2001 in a motel room in Boulder, Colo., where Desaubies lived at the time. They were immediately struck by their similarities.
“He was the combination of his father and me. He has my laugh, or I have his laugh, or however that works,” Anderson said. “Who knows what characteristics come from where?”
“When I saw her, it felt as if I were looking at a female, older version of myself,” Desaubies said. He was not surprised when she declared her intention to enter the Episcopal priesthood.
“Faith was already a big part of her life, but I often wondered perhaps whether giving me away was responsible for that,” he said.
When Anderson began the search for a position, there were just a handful of openings in Vermont. But one of them stood out: St. Barnabas.
The church administrations in Philadelphia and Vermont thought that the church would be a good fit for both Anderson and the congregation, which is active in pushing for a $15 minimum wage, volunteering time and supplies to the Haven in White River Junction, the possible resettlement of Syrian refugees in Vermont and the fight against predatory lending practices.
Anderson passed on her documentation to St. Barnabas, and church members in turn asked her pointed questions designed to weed out applicants who might not be in sympathy with the church’s mission.
Should a parish priest engage with social causes or organizations important to the community? Which theologians had been influential in Anderson’s work? Did the responsibilities of being a parish priest preclude further theological study?
Finally, how would a priest grapple with working in New England, the least religious part of the country? How would she engage with both liberal, affluent communities such as Hanover and Norwich, and more rural areas with pockets of poverty?
Anderson felt confident that the tenor of her life and work made her well-suited to St. Barnabas. “It was a really good feeling for me to know I was the right person for the job,” she said.
Hired for a three-year appointment in December of last year, Anderson began work in January. The job is half time, with an annual salary of around $35,000, easily less than what she would make in construction.
She officiates three weeks out of four each month and lives in the rectory, the first priest in some time to do so. She is trying to figure out a way to do part-time work in construction or carpentry in the area. She also is working part time at an after-school program at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in White River Junction.
Now that she leads St. Barnabas, she said her objective, in an era of diminishing church attendance and an increasingly secular populace, is to “find the language and a way to restructure our institutions so we’re serving our community now.”
The gardens and trails around the church are available to all, and the church is always open. Anderson is trying to forge a relationship with walkers on the Appalachian Trail and has offered up the rectory as place to spend a night for both thru-hikers and anyone living or passing through town who might need a bed for the night.
Members of the St. Barnabas congregation have warmed to Anderson’s brand of ministry.
“Her enthusiasm is contagious —for a rather staid and formal congregation,” said Ben Frank Moss, an artist and Hanover resident.
“There’s an energy there that we need,” said Bruce Graver, a professor of classics at Dartmouth College who has been coming to St. Barnabas since 1996 with his wife, Margaret Graver, who also is a senior warden with the church.
“It’s hard to find people who will want to come to a place at essentially not a living wage. You have to get lucky,” he added.
In early June, at the start of a 10 a.m. Sunday service, Anderson stepped out in front of the congregation, which numbered around 30 people. She rocked back on her heels and then rocked forward.
“Good morning!” she exulted.
The windows of the church were open, letting in the sound of a steady rain, and a squirrel chattering in a nearby tree. A soft wind blew through.
“Welcome to the season after Pentecost!” Anderson said. “The place is packed, I’m excited about that.”
Like almost everything she’s done in her life, Anderson doesn’t give a sermon in the usual way.
That morning she began by quoting Vincent van Gogh: “What would life be if we didn’t have the courage to attempt anything?”
Then, closing her eyes and singing slowly at first, she enunciated clearly the first words of Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence.
“Hello darkness, my old friend,” Anderson said, somewhere between speaking and singing. “I’ve come to talk with you again.”
She alternated sermon with song as the congregation began, tentatively, to hum along. The readings were keyed to Pentecost, which, in the Christian liturgical calendar, marks the birth of the Christian church, 50 days after Easter.
Is the Pentecost a miracle of the ear or the tongue?
That depends, Anderson went on. If she were in a position of power, she would need to be able to truly hear the voices of the persecuted; if she were powerless, she would need to have the power to speak.
“When have you ever had to muster the courage to be compassionate?” Anderson asked the congregation. “What are the hostile places where you do God’s work. How is God’s work being done through you?”
She returned to Simon and Garfunkel, voice slightly quavering. “And no one dared to stir the sounds of silence,” she sang, making a pot-stirring motion.
She brought the sermon back to the lessons of 1 Kings in the Old Testament. What abundance would people see burst forth because of their compassion?
Afterward, there were thank you’s — one for the life of Muhammad Ali and Anderson’s thanks for the rain in what had been a dry season. But, before Anderson sent the parishioners on their way, she addressed them again in a ringing voice.
“May God bless you with discomfort,” she said.
q
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.