Religiously Speaking
In all my years of writing about faith communities in Western Virginia – 65 this coming February – I have usually avoided identifying myself with a particular denomination.
Like not putting a political sign in my yard – my late journalist husband would not allow that – it has usually seemed better to keep my membership unknown.
Of course, I have not been able to be entirely secret, for many of my personal columns have revealed that I am a born and baptized Episcopalian who has been part of three parishes. This was also true of my late husband, Charles. It made for a strong cultural, as well as religious bond, between us. He inherited his Episcopal roots from his mother, I from my father. But we might both have been Presbyterian, for that was the other side of both our heritages.
All this introduces visits I enjoyed this summer to Homecoming events at two Roanoke parishes, neither the one I attend now.
St. James Day, July 25 in the calendar for worship used among our folk, is now marked as a festive occasion at the small church I attended for 35 years in the Williamson Road area of Roanoke. The group has been led for more than a dozen years by the Rev. Susan Bentley, a Salemite.
Begun as a mission to the rapidly expanding northern residential side of Roanoke in 1950, it still stands on Delray Street Northwest. Improvements to the grounds since I left there in 1988 have made it more attractive and more visible from the main thoroughfare a block away.
Since the 1960s it has been known as one of the most culturally liberal congregations in the valley being a pioneer in accepting African-American, mixed race, the gay community, the addicted, a black refugee group and others with inclusive views. Those changes did not come easily for many of us, but despite ups and downs the little parish has held its own, now aging but still vital.
St. James (the Great) Church is now old enough at 67 years to have two families of four generations still active there. This year the descendants of Otho and Olivia James and of Tom and Joyce Brown were honored in a two-day Heritage Weekend.
A highlight was the leadership of Grace Aheron, the great-granddaughter of the late James couple who came from Franklin County and were among the charter members. James, a homebuilder, and his wife were parents of the late Eva and Michael Aheron. A daughter, Susan Aheron, got attention for her serving in Washington as an assistant to members of Congress. Now retired, she was at the celebration.
Her brother Michael Aheron married Avis of Japanese-Korean ancestry and became the father of Grace, born in 1991, a prospective seminary student and the speaker at an informal program on Saturday evening as well as the preacher on Sunday morning.
The young woman – a tattoo of a Communion chalice on her arm – spoke of ‘How the church said yes to me.” She rejoices, she said, that she was reared in a congregation of diversity, people with modest incomes and openness to change. As a student at the University of Virginia, Grace Aheron helped start an “intentional community” to help young adults around Charlottesville find their place in God’s world. It has inspired a similar ministry, St. Aidan’s House, in downtown Roanoke.
St. James’ other four-generation family started with English-born Joyce, still an active 91, who remembers when the events depicted in the currently popular movie, “Dunkirk” took place. A few years later she married an American soldier, Tom Brown. He brought her home to Roanoke with other war brides and they became the parents of Doris Jean, now wife of Larry Mattox of Troutville. One of the Mattox children, Bryan, has an infant daughter, Eva, baptized at the heritage celebration.
Though I was never a member of Christ Episcopal Church on Franklin Road in Old Southwest, I have roots there too. On the 100th Anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone of the limestone structure, I visited for the commemoration of that event. One of my uncles, the late Robert W. Patton, served as rector of this church from 1895 to 1901. He married one of my paternal aunts, Janie Stringfellow Patton, and they left Roanoke soon after their marriage. She loved being the matriarch at what had been his family plantation in Louisa County; he for many years directed on the church’s national level an agency that supported several Negro colleges.
Patton served at Christ Episcopal long before the present Franklin Road building was even planned, for the congregation goes back to 1892 when its building was nearer downtown. One of several “second” churches in the city dating from the rowdy days of the burgeoning railroad town, Christ Church was one of several Western Virginia congregations organized by my late grandfather, Frank Stringfellow. He was not only a celebrated Confederate spy but later a clergyman and mission developer in what is now the Episcopal Diocese of Southwestern Virginia.
Besides Robert Patton of early Christ Church, Stringfellow had another clergy son-in-law, William Alexander Barr, who served in Rocky Mount and other nearby communities 125 years ago.
So my church and Virginia roots go deep, and many of us old-timers enjoy reflecting on them as the Rev. Alexander McPhail, current rector of the Southwest Roanoke parish, did July 30. A search of the attic turned up the service leaflet of the 1917 cornerstone laying and other relics.
Before eating a bountiful lunch, we sang two appropriate hymns from that day, “Christ is Made the Sure Foundation” and “The Church’s One Foundation” as was done on that July day in 1917. McPhail reminded us that many in America felt as uneasy about their country then as they do now.
