But saying no to one thing meant saying yes to another, she says. After Crafton was forced because of her health to retire as the rector of New York’s St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in early 2002, a project she had begun with parishioners became the conduit to one of her most popular ministries today: www. geraniumfarm.org.

In May 2001, she started writing love letters from “Electronic Mother Crafton,” or “eMo.” The mission quickly grew to reach many subscribers both within and outside of her parish.

Crafton did not learn cyber-priesting in seminary. In fact, the whole endeavor surprised her because, as she says, “I always hated computers. I could barely press ‘send.’”

Although geraniums bloom in the windows of her bepurpled house in Metuchen, N.J., Geranium Farm is virtual reality, “a spiritual harvest of the thoughts and prayers of thousands of people.” Crafton likens writing eMos to “praying ex tempore,” about which she says she was always good.

Weaves personal with pastoral

She often mentions her daughters and granddaughters, her husband Richard Quaintance (“Q”) and her felines Kate, What’s-Her-Name, Gypsy and little Noodle (B.C. Crafton could teach T.S. Eliot a thing or two about the naming of cats). She writes about her flowers, her passions, her politics and her unrequited longing for hummingbirds. Humor and reflection and learning shine through.

She envelopes, frames, undergirds and laces the personal with the pastoral and spiritual; even when she doesn’t write specifically of one or the other, each is there in her spirit and signature. She describes her messages as “middle of the road, not edgy, but not lukewarm either.”  Something in the eMos often taps into someone’s heart. When that happens, it’s Christ at work,” she says. “It’s not hard to see I’m a Christian, but many ‘farmers’ are not.”

Ten thousand people subscribe to Geranium Farm. Subscriptions are free, “always and forevermore,” although Crafton accepts contributions gratefully. The farm makes money by selling books -- about 25 titles (“I’m very careful in my selection”) -- and subsidizes much of her demanding and popular work as a spiritual director.

She is also starting a program called Parish Partners in Spiritual Direction to provide a director one day a month. “Rich churches should pay. Poor ones shouldn’t,” she says. “I let the churches decide which they are.”

Crafton incorporated Geranium Farm and assembled a board (one of its tasks is to remind her to mind her health). She wanted a board to help her think of ways Geranium Farm can support “the work of the church and of people growing in Christ or people who have long since ceased to pay Him mind or people scared of Him.”

For morning people

She enjoined “a young genius,” Matt Gai, who lives in Clearport on Long Island, N.Y., and whom she’s never met, to design a website. “I tell him what I want, and he finds a way to show it graphically,” she says.  Gai’s webmastering lets Crafton record audios of her eMo each day, and it allows “farmers” to light a prayer candle and to “talk” to each other. “The eMos are for morning people like me,” explains Crafton. “The bulletin board is for people up late.”

Each morning after reading Morning Prayer, Crafton e-mails “Let us bless the Lord” to a band of people praying in their own oratories, in their own time. “Into the mysterious ether it flies, and soon the answers begin to appear in my inbox. ‘Thanks be to God,’ says one after the other,” she writes in the Introduction to Let Us Bless the Lord, her first volume of meditations on the Daily Office.

Fueled by Morning Prayer, she then writes her eMo for the day with little fear that she won’t come up with an idea. “I don’t think God would set me in front of the computer without giving me something to say,” she says.  Although Crafton misses being a parish priest, she likes that Geranium Farm, via the Internet, extends her ministry -- and spreads the Gospel -- “to people the church would never reach.”