By John Schuessler
After spending a few minutes with The Rev. Becca Stevens, it’s easy to imagine her as the child she describes in her book, Sanctuary: Unexpected Places Where God Found Me – a girl who would run down a gravel road to spend a summer day with friends, swimming in a hidden pool, a “secret Eden” off Tyne Boulevard in Nashville, Tenn.
A priest of the Diocese of Tennessee, she has served St. Augustine’s Chapel on the campus of Vanderbilt University in Nashville since her ordination. She founded the Magdalene community in 1996 to serve women with a criminal history of prostitution and drug abuse. An author, activist, wife of a songwriter and mother of three boys, she has received numerous awards for her community efforts, including Nashvillian of the Year.
Much of her ministry has grown out of the community she has shepherded at St. Augustine’s. The retired Bishop of Tennessee, the Rt. Rev. Bertram Herlong, recently praised her pastoral gifts. “She moved into areas far beyond what I had expected when I appointed her chaplain,” he said.
With the rest of the Magdalene community, she has written a new book, Find Your Way Home: Words from the Street, Wisdom from the Heart, which tells the story of Magdalene and its non-profit business, Thistle Farms.
You talk a lot about the importance of community. What did you learn from your early experience in the church? How did it shape your life and what did it teach you about community?
My dad was an Episcopal priest in New York and got called to the south to start an Episcopal Church down there [St. Matthew’s, Nashville, in 1966]. My mom thought they were literally being sent to hell, the idea of going to Tennessee, switching from a cardinal parish in New York. He moved five kids down to Nashville, then he got killed by a drunk driver, in 1968. And up until his death, he would say the end of The Episcopal Church would be if they ordain women.
I was five, and I was profoundly influenced by the church, which for good and bad took us in after my father died. Some horrible things happened in that church – I was sexually abused by the senior warden – but great things happened, when people were kind and helped us get through school. It was the good and bad of community.
I moved on, got married, got ordained, and had a baby. So 27 years after my dad’s death, we were asking our little boy what he wanted to be when he grows up, and my husband said, “Well, maybe you could be a priest.” And he said, “Ooo! That’s a girl job!” It was like, “Oh my gosh, church history changed that fast!” And I thought, “Oh your granddaddy would have been so proud.”
But the sweet thing was I got ordained two weeks before I had my baby. Men who had known my dad were the ones that did the laying on of hands. It was really humbling and beautiful in that people that had issues with it, how much reconciliation there had been. It was moving and great to do it, especially at eight and a half months pregnant, because if you have a problem with women’s ordination that kind of accentuates it … This is what it means to ordain women – they get maternity leave when they start!
My husband’s a musician so we never had health insurance before I was ordained. He makes money and I make retirement and health insurance. I make a salary, but makes the real salary. The reason I like chaplaincy is there is so much freedom in it, I get to do all this stuff and never have to take money for it. I get to be a volunteer for Magdalene.
Your husband, Marcus Hummon, is, in fact, a Grammy Award winner and has written many songs that have been done by big names in country music [Rascal Flatts, the Dixie Chicks]. Which song is he most proud of?
I think what he’s most proud of would probably be stuff nobody knew, and that’s why nobody cuts it. It’s pretty deep and powerful. But the other thing he’s really proud of -- he does theater . That’s his passion and his heart, but country music has been very good to him, so he stays.
When you do what you’ve talked about -- be in involved in people’s lives and simply love them -- do you ever run out of gas? How do you replenish yourself?
I’ve kind of carved out my work because it’s what brings me joy. I don’t do any paperwork, I don’t do any things like parochial reports. I have people help me do all that stuff. I get charged up doing a business, that’s very fun to me. Or try to think what you can make out of thistles. I was raised by a mom that loved arts and crafts. Writing books is really fun – I can’t believe I get to do that because I’m not really a writer.
We have a school in Ecuador that we’ve been working with for 11 years. After my mom died I took the money that she left us, which was close to $7,000 … she worked for the Episcopal Church her whole life, too. She ran a community center in Nashville called St. Luke’s Center, started by the Daughters of the King in the 1920s … So we started this school in a small community down there and named it after her, called Escuela Ann Stevens.
We go down there in March and it’s like a huge vacation party now. We have a well that we dug. There’s a library where kids read books, you get to go down there and celebrate with them. It’s like the annual meeting. So it’s not like mission anymore, it’s like a family reunion. I’ve seen these kids grow up. You go down there with 25 of your friends and we run a clinic out of the school. I don’t have any skills so I don’t have to do any work. Isn’t that awesome? You get to just be kind to people! All that kind of stuff energizes me.
Community is a big deal to me. I have tons of community in my house, about a half-mile from Vanderbilt. I’ve had four cars stolen out of my driveway, but never anything stolen out of my house. I don’t think it’s because we’re just lucky, we have so many people coming in and out of our house that it’s a security system. Isn’t that wild? I have church at my house on Wednesday nights, my boys have everybody come over, my husband’s business is at the house. He’s produced two bands. They rehearse at the house. Magdalene woman come over...
I think community feeds me, where it exhausts other people. When my husband and I first got married, we were talking about what would be ideal for our life, and I said I wanted to live in a commune, where everybody has their own separate cabins, but we all have a joint kitchen, a joint playground, and all our children would play together, and everybody would have this commitment to community. And my husband goes, “You have just described hell!” But this is a good compromise. It’s nice, we have our own home but we have a lot of community. That doesn’t make me tired.
How about time alone?
I love being by myself. I live in the woods an hour a day easy, before I start things and after I drop the children off. That first hour is just walking and just thinking … that totally fills me up. That, and baths, which makes sense why I ended up with a bath and body care company, so you don’t feel guilty about taking long baths – “I’m doing research… Excuse me, I’m trying the geranium oil out! I would like to be left alone for another thirty minutes!”
We just got back from Rwanda. We met a man there who started a company that works with widows and orphans from the genocide and all they do is make geranium oil. You can put a few drops in “carrier oil” like olive or sweet almond oil, rub it on your skin and it’s a mosquito repellant. Isn’t that great?
You’ve compared yourself to the person on the side of the road. Could you elaborate on that?
After losing my dad and having a couple rough years, I was just so grateful for all the people like my mom and a lot of people who helped me out. I think what happens is you end up in a ditch, and you end up getting in a bigger and bigger ditch and sometimes for no reason someone just comes and pulls you out of it. Little things like Sewanee giving me a really great scholarship when I got out of high school. I never would have gotten to go to college.
The problem when you’re one of five little kids and your dad is a mission priest is you don’t have any money when he dies. That was the issue. You’re just not ready, so basically the family system falls apart because my mother went from thinking, “Well, I’m sacrificing, well educated and I’m the missionary’s wife raising the kids” to being a widow on Social Security. It’s not as interesting to people.
* * *
Read more about the Magdalene community and Thistle Farms in the Dec. 7 issue of The Living Church magazine. To order a one-year subscription to read The Living Church in its online edition, click here.
To purchase Thistle Farms bath and body care products, visit thistlefarms.org.
Visit the Rev. Becca Stevens’ blog, “Hither and Yon.”
&a
