Dean Sampson called to the priesthood at 7

LAST Saturday morning, the senior Canon in the Anglican Diocese of Trinidad and Tobago, Rev Canon Frank Caesar, presented Dean-designate Rev Fr Colin Sampson to the Lord Bishop, the Right Rev Calvin Bess, to be installed as Dean of the Cathedral Chapter and Rector of the Holy Trinity Cathedral Parish. The son of a Presbyterian father, the late Hayes Sampson, and an Anglican Barbadian mother, Cicely (nee Vaughan), the new Dean was both baptised and received at Greyfriars Church of Scotland by the late Rev Andrew Mc Kean. Not only did Colin have a Roman Catholic education at St Mary’s College, but when his great grandmother, Nurse Iris “Edith” Thomas, brought him into the world, she immediately offered him up at St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church and also the African Methodist Episcopal Church, both in Newtown. Dean Sampson explained:
 
“There might be an old African tradition where the male child who opens the womb is the one who is offered to God and it is done by the matriarch of the family, in my case it was my great grandmother.” Having felt the call to the priesthood by about age seven, Dean Sampson chose to enter the Anglican priesthood as very often, he attended St Michael and All Angels afternoon service with his mother. He entered Codrington College in Barbados in 1976, and two years later, before completion of  the three-year degree course for the Bachelor of Arts in Theology, was ordained deacon while on vacation in Trinidad. “I finished my final year as a deacon, a procedure I strongly recommend to the Province of the West Indies in that Codrington provides excellent ritual and liturgical training. I also had two years of pastoral training in the parish of St Stephen’s at Black Rock in Barbados under Father Frank Marshall, now Canon Marshall and ironically Dean-designate of Barbados, so that I was very glad to have him attend my ordination service.”

Dean Sampson’s priestly journey to the top of the Cathedral Chapter started there in 1979 as an assistant curate to Dean Rawle Douglin. He served until 1986, while filling in quite often at other parishes when clergy were on holiday and got to know the diocese including Tobago. He was ordained a priest on January 5 1980 and, not yet 50, will celebrate his silver anniversary next year. From 1986, the young priest became immersed in the work of the diocese, before leaving in 1993 for Christ the King in Freeport, Grand Bahamas, moving the same year to St George The Martyr with St Monnica Providenciales, Turks and Caicos Islands. Father Sampson returned in 1996 as Chaplain at the Missions to Seamen and Sunday duties in various parishes until his appointment as rector at Christ Church in Cascade in 2001, and finally at St Patrick’s, Mount Pleasant, Tobago, from 2003 until, as he said in his first sermon as Dean: “The son has wandered far and wide and has come back home as Daddy.” 

And although Trinity is not a big parish, it is a big job. Bishop Bess explains in the November Anglican Outlook: “Father Sampson has to provide ministry to more than the parishioners of the Cathedral. He faces an ever-changing environment with many and varied challenges. Among them, he has to bring the presence of Christ to bear on minds that are dominated by competition rather than compassion.” As is his custom when going into a new parish, Dean Sampson has long started to acquaint himself with the parish’s active ministry by opening up as many filing cabinets as possible and reading. “This situation is intense as there is so much to be read. I also have no full time curate at the moment. I need to know past vision, past activities so that at least for the time being I can work along with that until any necessary changes have to be made. It is better not to rock the boat too soon even though you realise eventually the boat has to be rocked. If you follow that course, they will realise we are all rocking together in harmony.”  

On a personal level, Dean Sampson remembers “as a child my father always told me be ambitious, aim for the top.  While in a worldly sense that is good advice, during my own ministry I have had to filter through the spiritual from the material so that I try to line up with what God is calling me to do rather than what I myself might be interested in doing.” The Dean is young, vibrant, and unafraid to speak his mind on any subject. He still remembers the helplessness of dealing with a system that he was not happy with when, as a young man just out of college, he worked for a short while at the St Michael’s School for Boys. “I was not happy with the system and to this day do not think I am happy about the system by which children enter and leave that Home, which is Anglican with Government involvement. We are indeed a Republic, but we have a heavy colonial heritage which we have to disassemble and think afresh how to chart a course as a Republic nation.” 

The Dean, like the majority of our leaders, was educated following the British system. “Remember ‘Dan is the Man in the Van.’ Thanks to our  calypsonians and philosophers who tried to guide us into a new way, we started to break out of that path. My personal grouse is why do we not have books of old calypsoes taught as English textbooks in our schools?” He hopes for a new pattern of raising leaders within the communities, who will be proud to call Trinidad and Tobago home, and who will be proud to make Trinidad and Tobago a place that the rest of the world will watch with intense fascination. “It is not happening now. The big minds are grabbed up by the northern countries. If there is a vision for 20 years from now and it does not happen, we cannot blame God, we cannot blame the prophets.

We can only blame ourselves and our lack of work that goes towards fulfilling a vision. We must put all our efforts into asking God to help with one thought at a time because we live in an age of multi-tasking, but in our relationship with God we need a clear focus. We need to recognise even if we never understand who God is, that God is. We need to be still and quiet in his presence which not many people are. The world is too noisy. Earthquake, fire and wind, he is not there. We must listen for the still small voice that is God’s.”