We welcome the beauty of springtime, as this area’s residents have done for centuries.

At water’s edge, great birds glide above while blossoms and leaves explode with color and life, as they have done for millennia.

Our moment in the flow of history is interwoven with all that has come before.

As individuals, families and as a community, we ponder, as have our forebearers, our place in the greater scheme of creation, grieving the losses and celebrating the milestones that mark our human journeys.

I am delighted to be serving as priest of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, a congregation that celebrates life, writ large, at the corner of Jefferson and Tyler.

You may know us as the quaint, well-photographed, white church with the red door. This year, we celebrate 150 years in our historic building.

The first service, held in the newly completed building, was Easter Sunday, April 16, 1865. Looking back, we remember all who have come before: the many families who brought their babies to be baptized; the couples who exchanged vows at the altar; the mourners who shed precious tears, all within a community that has known both economic booms and busts, war, struggle and change.

From its original foundation on the bluff, the church building was moved to its present location in 1882 to allow for the Monroe Street regrade that created better access to Uptown.

In more recent years, a new parish hall was constructed and a commercial kitchen installed that now serves our Just Soup program, offering free soup to the community from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.

On fair summer days, we sometimes worship under a sailmaker’s canopy in our Labyrinth Courtyard. Times have changed, but the meaning of community, and fellowship, and faith are enduring.

As part of our celebration year, I asked our own Mary Kell to give a historical perspective that bridges 1865 and 2015.

Of the present she wrote: “We are used to a world in which, if the president of the United States sprains a finger playing hoops, the video goes viral in a flash. It was different 150 years ago.” The construction of the church began within weeks of the Confederates firing on Fort Sumpter in 1861. Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on the April 9, 1865.

Mary ponders: “Did the congregation of St. Paul’s know, as they celebrated the maiden voyage of their new worship space, that they were also celebrating the end of a tragic and devastating war that had rent our country in two?” The technology was in place. A cross-country telegraph to Seattle became operational in 1864. News of the surrender would have arrived there on April 11.

While Port Townsend, temporarily, was not the Washington Territory “Port of Entry,” after a controversial move to Port Angeles in 1862, a fast packet would have had to pass by Port Townsend to reach Port Angeles. It is therefore likely that news of Lee’s surrender reached Port Townsend by April 12 or 13, before Easter morning.

“But here is where the plot thickens” says Mary. “President Lincoln was shot late on Good Friday (April 14) and died in the early hours of Holy Saturday. At the earliest, news of the shooting could have reached Seattle by noon on Easter Sunday. Therefore, the congregation of St. Paul’s may have been reveling in the joy of Easter in their new church building, without having the slightest idea that the president of the United States had been assassinated.

“When they received the news, they would grieve a great loss.”

In our time, the pace of change can feel logarithmic. Science has blessed us with an increasing wealth of knowledge. Technology has ushered in a communication renaissance. Even so, we share, with our predecessors, basic human experiences of awe and wonder amidst life’s milestones and losses. Our GPS location may be marked by satellite coordinates, but our place in the larger scheme of creation is beyond human metrics.

And so we continue to gather together, to ponder and celebrate this holy mystery in which we live, and move, and have our being.