How I Became Episcopalian – Part I

​I was born in November 1939 to a secular Jewish family then living in Kew Gardens, New York. All four of my grandparents had immigrated to the United States in the 1890s from various parts of Eastern Europe: one from Romania, another from Ukraine, and the other two from today’s Belarus. Of these four, only my paternal grandmother, Ida Litzky Feldman from Odessa, was a religious Jew. Her father, my great grandfather whom I never knew, had been what we might call a “holy calligrapher” who wrote the Hebrew characters onto the Torah scrolls used in synagogues. Because of his intimate relationship with the Word of God, moreover, he functioned in his community as a kind of advisor, judge, and psychotherapist rolled into one. Like his daughter, my grandma, he was an observant Orthodox Jew. My father, born in New York City in 1905 as the first of his parents’ three sons, had a strict observance of Judaism enforced on him, sometimes physically, by Grandma Ida. Later, when Grandpa Paul went to sea and Dad had to forego a piano scholarship to the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia to support his mother and younger brothers, he told his mother that, while he would do his best for her and the boys financially, he would have nothing to do with “her” religion anymore. And apparently, when my older sister and I came along, he made sure not to inflict that kind of religiosity on us. The result was that we got little-to-no Jewish religious training and didn’t celebrate any of the Jewish Holidays...

When I was one-and-a-half, my parents hired what was then called a “colored maid” to cook, clean, and look after us kids. Florine was an observant Methodist and, to my mind then and now, a kind of saint. She was to stay with us for a year but, in part because of me, ended up staying until I graduated from high school. She told me about Jesus and her church and loved me like the child she had never had nor would have. She became my idea of how a good person should be. Then, when I was 12, I began four years and two summers at Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey, mainly because my family had moved into Manhattan, and my parents didn’t want me to go to a New York City public school. Peddie back then was a boarding school for around 370 boys in grades 7 through high school and was affiliated with the American Baptist Church. In the early ‘50s we had daily chapel, were required to attend a Sunday church service, had Sunday-evening vespers, and took a required religion course on Christianity. I actually enjoyed all those things, especially the hymns, and I very un-Christianly prided myself on being the top student in the religion class. Later, as an undergraduate at Yale (1956-60), I started attending the ultra-high Episcopal church in New Haven. An English major, I loved the beautiful language of the 1928 Book of Common prayer, the Solemn High Mass, the smells and bells, and even the rector’s phony English accent. But as an early political liberal, I stopped attending Christ Church when I discovered that its clergy and lead members were politically conservative. More to the point, my favorite professor and undergraduate advisor, Alexander Maclaren Witherspoon, provided me with a role model for both college teaching—my later profession—and being a “Christian Gentleman.” To find out what happened next, read Part II of this blog in the coming week.

Yale English Professor Alexander Maclaren Witherspoon, d. 1963