April 27, 2005

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Palo Alto Online

The rebirth of St. Ann Chapel

by Jocelyn Dong

In the quiet of a recent Wednesday evening, hours after the clamor of local home construction had stilled, the white-robed Rev. H. Bowen Woodruff presided over an Anglican Mass at tiny St. Ann Chapel on Melville Avenue.

In the wooden pews, about halfway back, three worshippers knelt: a woman wearing a red T-shirt on the right, and a couple across the aisle from her. The rest of the pews were empty.

Birds called to one another outside, underscoring the reverential hush within.

"O Lamb of God that takest away the sin of the world," Woodruff intoned, his cadence smoothly rising and falling.

Those who measure the success of a church by its number of attendees might view these mid-week worshippers as the last remnant of a dying tradition. But that would be a mistake.

Rather than a dying breed, these faithful few represent budding life for the half-century-old church, whose future dangled in limbo from 1998 to 2003.

Built as a Catholic memorial to Stanford University student Ann Brokaw -- the daughter of Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce and stepdaughter to Time-Life founder Henry Luce -- the chapel was sold by the Catholic church in 1999 to endow the Stanford University Catholic Newman Center.

The Luce Foundation, which bought it, wasn't in the business of owning churches. So four years later, the nonprofit sold it to the Anglicans, after a failed attempt by the Thomas Merton Center to make the purchase.

Thus the memorial to Ann Brokaw, who had been killed in a car accident on Palm Drive in 1944, was saved. But the Catholic congregation that for decades had called the church home -- by one estimate totaling 300 members -- had long since disbanded.

Over the years, Palo Altans have grown exceedingly fond of the little University South neighborhood chapel, with its distinctive brick façade, white marble entryway, and matching bell tower.

Even today, passersby stop in, telling Woodruff their stories of being married there decades ago. They look up at the bronze sculpture of St. Ann and daughter St. Mary, poised thoughtfully over the front doors. They peer at the four windows inside painted by French artist Andre Girard, which -- like traditional stained-glass windows -- feature scenes from the New Testament. Visitors' eyes alight on 12 panels by the same artist -- the Stations of the Cross -- depicting the final hours of Christ's life.

Other postwar artwork hangs as it has for more than five decades, including an oval sculpture over the altar made of wire mesh and mosaic tiles, decorated with modern angels whose faces one writer described as "Picassoesque."

Small glass squares of red, blue and yellow set into a long concrete wall -- the chapel's most minimalist pieces of art -- flicker with the changing sunlight outside. Each color's squares are cleverly laid out in different shaped crosses, Woodruff noted -- rattling off the three types as he gave a tour of the chapel last week.

In 1998, fear of losing the chapel prompted some Catholics to turn to the City Council to save the church, after the diocese made known it intended to sell the property.

"If the Catholic Church won't preserve St. Ann's Chapel, let's pray that the Palo Alto City Council will," wrote resident Peggy Nute in a letter to the Palo Alto Weekly. "St. Ann's is an artistic treasure -- the church is selling a piece of its soul."

Today, Catholics who used to attend St. Ann occasionally visit the revived chapel, which practices a form of traditional Episcopalian worship. Letter-writer Nute hasn't been one of them, but nonetheless said she was glad to hear St. Ann has been preserved as a chapel.

It could be argued that a church's life flows from more than the preservation of a building, as beautiful as that edifice may be. A revival requires people too -- and gathering and shepherding that group has fallen to Woodruff.

The 43-year-old priest arrived at the parish from Cambridge, Mass. last December, holding his first service on Christmas Eve. Prior to Woodruff's arrival, Archbishop Robert Morse -- the head of the Anglican Province of Christ the King -- had been traveling down to Palo Alto from Berkeley every other Sunday to offer Mass for more than a year.

"It was touch and go," one parishioner recalled of the sporadic nature of the Masses.

Attendance at Sunday service these days hovers around 30 people, which Woodruff sees as a sign of progress.

"When I got there, there were about six," he said, vestiges of an Alabama drawl lingering in his vowels.

Parishioner Vic Downing, one of the three at the mid-week service, praises Woodruff's determination to lead St. Ann's congregation.

"It takes courage (for a priest) to come to a church with fewer than 30 people and sometimes hold Mass with two or three people -- and do that week after week," said Downing, a management consultant to Fortune 100 executives. "It's clear to me, he's not in the least bit intimidated by that. His criteria for success are the dignity and the personableness of what we're doing."

Woodruff began the mid-week services when he arrived, a Don Quixote-like idea given Silicon Valley's time-strapped culture. But numbers, while important, are not the focus for the priest.

"I don't have set numbers in mind. What I want to do is just preach the gospel and give the traditional faith and hope that they will come," he said. "We of course want to grow, and it has, (but) I don't want to be too businesslike about it."

He's also started opening the church doors every afternoon, to provide the neighborhood a place for prayer, meditation and solitude.

One might expect the priest of a conservative order that uses structured worship -- including Elizabethan language and plenty of kneeling -- to be stiff. Woodruff, however, is surprisingly personable, displaying a folksy humor and energetic stride as he showed visitors around his church.

Walking in the grassy backyard, he explained how he removed five dead trees so parishioners could hold "coffee hour" there. Leading visitors down a narrow pathway to get to his small office, he grinned. "It's like being on a boat," he said, holding open the door.

As for being a nerdy theologian, Woodruff admitted he relaxes by working Latin exercises, but he's also a fan of Preston Sturges comedies and camping. The sports enthusiast even hangs out at the Old Pro and the Oasis.

Downtown denizens might recognize Woodruff, who is known to get around on his black, Raleigh bicycle. The bike is not much to look at, but wearing the traditional white clerical collar and black suit, the dark-haired Woodruff does get some stares. One time, a woman called out to him, "Hey, nice costume!" He obligingly stopped to talk with her and explain that he really was a priest.

Retro may be the trend in fashion these days, but the St. Ann congregation eschews retro for the real thing, the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. Their adherence to tradition practically begs the question: Why not modernize with the times, like many area "mega-churches" that offer contemporary worship bands and weekly tips on leading a purpose-driven life?

Woodruff believes tradition offers a depth and richness of meaning that is lacking in contemporary culture. It's exactly what people are hungering for, he said.

"They look around as liberalism and secularism hasn't been very satisfying. They find something solid in orthodoxy -- there's something extremely exciting," Woodruff said.

"What we have here are enduring traditions for changing times. ... The music, the liturgy are very beautiful, very uplifting, very transcendent."

Woodruff is speaking from experience as one who returned to the faith, not as a dyed-in-the-wool career priest -- which he is not. An environmental attorney for nine years before turning to the priesthood, Woodruff grew up going to church, but fell away in his teenage years. He attended services on and off as an adult, he said, but "didn't like the secular humanist slant."

A partner in his South Carolina law firm introduced him to an Anglican church, and "it was like a breath of fresh air," he recalled. It had "an appeal to the head as well as the heart."

His leap to the priesthood occurred in the mid-1990s, when he attended a spiritual retreat in Sonoma County, where he met Morse. Morse was a well-known figure in the Episcopal community, having founded an Episcopal ministry at Stanford University.

In 1977, Morse entered the national spotlight by breaking with the mainline Episcopal church and co-founding the conservative Anglican Province of Christ the King, the national denomination that he now leads as archibishop.

Morse encouraged Woodruff to become a priest. Although the idea struck the younger man as funny at the time, within months Woodruff found himself leaving an unfulfilling law practice to enroll in seminary in Berkeley.

In 2000, he was ordained.

Woodruff is well-aware of the church being perceived as a conservative bastion in the sea of liberalism. But while he says the church has a role to comment on politics, he believes there's a difference between that commentary and a church becoming "politicized."

He doesn't broach politics in his sermons, and he doesn't expect his parishioners to toe any particular political line.

"It's entirely up to the individual. My purpose is to give them the gospel" and leave them to work out how it relates to politics, Woodruff said. "We've had some die-hard liberal Democrats. What they love about (the worship service) is it's not political. We have all stripes."

One of the greatest challenges to his line of work is not political disagreement but people's indifference to spiritual matters.

"It's like punching a big blob," he said, extending his fist out in front of him. "The frustration is, you have this wonderful thing, and all you want to do is have it known." Instead, he said, people's attitudes are, "That's all very quaint and nice."

But Woodruff keeps at it. Even his excursions to the local sports bars have a strategic purpose.

"It's important for a man of the cloth to get out into the world and mingle with people of all stripes," he said. To him, everyone -- from CEO to janitor -- is "on the same level. It's the same message: that they are loved."

If the image of a traditional church is a smattering of little old ladies sitting in pews, St. Ann bucks that trend, albeit in a small way. Thus far, it has attracted both families and couples who didn't grow up in the tradition.

Vic Downing considers his background "mainline Protestant -- Bible church, evangelicals, the White Anglo Saxon Protestant sort of thing," he said.

Downing and wife Connie -- Berkeley transplants as of last August -- started coming to St. Ann in January after stumbling upon it during a walk in the neighborhood. Vic Downing said his faith has grown since attending St. Ann.

"This church seems to spend more time focusing on who God is, and not on who I am. That's a wonderful thing. I understand myself better because I understand who God is," he said.

"I find that I'm more confident ... that God, who is good, is going to accomplish exactly what he intends to accomplish. So I'm far less anxious or fearful about things. This sense of faith, or peace, doesn't tend to vary so much anymore with the circumstances of my business or world politics. There's an underlying sense that things are not out of control. I feel like ... a participant in some good thing that's going on."

Connie Downing likes Woodruff's faithfulness to orthodox worship.

"This church particularly focuses on reverential love and worship of God. That's what really drew us," she said. "The mode of worship, the form, (is) not only with our minds, but our hearts and bodies. We kneel; we bow; we cross ourselves. The music is reverential, majestic. When I come to worship, I know I'm in the presence of God."

Jack and Nan Halliday, lifelong Episcopalians, also discovered what they were looking for at St. Ann. Nan Halliday found the church re-opened in 2003 while walking her dog. She ran back home and told her husband, "You're not going to believe this."

The couple went to a Mass and, in Jack's words, "It was like, 'Wow, we're home.' This is what we were looking for -- the faith and the doctrines from the earliest times."

On a recent Sunday, the sonorous harmonies of a four-voice, professional choir filled the simple sanctuary. Woodruff preached on the freedom that comes from serving God, and afterward, church members adjourned to the backyard to enjoy coffee, strawberries, and one another's company.

Looking ahead, Woodruff has high hopes for the small parish, listing a handful of goals for the congregation.

"What I would want St. Ann to be, first and foremost, is a place where people could come and find Christ and have the sense that this is Christ's body. I would like it to be a light and beacon of the Christian faith in Palo Alto and the Peninsula ... and a haven for families, especially those seeking to teach their children Christian morality," he said.

He would also like the church to become the "neighborhood church."

During his short tenure, Woodruff has already seen signs of that happening, as he's left the front door open weekday afternoons.

"The community's starting to use it, which is its whole purpose. Not just to show it, but to use it -- that's why it's here," he said, standing in front of the brick chapel for which he's everything from the welcome wagon, to the office manager, to the shepherd of the flock. "That's rewarding."

Senior Staff Writer Jocelyn Dong can be reached at jdong@paweekly.com.

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