An Episcopal priest takes over as Bates College chaplain

LEWISTON – Helping people nurture their faith – as Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists – begins outside tradition and sacred texts.

It begins by listening.

“There is so much religious (pride) in the world,” said the Rev. Bill Blaine-Wallace, the new chaplain at Bates College. It’s a job that requires him to help people of nine or 10 faiths. Humility is the key, he said. Pride and judgmentalism would get in the way.

When Blaine-Wallace, an Episcopal priest, meets with a group of Muslim or Jewish students, he doesn’t do last-minute reading for background on Ramadan or Rosh Hashana.

He works to find the right foods, and with his wife, Victoria, he opens his home.

“It’s amazing how food and hospitality translate,” the 55-year-old Georgia native said.

Soft-spoken with a lilting Southern accent, Blaine-Wallace said his goal is to create a haven for students.

Questionnaires to Bates students found that 62 percent identified a religious preference.

“I want them to have a place to come to,” he said, “some place to ask the ultimate questions.”

Blaine-Wallace has been working in havens for decades.

In the early 1980s, before AIDS had a name, he sat at bedsides in Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital, with people whom even nurses refused to touch.

In Boston, he worked as an administrator for the Hospice at Mission Hill. He later became a rector for Back Bay’s Emmanuel Church, where he helped start a homeless shelter.

He worked in Boston for 17 years, during which he and his wife bought a farm outside Farmington, meant to be a retirement getaway.

“We had a five- to seven-year plan,” he said. Then, he discovered the opening at Bates.

With a son and a daughter in college and another daughter with a child of her own, Bill and Victoria moved up from Massachusetts, renting a place near the college.

“You notice the quiet here,” he said of Lewiston-Auburn. “I love to hear the train at night.”

And he fell in love with the school.

After seven weeks on the job, he said he has been impressed by the ideas that percolate around the liberal arts school.

“People told me, but I didn’t realize the intensity,” he said. “It’s like being at coffee hour after church, seven days a week, 24 hours a day.”

He’s adjusted to the atmosphere and his new role.

“Certainly, I wasn’t sent over from central casting, because I have never been a college chaplain,” he said.

The job at Bates differs from other schools, where religious diversity is dominated by a single faith.

“Usually, you have a thick stew of Christianity, a dollop of Judaism and a dash of Buddhism,” he said. “At Bates, you have nine or 10 faith traditions. No one stands any different than the others.”

It’s a challenge for a guy whose only schooling on other religions was a single class at his seminary, decades earlier.

He recently had 22 Muslim students in his home celebrating Iftar, the evening breaking of the fast during the Islamic month of Ramadan.

“Before they came, I found the best Middle Eastern food to be had in Lewiston-Auburn,” he said.

They ate and talked. Blaine-Wallace listened.

And his own faith, as a devout Episcopalian, has only strengthened, he said.

“It’s called me and challenged me to hold onto it more,” he said. “I have to be a guardian of my own spirit.”

He and his wife have also had help.

Since arriving, the couple adopted a beagle from the Greater Androscoggin Humane Society. They named him Bo.

“He keeps us grounded as we take our walks,” Blaine-Wallace said. “He makes sure that we’re close to the Earth.”

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