When I sat down with Martha Tiller on August 3, 2022, it was for an oral history interview. Martha had so many roles in the life of our church that I was aware of then. She rang the sanctus bells during Eucharist at nearly every six o’clock service. She was a legend for her dramatic telling of the Passion during the yearly Good Friday Tenebrae service—a service normally read, but in her case, recited entirely from memory. I knew her from these public-facing rules, and as the elderly woman that Dan and Ann Miller faithfully brought to the evening service with them. So when Mtr. Patricia asked me to consider interviewing her, I said certainly. Patricia told me that Martha had a story I wouldn’t believe. It was true. Martha’s was a story full of pain and despair, as well as restoration and hope. But it was a hard story, and one I didn’t know how to write. And so I sat with it, hoping the words would come, looking forward to when they would and when Patricia and I would return to her home to read it to her, to follow up on some cookie crumbs she had dropped during our talk, and to get her approval to publish it. On September 13, I learned that day would never come, for Martha had died.
Martha Tiller was raised in Orlando and, at the age of four, experienced a traumatic event that too many children do: her father died. At such an early age, it wrecked her, as might be expected, but what wrecked her all the more was a comment from a spiritual leader in her life that “God needed daddy in heaven.” She was angry: angry at a father that would leave her, and angry at a heavenly father that would steal her daddy away from her. This comment, probably well intentioned, caused harm far beyond what the speaker could have imagined—and cause harm it did. Whether the cause or an exacerbation of something that was already there, Martha’s early life was marked by mental illness and despair.
In spite of that, as a young woman, Martha lived something like a glamorous life seen from the outside. She had her first taste of radio at 15 with the local radio station WORZ. She moved to New York to study drama and radio, where she spent six years, including some for graduate study. She sang at historic Orlando hotels, like the Langford 1 and the Skyline. But in spite of all that she did, mental illness was never far away.
Her battle with mental illness began in earnest at age nineteen. She suffered a breakdown and made her first visit to the local psychiatrist Roger Phillips, who would be her psychiatrist for the next twenty-five years. He diagnosed her with manic depression, what we would now call bipolar disorder, and helped her through the years to deal with the symptoms of her illness. But it was just the symptoms, and the underlying illness remained present and powerful. In New York during graduate studies, she suffered a severe set back. Addicted to drugs to the point of experiencing an overdose, she felt trapped, and remembers one day saying matter of factly “God, you’re going to get me out of this.” She didn’t know how, and it certainly wasn’t a sublime moment. Rather, it was a quiet confidence that the God of Psalm 139, the God who is with us even when we make our bed in Sheol, would deliver her from it. For she was still in Sheol. She returned home to be hospitalized, and waited in Orlando for a spot at the Highlands Hospital 2 in North Carolina, which was a mental institution near Asheville. While there, she learned to sing and play the guitar, as well as how to play the “system,” as she called it, to get herself out as quickly as possible. It was also there that she first had a sense she needed to do something else spiritually. She returned to Orlando to sing at those hotels of yesteryear, and decided to return to school locally to become a teacher. But Sheol followed her to Orlando, and she was again there, suffering a crash.
Following her feeling at Highlands Hospital, she called up various churches in Downtown Orlando, not wanting to seek help at the church of her youth. She worked her way through the phonebook, hearing again and again that various pastors and priests could see her, but not until… until she reached the receptionist at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke. Within moments of her expressing a need, she heard the big, booming voice of Dean Gray come over the phone, asking, “How soon can you get here?” When she walked into Dean Gray’s office, to her recollection, he looked like Jesus. When she first walked into the Cathedral, she thought “I’m home.” At first, she couldn’t be join the church, because she couldn’t come to the instructional classes that were required at the time for membership. Again, though, Dean Gray met her at her place of need, and arranged time for private instructions so she could join.
She continued singing, continued going to school, continued seeing Dr. Phillips, and continued a pattern of collapse. One day, Dr. Phillips told her with a frankness unexpected of a professional psychiatrist, “Doctors can’t help you, we’ve tried. Only Jesus can help you.” And what Dr. Phillips meant wasn’t simple church attendance, but prayers for spiritual cleansing and deliverance—in other words, an exorcism. Martha’s response was a simple “what have I got to lose?” At the time, Bishop Folwell had licensed certain women at the Cathedral to perform prayers of deliverance. On July 12, 1974, Martha and a group of these women walked into the room across from the Dean’s office, and the women prayed deliverance over her. The experience was life changing. She remembers hearing herself speak as a small girl again, her twelve year old voice, forgiving God and her dad. The prayers took six intense hours, full of spiritual warfare. But, as Martha said, “I walked in a mess, I came out a miracle.” “The air was cleaner, the sky was brighter. I could take a deep breath. The mental illness was gone, the addiction was gone, it was all gone. God had delivered every part of me that day. And I have never been the same since.”
Martha’s story after that was one that she didn’t want to fully tell, because as is so often the case with a saint, she had a reticence to speak too highly of her own virtue. But it’s a story of continued and simple faithfulness. She joined a bible study that started in the parlor at the Cathedral, and joined every prayer group she could. She gave her testimony to the local television personality Al Chubb, and got back into doing Christian radio, simply spinning records and reading scripture on air. She attended the 6 p.m. service, serving chalice for years, until Covid prevented that—and then, ringing the bells to mark the consecration of the elements. She told me she first started attending the 6 p.m. when there weren’t enough men to be found to attend during one particular Super Bowl Sunday. She did Tenebrae so often that, when she tragically discovered the beginnings of macular degeneration, she also discovered just had it memorized.
That Tenebrae service felt like the core of her story in so many ways. She thanked God for her memory that she was able to put to such good use in his service and the service of his church. And she also practiced it. She told me that during Lent, she read the Tenebrae service every day, not only for practice, but because by Good Friday she felt it became so a part of her, so central to her, that she just couldn’t hold back—that it would just spill out. As she said, she loves telling that story because “that’s our life.” And we, the Cathedral and anyone else who happened in on any Good Friday service in the last decades, were the recipients of that overflowing grace.
And of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention her dogs. She showed me so many of her photos and awards from her years as a full time dog trainer, and I became friends with her latest companion during my time at her house. She even told me that her first meeting with Reggie and Sharri Kidd wasn’t at the Cathedral, but was at a dog show, and that they had become close friends over that shared affinity. I’d looked forward to becoming better friends with her dog, to hearing more of the tantalizing stories she just barely mentioned—Dean Gray’s being a priest in the Philippines captured by the Japanese during World War II, the time a fire broke out in the cathedral, and all the like. She had lived a long life marked by faith, hope, and restoration. And while I’m sad that I didn’t get to hear more of it and to read this history to her, I’m filled with hope that she’s enjoying the fruits of that life of faith and hope—and that she’s experiencing the love of a God who redeemed her through anger and trial.
1 https://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/os-joy-wallace-dickinson-1214-20141214-
column.html
2 Interestingly, the mental hospital where Zelda Fitzgerald went.
