hat's it like to be the easternmost Jesuit in the United States?"

That question has come my way often in my eight years as pastor of St. Joseph Parish in Eastport, Maine. "How did a Jesuit get to Eastport?" might be a better question. The answer is, I followed my heart and Jesuit history.

Jesuits were first here in the 1600s as missionaries to the Passamaquoddy people. In the 1850s Jesuits were active in "the Maine Mission," and several served St. Joseph's, including Fr. John Bapst, later tarred and feathered in a notorious incident of anti-Catholic violence in Maine.

In 1972, Fr. J. Stanley Bowe, SJ, came to Eastport to minister to the Passamaquoddy Indian community, reestablishing the Jesuit connection. I visited Eastport often in the 1980s, grew to love the community, and volunteered to come when the pastor's death created a vacancy.

Author Fr. Paul Sullivan, SJ, pastor of St. Joseph's Church in Eastport, Maine, is also a gardener, actor, and chef. If he wanted to, he could set his alarm clock just right and be the first Jesuit in this country to see the sun come up.

Eastport, Maine's most downeast city, is on Moose Island. It borders Canada and juts out into the Bay of Fundy. The hills of New Brunswick are just in the distance. The setting is beautiful. Campobello, Franklin Roosevelt's island, lies across the harbor.

But as the local saying goes, "You can't eat the scenery." Nearly everyone in this county, one of the nation's poorest, makes ends meet with several jobs and seasonal work, such as picking blueberries or making Christmas wreaths.

It is no different for me. As pastor of St. Joseph's I wear a number of hats: liturgy celebrant, parish secretary, bookkeeper, handyman, and chief cook and bottlewasher.

Before I came to Eastport, I taught at Jesuit high schools, Cheverus in Portland, Maine, and Bishop Connolly High in Fall River, Massachusetts, my hometown. There my schedules were determined by class bells and calendar deadlines. But as a pastor in Eastport, the only bells I hear are the church bells that at times compete with the foghorn off Dog Island. Life cycles and tides are better measures of time in this parish.

Eastport has never lost its island character, though a causeway links us to the mainland. Just offshore is Old Sow, reputedly the largest whirlpool in the hemisphere and a good symbol for life here. Like the downeast Maine tides, which run 25 feet, there have been strong forces in the history of this community. During the War of 1812 Eastport was under British occupation. Waves of Irish immigrants made their first landfall in Eastport after crossing on sailing ships that returned home loaded with timber from Maine's forests. Most of the Irish headed to Portland and Boston, but enough stayed to begin building a church in 1828. A later group of Irish, recruited from County Antrim for the ironworks in Pembroke, built St. John in 1855. Many are buried in the cemetery next to the church.

For the last 50 years Eastport's tide has been going out. The sardine packing industry was born here and dominated life until the 1950s. "Quoddy," a 1930s-era plan to harness tides for electricity, promised prosperity for a while but came to naught. Development of a port that would have the deepest water at dockside (over 60 feet) of any East Coast city is the present hope.

St. Joseph's has endured losses as people moved away in search of jobs, but those who remained have become the core of a remarkable Church community. "There is something special about this church," visitors often remark. The building is indeed attractive, but it is a sense of the community-Church in the truest sense-that they are catching.

Fall

When the days shorten in fall, parish council chair Lya Hajos starts rounding up crews for our monthly Second Saturday suppers. From September to May these suppers offer everyone a time to socialize over great meals at the unbeatable price of $5, which helps the parish. Turkey and roast beef have been on the menu, but three years ago, ex-Navy Chief Rickey Jamieson suggested we roast a pig. He knew that if he could do one aboard ship, we should manage all right here, but it was a novel experience getting up at 4 a.m. to set that giant grill ablaze.

The Parish Rummage Sale is another sure sign of this season. This twice-yearly event (also held in spring) is eagerly awaited by those wanting to clean house or find clothing or household treasures at bargain prices.

Eastport, in one of the poorest counties in the United States, fights the economic battles many small towns do: lack of opportunities creates unemployment and spurs emigration of its sons and daughters. They make their way back, however, for celebrations and memories.

Winter

The congregations of Eastport's churches, though small, have developed a great spirit of ecumenical cooperation, including jointly sponsoring a food pantry started by Bruce Cummings, then pastor of the Eastport Full Gospel Church. St. Joseph's Lessons and Carols, an Advent service taken from the Anglican tradition and carried out here with choirs and readers from local churches, is another example. Our own Christmas Eve mass includes Fr. John Phelps, rector of the Episcopal church, his wife, and members of their congregation in our choir. Then, later in the evening a number of St. Joseph parishioners join me in singing at Christ Church. And last year some of the churches began a joint Scripture study program. Having clergy from the Roman Catholic, Episcopal, and Methodist churches joining as discussion leaders is a strong witness of the bonds between the churches.

In January, our Second Saturday supper observes the visit of the Three Kings and the end of the Christmas season with a Twelfth Night celebration. This year our chefs served a dinner based on the carol "Twelve Days of Christmas," Cornish game hens standing in for French hens as the main course. Brenda Booker, a Christ Church parishioner, made her mother's English Christmas pudding which, served flaming, topped off the meal.

This February I began leading a group of parishioners in the Spiritual Exercises; we meet weekly for mass and discussion, a schedule that will continue through early summer. I have also instituted the old Jesuit custom of the Novena of Grace in March, a period of prayer under the patronage of St. Francis Xavier. There may be only a dozen at the morning or evening masses these nine days, but to hear a week or a month or six months later that a prayer was answered has been a great reward.

"St. Joseph's is on the main road into town, and nothing in this yard goes unnoticed," says Fr. Sullivan, an avid raiser of lilies and other flowers, an antidote to the months of cold.

Spring

Lent is highlighted by two popular interchurch prayer events. One is a Soup and Sermon series held on Mondays at noon. Each week a different church prepares a reflection or prayer and a lunch of soup and bread.Up to fifty people attend and enjoy the sermon and the always delicious soups; this year Joyce Weber's corn chowder received rave reviews even over St. Joseph's turkey-vegetable-barley offering.

The other spring event is the Good Friday pilgrimage. If you had been on the streets last Good Friday night you would have seen the largest cavalcade of cars since the Tigerettes, Shead High girls' basketball team, won the state championship in February. This time the cars were going from church to church, each serving as a station of the cross and an opportunity for prayer in its own style on an aspect of the crucifixion.

Summer

Summer is beautiful, with clear days and pleasantly cool nights. Maine's coastal fogs usually clear by mid morning, and a number of downtown storefronts, vacant for the winter, come alive. One houses a gallery operated by local artists, others host craft shops, while the historical society's gift shop opens every day.

And then there are flowers. Maybe they are in reaction to our six months of bare trees and brown earth. Maybe the cool sea breezes are just right for flowers. But practically every doorstep has splashes of color, the favorite being the tall purple, white, or red spikes of lupine.

With the warmer weather, thoughts turn to July 4th, a day that for Eastport is a combination of Christmas and New Years, but with good weather. Many of Eastport's sons and daughters who have left over the years in search of greater opportunity return to this beautiful place for this weeklong celebration that includes parades, dances, and class reunions.

Summer does bring others to our town, people "from away," as anyone is who wasn't born here is called. Many are just passing through, looking for something other than Bar Harbor with its wall-to-wall crowds. Our biggest Sunday mass attendance of the year will be the Sunday nearest the 4th, after which we have a Welcome Home coffee hour on the lawn.

You should have heard the applause that erupted as our joint clergy marched in the July 4th parade last year! There we were, Rev. Nancy Huntington (Methodist), Frs. John Phelps and Thomas Reed (Episcopal), Sr. Janice Murphy and Fr. Rank Morin (St. Ann's Passamaquoddy parish), Fred Engel (Unitarian), members of the Congregational Church, and I, holding church banners aloft.

August Fair, St. Joseph's last summer fling, offers craft tables, food, games for the young or young-at-heart, and in recent years, the popular dunk tank. Yes, the pastor takes a turn there too.

By late August the chill is in the air by 3 p.m. Tourists (never more than a modest tide here) leave for the season. Then it is time to call the Second Saturday supper cooks and begin again. The cycles of life and the year begin anew.

There is a strength and a spirit at Fr. Sullivan's parish that makes itself known in many ecumenical connections with other Eastport congregations.

A Community

My life in Eastport is not all work and church. I like to garden and have built up a good display of asiatic and day lilies. Tending garden is good exercise and a great way to stay in touch with everybody, as St. Joseph's is on the main road into town, and nothing in this yard goes unnoticed.

I've also been working on my cooking skills and really enjoy that as a way to relax with friends. My culinary tastes are eclectic but tend to run to northern Italian (I have discovered the joys of making pizzelles, those Italian cookies done on a griddle) and many variations on classic sourdough bread.

Let me modestly mention my acting, too. During my first year here parishioner Lou Esposito asked me to take "just a tiny" part in a play hosted by Stage East, our community theater, which I've been a part of since, having played Lazar Wolf in Fiddler on the Roof and Prospero in The Tempest.

I take a break a couple of weeks each year when Fr. Patrick Ryan, SJ, comes from Boston College to hold the fort and I head for Mt. Hope Bay in southern Massachusetts and a bit of sailing. I do get away for a few days monthly to visit family in Massachusetts and run a few parish errands since we are not near any major shopping center.

I also get the opportunity to "check in" at the Jesuit community in Portland, 250 miles away. In an America magazine editorial Fr. Thomas Reese, SJ, observed that "one of the most enjoyable aspects of Jesuit life . . . is dinner table conversation." I don't experience that on a regular basis in Eastport; it's usually just me and Gremlin, my cat, for dinner. But Dick Roos, my Jesuit superior, makes the Portland house a warm and welcoming place for me and four other Jesuits who, like me, live at a distance from the nearest Jesuit community.

Eastport is no Shangri-La immune to the problems of modern life or the struggles of rural communities. How to pay for good schools? How to deal with drugs and alcohol and domestic violence? How to allay tensions between those who've always lived here and newer arrivals? These are the challenges to this community.

Yet for all that, Eastport is a very special and wonderful place, a place where one person can make a difference. Nobody is anonymous here. Folks joke that the only reason new people end up here is the federal witness protection program. That can't be true; everyone's life story is known five minutes after they arrive. I can give the Eucharist to everyone by name during all but the summer months. It also means that every funeral is the burial of a friend.

How is it to be the easternmost Jesuit in the United States? It is great. Eastport is a town with a strong sense of place. Its people express an active caring for each other, and St. Joseph's is a gutsy community building a future here "on the edge."