Priest's journey answers call of need

BILOXI, Miss. - The Rev. Jane Bearden has lived in Massachusetts for 23 years, but when Hurricane Katrina swept through the region of her birth, she felt the tug of her childhood home.

So earlier this year, Bearden sold her house in Georgetown, bid farewell to the parish in Methuen she had been overseeing, and moved to Biloxi to attempt an unusual experiment in hurricane relief - the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts is employing her for at least two years to work as a priest at a historic parish whose seaside building was one of six Episcopal churches along the Mississippi coast that were demolished by the devastating storm of August 2005.

Bearden's move is the most visible sign of an intensive effort by the Massachusetts diocese to pour resources into this region; the diocese says it has sent several hundred volunteers to work repairing houses here, it has raised $250,000 for the region, and a Boston-based bishop, Roy F. "Bud" Cederholm Jr., has visited six times. One Massachusetts parish, in Winchester, held a shrimp boil to raise money for the hurting shrimping industry here; others have purchased Home Depot and Wal-Mart gift cards to send to people trying to rebuild their homes; and the Massachusetts diocese has launched an organization, Samaritans Now, made up of healthcare workers to provide medical relief.

"The government has been ineffective, and even from the beginning we realized the church has been a much more effective way of helping," Cederholm said.

Bearden, 59, was raised in Gilbert, La., about 270 miles northwest of Biloxi. She proclaimed herself a Christian at a Methodist revival at age 9; then, as a student at a small Episcopal boarding school in Mississippi, she became enamored of the Episcopal Church's liturgy and joined.

In 1984, "kicking and screaming," she moved with her then-husband to Massachusetts, where she worked as a medical technologist at hospitals in Stoneham, Boston, and Cambridge, and was active at an Episcopal parish in Topsfield. In 2001, she was ordained a deacon, and almost immediately found a way to combine her healthcare and religious experience, volunteering as a chaplain at the morgue near ground zero in New York after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Four years later, as Bearden was studying to be ordained a priest, Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and Bearden again volunteered, this time as a chaplain at a morgue in St. Gabriel, La., west of New Orleans. When the Diocese of Massachusetts, at the request of the Diocese of Mississippi, agreed to focus its relief efforts on Biloxi's Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, Bearden came down several times, cleaning muck out of houses and doing other volunteer work, before offering to move to the region.

Now her duties include coordinating work, housing, and transportation for the many volunteers from the Bay State who continue to come down here, as well as helping out at the parish and assisting local nonprofits focused on environmental, human rights, and poverty issues associated with rebuilding the Gulf Coast.

"When the place where you're from is hurting as badly as the Gulf Coast is hurting, you are just drawn back to it," she says. "I saw myself as knowing the South and knowing Massachusetts pretty well, and I hoped to bring about a relationship that would make both places better."

She still has a Southern accent, and her ready smile and the easy tears in her eyes have made her popular in the parish.

"Her personality has made everyone fall in love with her," said Redeemer's senior warden, Jim Wheeler.

The Church of the Redeemer traces its history to the mid-19th century, and among its early and most-celebrated parishioners was Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. But the church's property is across the street from the Mississippi Sound, meaning it is extraordinarily vulnerable to tropical storms; one of the parish's two church buildings was destroyed in Hurricane Camille in 1969, and Katrina demolished the other, leaving just a bent flagpole, the steel girders of the church, and the foundation of the rectory.

For several weeks after Katrina, parishioners worshiped outdoors on their rubble-strewn seaside lot, and then for more than a year worshiped in a local elementary school. By this past Easter, they had finished rebuilding their parish hall and began worshiping there.

Now they hope to sell the land their rectory once sat on to land-hungry developers who are turning the Biloxi coast into a swath of casinos and condominiums. They plan to build a new church on land they have purchased inland, on higher ground.

But they want to keep the land on which their church long stood and build a chapel, which would be a memorial to the victims of Camille and an oasis on the cluttered coast, where the Hard Rock Casino gleams just across the road.

Bearden is still deeply connected to Massachusetts - she uses a combination of DIRECTV, MLB.TV, and cable to follow the Red Sox, and has affixed to her Saturn SUV the seal of the Diocese of Massachusetts. She plans to return to Massachusetts, but she considers both regions home.

Mississippi Bishop Duncan Gray III, who joined Massachusetts Bishop M. Thomas Shaw in worship at Redeemer yesterday, said in an interview that Bearden's work on behalf of social justice concerns is significant.

"She has really brought this church into a deep appreciation of the needs beyond its own walls - Jane has helped them to touch the brokenness of others," he said.

Gray also noted that Bearden is the first woman to serve at Redeemer, which until recently had been led by a pastor who opposed women's ordination.

"Their reception of Jane has been pretty remarkable - it's a watershed moment," he said.

Michael Paulson can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com.