Signs of Belonging: Remembering Thomas Gallaudet and Henry Winter Syle

Every family has its own private language. I don’t mean regional dialects or local pronunciations, but entirely unique inventions. Those languages include the word your nephew made up because he couldn’t say macaroni or that hilarious phrase your spouse misheard that’s taken on a life of its own.

“Turn off the lights, we don’t have shares in ConEdison,” was a classic in my household growing up. I really thought this was a normal idiom of sorts, along the lines of asking someone who left the door open if they were “born in a barn.” It was only upon arriving at college that I discovered that this pronouncement is the sort of thing only the kids of stockbrokers hear. Who could have guessed?

Of course, the church has its own language, too. It has its particular words bound up in polity and practice and those words have their own origin stories. Much as we can trace languages along family trees —Indo-European languages giving way to Iranian, Germanic, and Slavic language branches—the vocabulary of our tradition calls upon fragments of history, words drawn from ancient languages, syllables carried forward from another time.

Linguistic family trees point us to the history of written and spoken languages, but the story of signed languages is much different. American Sign Language (ASL) traces its roots to French (Langue de Signes Française – LSF) but has much less in common with British Signed Language (BSL), for example. 

Prior to the founding of the American School for the Deaf in 1817, where ASL was taught, deaf people in the United States largely lacked a common language. Instead, communities like those on Martha’s Vineyard, where congenital deafness was common, used their own local languages. Individuals in places without a substantial deaf population might develop what are still called “home” or “kitchen” signs that had little utility beyond their family context. And the lack of a standard language system had ripple effects across all of society. 

Without communication, building community, including worshipping communities, was impossible. That’s why, on August 27, the Episcopal Church remembers two Episcopal priests who began to break down those barriers: Thomas Gallaudet, founder of the first deaf worshipping community, and Henry Winter Style, the first deaf clergyperson in the United States.

1. Communication 

You likely know Thomas Gallaudet’s name because Gallaudet University in Washington D.C., the preeminent educational institute for D/deaf* individuals, bears his name, but you may not know that this particular Gallaudet was an Episcopal priest who delayed his call to pursue deeper work in deaf education. The university is actually his brother Charles’s crowning achievement, the next step in a family legacy that includes his father Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet founding the American School for the Deaf.

After working as an educator for a time, Gallaudet continued on his path toward the priesthood. His father had been a Congregational minister and, at first glance, his pursuit of this call to ministry seems unremarkable. It certainly could be described as such, at least from the perspective of hearing communities. He was, after all, another well-educated white man in the 1850s; in that way, he was hardly unique. Nonetheless, as a priest who could communicate in fluent sign language, his ministry changed everything.

2. Community

Gallaudet seeded deaf ministries beginning at St. Anne’s Church in New York City, where the community worshipped primarily in the emerging American Sign Language as taught at the American School for the Deaf. Gallaudet also continued teaching, which was how he came to know Henry Winter Syle, a remarkable young deaf man educated at Trinity College and Yale University in Connecticut and St. John’s College in Cambridge, England. 

Henry Winter Syle was physically a bit frail, which was not uncommon for the time, but the fact that he was deaf set him apart when it came to his call to the priesthood. However, with Gallaudet’s support, he successfully pursued ordination; in 1876 Syle was ordained to the diaconate, becoming the first D/deaf person ordained to any denomination in the United States. He was ordained a priest in 1883 and went on to found All Souls Church for the Deaf in 1886. Unlike Gallaudet’s worshipping community at St. Anne’s, All Souls was the first church designed specifically to serve D/deaf worshippers.

3. Communion

We cannot live into our baptismal promises, into our commitment to community, into the unity of the Holy Eucharist unless we can communicate with each other and unless we are able to experience both windows and mirrors in our faith. 

Windows and mirrors is an educational theory that says that we need to both see and understand the lives of those who are different from us – looking through a window – and see ourselves as the center of stories – looking in a mirror – in order to experience true inclusion. 

Too often, our parishes hold only mirrors; we file into pews with people who are mostly similar to us, who speak our shared language, both literally and figuratively. Gallaudet grew up in a family where, even as a hearing child, deafness was part of his story because his mother was deaf; he was what we would call a CODA today (child of D/deaf adults). He knew about the third option that educators have added to the framework: the sliding glass door that carries us from the outside and into action alongside those who are different from us, making us part of the same story.

When we talk about windows and mirrors in the life of the church, then, it is not enough to emphasize language access. An interpreter provides access. Equal opportunities to lead – to pursue ordination, to serve in ministries across the Church – that is what inclusion looks like. That is communion: Gallaudet and Syle side by side, offering the bread and the wine, equal ministers in the Church, equal members of the communion of saints through all ages. There they are, like Pentecost day, full of language to understand and to be understood by all those around them.

*The written form D/deaf is used to denote both those for whom deafness is an identity and a culture (Deaf) as well as those with limited hearing who may not identify as part of a larger culture or community in this way (deaf).