The Episcopal Church of the Epiphany

by Paul Sweitzer

In June 1940, my family moved into our new home on East Elm Avenue, a block and a half from Epiphany Episcopal Church.

After several years of enforced playing in my own yard, I began exploring the neighborhood. It was then I noticed, for the first time, the charming little Tudor style church on the corner and began to ask my mother questions. "What church is that?" "That's the Episcopal Church." "Can we go there sometime?" "We go down the street to Nativity."

Despite Mother's best efforts, Epiphany became my first venture to "another" church. I was almost six when one afternoon I was playing at my grandparents' home on the northwestern corner of the intersection of Elm Avenue and Leroux Street and saw the front door of Epiphany open. I was thoroughly fasinated by the chimes from the small church's tower, by seeing the Rev. George Godderham, then the rector, around the church, and just by the church itself.

I was a curious, but not necessarily an adventurous, child. That quiet summer afternoon, however, that open door was too much. I walked boldly across busy Beaver Street and went inside. I didn't stay long, but I had been in my first "other" church.

When you grow up in a town that is in its own youth, you, frequently and often without knowing it, can reach out and touch history. I knew the late Edward Mills, for example, whose skilled hands in 1912 had shaped the beautiful woodwork inside Epiphany, and who years later also helped with the woodwork inside Nativity. I can remember the stately figure of Mrs. Orrin Webber as she walked each Sunday morning, properly dressed with hat, purse, and gloves to services at Epiphany. Mrs. Webber lived in a large house three blocks east of ours. During World War II, my mother used those Sunday morning passsages to ask after the welfare of Mrs. Webber's son Harry, then a prisoner of the Germans after his airplane had been shot down on a bombing mission.

Epiphany was also the site of my first church service outside Nativity. I was ten when a family friend, May Vail Palmer, married in the church. As I entered the church, I suddenly felt so at home that I followed my mother to our seats and genuflected, exactly as I would have done at Nativity. My mother, I am sure, suppressed a smile as she told me I was not required to do that in Epiphany and, in fact, should not do it.

Over the years, I attended several of the beautiful Christmas Eve concerts Dr. John Stilley gave for 25 years on the magnificent organ he built in the church. I once did a Sunday picture page in the Arizona Daily Sun on the church and its people.

For me, Epiphany always stands, because of two moments, for how Flagstaff and its people feel about their churches and the faiths they represent. There is no great or bitter division here among different faiths, and never has been.

Nowhere else in Flagstaff's history does that stand out better than on a bright, brisk day in November 1916, when the funeral of the great American astronomer Percival Lowell was conducted in Epiphany by the Bishop of Arizona, who came from Phoenix. After the service, the most distinguished list of pallbearers in Flagstaff's history lifted Dr. Lowell's casket onto a horse-drawn hearse to be taken to a temporary burial site on the eastern slope of Mars Hill, near his observatory. At the burial site, the eulogy was delivered by Dr. Lowell's longtime friend, the cultured, good-humored French-born missionary, Father Cyprian Vabre, Roman Catholic Pastor of Flagstaff. It probably never occurred to anyone that anything unusual was happening. All of Flagstaff mourned Dr. Lowell, and Father Vabre simply spoke for the town.

Fifty years later, I was at both Epiphany and Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on the historic Sunday that Father Robert Lord, Epiphany's rector, and Father James E. Lindenmayer, Guadalupe's pastor, exchanged pulpits. That day marked the first time in 400 years, anywhere, that Anglican and Roman Catholic churches publicly acknowledged each other's existence.

The history did not overwhelm me, because I did not have the time for that. I was working and, after all, anything that might happen at Epiphany did not surprise or mystify me.

It was the church on the corner.

It had been there all my life.