faith! - Marie Askins

Over the arc of Marie Askins’ life, she has seen technology move from a radio crystal to an operator-connected telephone system to a dialing phone system to cell phones. And she confesses, the most recent changes have been fast, furious and “frustrating” to keep up with.

“Very,” she noted with a smile.

“Sometimes I tap a button and everything works. And then I tap and it freezes.”

Ah, life in 2022.

Prior to the pandemic, Marie, who turned 99 in February, was a regular at the 8 a.m. service. You could count on seeing her sitting on the lectern side, and if you looked closely at her back right shoulder, you would always see a jeweled butterfly pin attached to her sweater or jacket.

“I have about 28 butterflies and I noticed that everyone puts pins on the front of their clothing, but there’s never anything on the back, so I started putting them on the back for people behind me to see. I have always loved butterflies because of their beauty.”

Once the pandemic struck, Marie’s butterflies stayed home, cocooning just like her. Out of an abundance of caution, and because movement is challenging for her due to osteoporosis, she has not yet been able to return to in-person church.

Marie came to the Episcopal Church while growing up in Spokane, Wash., thanks to the invitation of childhood friends who were twins.

“My father was an invalid from the time I was a year old until he died when I was 10, so we didn’t go to church as a family. I would go with whomever I was friends with. I saw lots of different varieties and a few that scared me to death,” she said, recalling with a chuckle churches she referred to as “holy rollers.”

But in high school, twin sisters Neta and Nada invited her to Spokane’s tiny Episcopal Church. Marie was hooked, and has been an Episcopalian ever since.

“I liked the formality, the peacefulness and calmness of it.”

A number of years later, when she married a Baptist, Joseph John David Askins III, and moved to the small South Carolina town of Harstville, she mostly attended First Baptist Church with John’s mother and sister.

John’s tour of duty with the Air Force in Europe was interrupted by an illness that left him hospitalized in Italy with an extremely high fever. He was sent back on a hospital ship to a hospital in New Jersey, and then discharged.

Marie still recalls the Christmas he was gone and how they wrapped presents for him thinking he would be home. But because correspondence with him had stopped by the time Christmas arrived, they left the tree up with the unwrapped gifts beneath it. Finally, in late January, they learned he was hospitalized in Italy. Not long afterwards, he was sent to New Jersey, where Marie went with his mother and other family members to pick him up and bring him home.

In 1950, as a group of people in Columbia were starting St. Martin’s, John was transferred with the S.C. Employment Bureau to the capital city. An invitation to a breakfast gathering at St. Martin’s is what convinced John to join in the founding of the new Episcopal parish. Soon Marie, John and their two young children, Lynda and Cregg, were attending church and Sunday school each week.

And like families today, getting everyone out the door was “hectic,” Marie recalled. “They still remember going to Edisto Ice Cream Shop in Trenholm Plaza after church for their weekly ice cream.”

During these years Marie was busy raising her family and participating in various guilds that St. Martin’s offered. She loved the guild-sponsored fall festival and all the preparations of Advent and Christmas.

Christmas is especially meaningful to Marie because of her deep admiration for Mary.

“The knowledge of what Mary went through to be a mother ... she was such a brave person,” Marie said. “And what a tremendous responsibility knowing she was giving birth to the Christ.”

That admiration has only grown as Marie has aged, she said. She has found comfort in thinking of Mary’s life throughout the pandemic, especially as she has considered families trying to care for their children. A former kindergarten teacher and administrator at The Timmerman School, Marie has a special love for young children.

That affection for children also impacted her experience of the pandemic. As a former teacher, she felt such concern for how children had to deal with school throughout the experience. “I just figured a few months, and we’d be back to normal. I never experienced anything like it.”

No one had.

And while that technology that Marie has seen change so much throughout her lifetime saved the day in many ways throughout the lockdown, Marie agrees that online church can’t replace sitting next to someone you love and taking part in the worship service.

“It just isn’t the same,” she said, adding, however, that if there is one thing her long life has taught her, it is this: “You adjust. You adjust a lot.”

Marie Askins has been a member of St. Martin’s since 1951.