“The work of Dr. Breck at Faribault was enough to occupy the attention of one man for life, but for Dr. Breck it was but one in the chain of schools and missions with which he intended to join the East and the West in the bonds of the ‘American Catholic Church.’"
Theodore I. Holcombe, An Apostle of the Wilderness

On California's shore / Thy dauntless spirit fought and fell, / Blood-stained it evermore.
The scarlet poppies spring / Around the ruin of thy work, / Beared on thy faith's strong wing.
Forgive our disrespect— / Forgive our selfishness towards thee, / Forgive our great neglect.
God grant / The Church shall rise in might, / And build for thee thy cherished walls
On thy foundation's site.
Apostle of the Wilderness, / Star of the Western night / The Church within her jeweled crown Wears radiantly thy light.
Helen Holcombe Denton

How to Bury a Missionary

The Episcopal Church buried James Lloyd Breck the first time with a view of the Pacific Ocean.

Grave #1: Benicia, CA

It buried him the second time with a view of Nashotah House.

Grave #2: Nashota House

Where will it bury him next?

Even his biographer seemed to worry that the “recommital” in Wisconsin, attended by fourteen bishops, one hundred presbyters, and hundreds of the baptized, might not be final: “A strange procession [made] its way among the trees, with mingled emotions of grief and rejoicing, until all had gathered on the solitary spot of vantage ground from which the institution itself and the lake beyond are visible, and there, when the sun was low, and the gray October day was closing, Dr. Breck found, we trust, his lasting grave.” “We trust?”

What premonition troubled Theodore Holcombe, Breck’s first and chief biographer? Had he taken to heart Mark’s version of the Parable of the Sower, in which the one who sowed the seed is genuinely surprised by what sprouts? Was he made nervous by God’s habit of making some plants grow while others wither? Or was he simply aware to the Episcopal Church’s penchant for exploiting its successes by building ever-larger tombs?

James Lloyd Breck himself would most likely have been content to await the return of Jesus in Benicia, California, where he died while...or from....trying to infuse the Spirit of mission into the fledgling Diocese of California by founding schools for boys, girls and ordinands. “The parishes were like strong men with nothing to do, sunk in selfishness and sloth inconceivable,” wrote Holcombe. “It was a new day and a new thought in church life for that distant Diocese [when Lloyd Breck arrived]. There was a new breath in the air, a new wind stirred the branches and leaves of the forests.”

But Breck died before he could see his California Dreams realized, and they collapsed without his strong personality to oversee their implementation. His sons were not happy that their father should lie buried far from the rest of the family in a place where no significant institution had sprung to life, so they agitated for the translation of his relics to Nashotah House, the place of his greatest success.

With all due respect for the family’s wishes, on the symbolic level this reburial surely marks a kind of theological retreat, an option for money and the buildings it erects over ministry that may or may not leave any lasting monument. Breck’s biographer noted as much in 1903 with a touch of sarcasm: “It is a singular fact that the General Seminary never furnished a man for the West except Breck, Adams, Hobart and Cole, and these did more to arouse the Church generally to the work of missions than any other instrumentality whatever. It always seemed a strange and unaccountable thing that [these four] should have exhausted the missionary spirit of the Seminary.” “Is that it?” Holcombe seems to be asking. “Is that all you’ve got?”

What did the crowds assembled on the shores of Upper Nashotah Lake who heard Helen Denton’s poem read aloud understand by her words “Forgive our great neglect”? On that gray October afternoon the neglect might have been of Lloyd Breck’s California grave, a problem now righted by the recommital. But what if Mrs. Denton meant his passion for moving outside the church as it existed to “place a flag on Future’s walls, and clasp the hands of Time,” as she wrote elsewhere in her poem? What if she had meant that we had neglected Breck’s passion for wilderness?

In Breck’s day there was wilderness to spare...huge areas of this continent never seen by a European, or, in some cases, any human being. For the great missionaries of the late 19th Century, wilderness was geographic. Where is our wilderness today? Is it not inside the church and its seminaries, rather than beyond their walls? So many of us came into the church or seminary seeking, and sometimes finding, a place where the seeds of our faith might flourish. If only we could return to that naivete, that time before the church weaned us from our wide-eyed optimism and taught us the price of creativity!

The Episcopal Church has no more comfort with entrepreneurs like Breck today than it did in the 19th Century, but at least then there was some place for the entrepreneurs to strike out to. Today our imaginations seem stunted to the point that “mission” means increasing the membership of our local congregations, a field in which moving from 150 people on Sunday to 300 hundred is deemed a world-shaking success. But if numbers qualify as mission, the Roman Catholics and Pentecostals have us beaten by a much wider margin than 75 to 70. We wouldn’t even register on the world’s screen if our history were not so intimately tied up with that of the British and American empires and their leaders. What we need are missionaries to our wilderness, and we need to stop burying them.

How do you bury a missionary? Send her for psychological evaluation to curb her joyful spirit. Tell him his performance on the General Ordination Exams calls his future ordination into question. Give the baptized a menu of ministries that range from altar guild to vestry, tasks that have no application to their lives away from the church property. And be sure to write the same epitaph on your labors that James Lloyd Breck’s admirers carved on his final monument: “Jesu, mercy.”

Until we believe the proclamation of today’s scriptures — that all mission is God’s, that the reign of God flourishes in unlikely places and in mysterious ways and its growth cannot be aided by human beings — we will continue to be in the funeral business. But the Easter season puts a twist on the mortician’s art: like James Lloyd Breck, our graves are never final. If we have been buried with Christ, we will also be raised with him. Is he not the seed sown by the Sower that sprouts mysteriously during the night and flourishes in the day? Is he not the tiny thing that grows into a large but unimpressive bush that nevertheless offers shelter and hospitality to those on the wing? If you and I can be missionaries with that seed in our pouches, just let the church try to bury us.