A message from our Priest-in-Charge

Dear People of God gathered at St. Matthias Episcopal Church,

Grace to you and Peace from God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ!

I am honored to be called to serve as your Priest-in-Charge and look forward to meeting, guiding, learning from, worshipping and living with all of you. I am also grateful to my friend, Eleanor Holland for all her inspired and compassionate leadership of St. Matthias over the past seven years. Coming to you, I stand on the shoulders of a great priest! Thanks, too, to Lois Phelan, your senior warden, and your treasurer, Pat Franey for the graceful way they have managed this challenging transition. I look forward to seeing you this coming Sunday and hope you will stop by and introduce yourself in the following weeks as I move in and begin to learn the ropes. Below I offer a brief blanket introduction to supplement the announcement Lois sent last week.

I was born and grew up in Memphis, TN. As an adult, I returned there for a time and raised my family. My father was a Southerner--my mother an army brat who lived all over the United States. Her influence is my best explanation for my almost complete lack of a Southern accent.

I was baptized in the Episcopal Church; she has companioned me ever since. From the second grade through the twelfth I attended an Episcopal school which managed to have full-fledged morning prayer each day. As a result, many of those wonderful collects and canticles as well as large sections of the Hymnal are in my bones.

I have two children, Hannah and Daniel. Hannah, the eldest, is a midwife married to Sam, a doctor. They have two children, Silas and Anabelle, aged six and nine. Daniel, our son, is also a doctor, having completed his residency in Family Practice in June. He and his wife, Hanh, also have two children, Mathilde and Harrison, aged four and six. They live in Seattle, where Daniel began his practice in a downtown clinic in September. Since my family is so far-flung (a sister in Nova Scotia, a brother in Dallas), I am especially grateful that my mother, Ann Morton, lives here in Baltimore.

In hindsight, my journey towards ordained ministry took place over a long period of time, but was given major impetus by my experience at Yale Divinity School from which I graduated in 1995. I was ordained deacon in 1997 and priested in 1998. Since my ordination, I have served in a variety of settings: as chaplain in a women’s prison outside Las Vegas, a member of the staff of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, an associate rector at St. Thomas in Owings Mills, and Interim rector at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Baltimore.

It is appropriate that we begin our life together on Thanksgiving weekend. May gratitude to the God, who is ever faithful and wills us well, abound!

God’s Peace,
Ann+