Reposted from the Diocese of Algoma website. See original posting for pictures and a video link.
For Esther Anstice, an unlikely journey from a small island parish to one of the world’s great cathedrals has become a vocation in the Church
You can almost hear the red carpet being rolled out as Esther Anstice, Deputy Head Virger* at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, England, makes her way home to Manitoulin Island for her annual visit.
Former teachers want to see her. Friends and neighbours want to hear about life at one of the world’s great cathedrals. And there is, inevitably, a return to St. Francis of Assisi, Mindemoya, where Anstice grew up serving at the altar, helping with Sunday school, attending Youth Synod and singing in choirs.
Anstice finds the attention slightly amusing. During this year’s visit, she and her mother, Dorothy, stopped to see one of her former teachers, who told her she felt as though she needed to touch Anstice because she would have “touched someone who touched royalty.”
“There is this very strange kind of local celebrity effect,” Anstice says.
Even she sometimes marvels at where life has taken her. “I’m from Tehkummah,” she says, referring to the small rural community near the southeastern end of Manitoulin Island. “This doesn’t happen to people from Tehkummah.”
Home is still the family dairy farm, owned and operated by four generations of her family. Her parents, Dorothy and Jim, are there, along with her brother Alex, sister-in-law Caroline and nieces Emily and Chloe. For Anstice, the sound of the milk pumps running at milking time, the fresh air, the smell of autumn leaves—these are the sense memories that tell her she is home.
Which raises the obvious question: How does a girl from a dairy farm on Manitoulin Island end up as Deputy Head Virger at St Paul’s Cathedral in London?
The answer is not entirely straightforward—although, looking back, Anstice can see how the pieces have fit together.
Anstice’s first encounter with English cathedral life came through music. As a young adult, she travelled to Britain with the Cathedral Singers of Ontario, singing in several cathedrals, including St Paul’s. At Salisbury Cathedral, she noticed virgers moving chairs and preparing for worship and thought it looked like an interesting job. But it was a fleeting thought—the kind that catches your attention for a moment before life moves on to whatever comes next.
Back in Canada, Anstice completed two degrees at Nipissing University, including teacher training, worked for a time at The Manitoulin Expositor, and later trained as a paramedic, at one point expecting to work in emergency medicine in Northern Ontario. Instead, at 29, she moved to the United Kingdom.
Eventually her mother sent her a job posting for a weddings and baptisms coordinator at St Paul’s. “Mum sent me the link: ‘This is your job. You need to apply for this job.’” Anstice was doubtful. “I told her, ‘They’re not going to want me. I’m Canadian. I have no experience in doing anything like this. And I’ve got a Canadian accent! And they’ll all be very posh and proper’”.
She applied anyway—and got the job. After four years in the Cathedral’s liturgical office, she successfully applied to become a Virger. “Eleven years later, I’m still doing it.”
St Paul’s the Grand; St Paul’s the Merciful
Ask Anstice what a Virger does and she offers an unusual job description. “If you take two jobs and stick them together,” she explains, the first is “a theatre stage manager.”
Virgers coordinate the people and details required to make the Cathedral’s liturgical life work: processions, clergy, readers, service papers, vestments, seating plans and much more. The scale can be considerable: the Cathedral can be configured with more than 2,300 chairs, while its calendar moves constantly between daily worship, concerts and major national services.
As Anstice settled into her new vocation, her seemingly unrelated training began to make wonderful sense. Teaching gave her organizational and communication skills. Paramedic training taught her to think on her feet, put other people first and “expect the unexpected.”
Which brings her to the second half of the job. “You’re a mental health triage nurse,” she says.
There is, after all, St Paul’s the Grand: standing at the great west doors awaiting royalty, ambassadors and dignitaries, surrounded by trumpeters and ceremony. And then there is St. Paul’s the Merciful. “There are times when you meet somebody at their absolute worst,” Anstice says. People arrive grieving, sleeping rough or experiencing serious mental-health crises. One of the Cathedral chaplains describes it this way: “People bring problems that fill this space.” “And we have a very big space,” Anstice adds.
Anstice’s boss has a maxim for this ministry of hospitality: “Everyone is a guest of the Dean, whether or not it’s the King or it’s somebody who’s been sleeping rough for seven months and has finally got the courage to come in and ask for help.”
For Anstice, the Grand and the Merciful are not really two St Paul’s. The same doors receive both.
Few days have demonstrated the scale—and humanity—of Anstice’s work like one in December 2017.
In the midst of Advent, St Paul’s hosted the Service of Remembrance for victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. The Virgers arrived around 5 a.m. More than 1,000 grieving family members attended, along with representatives of major faiths and five principal members of the Royal Family. The service was broadcast live by the BBC.
By about 1 p.m., it was over. The BBC began to de-rig, furniture was moved and the Cathedral started changing scene again—this time for its Celebration of Christmas Concert at 6:30 that evening.
Anstice worked from about 4:30 a.m. until 11 p.m. and “collapsed in a heap” shortly thereafter.
That kind of transformation helps explain why Christmas planning can begin as early as March. Anstice remembers emerging from her first Christmas planning meeting convinced they could never accomplish everything in the diary.
“We’re never going to make it. We just can’t do all this stuff,” she recalls saying. Her boss offered simple advice: “We take it one day at a time.” And for 11 years she says, “we’ve taken Christmas one day at a time, and it has been fine.”
A calling in the Church
For all its logistics and ceremony, Anstice does not regard her work as simply event management—but neither is it a stepping stone to ordination. “I think the Church needs good lay leadership in a lot of ways,” she says. Good ordained leadership matters too; in Anstice’s view, the two belong “hand-in-hand.”
For some, becoming a Virger may be part of a journey toward ordination. “But not for me,” she says. “It’s definitely a calling within the Church.”
And that calling has roots a long way from London. “I don’t know that I would be doing what I’m doing without the upbringing that I had within the Church,” she says, pointing to her parents, her mother’s music ministry, St. Francis and the choir experiences that first carried her to England. “It was all very much a sort of series of events that led me to where I am.”
There is a lovely circularity to the fact that today Anstice sometimes welcomes Canadian visiting choirs to St Paul’s. “Speaking as someone who started out in cathedrals with a visiting choir from Canada, I can attest to the fact that it does sort of change your life.” Then she laughs, “Look at me now.”
Soon enough, the annual visit will end. Anstice will leave the family farm and return to her home in Limehouse, in East London. And one can imagine more than a few tears being shed as the red carpet rolled out for her is carefully put away until next year.
At St Paul’s, the great machinery of cathedral life will continue. Royalty and dignitaries will arrive for great occasions. School groups will climb the stairs and children will stare up in awe at Sir Christopher Wren’s dome. People in distress will come through the great west doors looking for somewhere safe, somewhere they might find help—or simply someone who cares.
And this daughter of Algoma, the pride of Tehkummah, will be there to welcome them all.
*Editor’s note: St Paul’s Cathedral in London, England, uses the spelling “Virger,” with an “i,” rather than the more common “verger,” with an “e.” This article follows the Cathedral’s preferred spelling.
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