Carrie Jones
just now
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by First National Bank.
BAR HARBOR—The sun has been streaming through the stained-glass windows of St. Saviour’s for generations.
It has colored the saints, the angels, the flowers, fish, and the bits of Heaven imagined in glass, casting them across the old church in Bar Harbor. Now, on the roof above those windows, the church is beginning to catch some of that same sunlight for a more practical purpose.
Seventy solar panels have been installed on the roof of St. Saviour’s, enough, church representatives say, to produce about 138 percent of its annual electricity needs for the church and rectory.
On Sunday, Oct. 4, the congregation will gather on the lawn to bless those panels and the community is invited to join them.
It is an unusual sort of church ceremony, perhaps: partially a blessing of machinery, of photovoltaic cells and electrons and the promise of lower electric bills. But at St. Saviour’s, the panels are being understood as something older and larger than technology. They are an expression of a charge the congregation says it hears every Sunday—to care for what it calls “this fragile earth, our island home.”
“Our board, like many non-profit boards, has been struggling with ideas to help make our property more sustainable. At the same time, we felt a moral imperative to lean in to greener energy, to be the best possible stewards of God’s creation,” The Rev. Canon Cricket Cooper explained.
In a letter to all of the parishes in the Diocese of Maine in November 2025, their bishop, the Rt. Rev. Thomas Brown, wrote that Christians have a responsibility to care for the earth, and urged parishes to consider renewable energy as a response to a warming planet.
St. Saviour’s Vestry voted to begin researching solar companies around the same time.
Bishop Brown’s charge to promote and maintain the parish in any environmentally conscious way that the congregation could had been tried previously, but the cost for solar panels had been too prohibitive.
When Versant’s electric rates increased by more than 25% in 28 months and with rising fuel costs, one parishioner said, the plan passed.
“Our array was put on our roof by the wonderful people of ReVision Energy. Interestingly, when the town of Bar Harbor came to do our inspection, Mike Gurtler said that he wasn’t worried at all about how our project went because it was being done by the top solar panel provider in the state of Maine, which is ReVision Energy,” she said.
There were two hiccups in the process. The first was town approval, which was given. The second was making sure that the National Registry of Historic Buildings and Places approved. It did and the historic preservation coordinator for Maine said that it didn’t hit a threshold for regulatory review.
While she was in seminary in New York City, Canon Cooper was impressed by a performance of the Missa Gaia (Earth Mass) by the Paul Winter consort.
“The music incorporates animal sounds- whales and wolves- into the music as a celebration of all of creation,” Canon Cooper explained. “It was performed for several years at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine as part of their blessing of the animals services honoring St Francis. Animals from the Bronx Zoo were famously paraded down the center aisle of this event!”
The timing of the blessing is fitting. The panels will be blessed on the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th-century friar whose love of the natural world has made him a patron saint of animals and, more broadly, of the environmental movement.
Francis did not have solar panels in mind when he wrote his “Canticle of the Sun” in 1225. But he looked at the natural world and saw something worthy of praise: Brother Sun, Sister Moon, wind and air, water, fire, and the earth that feeds us.
At St. Saviour’s, that old idea is being given a distinctly modern form.
The church is not simply blessing what sits on its roof. It is blessing, in its own way, the sunlight that makes the panels work, the earth the members hope to help protect, and the shared responsibility that brought them there.
“St Francis is known for his love of all creation, and on his feast day, October 4, many churches celebrate with a Blessing of the Animals. Francis was a strong believer in God’s goodness as seen through all of creation, and so in addition to honoring animals, he also is known as the author of the Canticle to the Sun,” Canon Cooper said.
Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
especially through my lord Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and you give light through him.
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.
Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars;
in the heavens you have made them bright, precious and beautiful.
Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,
and clouds and storms, and all the weather,
through which you give your creatures sustenance.
Be praised, My Lord, through Sister Water;
she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.
Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through whom you brighten the night.
He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.
Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth,
who feeds us and rules us,
and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.
— an excerpt from St Francis’ Canticle of the Sun:
The canticle and the Blessing of the Animals is not all St. Francis known for.
“Francis is also known for his emphasis on compassion and forgiveness, as seen in his prayer which is found in our Episcopal prayer books,” Canon Cooper explained.
Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is
hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where
there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where
there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where
there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to
be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is
in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we
are born to eternal life. Amen.
There is a person who helped move the project forward, but she has asked not to be named.
She has spent many hours helping bring the project to completion, but she doesn’t want the extra credit. For her, the accomplishment belongs to the congregation.
“As far as I’m concerned, I get my reward in Heaven and not here on Earth. Please do not use my name as the person responsible for this effort. The entire church supported it and made it happen….that is what counts!” she said.
That sense of shared responsibility runs through the congregation’s thinking about the solar project. It is not one person’s accomplishment, or even simply a church improvement project, but an effort by a community to put its beliefs into practice.
“We are excited about the event because we are—all of us—in this together. We can, as individuals and as organizations, all make a difference in caring for our earth. It is not a celebration just of ‘church solar panels’ but a reminder of the goodness of this life and this earth, a celebration of the sun that shines equally on us all, and that makes our life possible,” Canon Cooper said.
That idea—that sunlight belongs to everyone—may be the simplest bridge between the old saint and the new panels. Francis saw the sun as a gift to be praised. St. Saviour’s is trying to treat it as a gift to be stewarded, too.
“To say we are excited about this event would be trivializing it,” Canon Cooper said. “It’s not so much the event as it is the fact that the project we’ve been working on for over a year is finally complete.”
There is, however, one small piece left.
The church is waiting for the “go” from Versant before it can flip the switch.
The blessing comes first. The sunlight has been waiting all along.
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Rick Osann Art.
St. Saviour’s website.
ReVision Maine
A Climate To Thrive (for more about sustainable and energy initiatives and work in our area).
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/a-beastly-blessing-st-francis-day-at-manhattan-s-cathedral-church-of-st-john-the-divine
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ZYW3tgB10Wg?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
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