For People with Bishop Rob Wright
For People with Bishop Rob Wright
Receiving with The Rev. Tricia Templeton
This July, we are featuring special guests from across The Diocese of Atlanta. This is the first of four special guest episodes.
The Good Samaritan is a parable that many in our society have heard. We often think of ourselves as the Samaritan - the helper. But what happens when we find ourselves helpless and in need? The Rev. Tricia Templeton's personal journey offers a unique perspective taking us on a personal journey through the Good Samaritan parable—not as the helper, but as the one who needed help.
In this episode, Melissa has a conversation with Tricia about her time serving in the Peace Corps in the early 1980s. Tricia experienced a frightening situation when thieves broke into her Malaysian hotel room while she slept, stealing everything except her passport. Stranded with limited options, she encountered unexpected compassion from a Thai woman prostitute. This stranger provided meals, packed lunch for Tricia's journey, and gave her emergency money—going far beyond basic assistance. The parallels to Jesus' radical parable are striking: help often comes from those we least expect.
This episode challenges us to examine our resistance to receiving. Have we internalized the message that giving is superior to receiving so deeply that we miss blessings offered through unexpected channels? As Tricia wisely observes, "The most unlikely person might be just the person who has what you need at that moment." Listen for the full conversation.
Read For Faith, the companion devotional.
The Rev. Tricia Templeton has been rector of St. Dunstan’s for 21 years. She previously served churches in Knoxville and Chattanooga. Before going to seminary she was a newspaper reporter and editor and a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand.
Not to let our preconceived ideas of who's going to be the helper keep us from receiving or from just being able to appreciate that people who we might not expect to be there might be there with just what we need in a time of trouble, kind of like respecting the dignity of every human being. The most unlikely person might be just the person who has what you need at that moment.
Melissa:Welcome to For People with Bishop Rob Wright. I'm Melissa Rau, and this is a conversation inspired by For Faith, a weekly devotion sent out every Friday. You can find a link to this week's For Faith and a link to subscribe in the episode's description. Now, over the course of July, bishop Wright is focusing on continuing education, and so we have four special guests from the Diocese of Atlanta, and our first guest today is the Reverend Patricia Templeton. She serves as the rector at St Dunstan's Episcopal Church. Welcome, Tricia.
Tricia:Thank you, I'm glad to be here.
Melissa:We're glad you're with us. So you prepared the devotion this week and that you named receiving and it's really based off of the Good Samaritan. And that you named Receiving and it's really based off of the Good Samaritan. You shared a personal story where you happened to be in Malaysia, were down on your luck and you were robbed, right.
Tricia:Yeah, yeah. I was in Malaysia and someone broke into the hotel room in the middle of the night and when I woke up in the morning, like every well, my camera and all my money were gone. They left my passport, fortunately, but everything else was gone.
Melissa:That's incredible. And so wait, they broke into your hotel room. You slept through it Well.
Tricia:I was. I slept through it, which is a little disconcerting.
Melissa:Holy moly. Yeah, that's wild. And so why don't you just kind of sum up, I guess, how long ago is this?
Tricia:Oh, this was a long time ago. It was when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand from 1980 to 83. And it was our summer break and we I was with some friends we were going to take the train from southern Thailand all the way to Malaysia, Singapore, through Malaysia to Singapore, with stops along the way, and this was our first stop.
Melissa:I have really appreciated the fact that you kind of invited us the reader, if you will to come into the story in a number of different ways, and so you asked a really good question, kind of like how, with whom or with what do you identify in the story, right, what would you say about that overall?
Tricia:Well, you know, the Good Samaritan is is almost trite it's. You know, it's such a well-known story and it's lost a lot of its punch, you know, because now we think of Samaritans as all good. In Jesus' day, jews hated Samaritans and I think when we read that story we all want to think that we're the good guy. You know, we're the good Samaritan, we're not going to walk by somebody in need and ignore them. We're the good Samaritan, we're not going to walk by somebody in need and ignore them. But I don't know, I've never, all these years, I've never put myself in the to identify with the victim lying in the ditch. And that just seemed to me to be a new way for me to think of the story. And when I thought of that, I thought of what happened to me in Malaysia many, many years ago.
Melissa:You talk about the Thai woman who you met at the pool at the quote expensive nice hotel. Yeah, you owned your privilege and your whiteness, so though you were staying at kind of a more seedy hotel. You said you met this Thai woman who happened to be a prostitute, and I got to ask so how did you know that?
Tricia:Well, first of all, you know there is a lot of prostitution in the open in Thailand and it was not unusual for for men, western men who were in the country for an extended time to maybe it's a high end prostitute, but they will have a woman. You know that they are paying to be their companion for the time that they're there and maybe it turns into something more. You know, she called him her boyfriend, but I, you know that's, and maybe he, maybe he, turned out to be that, but, um, it certainly started out as a transaction, a business transaction, their relationship, yep. And so what happened is my yeah, she did.
Tricia:And how I got there was my friends. You know, I had zero money. My friends didn't have enough money for us, to all of us to continue the trip and, you know, nobody used credit cards then. So they gave me enough money to get back to Thailand and stay in this seedy, really seedy hotel, and there was also a nice hotel in town that catered more to westerners, and I knew that if I went there and sat by the pool, no one would question me because I was white. And that's how I struck up a conversation with this woman, um, and when she heard my story.
Tricia:you want me to just go ahead and tell you the rest yeah when she heard my story, um, she insisted that she and her boyfriend take me out to dinner that night. And the next morning there was a knock on my door at the CD Hotel and that day I was taking the bus to meet other people to do a workshop in Southern Thailand. Anyway, she came to my door and she had breakfast for me. She had a box lunch for me for the bus ride and gave me money for an emergency.
Melissa:Wow, I just got goosebumps because, like, talk about going above and beyond, which is really what the Samaritan did. So the Samaritan didn't just intervene and pick, you know, and take the person who is lying in a ditch to a hotel, but also then paid it forward right and said I'll handle and I'll take care of everything, even beyond right, when I guess I'm curious if you've seen this kind of stuff happen in the day to day, in how you you've been the rector at St Dunstan's. And so you know your neighborhood pretty well, I would imagine. Yeah, how have you seen stories of the Good Samaritans show up in in your, you know, in the everyday milieu of the neighborhood of St Dunstan's?
Tricia:Well, the neighborhood that St. Dunstan's is in is a very different kind of neighborhood, because we are the only non-residential building on our street and we're also probably the smallest building. We are surrounded by mansions, mega mansions that are millions and millions of dollars, which is not the case when the church was built. So you know, it's a different kind of neighborhood. But I can think of two examples One from the pandemic when schools closed and there were women in Sandy Springs, which is the suburb that we're in, who realized that their, their kids classmates were not going to be receiving breakfast and lunch at school and what a toll this was going to take on families. And so it started out with a bunch of moms just buying groceries, extra groceries, and people started showing up and then bringing more food and it ended up to be this big food pantry which is still going on now and it's 100 percent volunteers. They do all sorts of other things. My congregation, while the building was shut down, every week people brought a mountain of food to the church door and then we took it to the pantry. So I mean, I think that has a bit of the Good Samaritan of us being the Good Samaritan at that time, not being the ones in the ditch and my congregation right now is in a good, I think, a good Samaritan kind of way.
Tricia:We were planning to sponsor a refugee family and all we knew was that they were going to get here before January 20th, when we knew that everything was going to shut down for refugees. We didn't know where they were coming from or how many there were or when exactly they were coming. And the Tuesday before the inauguration on January 20th my outreach chair got a phone call from the refugee services and said would you be able to take two families instead? So we're trying to get as many people in as we can? And she just automatically said yes, and the congregation stepped up and turns out it's really one large extended family. But it's been really amazing to just kind of sit back and watch what has happened with that.
Melissa:I do have a question about, I guess, being quote the victim you know being the person, or you know who who is quote lying in the ditch, if you will. You were down on your luck and someone came alongside you maybe someone you might not have expected to give you a leg up, you know a help up and went above and beyond, and she didn't really typically fit the idea of what somebody who would go above and beyond for somebody else would right, based upon our own preconceived ideas. I'm curious about what you think about receiving versus taking. Got any insight for that?
Tricia:Yeah, I've been thinking about that. You know we don't want to be the ones. Most people I know don't want to be the ones who are the receivers. You know, I remember when I was growing up in an Episcopal church, the rector said every Sunday before the offering remember the words of our Lord Jesus, how it is more blessed to give than to receive. You know that message is hammered in pretty early on, although I later realized that we never have a record of Jesus actually saying those words.
Tricia:Paul says Jesus said that. So maybe he did or maybe he didn't, you know, but whether or not it's still, I think that is ingrained in a lot of us. And it can be hard to be the one on the receiving end. And I've had to do that a lot lately because my husband died of COVID a couple of years ago and you know, all of a sudden the congregation's taking care of me instead of me taking care of the congregation, and it was both wonderful and hard, you know, to receive all that. So, but you know, sometimes you're in a position when you're in the ditch and you really do need to be the one who receives.
Melissa:You're in the ditch and you really do need to be the one who receives. Yeah, I kind of feel like we're living in a time where people see receiving as weakness, exactly, exactly and. I don't know that it is. Yeah, I don't see receiving.
Tricia:I mean, you know there is a fine line between receiving and taking and I think that sometimes people feel like they are taking, despite the fact that something is being freely given as a gift. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Melissa:I think that's true, Tricia. So you are rector and I'm curious if you have any final words of wisdom tied to this very incredibly real modern day parable.
Tricia:Not to let our preconceived ideas of who's going to be the helper keep us from receiving, or from just being able to appreciate that people who we might not expect to be there might be there with just what we need in a time of trouble. Be open to that, you know, kind of like respecting the dignity of every human being. You know, the most unlikely person might be just the person who has what you need at that moment.
Melissa:That's right. Thanks be to God, Tricia. Thank you so much for spending time with us. Thank you for your reflection and folks, we're grateful for you for tuning in to For People. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at Bishop Rob Wright, or by visiting www. forpeople. digital. Please subscribe, leave a review and we'll be back with you next week. You.