Mother Jeanne says goodbye to Grace Episcopal

By MARY GREENE

PORT JERVIS, NY — Jeanne Hendricks attended the Roman Catholic Church as a little girl in Wisconsin, where she grew up. She went alone, dropped there every Sunday, because of a promise that her mother made.

“My father was Roman Catholic, and my mother signed an agreement that I would be raised a Catholic. She kept that agreement.” (Jeanne’s father died at Pearl Harbor when she was only three. Jeanne’s mother remarried when Jeanne was still a small child.)

She also attended Catholic school. But upon her confirmation, she was allowed to attend another church (now called the United Church of Christ) with her family.

She had a good childhood, she said, “easy and quiet. I was outdoors a lot.” But the nuns in her school were “brutal.” She was naturally left-handed, but was hit on the hand with a ruler when she tried to write that way because it was “against the laws of God and nature. One nun hit me so hard she broke my little finger.

“At the same time,” said Mother Jeanne, “my very first introduction to religion as something to take seriously was in the Catholic School.” Her third-grade teacher talked about prayer and how to be in contact with God. “She’d sit with me and talk about God, and Jesus, and how if you were just quiet, you could be close to God. That was my first introduction to the idea that silence is real prayer.”

Jeanne graduated from college and went on in 1963 to receive graduate degrees in public speaking and communications from the University of Wisconsin. “I was not particularly religious during those years,” she said. She went to the University of Guam to teach, in the South Pacific. “It was interesting—a real melting pot of people” at that time. She stayed five years, met her husband there and had her first child. And, she began to attend the Episcopal service.

The couple moved back to the states and settled in Connecticut, where her husband was president of a small community college. In a few years, now with a daughter as well as a son, the couple moved again, this time to Staten Island, where Jeanne lived for over 25 years.

She didn’t like Staten Island, which for her was “a shocking place,” as people from Brooklyn began to pour over the new Verazano Narrows Bridge, and mile after mile of housing developments were constructed. But, she loved her church and was comfortable in her neighborhood, an older settlement called Princess Bay.

She was close to her church community. “My husband died in 1979. The children were very young, and I had only been working part time. But, we struggled along.” The church was “the center of my social life, and pretty much everything else.”

Once her children left home, Jeanne had no reason to stay in Princess Bay. While her children were in college, she made the decision to attend seminary. She had received the call.

“I’m sure people find these ‘call’ stories very strange,” said Mother Jeanne. “One day I was driving down the West Shore Expressway and I thought, ‘When I am a priest, I am going to do an instructed Eucharist with the children.’ Then I pulled off the road, because I had never once thought of becoming a priest.”

She was reluctant. She was in her 40s, and her kids were grown. She didn’t think she wanted to do the work involved in becoming a priest. She waited five years. In that time, the call did not diminish, and it was reinforced by dreams she had at night of giving communion to the children in her parish. Finally, she made the decision to attend New York Theological seminary school.

After completing seminary school, which, she admits, “was hard,” Mother Jeanne became director of pastoral services at the Staten Island Hospital hospice program, and then at Arden Hill Life Care Center in Orange County. “I never wanted to be a parish priest,” she said, but found herself filling in for the priest at Grace Episcopal in Port Jervis. “For some reason,” she said, “one day I thought, ‘I will take this parish, if they want me.’” And, they did.

Mother Jeanne stayed at Grace Episcopal for five years. “They were such good people,” she said, “strong in so many ways. But they needed so much.” She helped the congregation learn to communicate, try new systems and share the work. “It’s been an excellent experience. A wonderful experience with God-centered people, willing to try anything I asked of them.”

On Sunday, September 17, Mother Jeanne presided over her church for the last time. The night before, the 130 members of Grace Episcopal held a farewell supper for their priest, who has been forced into retirement by ill health. Her heart is failing, and surgery is not an option because she does not handle anesthesia well. Mother Jeanne does not see a silver lining in the turn of events. “I am not at all confused about my feelings,” she said. “I don’t want to go.”

Although there is obvious concern for the members of her parish, “they will be okay,” said Mother Jeanne, and “my kids tell me I have to live.” She is referring to her son and daughter, with whom she plans to spend a lot of time, as well as with her three grandchildren. She will also serve as an associate at St John’s in Monticello.

“I have never experienced God closing a door and not opening another one, until now. God is silent,” said Mother Jeanne. “I haven’t found any answers, any meaning.” But, her faith is not tested. “The meaning will come,” she said. “It will be there. It always is.”