Interview with Grant and Norma Voth
Interview by Karin Forno with Grant and Norma Voth, April 19, 2021
This is how we came to St. Mary’s. Both of us were raised as Lutherans in the rural Midwest. We in fact met at a Lutheran College where Grant was in the ministerial program and Norma in education. Grant left the ministerial program after college and joined Norma in education, eventually getting a Ph. D. from Purdue. He taught in colleges in Indiana, Illinois, Virginia, and ended up at MPC, and Norma, eventually earning an M.A. degree from LaVerne University, taught in Lutheran schools and public elementary schools in the same states. When we moved to California, we joined Bethlehem Lutheran Church, where we were active members for over 20 years. Eventually we became dissatisfied with some doctrinal issues and practices in the Lutheran Church, and we spent a year visiting other churches. The Sunday we visited St. Mary’s the monthly CSC report was given, and we realized that it was a place we wanted to be. In December of 2008, we joined St. Mary’s, became very involved with CSC, later adding choir, the Stewardship Committee, Edwards Hall bulletin boards, and other parts of St. Mary’s ministry to our activities. Because of our age and some pre-existing conditions, we were asked to discontinue our direct involvement in CSC when the virus struck, but we have continued to work in the program in an arm’s length way. The program meanwhile has flourished under the imaginative and capable direction of Sarah Schramm.
Our experience of the pandemic is probably typical of people of our age. We stayed almost entirely sequestered (except for trips to the grocery store, daily walks, and medical appointments) for almost the entire year. We realized during the year that this was really the first time in our fifty-five year marriage that we had spent all of our time together—not just evenings and weekends. We lived out the old joke about marrying each other for better or for worse, but not for lunch, and found out that lunch was okay, too. We think that our marriage actually grew stronger thanks to the virus. Another unexpected joy was our discovery of the weekly broadcast of services from Washington National Cathedral; we have found its music, its liturgy, its procession of brilliant preachers, and its messages of the Gospel and social justice to be for us a stay and support. Finally, we used some of the gift of time at home to contact friends and relatives across the country, via telephone and email and Zoom. Our relationship with our brothers and sisters and many of our friends probably benefited from the plague hiatus as much as our marriage did.
Our relationship with St. Mary’s has of course become a little less intense than it was in the days of in-house worship, choir practice and performance, bulletin boards, and the many ways we were involved with CSC; we were frequently on the church campus five or six times a week. But we have been grateful for the Zoom services, we both have served on various committees under the aegis of the Vestry during the plague year, and by now most of our best friends are fellow parishioners, so our fellowship with our church community continued and remained strong.
For us, overall, the effects of the virus have not been all bad, and as indicated above, there have been some positives that came out of it. We realize that the pestilence was not a drill, nor was it a simple test of faith or attitude or for a way for us to find new ways to be grateful. For many, it was a catastrophe on a scale seldom seen in our country. But if we may be permitted a moment to think about the silver lining in this abysmally dense cloud, we found some strengths we did not know we had, we found some friends who were more loyal and loving than we realized, we recognized in new ways our good luck to be where we were and how we were during the pandemic, and we end the long dark night grateful to St. Mary’s, to Washington National Cathedral, to our friends and family, and to each other. For us, everything could have been a lot worse, and it wasn’t. We look forward to digging out and moving on.