On the Edges of Life
by The Reverend Rebecca Jones
When The Reverend Sally Brown was ordained a deacon in 1987, it happened to be the weekend of the big garage sale at St. Thomas, Denver, her home parish. With the fellowship hall thus occupied, her reception got pushed out onto the streets around the church.
“And I’ve been in the streets ever since,” Brown recalls. “Maybe there was God’s handwriting in the street. I’ve always worked with folks on the edges of life.”
In October, Brown was honored with the “HALO Award” in recognition of her many years of service at the St. Francis Center, the day-shelter for the homeless founded by The Reverend Bert Womack in 1982 and still the cornerstone of Episcopal outreach in Colorado.
“I must confess that my immediate family and feisty close friends have had many laughs regarding the naming of the award,” Brown said at the annual St. Francis Center gala. “I may never live it down! The HALO award? Really? They and I know well — as does my Bishop — that any errant halo wandering close to my head… was clearly veering off course in the cosmos.”
Indeed, there was laughter over her award.
“The idea of being ‘haloed’ has about as much appeal to Sally Brown as a castor oil cocktail,” said The Reverend Ruth Woodliff-Stanley, rector at St. Thomas. “Her Irish soul cannot abide such a thing. She prefers her feet firmly planted on the ground, mucking out the streets and, yes, at her beloved shelter, to the heavenly reaches. The truth that she knows better than anyone I’ve ever met is that heaven is in those places. Sally brings heaven into focus for me on a daily basis.”
“She has the bracing bite of an Irish soda bread,” agreed The Reverend Elizabeth Randall, rector at St. Andrew’s, Denver, where Brown served as deacon for 14 years. Randall continued:
“Here’s a story that could happen only to Sally. One day she pulled up at a stoplight and saw a homeless man holding a cardboard sign that said, ‘Savin’ for a hooker.’ Sally rolled down her window, fixed the man with that famous beady eye, and addressed him by name. ‘Now, John, you don’t really mean that. Why do you have that dumb sign? That’s not you.’ And the man said, ‘Oh, Sally, I never would be holding up this sign if I knew you would see me with it. I’m so ashamed.’ And Sally said, ‘Don’t be ashamed, John. Just don’t hold that sign!’”
Drop in to the St. Francis Center any Wednesday, and you’ll find Brown at her familiar perch, greeting guests as they enter. “I love greeting,” she says. “I’ve done other stuff. I’ve done laundry, sorted socks, worked at the mail and storage desk, and I certainly jump in there if they’re short of volunteers. But I do think my gift in that community happens to be greeting. It gives me the chance to be in direct conversation, and to assess where folks are on any given day. And if I’m having a down day, greeting helps me too.”
Though she’s never been homeless herself, Brown feels she shares a yearning for rootedness that marks many St. Francis Center guests. Born in 1936, the post-Depression and war years were formative for her. Her family moved often. And as a small child in the Pacific Northwest, she saw many friends — those from Japanese families — disappear in the middle of the night, victims of wartime internment policies. It had a profound effect on her.
Brown’s journey to her vocational calling began at age 11 — not on the streets, but on the sidewalk outside St. Thomas. Hers was not a churchgoing family. But one day, she was walking past the church and heard music.
“I opened the door, peeked in, and the choir director said, ‘Oh, you must be here for the children’s choir,” she recalled. “I was so introverted, I didn’t know how to say no. So I found myself in the children’s choir.”
When her newfound choir friends began getting confirmed, Brown also sought confirmation. “I got into that, and then they realized I wasn’t baptized,” she said. “So they baptized me on March 14, 1948, and confirmed me on March 21. It was a quickie baptism. To this day, I can’t be present at a baptism without tearing up. I had met my identity.”
When Brown left home for college, she intended to become a medical technologist. But when she discovered she hated chemistry, she switched to fine arts. After college, she went to art school in San Francisco. “It was at the tail end of the beatnik era,” she says. “I painted and wrote poetry that was awful. I think I write better poetry now.”
She got married, and she and her husband, a doctor, lived in Singapore and Malaysia for several years in the early 1960s, working with the International Center for Medical Research and Training. Eventually returning to Denver, they raised their four children and Brown got very involved in the Civil Rights movement.
In 1972, a friend decided to run for Congress as an antiwar candidate. Her name was Pat Schroeder.
“We didn’t think she’d win,” recalled Brown. “But she did. And the morning after the election, she said ‘You crazy fools got me into this, so you better stick around and help me.’ So I did.”
Congresswoman Pat Schroeder went on to serve her Denver district for the next 24 years. Brown remained on her staff for a decade, including managing a couple of her reelection campaigns. “One of the gifts of that time was that I really learned the neighborhoods of Denver and who lived in them and what the problems were,” she said. “It was all coming together.”
Also coming together for her was a real nudging toward the priesthood. “And when I began to try and put some flesh on that, I realized that — Wow! — we aren’t ordaining women,” she said. Brown did “a little work around the edges” of the women’s ordination movement, spurred on by her mentor, Sister Mary Luke Tobin, former Superior General of the Sisters of Loretto and president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. “She just kept pushing me,” Brown said.
Fifteen years went by. “I thought I was waiting for the possibility of being ordained to the priesthood,” she said. “But actually, I was discerning a call to the diaconate. And when I was going through the Holy Orders process, a young canon at the Cathedral by the name of Rob O’Neill came onto the Commission on Ministry. That’s been a delight, to have had that long history with him.” O’Neill is, of course, now Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Colorado.
Eventually, Brown was ordained — though she first had to reassure members of the Commission on Ministry that she was not a Marxist, as some had feared, given her work among the poor in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
In 1990 Brown’s oldest son, Matthew, suffered a traumatic head injury that left him severely challenged until his death in 2011. Throughout those long years of accompanying her son, Brown was continually taught by Matthew’s courage, determination, and gentleness.
Following an amicable divorce in the early 1990s, Brown met her life partner, Mary Boland, a former nun. Boland had left her religious community in the mid-1970s and eventually became vice president of Catholic Charities. Boland died of cancer in 2009. “Mary was an incredible gift to my life, and to the lives of my children.”
Brown retired from parish ministry in 2009, after having served at St. Thomas for six years, then at St. Andrew’s in Denver for 14. But she’s never stopped living out her diaconal vocation. “I love having more time, quite frankly, to do that,” she says. “I love to be able to just laser in on my ministry while cutting back on too many meetings.”
Don’t look for her to retire from serving those on the streets any time soon. “I don’t anticipate any major changes or hibernations,” she says.