Photo Credit: Tom Wilson.
When the COVID-19 pandemic erupted five years ago this month, St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church closed its doors as the first measure to keep worshippers safe. Two years ago this month, the community was shocked and devastated when the virus killed the rector’s husband. This month, to mark the human toll of this disease and the collective strength from weathering it, St. Dunstan’s consecrated a large icon with intricate scenes of the COVID era.
After receiving the Eucharist in the March 16 consecration service, each worshipper was invited to put a bit of gold leaf on their thumb and add their thumbprint to the 4 x 5-foot icon, creating halos around each image.
The service hearkened to the 13 months in 2020-2021 when a sign hung outside: “The building is closed. The work of the church continues.”
“So many memories and feelings seemed like they were from a lifetime ago,” said senior warden Susie Throop after the service, held on the fifth anniversary of the last in-person service before the building was closed.
“St. Dunstan’s is a very caring community,” she added. “During COVID, even though we couldn’t be together in person, we met online each evening for compline, the choir produced choral music with the help of technology, we held Sunday worship online, folks delivered meals to each other via porch pick-up, we checked on each other with phone calls and cards. The blessing of the icon today was a reminder of who we are and the work we are called to do.”
Joe Monti (1943-2023)
Last year, St Dunstan’s marked the 60th anniversary of its first services, as a mission established by St. Anne’s. Since 2004, the Rev. Tricia Templeton has served the congregation of about 170 people in the Mount Paran/Northside area of Atlanta.
“St. Dunstan’s is so blessed to have such a caring, active priest,” said longtime member Bob Longino. “Our parish has a close, comforting relationship with Tricia. She is a tremendous writer, and her sermons are always interesting, inspiring and memorable. We are a small church, but a vibrant one dedicated to hands-on outreach, which Tricia encourages us to do a lot of.”
Her husband, Joe Monti, became very involved at St. Dunstan’s.
Monti was a former Catholic priest with a PhD in theology who taught moral theology and Christian ethics at the Episcopal Seminary at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN, for 25 years, helping to form several generations of Episcopal priests. He met Templeton when she took his classes in the early 90s, and they married in 1996.
At St. Dunstan’s, Monti taught seminary-level adult Sunday School classes, served as an usher and lector, and their son, Joseph Henry Monti, grew up with parishioners as his extended family. “Joe was a tremendous gift to us,” Longino said.
The congregation took a very conservative approach to COVID “even when we came back in person on Easter 2021,” Templeton said.
“During the omicron variant in 2022, we went online only for six weeks. We may have been the only church in the diocese to do that. Everyone at St. Dunstan’s had been vaccinated, most of us many times. Many of us had gotten COVID, but cases were mild. No one had been hospitalized or died. We had made it through intact. Or so we thought.”
Around Christmas 2022, after receiving the widely available vaccines, Monti and Templeton got COVID.
“We didn’t even have a fever, and both thought we got lucky with mild cases,” Templeton said. “In early January [2023], when Joe started feeling bad, it never occurred to us that he still had COVID. He hated going to the doctor, but he got weaker and weaker, and I couldn’t lift him out of a chair. He didn’t object when we went to the hospital because he knew it was bad. After 10 days in the intensive care unit, he was expected to have a full recovery, then go to rehab.”
In the hospital, and throughout the pandemic, Templeton documented and reflected on her experiences to share with St. Dunstan’s:
“The noise of the oxygen machine… is the soundtrack of our lives now — a continuous loud swooshing right above Joe’s head. As I’ve listened to that sound and watched the rise and fall of Joe’s breath the last two weeks I am reminded of the importance of breath and spirit in our faith.
In my more fanciful moments, I imagine … each swoosh sending divine breath into Joe’s lungs, slowly breathing him back to wholeness and health. What once was an annoying noise became a comfort, a reminder of God’s presence even here.”
With her husband in rehab, Templeton planned to be back in the pulpit on the first Sunday of Lent. But early that morning she got a phone call that Joe was on his way back to the hospital. Covid had spread from his lungs to his heart.
Four days later, the 79-year-old Monti died of COVID on March 1, 2023 – Templeton’s 67th birthday.
“His death leaves a giant hole in the hearts of those at St. Dunstan’s,” his obituary stated.
Care For Their Caring Priest
At the March 5, 2023, funeral, Monti’s ashes were interred at the church’s memorial garden, and Templeton remembered Bishop Rob Wright’s counsel: Let your congregation care for you and your son Joseph Henry (then a student at Georgia Tech). After all, haven’t you spent almost 20 years helping them learn how to be the church? So let them.
Templeton’s dedication made her expect “she would come to church and work and preach during that hard time” of her husband’s illness and death, said Longino, the senior warden then. “Especially nearing the end, the vestry and I kept telling her no. We wanted her to concentrate on Joe and her own mental health.”
“When Joe entered the hospital for final treatment, it was a Sunday morning,” he recalled. “There was no substitute priest, and I still told her it was best for her to go to the hospital with Joe. At church we conducted the service, minus a sermon and using previously blessed bread and wine for communion.
“After Joe passed [on March 1, 2023] it was near Easter and Tricia was very concerned about tending her flock. Again, I told her no and that I had already hired supply priests through the end of Lent and Easter.” The vestry also gave her meal delivery gift cards, in addition to parishioners who brought her many meals.”
In April 2023 at the parish’s annual meeting, Templeton gave a personal report.
“Joe is so intertwined into the life of this place that being back makes me miss him in new ways,” she said. “He should be sitting on that back pew … he should be sitting on the bench in front of the church petting [church cat] Dunstan … he should be in Sunday School and at coffee hour talking sports and politics with the guys. And he should be here for me to bounce ideas off and discuss whatever is going on at church. He loved St. Dunstan’s so much and I’m going to feel his absence here for a long time. But I’m also coming back full of gratitude for so many people.”
Gold On a Cat’s Paw
Templeton wanted to do something for St. Dunstan’s to honor her husband and all who died from COVID.
Her book of reflections, Church in the Time of Covid, chronicled the painful reality and unpredictability of this awful disease and told the story of St. Dunstan’s extraordinary outpouring of love and support. But she needed to do more: “There were 1.2 million deaths in our country, and that’s a lot of people grieving, who had to do it alone and in isolation.”
Templeton commissioned iconographer Kelly Latimore, who may be best known for his portrait of Matthew Shepard in the National Cathedral. At a time when we are surrounded by images, Lattimore believes that “icons can teach us to slow down and observe.”
As they discussed her idea, no single depiction seemed to capture her message.
“Honestly how does one contain and capture such a varied yet universal event that happened to everyone into one image?” Latimore noted. He told the story in a sermon at the March 16 icon service.
Finally, they settled on a border of 14 10-inch square scenes of life in the pandemic. In the icon’s center are nine faces of COVID victims of diverse races, ages, and gender. Monti is one.
“We are not going to forget,” she said.
In the March 16 icon service, Templeton wrote the prayers of the people with COVID in mind:
We pray for those who suffer from Long Covid, that successful treatments be found, and that they may be restored to wholeness and health.
We give thanks for all healthcare workers who risked their own lives to care for the sick and dying. We give thanks for scientists who worked long hours to discover a vaccine, and who continue that work as new strains of the virus evolve.
We give thanks for all first responders, for teachers, for grocery and drugstore workers, for restaurant staffs and delivery people, and for all who worked to keep our communities, schools, and services going through the months of isolation. We pray for those who still remember the pain of being isolated from families and friends during the months of quarantine.
In the parish hall after the March 16 service, parishioners and visitors added more thumbprints, and the church cat, Beppe, added a gilded pawprint. In Italian, Beppe means “Joe.”
