Priest and poet Spencer Reece: 'Bless everyone you can think of'
Spencer Reece: “At its best, church is a murmuration.”
The Rev. Spencer Reece ’11 M.Div. preached recently on the birds of the air, specifically starlings, the way they take flight in a fantastic ever-changing spheric formation called murmuration, somehow making their way beautifully across the skies.
“They fly in one mass of love,” he declared. “They have no leader. They pulse as a single entity. The starlings are the words of Paul come to life: ‘For all of you are one.’”
The voice of Reece is gentle, wry, alert. In conversation it has the effect of inviting others into a practice of quiet resolve and solidarity in an era of bewilderment and cruelty. Reece is an Episcopal priest in Wickford, R.I.—and a celebrated poet far beyond. He’s also a painter. And a memoirist. He’s been a chaplain, a filmmaker, an organizer of literary festivals on three continents, a beloved teacher at a Honduran orphanage.
Shrinking the ego
Connecting all these gifts and experiences, he is a gospel messenger doing parish work in the 21st century. It requires some ministerial murmurating.
“At its best, church is a murmuration,” he said in a recent interview. “If it’s done right, a priest is a leader who is being led. But if you’re a leader and you think your ego is in charge of all the starlings, it won’t work. You have to shrink your ego to the size of a pea, and that’s not an easy thing to do. The power of church is community and community-building. And the future of the church is how it will bridge to the secular world.”
As vicar at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Wickford, he has shepherded a notable turnaround in membership, programming, and outreach since arriving in 2022. Regular attendance has increased to about 150, and 15 youngsters are now enrolled in the children’s program, which had been dormant.
“I come out of a hierarchical tradition where I am obedient to a bishop, and I’m happy to do that, but church is collaborative because that’s what Jesus did that was so revolutionary. He calls people to fellowship. His leadership is collaborative.”
The magnetism of Christ
Reece speaks with conviction about church renewal, innovation, and the mysterious power of preaching to stir hearts to belief and action. His voice carries also a note of shy wonder or bafflement that he has managed to follow a long, unpredictable vocational path forged by the grace of God.
“I never thought there would be a place for me in the church,” he says. “I think church is a hospital of sorts. And some wounds you can see, and some wounds you can’t. But the important thing is the magnetism of the story of Jesus Christ. It’s not a victim narrative. It goes beyond that. It’s much wilder than that.”
Reece at a poetry reading: His first book of poems, The Clerk’s Tale, put him on the map as a poet.
“This poem invited me to live”
Born in Hartford and raised in Minneapolis, he often lived in torment and endangerment as a closeted gay young person. Alcoholism and suicidal impulses plagued him into his college years, which he chronicles in a rich and candid narrative, The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir (Seven Stories Press, 2021).
He found a lifeline in poets—first, in the intensity, ambition, and tragedy of Sylvia Plath, then in the slow-burning epiphanies of Elizabeth Bishop. They taught him that writing could metabolize pain and illuminate one’s true identity and soul. He began drafting—slowly—his own poems.
Starting college at Bowdoin, he transferred to Wesleyan and found himself taking a writing class led by Annie Dillard, a luminous presence who encouraged him further. He encountered the poetry of George Herbert and John Donne, 17th century poets who were also Anglican priests. They became mentors across 300 years. The notion of a sacred community, a Christian community, was coming into focus for him. Herbert’s poem “Love III” especially struck home with its opening lines, “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin.”
“Clearly, simply, Herbert in that poem invited me to live,” Reece recalled in The Secret Gospel of Mark. “This poem looked directly at me, like one of Vermeer’s women, and in confidence said, ‘Over here! Welcome. You are loved.’ Love bade me welcome.”
A tentative but persistent calling
Through these years, he had also discovered Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, experiencing for the first time a world of healing and forgiveness among other people. Often they gathered in church basements. He could no longer ignore a growing sense of calling. He entered Harvard Divinity School, thinking he’d be a hospital chaplain in an AIDS era of so much suffering. After receiving his Harvard M.T.S., though, he returned to Minnesota and worked on his parents’ farm for a time. Needing steadier long-term income, he found a job with Brooks Brothers in the Mall of America in suburban Minneapolis. After hours, in disciplined solitude, he was still writing poetry.
In 2003 the New Yorker accepted a poem of his that he had worked on for several years, “The Clerk’s Tale,” about his dutifully competent but lonely life on the sales floor of the clothing store. It begins:
I am thirty-three and working in an expensive clothier,
selling suits to men I call “Sir.”
The published poem was a sensation, striking a public nerve, revealing buried emotional truths about the customer-facing sheen of retail life and the human facts of personal isolation. That same year, lightning struck again: his first book of poems, The Clerk’s Tale, was selected by Nobel laureate Louise Glück for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Award. He was now a celebrity in the poetry cosmos, doing public readings, winning grants. Still he kept his day job. And a religious vocation, however tentative, refused to shrink or withdraw. In the cathedral-like poems of Herbert, Donne, T.S. Eliot, and Gerard Manley Hopkins—and in his volunteer hospice work and his deepening attachment to the Episcopal Church—the Kingdom of God was beckoning.
Reece performing his priestly duties at his church in Rhode Island
A place at God’s table
Despite lacking a clear personal idea of a priestly vocation, he decided on Yale Divinity School. As he perceived it, God’s banquet table was waiting, with a place for him.
“I had a place even if I felt unworthy,” he wrote in his memoir. “Even with doubts. I had a place as I had in church basements. I was the meek. Christ was not blocked to me.”
At YDS, where he was enrolled in the Institute of Sacred Music and Berkeley Divinity School, he did the customary Clinical Pastoral Education internship. It wasn’t his first choice, but he accepted an assignment to Hartford Hospital. His work threw him into the hospital’s Level 1 trauma center. The ordeals he witnessed there transformed his commitment to vulnerable others who suffer without remedy or recourse.
“Being exposed to the gang violence and the murdered young Black boys and murdered young Latino boys changed the course of my life,” he says. “A Latino boy was stabbed and his mom came with him into the emergency room and I was there and she didn’t speak English. And he died. And I was dressed as a priest. But I wasn’t yet a priest and I felt like a fraud. And I decided right then to learn Spanish. And that changed everything.”
A Spanish-language turn
Fluency in Spanish opened his world. He was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 2011. For his Spanish-language immersion program, he lived in Honduras for three months. There he connected with Our Little Roses orphanage, a life-saving refuge for girls in a horrifically dangerous and traumatized part of the world. On his last day there, one of the young residents meekly said to him in Spanish, “Don’t forget us.”
He vowed to return, and with a Fulbright grant he arranged to stay at the orphanage for a year to teach poetry to the youngsters, encouraging them to write their own. His book Counting Time Like People Count Stars: Poems by the Girls of Our Little Roses, San Pedro Sula, Honduras (Tia Chucha Press, 2017) honors the young poets he worked with. Reece was also involved in making the documentary Voices Beyond the Wall: Twelve Love Poems from the Murder Capital of the World.
After Honduras, he moved to Madrid, where he worked for the Episcopal Diocese for nearly a decade. In Spain he also founded an annual international literary event called the Unamuno Author Series. By 2020 he returned to US church life, where he could also be of greater assistance to his aging parents. He soon became the interim priest-in-charge at a bilingual parish in Queens, N.Y., before he moved to St. Paul’s in Rhode Island.
Word and watercolor
And the writing continues—by now his books of poetry include The Road to Emmaus (2014) and Acts (2024), both by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, with another forthcoming from FSG soon. A collection of his vivid watercolors, All the Beauty Still Left: A Poet’s Painted Book of Hours, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2021. Each painting features a quote from a writer or performing artist who has inspired him, whether James Baldwin, Emily Dickinson, Annie Proulx, Katharine Hepburn, or Janis Joplin.
Reece’s far-flung life story gives him an unconventional slant on conditions of contemporary church life. He’s not preoccupied with pervasive denominational narratives of decline, but he’s keen to advocate for congregations to be creative in a time of daily distraction or discouragement.
“Certainly, I think there is a place for mainline, organized religion, like the Episcopal Church—a place of meaning, a place that assures us that we are loved, that the world is watched. But I think church also has to be entrepreneurial and inventive, the way a bookstore has to be entrepreneurial and inventive in order to survive.”
It might involve a warmer welcome at the church entrance, or starting a speaker’s series, a café, a compelling online ministry, or offering a deeper invitation into church devotions of silence or listening or awakening to the beauty of God.
The music of the gospel
For Reece, the eight-minute sermon remains a weekly opportunity to get it right.
“For me it’s rigorous exercise right now to write a sermon every week and to say something memorable and meaningful to people who have busy lives and are paying mortgages and are anxious about the political climate and have children and live on Social Security, and yet here they are, showing up for church, and I regularly thank them for that, and I hope the gospel, the music of the gospel, is something they’ll take with them and remember.”
In his recent sermon on the starlings, Spencer Reece’s preaching took flight, linking the awesome movement of avian murmuration to the bold call to divine love and neighborliness in a period of crisis, coping, and counteraction.
“The beauty of starlings is as beautiful as the murmuration of the disciples as they gather for the Sermon on the Mount,” he said. “Jesus stands before them like the Statue of Liberty and asks them to consider a call to radical love. Bless everyone you can think of until you can’t think straight. Everyone listening, in a mass of love. Everyone led by Jesus, a leader who is led.”