Because The Universe Depends On It

Why is one of the largest corporations in the world trying to help one man talk?

Goodbye And Hello To Clarence And Ed

I still remember the night in 1974 when my college buddy Ed Simons (shown here with his arms around father Clarence and brother Gabriel; mother Aurora and sister Celeste are there, too) said, "Let's go to Denny's for coffee."

I said, "Why would we want to do that?" While Starbucks had gotten its start in Seattle three years before, the cafe ethos hadn't yet intruded on the reality of southern California 19-year-olds.

But Ed eyed me narrowly (the sort of phrase he used in his columns for the UC San Diego paper, where we both worked in lieu of attending classes). And so we went to the Denny's near the Del Mar race track and fairgrounds, laid down our 39 cents each, and drank coffee for about two hours, cup after bottomless cup. I've been hooked ever since.

Ed, who died 15 years ago, was surely amid and among his family and friends this morning in Norwalk, near Los Angeles, when they said goodbye to Clarence, whom they lost last week after a long illness. I officiated at the service. The bemusement Ed would have experienced about my following a priestly vocation seemed to radiate from the face of our friend and roommate, research scientist and nutrition maven Mark McCarty, a devotee of Clarence who'd driven up from San Diego. Mark sat grinning about four pews back. I tried not to meet his eyes except when I slipped in a completely gratuitous reference to Stephen Hawking.

Clarence and his beloved Aurora (pictured above with her brother Alfred) were married for 52 years and had five children. I'd never heard anyone talk about their siblings more than Ed did about Celeste, Cecille, and the twins, Gizelle and Gabriel. He talked about his father with a reverence that exceeded that reserved even for his '68 Nova (which he called the Colonel), Blue Öyster Cult, and the guitar playing of Nils Lofgren (way before he joined the E Street Band).

Ed was a talented guitarist, singer, and composer himself. I remember the first verse of a song he wrote about the working class town south of San Diego, National City, where the Simonses settled for a time and I worked on the newspaper for a year or so:

She was born in the Ozark Mountains back in Arkansas
She was just sixteen when they moved to California
Now the hills in Nasty City ain't big enough to make the grade
But everyone who knows her will tell you she's a mountain maid

Ed spelled "mountain" differently, but this is a family blog. Musical ability was among Clarence's considerable gifts to Ed and the rest of his family. He played trombone in an Army band during World War II and, after the war, the double bass in jazz bands while running the musicians' union in his home town of Savannah (where he'll be buried next week). I could swear he told me once that he handled the details when Alan Greenspan's big band came through town in the late 1940s.

He married Aurora six months after they met. She sang in his band for a while and even played some drums before they moved to her home state of California, where he spent over 30 years teaching music in the Los Angeles Unified School District. At the funeral, Cecille's 15-year-old daughter Emma, accompanied by her father, Cisco Araya (brother of Tom Araya of Slayer), sang with a lovely, powerful voice, belting out the song as though she knew that if she held back, she'd start crying. "He protected us," Clarence's younger son Gabe told me when I asked what he most remembered about his father. "He told us everything would be all right. He comforted us."

Clarence was Presbyterian; Aurora's Roman Catholic. Ed's southern California-based sisters, Cecille and Gizelle, have found their way to St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Long Beach. Emma and her 12-year-old brother, Isaac, have spent the last two summers at our diocesan summer camp in San Diego county, where, it turns out, they met my younger daughter Lindsay, who's on the camp staff.

There was more synchronicity after the service, when one of Clarence's LAUSD colleagues, Sheldon Alpert, introduced himself. While talking afterward over a delicious lunch at Gizelle's La Habra home, we learned that we'd performed together once at the Nixon library, Sheldon as a violinist in the orchestra for a Yorba Linda organization's annual "Messiah" singalong and I as narrator. That's Sheldon at left, with Gizelle, her younger daughter Olivia, and Mark McCarty (who would like to tell you about Spirulina as a source of phycocyanobilin). Sheldon and I had never actually met before, but we did today thanks to Clarence and Ed, and we'll all meet up eventually. That's the small, abiding comfort that comes from memorializing and celebrating those we love and lose in faith.

Sunday's Sermon: "Explaining Everything"

It's easy to criticize astrophysicist Stephen Hawking for saying that the universe could have sprung into being without a divine author. But let's not forget how often we people of faith leave God out of our own stories. My sermon for the 15th Sunday after Pentecost at St. John's Episcopal Church is here.

Hawking, Dickens, And Spontaneous Combustion

Stephen Hawking now says that the laws of gravity were enough to bring the universe into being -- which would have been the first instance of spontaneous combustion. For us old-earth Bible-interpreters, this is big news. Since the publication of his A Brief History of Time, Christian adult education teachers who found no essential conflict between the big bang and Genesis have been able to say that the great British astrophysicist himself was willing to concede the possibility of Someone throwing the great switch.

That Hawking has changed his mind, as disconcerting as it may be at first to the Bible study teachers, just means that he has chosen to insist that "science is on his side in order to make his case for the imagination." Oops. Sorry, that's what Brooke D. Taylor says about Charles Dickens in the September 2010 issue of Dickens Quarterly.

See, the 19th century's greatest English writer believed in spontaneous combustion, too, and used it in his novel Bleak House to dispose of a character named Krook. Krook had been hoarding papers which held the key to a legal case that has been grinding along for decades. Two characters who come looking for him find -- well, you could say that they find evidence of a sacramental reenactment of the scientist's vision of the beginning of the universe, a mass for rationalists:

Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to be steeped in something; and here is--is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? O Horror, he IS here!

That's Krook's burnt remains that are "here," not God. As Hawking now insists about the universe, no one had to light the fuse in Krook's grubby little room. It just happened. Really, it happens all the time. As he assured his readers in the preface of Bleak House, Dickens had studied the literature.

All these years everyone has thought him a bit daft on this narrow point. Seeking to rescue him, Brooke Taylor concludes:

In the end, most of us agree that, for literary purposes, the scientific accuracy of Spontaneous Combustion doesn't matter. But Dickens argues for the scientific authenticity of this manner of death because a world in which fact and feeling are irreparably divided is a tragic and frightening place.

Maybe that kind of fear helps us understand why the mystery of God can be such a challenge or an affront to the rational mind. For Hawking and those who are most pleased by his latest assertion, it actually seems less preposterous, or perhaps less frightening, to say that they know what occurred 14 billion years ago at a point in-- well, somewhere, than to accept the possibility that a living but persistently invisible source of ultimate meaning and benevolence is present right now, right here. The very idea of a power they can't fully explain must make them want to explode.

Noah's Lark

That's state-of-the-art marketing guru and St. John's Episcopal School trustee Noah McMahon (right), who cut his teeth at the Nixon Library, riding the merry-go-round at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, California.

Perhaps you're wondering why.

See, you never know what Noah will get up to -- such as, for instance, floating around at 30,000 feet with legendary astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in Zero Gravity Corp.'s specially rigged 727. This time, Noah and Wing Lam, owner of Wahoo's Fish Taco, were assisting their fellow supporters of the Orange County Register's "Season of Caring Presents the Possible Dream," a collaboration between our hometown paper and world-famous shopping center (all presided over by the energetic Sandra Segerstrom Daniels) to raise $270,000 for ten local children's charities. I'm proud to be one of the judges as well as a board member of Register Charities.

After a campaign over the holidays had raised 70% of our goal, Noah and his colleagues had the bright idea of putting 17 county leaders on SCP's famed carousel with their cell phones and riding (and riding, and riding) until each had raised $4,000 from friends, colleagues, and anyone else who felt sorry for them.

At a ceremony this afternoon at the Santa Ana offices of my valiant friends at the Register (who are battling to save democracy by saving the newspaper business), I forgot to ask Noah what was worse: Floating upside down for 30 seconds in Zero Gravity's vomit comet, or spending two and a half hours on a giant bunny rabbit while trying to dial numbers on BlackBerry keys the size of Chicklettes.

Either way, Noah and Co., you brought big dreams to life for some of those hit hardest by the economy -- even if you were just going around in circles.