Rev. Patricia Rome Robertson began her official ministry at the Episcopal Parish of St. Mary and St. Jude in Mount Desert on Sept. 1.—BECKY BUYERS-BASSO PHOTO

After 10 years in “disarray,” the Episcopal Parish of St. Mary and St. Jude in Mount Desert has cause for celebration. Following a yearlong search for a new rector, Rev. Patricia Rome Robertson began her official ministry on Sept. 1. The former-child-care-teacher-turned-priest brings with her professional experience working with congregations in Massachusetts, California and Washington State, as well as life experience as a wife, mother and grandmother.

Rev. Patricia Rome Robertson

“Our ultimate objective was to discern one individual who would be the new spiritual leader for a parish whose diversity of background, opinions and perceptions was truly the stuff of legend,” Mr. Catlin wrote in the parish newsletter, “The Harbor Chart.”

“We were also in disarray from 10 years of mismatches and temporary solutions,” he wrote.

Mr. Catlin and fellow committee members Mike Chace, Dorothy Clunan, Jean Fernald, Robin Reath Graves, Karol Hagberg, Mike McDonald, Maude March and Christine Strawbridge had to develop trust among themselves and hone their communication skills in order to complete the search process, Mr. Catlin reported.

“The nine members of your discernment committee (DC) have shared a remarkable journey,” he wrote. “Our perceptions of each other, our parish and ourselves have changed dramatically and for the better.”

Rev. Robertson is not surprised by the transformation that took place among the committee members, she said during an interview last week.

“The beauty of this particular island draws people to connect with what many of us call God or divine life.” — Rev. Patricia Rome Robertson

Sitting calmly in the midst of a busy church office one morning last week, Rev. Robertson answered questions about the job she has undertaken. How would she manage to minister to such a diverse parish?

“I’ve worked with a wide variety of backgrounds – racial, economic, sexual orientation,” she said. “We’re all asking the same question: who is this God that Jesus talks about? There are many ways of describing God.”

Healthy communication was one of the first things Rev. Robertson put on the table for her new parish.

“I’m a big-picture person,” she said. “I tend to think holistically. Partly due to my spiritual practice, I notice patterns of behavior and see the impact on the whole. When someone shares a negative comment about someone confidentially, it creates a muddy, negative atmosphere that makes people feel that they can’t trust each other. If someone comes to me with a complaint about someone else, I will send them to speak to that person directly.”

In her second week in the pulpit, she preached about healthy communication, boosted by scripture readings from the Gospel of Matthew. She has also recommended that her parishioners read a book by Edwin Friedman called “From Generation to Generation” that outlines how certain negative behaviors are taught unconsciously and offers a positive alternative.

During the 10 years she served as rector of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Seattle, Rev. Robertson offered training for her church leadership and staff members in healthy congregational behavior and systems thinking. She also founded the Contemplative Wisdom Community, a group that practiced a type of meditation known as Centering Prayer and focused on the wisdom tradition of Jesus and the early church.

One of the things that attracted her to a parish on Mount Desert Island, she said, is the rhythm of life here, which allows both introvert and extrovert time, opportunities for contemplation and prayer, and time to exercise leadership skills and build the congregation.

“The rhythm of life on the island matches the rhythm of the work in a way that parish ministry for me has not in the past,” she said. “In Seattle, we worked very intensely from September to May and then just collapsed in the summer, which was quiet. But that pattern didn’t match the biological rhythms. I felt like I was fighting creation working so hard during the short, dark days of January and February. Here, work life and the seasons of the year have more correspondence.”

Indeed. Her flock of 30 to 60 year-round parishioners more than doubles in the summertime, and the parish overflows its winter chapel, St. Mary’s in Northeast Harbor, into the larger stone church down the road, St. Mary’s-By-the-Sea, and St. Jude’s summer chapel in Seal Harbor.

“I’m thrilled to be here,” Rev. Robinson said.

She and her husband George, a computer scientist, used to vacation on Mount Desert Island for weeks and sometimes a month at a time, she said, especially when she was in seminary.

“My younger son, who is 25 now, learned to hike here,” she said. “We’d hike and pick blueberries … Those rituals that families do, generation after generation, have a unifying effect. We always felt healthier after our time together here.

“Mount Desert Island is a very special place. I’ve visited Iona, an island off the western coast of Scotland considered to be the center of Celtic spirituality. It’s been a holy place for millennia and a gathering place. I think that this island has some of the same characteristics. Both have ancient exposed rock that speaks to the permanence of creation, and the beauty of this particular island draws people to connect with what many of us call God or divine life. It’s a place that invites reflection.”

Theological reflection is at the heart of what she does. In addition to her ecclesiastical training – she earned her Master of Divinity at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge – she is also a certified spiritual director, a kind of counselor that combines contemplation and prayer with deep listening. She earned her certification from the Pacific Northwest School of Spiritual Direction in Vancouver, British Columbia.

“I am open to do spiritual direction here,” she said.

In Seattle, and in other communities where she has ministered, Rev. Robertson has fostered many outreach programs, including a community preschool, hosting a Chinese congregation, developing youth programs, and mission trips to Mexico, Hondoras, El Salvador, Appalachia and New Orleans. She’s also taught of classes on spirituality, history and the church.

She doesn’t know yet what she will be called to do on Mount Desert Island. “I am really open to what emerges from the life of the community,” she said.

“The church is meant to be an organism not an organization. It is the embodiment of Christ, the eye of the heart.”

Not a “cradle” Episcopalian, Rev. Robertson was born to a German Lutheran mother and a Roman Catholic father in an area settled by the Acadians along the Mississippi River, near New Orleans.

“I was raised Catholic because my mother signed a piece of paper when she married my father promising to, and Lutherans always keep their word,” Rev. Robertson said.

But like many young people, Patricia steered away from church altogether for a while and when she resurfaced years later in an Episcopal Church, she said, she felt she had synthesized both roots of her family’s religious traditions.

Keenly aware of the economic and cultural differences that exist among members of her new congregation, Rev. Robertson said she believes that diversity actually strengthens a church.

“When you weave a fabric from all the same fiber, it can be strong, but cloth woven from a multiplicity of fibers is stronger,” she said. “In this way even a small church can be mighty.”