Click-Click-Click MERRY Christmas

Hat tip to Jim Lusby

Seventh Grade Heaven

During St. John's School's lessons and carols service last night, Headmaster Jim Lusby and I were in the front row, with a corps of 7th graders (my students in New Testament on Tuesday afternoons) standing just a few feet away. As 75 angelic voices swelled around us, Jim whispered, "The 7th grade boys are doing well this year."

Not that they didn't sound great, but he was referring to their deportment. "They may be a little worried to see us together," I said. "They realize we really do know each other."

"And we talk," he said with a smile.

That's Jim at right, with the bow tie. As any teacher will tell you, the upstairs backup can come in handy. While I've been at St. John's for over six years, this was the first time I'd attended a lessons and carols service as a member of the Middle School faculty. I was reasonably confident about the new challenge, since I'd taught almost all of the same kids in 5th grade. But in these young lives, those particular two years turn out to have been long and eventful. We're having a great time together. And yet there's wisdom in the insight of a retired 7th grade teacher, now in her 80s, who was quoted to me as saying, "Seventh graders are interesting and in transition."

In staging our annual Advent and Christmas iteration of an Anglican tradition that dates from the 19th century, choir director Lori Speciale shows what it takes to organize middle schoolers into coherence and even transcendence: Skill, discipline, and love. As 350 parents, family members, and friends watched and listened, our students retold the Christian story through scripture readings, anthems, and two hymns in which the congregation was invited to join.

Gary Toops was at the mighty Rodgers organ, and St. John's Church's Buddy Lang had brought his trumpet and some distinguished colleagues on violin, woodwinds, and percussion. When this whole ensemble was playing and singing, with the girls (and still some boys) taking the descant parts, it just sounded magnificent. If we weren't yet in the Christmas spirit, it had entered the hearts of at least some of us by the time we got to verse three of my favorite Christmas hymn, which has a line that encapsulates the gospel: "Word of the father, now in flesh appearing." The children really do lead us, every time.

Obispo Y Obispas

As a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, I have three bosses (well, besides Jesus): Our bishop diocesan, Jon Bruno, and our two new bishops suffragan, Diane Jardine Bruce (below left, with other colleagues) and Mary Douglas Glasspool. At our annual convention last December, +Diane became the first woman elected bishop in our diocese, +Mary, a few hours later, the second. +Diane's responsibilities include the churches in the bottom third of our five-county diocese (lucky St. John's), +Mary's all the diocese's schools (double lucky, since St. John's has one of the nation's largest Episcopal day schools). Bishop Bruno visited St. John's last spring and checked in with Headmaster Jim Lusby. Bishop Bruce paid a gracious private visit a couple of weeks ago.

And this week, on Monday (All Saints Day in the liturgical calendar), Bishop Glasspool celebrated Holy Eucharist and preached at a rousing service attended by 750 students, teachers, and administrators as well as a parent or two. Using the opportunity to teach the congregation about the origin of Halloween, she marched in wearing pretty much the scariest monster mask ever worn by a bishop (which fit neatly under her miter). Before the service, she tried it out on her chaplain for the day, 8th grader Christopher Lanham.

Doffing mask and miter, she was soon teaching us a handy mnemonic chant -- Spooks! Saints! Souls! When we dress up on Halloween, it's like the ancient Celts putting on costumes and masks to ward off demons. The next day, All Saints, the Christian church remembers its heroes. Nov. 2, All Souls Day, is reserved for all the precious souls God has made.

That's Bishop Mary below, with the precious young souls who helped with Monday's worship. Headmaster Lusby and Chaplain Patti Peebles are at right.

Photo by Jo Ellen Wilson

Joy In Leadership

Headmaster Jim Lusby and School Committee Chairman Bob Dochterman at this afternoon's Family Festival at St. John's Episcopal School, either sharing a joke or perhaps just realizing that, whatever else may be going on in their busy lives, they don't have biology homework due Monday.

We Don't Mind Studying, But Please: No Test

The yellow cookie-cutter figure, signifying a child injured in a disaster, is the closest we hope we'll ever get to the real thing at St. John's Episcopal School. And yet each year during orientation week, our school nurses, Marjorie Trujillo and Jeanne Rodriguez, walk the faculty and staff through a meticulously planned drill in which we're invited, or rather beseeched, to anticipate every possible contingency.

Supervised by our headmaster, Jim Lusby, inspection and response teams roam the campus checking for injuries and damage, while reunion teams get ready for the parents who'll be rushing to Via Con Dios virtually en masse to collect over 700 students. Marjorie and Jeanne give us a quick lesson in triage. Some of us put on vests signifying our roles (my colleagues Gerda Kilgore and Suzy Hardy are at left) and practice with walkie-talkies: "Command? This is inspection team one, over." And we pray we won't have to think about it again until next year's drill.

The Dropout's Unnumbered Diplomas

"There goes the dropout." A teenager named Ernest Sillers heard those harsh words one day in 1929 as he walked past the manager's office at the Pasadena Bank of America branch where he was working as a clerk. After making a minor grammatical error on a form, Ern had confessed to his boss that he'd left high school in Nova Scotia after his freshman year. A two-week visit to his sister in sunny California had turned into a seemingly indefinite stay -- until he heard the tone in the manager's voice and decided to go home and back to school.

As Lisa Merryman writes in Ernest Sillers: Story of a Visionary, Ern got more constructive and no less fateful advice during the final leg of his long trip home to Nova Scotia. The well-dressed stranger who invited him to sit at his table in the crowded dining car turned out to be the Very Rev. John P. Derwent Llywd, dean of the Anglican cathedral in Halifax. By the next morning, Derwent Llywd had persuaded Ern to dedicate his life to God and his church.

At Fr. Ern's funeral service this morning at St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in San Juan Capistrano, one of his eulogists, longtime friend John Milam, told this story to help hundreds of us mourners understand why his daily prayer is "God Bless Dean John."

Canon Sillers' life was an ecclesiastical triptych -- six years as a Baptist minister, then an Episcopal parish priest until retiring (so to speak) at 70, and finally a third career as school builder and church planter. Merryman writes that Sillers, renowned for his gifts as preacher, teacher, and fundraiser, convened the first planning meeting for St. Margaret's Church and School in 1979 at El Adobe near Mission San Juan Capistrano, one of President Nixon's favorite restaurants (thus do my worlds persist in conjoining). He launched three other southern California institutions, including our own St. John's Episcopal Church and School in Rancho Santa Margarita, where a number of his initial collaborators are still joyously at work, including business manager Chris Connally, director of admissions Noreen Cohen, elementary school principal Melissa Christian, and superintendent of buildings and grounds Fernando Pedraza, whose father once worked at St. Margaret's. Fernando (who now reports to St. John's Headmaster James Lusby, in his 13th year at the helm) was tapped this morning to be a pallbearer.

As St. John's Church's new vicar several years ago, I had the pleasure of a long lunch with our founding headmaster, who used the opportunity to sketch out his latest project, a teacher's college, on a napkin and asked me to let him know when ("if" was not an Ern word) the names of any potential capital contributors occurred to me. He was then 95. He died on Oct. 15, a fortnight after his 99th birthday and a couple of days after Joan Haneishi, a member of our church and a former colleague of Fr. Ern at St. Mary and All Angels School in Aliso Viejo, which he also founded, had visited him in the hospital. Joan told me that she squeezed both his hands and, beginning with a quotation from Jesus, told the great man, "'I am the vine, and you are the branches,' and these branches have borne much fruit."

At today's funeral, during which the Rt. Rev. Sergio Carranza, assisting bishop in the Diocese of Los Angeles, was celebrant, no one was willing to guess the number of tender branches into which Fr. Ern had settled diplomas over the years, the number of boys and girls who have gotten academically rigorous, theologically expansive, and values-intensive Episcopal educations thanks to one faithful man's vision and energy. Certainly the 40 children in the four-school choir this morning, including these four from St. John's, will someday have good cause to say their own prayers of thanksgiving for Fr. Ern.

As for some of the grownup ministers of Fr. Ern's funeral service, Bishop Carranza is shown above with the Rev. Elizabeth Habecker, rector of St. Mark's Church in Downey, California (where Sillers also established a school) and the Rev. Doran Tregarthen, who said in a brief, powerful eulogy that Fr. Ern, on gaining heaven, had no doubt gone looking for God, his beloved wife of 70 years, Aldine, who died in 2004, and a school to found, although Fr. Doran was not entirely sure in which order these actions would have occurred.

Toasters, Chekhov, And The Mind Of God

Stanley Fish reflects on a new book by British writer Terry Eagleton:

[T]he fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”

Hat tip to Jim Lusby

Accustoming Boys To Obey

From 1837 until his death in 1871, my seminary-trained great-great-grandfather, Samuel Harvey Taylor, was principal of Phillips Academy, a boys prep school in Andover, Massachusetts. In later years, it had a headmaster; these days, it has a head of school, Barbara Landis Chase. These successors of Dr. Taylor are lucky that Andover, which Humphrey Bogart, Jack Lemmon, and the Presidents Bush all attended, survived him. While a lot about secondary education changed between the Presidential administrations of Gens. Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant, Samuel Harvey Taylor did not. He discouraged the study and even reading of literary fiction, for instance, preferring a curriculum focused on Latin and Greek and maybe a little mathematics.

He died of a massive stroke one Sunday on the chapel steps. His massive gravestone says that students and faculty "made great lamentations" as a result. His son and grandson taught at or attended Andover, but my late father, Harvey Hileman Taylor, could not. He always dreamed that John Harvey Taylor would attend, and even after they had divorced, my mother struggled to make it possible. I probably wouldn't have gotten in without the family connection (I lived for three years in the shadow of Taylor Hall). Like Flounder in "Animal House," they had to take me. An indication of the quality of my academic work is that when I wrote a paper for Dr. Frederick Allis's History of Andover class about my own relative Dr. Taylor, I could only manage a C.

Ironic, then, that I should begin full-time work this week as the vicar of an Episcopal school in south Orange County. The blessing is that my work is primarily pastoral. We have a visionary headmaster with a third of a century's experience in independent and Episcopal education, Jim Lusby, who skillfully runs St. John's. While Mr. Lusby considers values education as important as academic success, we can be grateful he doesn't adhere to Dr. Taylor's specific doctrines, described by Professor Edward A. Park in an address contained in a memorial volume which was published by the principal's last class in 1871:

[Dr. Taylor] believed that one of the dangers to which this democratic land lies exposed is a disrespect for law: he therefore believed that he was performing an act of kindness to his pupils when he was accustoming them to obey. He believed that, if they would yield their wills to the authority of a school, they would more easily yield their individual interests to the civil government, and would be more apt to prostrate themselves before the Infinite Ruler and Sovereign.

Less so by the time I arrived in 1969, which turned out to be the last year of coats and ties and mandatory chapel. That same autumn, students successfully pressured the administration to cancel classes for a day so we could learn more about the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. The following year, "Time" magazine wrote about students smoking dope in the on-campus bird sanctuary and having sex with girls they had smuggled into the dorms. These were the last years of headmaster John Mason Kemper (who colorfully describes Uncle Sam's reign of fear here) and the first years of Theodore Sizer, a leading independent educator. Especially after it became coeducational in the fall of 1973, the year I was graduated, Dr. Taylor probably wouldn't have recognized the place, and yet it turned out to be a blessed experience for his great-great-grandson. I discovered my love of my parents' vocation of journalism and began to learn to live on my own. Thank you, Uncle Sam!

That's Our Boy!

Headmaster Jim Lusby dropped by my office this afternoon to say proudly that Robert Ward, the USC senior who won $165,000 by sinking a basket from half court during the Lakers game last night, is a St. John's School alumnus.