The Future of All Saints Is Close at Hand

The Very Rev. Ed Bacon, chosen last month by All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena to succeed the Rev. George Regas as rector, is a former Baptist preacher who spends a weekend a month at a Jesuit retreat house.

Like Regas, Bacon is a Southerner. Born in Georgia, the son of a Baptist preacher, he made his way by stages into the Episcopal priesthood. A defining period in his life, as in Regas’, was the Vietnam War.

Bacon, already ordained, was a student at Vanderbilt University Law School in Nashville in 1971 when the university chaplain, Beverly Asbury, “preached a sermon that challenged us to come to terms with what we stood for” in the war, Bacon recalls. He made his choice and persuaded his local draft board to grant him conscientious objector status. In lieu of military service, he worked with disabled children.

Reading the Roman Catholic monk and spiritual writer Thomas Merton, teaching the Bible, and meeting with Episcopalians led Bacon and his wife, Hope, to start attending an Episcopal church. They realized they “were Episcopalians at heart.”

Bacon, a tall, energetic man of 47, says he believes in “radical Christianity--in the sense of going back to the roots.” Of All Saints’ religious and social justice programs, he says, “There is no turning back.” He seems as self-assured in his way as Regas is in his. Bacon says he will devote his first months in the new pulpit to exploring “the spiritual underpinnings” of the social gospel. “This has been the focus of my ministry for the last six years” in Jackson, he says. “This is the strength out of which I am ministering now,” he says, and “this is one of the gifts that attracted the search committee.”

While he and Regas agree on their theology and on the imperative for social justice, Bacon leaves the strong impression--perhaps not to be borne out--that he will talk with his flock about the spiritual life in more orthodox terms than Regas does.

In a “summing up” sermon preached as he prepares to leave Jackson, Bacon spoke at length of the nature of the spirit.

“I think I know something of this spirit world,” Bacon said in a late January sermon. “When I was around 5 years old, I was playing alone in a pine grove between my parents’ house and the (Baptist) church where my father was pastor. . . . All of a sudden I had a mysterious sense that I was loved totally and unconditionally by God. . . . I had a sense that I was the most special person there was. . . . I had an equally powerful sense that every other person in God’s creation was the most special person ever created.”

In the same sermon, he spoke of an experience last August in the Jesuit retreat house at Grand Coteau, La. “I was awake one morning very early, praying for an experience of the Trinity. . . . I began to experience a low hum or buzz surrounding me. I understood it to be that hum of love eternally communicated between the Creator, the Redeemer and the Spirit.” Experiences like this, he said, “inform us that God’s Spirit is a Spirit of Love for every creature.”