After attending St. Paul’s for several months, I could answer the question about what I am thankful for at St. Paul’s in much the same way many of you would. The music is spectacular and the worship space is beautiful, we are blessed with engaging sermons, enriching educational offerings and a welcoming and inclusive environment. The program for youth reaches young people in a language they understand, engaging even the most reluctant of churchgoers and a tough audience under the best of circumstances, our teenaged sons.
I loved all these things about St. Paul’s from the moment I walked in the door, but I was content to enjoy them from a detached distance, sitting in the back of the church and exiting quickly each Sunday, telling myself that my demanding job and the myriad activities of our children precluded me from getting more involved in the life of the Cathedral. That all changed last September, when our family walked a journey with the people of this Cathedral that has altered forever my understanding of the meaning of the terms “thanksgiving” and “generosity.”
In September 2010, my husband Doug was riding his bike up Ulric Street in Mission Valley when he had a heart attack and collapsed on the street. A bystander saw him fall and hailed a police officer who stopped and administered CPR for several minutes before the fire department arrived, shocked Doug’s heart and took him to Mercy Hospital. When I arrived at Mercy Hospital with one of our children I found Doug intubated and non responsive. The doctor informed me Doug’s condition was dire and that I should summon our other children and a priest. We located our daughter with her friends on their way to the movies, and one of her friends went to retrieve our other son from my father’s house. Then we called the Cathedral.
When I dialed St. Paul’s, it was a Saturday night, Labor Day weekend, and I didn’t expect to reach a real person. What church has an actual person answering the phone on weekend nights? Well, St. Paul’s does, and the angel on the other end of the line was Christine Spaulding, who provided comforting words and the promise that she would find a priest. A few minutes later Dean Richardson, whom I had met on only a few occasions before on the patio after church, walked into the Emergency Room. There he found three terrified teenagers, one of whom was still breathing with oxygen given to him when he passed out after seeing his father near death, and their equally frightened mother, who had gone numb and was functioning on autopilot. It was truly surreal.
The Dean prayed with us, and while much of the evening is a blur, I clearly remember his reassuring presence, and the calming effect of his prayers and words of kindness, concern and comfort on this group—we felt God’s presence and love as we faced the night ahead, a night we weren’t sure Doug would survive.
But Doug did survive the night, by the grace of God, and through the love and prayers of many throughout those first 24 hours. But it didn’t end there. Doug was in the ICU in a coma for 9 days, during which time we did not know if he would live, or if he did survive, if his mathematician’s brain would be intact. Every day multiple members of the St. Paul’s community visited us in the hospital. When she wasn’t there, Dorothy Curry was calling me on the phone to make sure we were ok. Chris Harris , Lisa Crosbie and Chris Wells were there the day Doug woke up. All of us remember that Doug asked first-- as every good Episcopal mathematician would do—for his Combinatorial Optimization book --and the Book of Common Prayer! Sub Dean Thomas celebrated Eucharist with our family in Doug’s hospital room the day after he woke up. St. Paul’s parishioners, particularly Christine D’Amico, the Petrie family, and others in the youth ministry team, reached out to our children. Several families brought us food. Many of the people who helped us were people we didn’t even know, people who stepped forward when they saw a family in need, enfolding us in a cocoon of love and care. At times when I felt despair and hopelessness, God showed me He was there, in Mercy Hospital, with our family, in the person of the priests and parishioners of the Cathedral.
And do you believe in miracles? I do now—defying the odds, Doug walked out of the hospital two weeks after he entered, unprecedented even by the testimony of his doctors, something only 1- 3% of people who have a cardiac arrest on the street will ever do. Today, a year later Doug has resumed his usual activities.
Except nothing can be usual after an experience like this.
Our lives have been forever changed by what happened to Doug, and what happened to us through the example of so many of you. Our thankfulness is no longer limited to the building, or the music or the youth programs. This experience-this miracle- demonstrated to us that we worship here at St. Paul’s in the midst of a profoundly exceptional community, where the words of welcome and the Cathedral motto—Love one Another—are truly lived by its people. I am thankful for the community that loved and prayed my husband back to health, and that showed my family through countless acts of kindness and love that God is in our midst.
And those acts of generosity by St. Paul’s parishioners and clergy inspired and changed me. During Doug’s recovery, I asked myself how I could become a member more fully of this community, how could I be generous as others had been so generous to me? I am still figuring out the answer to that question.
I started slowly, by gradually saying yes when people ask me to help out, starting slowly by helping out with the youth on Sundays. All of our family members are greeters now. Doug is an active member of the choir. The boys have become acolytes. My father even comes to church with us every Sunday, overcoming his hesitation about coming to a church more progressive than those to which he was accustomed. Last year at pledge time, when we were considering how much we could give back, the excuse of “we have a daughter in college, we can’t afford it” seemed meaningless in the face of what had happened to us.
So why do I choose to be generous? Like I said, I’m still figuring that out. But I do know that the people of St. Paul’s have inspired me to be generous in ways I could not have imagined before.
On behalf of myself and my entire family, thank you for being there for us.
Susan Hulbert
EDITOR’S NOTE - In order to keep the witnesses as short as possible without loosing their power, these texts are heavily edited by the time they make it to the pulpit (not to mention to keep them under 10 minutes!). But you can imagine how hard it is to see important parts of your life fall to the cutting room floor so to speak. So this year we thought it would be fun to post the original, longer versions of each witness on the blog. The “extended cut” if you will. They tell a more complete story with more personal details. Thank you to all of our witnesses who so courageously share a part of their lives with us so that we might be opened up just a little more to how God is working in our lives and in the life of St. Paul’s.
Do you have a story to tell about why you are thankful to St. Paul’s? Email Chris Harris at harrisc@stpaulcathedral.org – we’d love to share them here!
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