A MAN OF TWO ROBES
BEAUMONT JUDGE DOUBLES ASAN EPISCOPAL PRIEST
BEAUMONT— Aim moderate lover of coffee, Judge Keith Giblin talked fast as he convened his federal magistrate court.
Wrist-shackled and glum, defendant after defendant shambled into the near-empty Beaumont courtroom to hear the bad news. All business, Giblin advised of rights, pledged to appoint defense lawyers and laid out the potential punishment for each offense — punishment, in some cases, entailing sequential life sentences and half a million dollars in fines.
The morning session, lasting less than an hour, reflected modern life at its rawest.
Few if any of the dour souls on the business end of the judicial system likely suspected that the baldish, pudgy middle-aged man on the bench — once a federal prosecutor — is revered in this tough East Texas industrial city as a gentle-hearted saver of souls.
Keith Giblin is a man of many robes.
By day, Giblin — a one-time chemical plant laborer — handles pretrial proceedings for the Beaumont Division of the U.S. Eastern District of Texas. His off-duty hours are devoted to leading the faithful of St. Paul Episcopal Church in nearby Orange.
At 58, Giblin, now beginning his 13th year as judge, his third year as priest, is renowned as an oilpatch polymath. He’s a glutton for knowledge, who, while rearing four children with his nurse wife, Joyce, commuted to Houston to study law, then to Navasota to pursue religious studies.
“Here’s a guy who will spend midnight with his son, the only son he still has at home, working on his basketball career,” said Giblin’s colleague, U.S. Judge Thad Heartfield. “At midnight, he’s going over his sermons. He’s in the courtroom all day long. ... He’s probably one of the smartest, most dedicated, invigorated, energized judges I know or have met. ... I don’t know when the man sleeps.”
With an East Texas aw-shucks manner, Giblin deftly deflated the praise. His stamina, he asserted, is bolstered by prodigious coffee consumption — enough to prompt court staff to admonish him to slow his speech.
His life’s course? Driven by God. Even its most burdensome aspects — commuting to the Episcopal Iona School for Ministry near Navasota, say — were only blessings in disguise.
“The drive back and forth,” Giblin said, “gave me time to decompress.”
Modesty aside, Giblin’s professional growth reflects a remarkable rising above circumstances.
ABeaumont native, Giblin was the son of a Mobil refinery worker. “All my family worked for Mobil, my grandfather, my uncles,” he said. “Momwas a housewife.”
When Giblin graduated from Beaumont’s French High School, he followed the family trade, signing up for the labor gang at the local Goodyear plant. With time, he advanced to other positions — warehouse worker, tank truck driver and, finally, draftsman.
The technical-artistic position was realization of a longtime goal.
Within a year of joining Goodyear, Giblin took advantage of a company tuition-assistance program to enroll at Lamar State University to study drafting. Before graduating 10 years
later, he had abandoned the drafting major for electrical engineering, then for physics.
“I loved electrical engineering,” he said. “I loved physics. But during my last semester, I looked at my grades and decided that I really was a liberal arts person. That’s when I decided to go to law school.”
By that time, Giblin had been married five years. Shortly after graduating, the couple’s first child was born.
Giblin enrolled at Houston’s South College Texas of Law, making the threehour round-trip several times a week.
“It was known as a great school for working people,” Giblin said. “When I went to law school, I fell in love with it. The professors were nothing short of fabulous.”
During the three years Giblin pursued his law degree, he recalled, his wife’s job as an emergency room nurse largely paid the family’s bills.
The new lawyer followed his 1989 graduation with a short tour of duty in general law. When he learned of an opening with the Beaumont federal prosecutor’s office, he applied.
“I had done very little criminal stuff; no criminal prosecution,” he said. “I applied, and magically and mysteriously they hired me.”
The learning curve was steep, Giblin said, but colleagues provided training by example. “It took a while,” he said. “I did it for about 14 years.”
Beaumont U.S. Attorney Brit Featherston described Giblin as “an extremely smart guy.”
“When you first meet him, he has something of a low-keyed country approach, but by the time the initial conversation is over, you’re going, ‘Wow! This guy is sharp as a tack.’”
Alongtime friend who shares Giblin’s passion for bass fishing, Featherston asserted the prosecutor-turned-magistrate judge possesses “a touch.”
“It goes far beyond fishing,” he said. “He has an understanding of the world that a lot of people don’t have. When you walk away from him, you feel better about yourself. He’s a very positive influence.
In 2004, Beaumont’s federal judges unanimously chose Giblin to fill a vacant spot as magistrate judge. In that role, he conducts pretrial criminal and civil hearings and, at the request of both sides, civil trials.
When he recognized he would be handling cases involving intellectual property issues, he commuted to the University of Houston School of Law to pursue a master’s degree in that legal speciality.
Giblin said his years in the federal judiciary have heightened his sensitivity to human frailty.
“Sometimes,” he said, “good people make mistakes. There are some people who seem to make mistakes time after time. It’s hard sometimes when you go down a bad path to undo it. So many people took different roads than I did. Maybe they didn’t have the support I got.”
Although Giblin worked hard to put miscreants behind bars, he rejoiced if they eventually redeemed themselves.
“I was so happy for them,” he said.
Giblin’s understanding of humanity was informed, too, by his religious life. After an ecumenical childhood, he and his family joined a Beaumont Episcopal congregation.
“I saw the beauty of the liturgy,” he said, noting that he increasingly became involved in church work. “I sat on the vestry,” he said. “I became a reader. I helped wash dishes. It seemed the more active I became in church, the more fulfilled I became.”
Heartfield recalled that Giblin’s out-of-court conversations often drifted to religion.
“He began to come up to chambers talking about St. Paul and St. Matthew,” Heartfield said. “He’d do it in a funny way.”
Others in Beaumont’s federal judiciary told Giblin that he’d someday become a priest. As his religious life deepened, he began to take the idea seriously.
After a period of conversation with religious leaders and prayer, he decided to apply for admission to the Episcopal Diocese of Texas’ Iona School for Ministry.
The four-year program targets working students who want to enter the clergy as a second career. Classes meet one weekend a month at the denomination’s Camp Allen near Navasota.
Graduated deacons and priests often work for free at churches that cannot afford to pay clergy.
Mary Lenn Dixon, the school’s dean for diaconal and lay life formation, said Gilbin stood out among students.
Once, she said, he spoke to diocese leaders about how he came to his “spiritual call.”
“I remember being so moved by it,” she said. “I was so surprised. He was so composed. He was such a figure of authority and power. You just don’t think of the kind of vulnerabilities such people may have.”
Aperpetual student, Giblin said he reveled in the curriculum that was as demanding as anything he had encountered in law school.
“I got into church history, the Old Testament, the New Testament,” he said. “It was intense study. I loved it.”
Midway through his studies, Giblin was asked to work with the congregation at Orange’s St. Paul Episcopal Church.
By the time Giblin arrived, the church, a major Orange religious institution founded in 1863, no longer had a local priest. It’s Sunday attendance had dwindled to about 45.
Upon his ordination two years ago, Giblin became the old church’s new rector.
Most of Gilbin’s week is devoted to his duties on the federal bench. On Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, though, he trades his black robes for vestments.
“I’ve learned to manage my time,” he said of his work obligations. “I work on my homilies at midnight. I make hospital visits on my lunch break.”
Parishioners step in to handle many of the church’s day-to-day tasks.
“Everyone,” he said, “is part of the hands and feet of Christ.”
Giblin said the lessons of the courtroom have great currency in the church.
“I think that what I’ve learned as a judge is just to listen,” he said. “Sometimes, that’s all people needed. Nowadays, we’re not good at listening. We’re good at talking a lot. ... In church, the best pastoral thing is just to listen.”