DESPITE his almost four books of published poetry — one is due out shortly — and a poetic autobiography, an Episcopalian priest from the United States, the Revd Spencer Reece, does not introduce himself as a poet.
Although his poetry predates his priesthood and his first exploration of faith, he says that it is partly that poetry is harder to explain to a casual enquirer — “like some kind of job that doesn’t really exist”. But it is also, perhaps, that the distinction is artificial to him: for Fr Reece, as for his beloved George Herbert, the illustrious 17th-century poet-parson of Bemerton, poetry and ministry have converged.
Fr Reece has just finished giving a series of talks in the UK, invited by the Revd Jonathan Evens to the parish of Wickford and Runwell, in Essex, the namesake of Fr Reece’s own in Wickford, Rhode Island. One talk was held in the chapel in Bemerton, a few steps from the door of Herbert’s former rectory.
Fr Reece’s journey to ministry was not direct or conventional. Long before he entered seminary in the US, there was poetry. As a student, he read Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins. What followed was a long and bruising poetic apprenticeship: 15 years of submissions, 300 rejections, before a late breakthrough.
At 41, his first collection, The Clerk’s Tale, was selected for a prize, transforming his literary prospects overnight. But just as he found success, his career took a less conventional turn. Within a few years, he began training for the priesthood.
His faith was something that had also emerged slowly and after much pain, including depression and alcoholism. Raised in the Episcopal Church, he describes his early education at an Episcopal school as formative but not transformative. The change came in his early twenties, after the murder of a cousin of his own age and amid his own struggles with alcohol. Entering a 12-step AA programme, he says, “was where thoughts about God really began”.
His first experience of ministry was at a home for abandoned and abused girls in Honduras. He taught them poetry, and a film has been made about that experience: Voices Beyond the Wall. He continues to serve on the board of the home and returns once a year. The poetry has also continued at the home: a philanthropist now pays for poets to spend a month at a time there.
“That’s probably the most informative experience of my priesthood and the work that I continue to do there, and it inspires me, it informs me, it defines me as a priest,” Fr Reece says. “Everything I learned about being a priest — a lot of it comes from working with abandoned and abused girls, and all the things that they taught me.”
Both his poetry and now his ministry have also helped him to survive personally. “Poetry saved my life,” he says; and the Church saves it now, though in a different way. As Rector of St Paul’s, Wickford, in Rhode Island, and after the recent deaths of his parents, the church has become not just a place of ministry, but a community that sustains him.
Does he think of himself as priest-poet or poet-priest? The priesthood “comes first” in terms of responsibility. Writing happens in the background, carved out of whatever space remains, but it also infuses his ministry, he says. Writing sermons “activates” his imagination, feeding directly into his current work.
He describes himself as an “unconventional” priest who needs the convention of liturgy and structure. “I’m a literary person that has found a home in the Church.”
During his current appointment, his congregation has grown, with new families and young people, after being close to closure. “When I arrived, there was just bald heads and white heads, and I love bald heads and white heads — I’ve got one myself,” he says. “But now I’d say one third of the sanctuary has got young people in it.”
Hanging above those heads are large paper butterflies with drawings by the girls of the Honduras home on each. In this old Episcopal church, the effect is just “lighter” for everybody who attends, weaving in creativity and care for others beyond the neighbourhood, he says.
His leadership is less about direction than about attention. At one point, he uses the image of a murmuration — the shifting, co-ordinated movement of starlings in flight — to describe it. There is no single leader in a murmuration: just a shared responsiveness, as each bird adjusts to those around it.
“I’m having the time of my life,” he says. There have been challenges, but the work has become deeply rewarding. Recently, during a series of guest preachers in Lent, he noticed something shift in the congregation: a quiet, collective happiness. This was a church that had faced decline — and yet something had changed.
Leadership, for him, is not about control, but about attention, “to reduce my ego to the size of a pin, so that it can happen”. To witness that renewal, and to serve it, he says, is “the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done”.
Unlike Hopkins, who struggled with his dual identity as a poet and a priest, Fr Reece sees these two sides of his life as expressions of the same vocation: to pay attention, to find meaning, and to help others to express theirs through creativity and worship.