Travis Helms transcends in the Tetons

Minister communes with ‘deeper reality’ through skiing, poetry and live music.

By Christina MacIntosh

ENVIRONMENTAL REPORTER

For Rev. Travis Helms, transcendence isn’t confined to the church or organized religion. “I’m always hungering for these peak experiences to be in communion or union with this deeper reality,” Helms said.

Helms, 42, who oversees the children, youth and family ministry at St. John’s Episcopal Church, gets in touch with the sublime through church, yes, but also through running up the Grand, seeing live music, reading poetry and backcountry skiing.

“I want to have a felt sense of this deeper reality, whether you call it God, the sacred beauty, wonder, quantum weirdness,” he said. “Whatever this deeper thing is that we can’t explain away through scientific analysis.”

Helms runs Campfire, a bimonthly storytelling and conversation series put on by St.John’s for people who identify as spiritual but not religious. It’s non-traditional, open and accessible, Helms said.

Rev. Jimmy Bartz, the rector at St. John’s, in part hired Helms to create the program,after Helms successfully started LOGOS, a liturgically-inflected poetry collective in Austin, Texas.

Helms, who grew up in Houston andAtlanta, was exposed to “a lot of forms of theology that felt incredibly toxic” in his youth. But he also was raised in the Episcopal church, had a fascination with the sacred and always felt more at home in church than anywhere else.

That said, Helms’ road to the pulpit w as meandering.

He attended college in New Hampshire, at first intending to major in ceramics before pivoting to literature and creative writing after falling in love with T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

The first time Helms read the poem,he was shaking. He was amazed that someone who had been dead for decades was able to communicate something to him that felt so real and vital. He wanted to create that experience for other people.

“All I wanted to do after that, and sort of all I still want to do, is write poems and put books into the world that resonate with people in meaningful ways,” Helms said.

Helms still considers himself a poet first and foremost.

“I feel like my day job is priesting,” he said. After graduating from college, Helms moved to San Francisco and worked for a classic rock music journal for a year. Afterward, he decided he wanted to travel and write the next greatAmerican poetry collection. But he also didn’t have health insurance.

For that reason, Helms joined the Peace Corps to accumulate life experience and do some good in the world. He taught English in Madagascar for two years.

Upon returning to Texas, he decided to go to divinity school, to deconstruct the ideas that he’d been subjected to in the South and find a more “life-giving” way to look at religion.

“There are many expressions of Christianity that have what I would call a very low anthropology,” he said, like the concept that humans are broken,mired in sin and enthralled to Satan.

“It feels like a very psychologically damaging and unimaginative way to look at the story,” he added.

When Helms reads the Bible, he sees Jesus as building relationships with marginalized and disenfranchised people to create a reality of love and liberation for all people. Helms thought that maybe he could do that too.

“My heart tells me that God is love, that spiritual and religious experience should be all about embodying more love and liberation in whatever way we can for more and more people,” Helms said. After seminary, Helms thought he still might like to be a college English professor. So he went to the University of Cambridge to get a Ph.D. in theology and literature, studying American transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. His mother died of pancreatic cancer while he was in England, and through a combination of hot yoga and theology, he was able to process the grief of her loss in a healthy way. Her death clarified his call to the priesthood.

He wanted to know what it was like to baptize a baby or to kneel at someone’s deathbed.

“I want to write about that kind of stuff and I want to live it with other people,” Helms said. “I’m standing on sacred ground and I’m having these beautiful interactions with people who are shaping who I am as a writer as well.”

Helms returned to Texas in 2015 and started working as a minister while finishing his dissertation. Getting ordained was a long process, because the church felt that Helms had gone“a little rogue.”

“The bishop basically said,‘Prove that you’re really committed to working in a church,’” he said.

Within a three month period in 2017, Helms was ordained as a deacon, got married and got his doctorate.

In 2019, he became the campus missioner of the University of Texas at Austin.

“Trying to walk beside people as they figured out that sense of purpose and calling in life was so much fun,” Helms said, though he was surprised by how much suffering students were carrying.

In the summer of 2020, Helms did a summer residency at the Chapel of the Transfiguration in Grand Teton National Park. He had been visiting the Tetons since 2006 to ski with friends who moved here after college.

“Jackson has always been the place that most makes my heart sing,” Helms said.

After his month in the Tetons in 2020, he told Bartz that if there was ever an opportunity for him to move to Jackson, he would take it. His opportunity came in 2022.

Jackson has been as amazing as Helms expected it to be, he said. He has been impressed with how intergenerational the community is — especially in the mountain adventure space — and the love and reverence people here have for the land.

“People in Jackson do see that there’s medicine in the wilderness all around us,” Helms said. “Even the rocks are vibrating at a frequency that our ears and auditory equipment can’t pick up in a heard way, but our bodies register.”

Helms is involved in activism through the church, which, through Browse ‘N Buy, donates to the Wyoming Immigrant Advocacy Project, One22 and Teton Youth and Family Services.

“We believe that affordable housing is the greatest moral crisis of our time — before ICE — that we’re trying to address in Jackson,” Helms said.

When Helms is not skiing, preaching or writing poetry, he is watching live music at Snow King or the Mangy Moose, trail running, fishing and climbing. He is slated to run an 100-mile ultramarathon this summer. “God wants you in your body doing what only you can do,” Helms said. “Every one of us has this unique constellation of gifts and loves and passions and frustrations that we’re trying to channel and harness in this effort to just do good in the world — among one another and for one another.”

Contact Christina MacIntosh at 307-732-5911 or environmental@jhnewsandguide.com.

Travis Helms oversees the children, youth and family ministry at St. John’s Episcopal Church.

CHARLIE NICK / NEWS&GUIDE

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Travis Helms