Dwight And Josh

Josh and Dwight

Have you ever been at a party, enjoying a conversation with a friend while discovering that you are almost overwhelmingly curious about what two people are talking about just out of your hearing?

 It happened to me one recent Saturday morning at Isaiah House, Catholic Worker’s shelter for homeless women in Santa Ana. For over two years, Josh Bradshaw, one of our high school students, has organized our Isaiah House breakfast and fellowship ministry. It’s now scheduled almost every month on the second Saturday at 9:30 a.m.

I was talking to one of the residents about her plans to move back east to rejoin her family. Over my right shoulder, I could hear Josh having an intense conversation with Dwight Smith, who has operated the ministry for nearly 20 years with his wife, Leia. I was dying to listen in.

As the other members of our St. John’s contingent were leaving, I gave Dwight a blessing (he’s having back surgery in early October) and then sat at his knee for half an hour. Dwight’s an authentic prophet, living out Catholic Worker’s mission to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Reporters call him to find out what’s really going on around town. City hall officials see him coming and hide. One leaves a conversation with him feeling indicted, reconstructed, and energized.

I also hoped he would give me a flavor of his conversation with Josh, and he did. I’ll leave it to them to tell you in more detail. But it’s no secret that Dwight thinks that people such as Josh who choose to serve the poor face to face occupy a privileged position in the heart and mind of God.

Dwight and Leia work each day in the spirit of pacifist Roman Catholic laywoman Dorothy Day, who

Dorothy Day

cofounded Catholic Worker in New York during the Great Depression. Isaiah House is one of over 200 such communities, mostly in the U.S., that practice hospitality for its own sake. In Orange County, if you’re a woman on the street, and Isaiah House has an opening, you can receive food and shelter indefinitely as long as you follow house rules.

 St. John’s has many historic links to Isaiah House. Our youth leader, Patti Peebles, takes our middle and high school kids regularly. When he was working as an attorney, Andy Guilford provided pro bono legal services. He still volunteers each month. We also make periodic financial contributions. Isaiah House depends on the kindness of its volunteers and donors as well as the faith, energy, and self-sacrifice of its proprietors.

The Smiths (who promised in 1997 that they would give it five years) live upstairs. Leia is a cancer survivor, and Dwight had lost significant mobility because of back problems. Serving the poor every day of their lives, they have foregone most of the luxuries we take for granted. And yet they don’t sentimentalize the poor. Working with people on the street, many of whom are suffering from mental illness, is exhausting and sometimes dangerous. But their hearts compel them to remain in relationship with marginal people from whom most of us are tempted to avert our eyes.

As it turns out, the purpose of Josh’s ministry isn’t to feed the women. If it were, we could take up a collection each month and have someone drop off 35 Big Breakfasts. Instead, Josh takes us there to meet fellow voyagers, sit across the table from them, shake their hands, learn their names, say ours, and ask the questions that always work. Where are you from? What were your parents like? Do you have any brothers and sisters? What do you love the most?

These questions also work at the monthly Rancho Santa Margarita food pantry and anywhere else St. John’s people make personal (the Christian word is incarnational) contact with the poor. (The questions are just as helpful with newcomers at coffee hour.) An exciting new example of such a ministry is Laundry Love, coming together under Mo. Martha’s stewardship. You may have the mistaken impression (I certainly did at first) that the purpose of Laundry Love is to do poor people’s laundry. Its true, divine purpose is to enable new relationships among God’s people. It is from these gracious little miracles, one built on the other, that all good things come.

This post was originally published in the Vaya Con Dios, the parish newsletter of St. John's Episcopal Church.

It Takes A Parish

Max and Elizabeth

I’ve never been prouder of a thumb’s up.

Early this year, I asked our Max Mizejewski, who died Sept. 19 when his Cessna 162 crashed near Borrego Springs, to read the manuscript of my political novel Jackson Place. Max was a war hero who barely survived the 1967 crash of the Huey he was piloting.

Much of the book concerns the Vietnam War. Since I didn’t serve, I feared writing inaccurately or blithely. Two weeks later, Max handed it back with a smile, a few words of encouragement, and a thumb’s up. That was all I hoped for. Max used language carefully. He didn’t gild the lily or stop to smell the roses unless there was time on the schedule and the olfactory episode had been thoroughly mapped out.

Sometimes he didn’t have to speak at all. St. John’s friends sitting in pews behind him say they’ll never forget the Sunday we celebrated the 200th anniversary of the “Star Spangled Banner.” He stood ramrod straight for all three verses, facing the front of the church and saluting. Then he hugged Rebeca and their daughter, Elizabeth.

It was five days before his death. May they always remember the deathless energy of his embrace. May we all remember the energy with which he lived and his example of uncompromising devotion to those he loved.

Max wasn’t the only St. John’s resource I tapped. I invited Trinh Hinson, who was born in Vietnam, and her family to point out any egregiousness in my descriptions of Vietnamese society and places in and around the city that was once called Saigon. Gerry Larson, internationally noted scholar and Presbyterian pastor, asked incisive questions. Our meticulous head of school, Michael Pratt, who has a PhD from Harvard, said he was pleased to have caught relatively few punctuation errors and then wrote a generous review on Amazon. Fellow Detroiter and thriller aficionado Tom Tierney thought I got both the politics and the Motown scenes right.

Cover painting by Robin Rogers Cloud

Andy Guilford was patient indeed, permitting me to feed him chunks of text as they came off the printer and making more great suggestions than I can count. I wrote three drafts of one section before getting a favorable ruling from the bench. He did question why I missed no opportunity to portray Richard Nixon sitting in an easy chair, his feet on an ottoman, while he twirled and chewed on his reading glasses. Had I forgotten writing about the eyeglasses just five pages before? If I may, Your Honor, we call that a leitmotif, I said carefully.

All their good advice notwithstanding, considerably better than the text is the cover, which is based on the work of Robin Rogers Cloud, acclaimed plein air painter, associate professor of art at Saddleback College, and member in good standing of the St. John’s Altar Guild. If you’re Robin’s friend on Facebook, you’re enjoying her exquisite paintings, including those she made during her summer in Montana with the St. John’s Swansons.

After finding the courage to ask an artist of Robin’s stature to help, I suggested a pretty painting of the leafy row of townhouses in Lafayette Square opposite the White House, where much of my story’s action occurs. Robin asked what the book was about. I told her Nixon doesn’t resign in August 1974 and moves into 716 Jackson Place so Acting President Ford can use the White House. In that case, Robin said, it should be scary: “Think Edward Gorey.” Of course, it’s perfect.

The contributions of LEM coordinator and former Nixon chief of staff Kathy O’Connor are also too numerous to mention. I borrowed a description of a child's first glimpse of a baseball diamond from one of my own Vaya columns last year (thanks, editor Linda). I fretted over a paragraph in which Mitch realizes that Emily loves him. Finally, I tried the passage out on participants in one of our Tuesday evening Bible Fellowship meetings.

My fellow pilgrim Gene Giordano gave me permission to use his last name for Nixon aide Ron Ziegler’s bartender at the Carlton in Washington. Gene will forgive me for saying that Mizejewski would also have suited my tough, fiercely loyal character.

I also consulted authorities in the outside world, including famed Watergate reporter Bob Woodward. But I couldn’t have done it without St. John’s. One is blessed to have such collaborators, in ministry and in life. Someone said it take a village to raise a child. It took a parish to write a book.

This post originally appeared in the Vaya Con Dios, the newsletter of St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church.

Calling On Angels

Al Kaline at Briggs Stadium, 1957

I left my heart in two places (outside of home) in my hometown. The Cathedral Church of St. Paul on Woodward Ave., where I was baptized and confirmed in The Episcopal Church, remains. The other, gone since 2009, was old Briggs Stadium, ancestral turf of the Detroit Tigers, who baptized me into baseball.

Though my mother and godfather usually took me on weekends, my first game was on a weeknight. I was about six. Along with millions of boys and girls, I have an inner YouTube video of that first walk along a darkened passage toward a light-soaked space -- the long white lines, the emerald grass, the clay-red diamond after it had been raked and hosed down, just before determined figures in brilliant raiment would surge from the home dugout, scattering the dirt with their cleats.

Starring in my field of dreams were sluggers Al Kaline and Willie Horton, now in their 70s and still active in the front office. After my mother and I moved to Phoenix in 1967, when I was 12, I kept my Tigers by the tail by clipping box scores and taping them in a scrapbook. When they beat St. Louis in the 1968 World Series, my godfather, who worked at the Detroit Free Press, mailed me the cardboard mat the pressmen had used to make a plate for the front page the next morning. The headline shouted “WE WIN!” to a town that was already experiencing harbingers of last month’s bankruptcy.

In the late 1960s in Arizona, the diamondbacks’ only prey was mice, rabbits, and gophers. While in college, experiencing vocational foreshadowing, I rooted for the Padres. I never cottoned to Yankees or Mets during ten years in New York. But I was in old Yankee Stadium (brilliantly portrayed by old Briggs in the 2001 movie “61”) with Richard Nixon and his son-in-law David Eisenhower on July 4, 1983 when lefthander Dave Righetti pitched a no-hitter against Boston.

Many years later, Kathy and I took Eisenhower to the Big A. He looked around the house that Disney

John and Andy at the Big A, 2013

renovated and said, “I envy you living so close to a major league ballpark.” But I was a utility fan at best until something flipped a switch a few weeks before the end of the Angels’ unremarkable 2012 season. I couldn’t wait for opening day. I’ve already been to the ballpark eight times this year. Kathy graciously watches more games than she would prefer. I use an iPhone app to listen to play-by-play from all over the country.

I’ve resisted using my phone to research whether a sudden spike in childlike enthusiasm says something I should but don’t want to know about my aging brain. While I’ve also resisted Googling “Jesus and baseball,” I wonder about the theology behind all the things we love with innocent abandon – from sports and music and painting to bridge and quilting and fishing and reading and all the hobbies and avocations in between. In March David Ferguson wrote in The Onion, “Find the thing you’re most passionate about, then do it on nights and weekends for the rest of your life.” I suspect most of us indulge our non-remunerative passions not to escape reality but to reveal our true selves to others and even to ourselves.

As people of faith, do our greatest passions also signify something about our conceptions of the sacred? Think about Angels fans wearing Holy Spirit red while celebrating and (so far this season) mourning as one. Children have more fun at baseball than at football and basketball games, and that’s also a holy thing. Others have written more eloquently than I possibly can about the game’s intricacy, its sights and strangely comforting sounds, its history, symmetry, and beautiful displays of athleticism. I enjoy the fellowship in the stands and the comradeship among the players, their youthful quirks and superstitions. I love winning and having faith that we’ll eventually stop losing. Baseball is tidier than everyday life and doesn’t matter anywhere near as much – until it does, when it’s almost like heaven.

This post originally appeared in the Vaya Con Dios, the newsletter of St. John's Episcopal Church.

Late-Season Skies

On a beautiful Monday evening, Kathy and I saw the Angels take the first of three from the Red Sox. They're three outs from winning the third game, which would be the second sweep against Boston in a row.

My St. John's friend Andy Guilford is at Dodgers Stadium on another perfect evening tonight, where the Arizona Diamondbacks are leading, 2-0.

Sometimes A Missile Is Just A Missile

My St. John's friend Andy Guilford snapped this photo today while touring the White Sands Missile Range Museum in New Mexico.

That He Should See No More Evil

My St. John's friend Andy Guilford took this photograph of a disconsolate savior in Oklahoma City, where the statue stands in a churchyard, its back to the memorial to victims of the 1995 terrorist bombing.

Safekeeping

After a solemn service of Holy Eucharist on Maundy Thursday, when we remember the last supper, Jesus's commissioning his disciples to love one another, and his agony in the Garden of Gesthemane, some ministers strip the altar bare while others take what remains of the consecrated bread and wine to an altar of repose elsewhere in the church. This remnant is used for Holy Communion on Good Friday. Andy Guilford of St. John's Church took this photo early Friday morning during an all-night prayer vigil.

Lenten Light

The late John Castelli's Christus Rex cross at St. John's, draped for Lent
Photo by Andrew Guilford

Giving Lawyers A Heep Of Grief

Acknowledging the contempt that one-time law student and court reporter Charles Dickens expressed for the British legal system by imagining characters such as Uriah Heep in David Copperfield and never-ending lawsuits for lawsuits' sake in Bleak House, law clerk Joseph Tartakovsky speaks up for his profession:

Isn’t it true that for both lawyers and novelists, whoever tells the best story wins? The difference is that lawyers (one hopes) take facts as they exist instead of inventing them. Dickens, for all his genius and wrath, was himself unable to undertake reforms, or protect clients, or draft fairer rules. He needed lawyers to achieve his vision of a just society. Even the inimitable novelist would agree that the two old trades must go hand in hand, together improving the noble system that, for all its Dickensian farce, makes us civilized.

In fairness, even in Dickens there are good lawyers and bad ones. Uriah Heep is a law clerk who usurps the practice of Mr. Wickfield, a diligent and highly ethical solicitor whose professionalism is eroded by alcohol and grief over his wife's death. Thanks to David (a stand-in for Dickens) and a plodding but virtuous young attorney friend from school, Tommy Traddles, the facts as they exist are exposed, Mr. Wickfield's fortunes are restored, and Heep is ruined. Even in a Dickens yarn, the system works.

His bicentenary is tomorrow. God keep his noble soul.

Hat tip to Denise Paddock, clerk to the Hon. Andrew Guilford

Unborn Hero

During a January visit to the 9/11 Memorial, my St. John's friend Andy Guilford took this photo juxtaposing the name of hero Todd Beamer with an unborn, unnamed child who also died aboard flight 93 in Pennsylvania

Our Epiphany Palm Sunday

Pilgrim Andy captured the moment in January when St. John's pilgrims participated in the tradition of following Jesus's Palm Sunday walk into Jerusalem from Bethphage on the Mount of Olives.

I've Heard Blues Future

A Joyous Racket from Barefoot Workshops on Vimeo.

The story of a great music teacher named Justin Zamm and an 11-year-old* guitar and drums prodigy named Kedrious Thomas whom you will hear from again. It all goes down in a classroom and church in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a town most famous as a musical landmark (at least before Kedrious arrived) thanks to the legendary Robert Johnson. Watch until the closing titles, and you'll hear the young people performing Johnson's "Cross Road Blues." And here, from my office wall, is a photo of the crossroad in question.
Hat tip to Colleen and Andy Guilford

*The original post had Kedrious's age wrong.

The Place To Find God

I'm pleased to post the Holy Land reflections of the Hon. Andrew Guilford of St. John's Church. In January, Andy and Loreen completed their second St. John's pilgrimage:


By Andy Guilford

The Holy Land is a powerful place filled with confusion, but bringing clarity to pilgrims seeking to know God. The confusion starts with what to call this land of milk and honey. Israel? Palestine? The West Bank? Samaria? Judea? But there is the clarity of all three Abrahamic religions agreeing that something's happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear, to some, and there's a man with a gun over there. Actually, there are many there with impressive automatic rifles, but they are just boys and girls, and we can call this place Israel only because of them.

As for what's happening, for many this is where the physical meets the spiritual. Theophany is a powerful thing. Incarnation even more powerful. And it is in this physical place that these physical and spiritual things happened. That gives this place a Holiness like no other place.

There is no sign of a "post-Christian" world here, as diverse folks of many colors from around the world piously pilgrim to where the Holy One walked. Wavering Christians who seek holiness or truth or beauty or discipline elsewhere should first fully appreciate the Christianity that thrives around where He was born in Bethlehem, where He preached in Galilee, and where He was crucified and resurrected at a rock and slab honored under one roof at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

The calming Holiness of this place contrasts with the confusion of the conflict all around. The conflict may come from the desire of so many to control such special land. And perhaps it is fueled by the inability to forgive, and reconcile, and together move closer to the One God.

There is also the striking physical contrast between two cultures, with one producing the sparkling indicia of achievement, and the other stumbling thorough the rubble of poverty, even a poverty that remains full of the spicy richness of life. How can this be side by side? Are we witnessing cultural bias, the oppressor and the oppressed, or those who are left free to achieve and those who are not?

Surrounded by all this, in the end, with the Creation thriving here in all its glory and pain, this is indeed THE place to find God.

Photos: Pilgrim Andy at the Western Wall; Andy and Fr. John at a spot where the three Abrahamic faiths converge; Israeli soldiers drilling for a ceremony at the Western Wall plaza; Andy watches as pilgrim Loreen touches the stone of Mt. Calvary in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; woman selling parsley in Jerusalem's Old City

Peeks And Peaks Of Jerusalem

From pilgrim Kathy's holy memory stick, a couple of her favorite images from our January 2011 pilgrimage to the Holy Land. That's pilgrim Andy at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, looking enigmatically from the men's into the much smaller women's section of Judaism's holiest place. The orthodox rabbis who run the Western Wall insist on gender segregation -- and also give the women the smaller part.

Near the end of our 12 extraordinary days, Kathy took this photo of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which encloses the site of Jesus Christ's crucifixion, burial, and resurrection.

Sounding Flutes In Jericho

Pilgrim Andy snapped this photo of my duet with a merchant in Jericho during our recent St. John's pilgrimage. The walls may not have come tumbling down, but I think a pilgrim or two plugged her ears. Pilgrim Kathy was especially pleased that I've acquired a new instrument!

Here Endeth The Lesson

Former Orange County sheriff Mike Carona, convicted of jury tampering in 2009 and sentenced to five and a half years in prison by my St. John's friend Andy Guilford, is turning himself in at a federal correctional institution in Colorado, probably today.

At The Center Of The World

During two Holy Land pilgrimages and the 18 months in between, pilgrim Andy and I have been carrying on a conversation about the Middle East. It hasn't really been a debate, since we're both strong supporters of Israel who are working to deepen our appreciation of the immense complexities of the issue and of the necessity for a just provision for Palestinians' right of self-determination.

We rarely have the opportunity we did today to conduct our discussion at the epicenter of the crisis. We were standing with our fellow pilgrims inside the Jerusalem Archaeological Park, on steps leading to a walled-up spot that was once an entrance to the Second Temple. The towering wall at our back faces south. You can see Herodian (which is to say time of Jesus Christ) stones at the bottom and the windows and blue dome of the al-Aqsa mosque on top. Could Jesus have climbed these steps on one of his visits to the temple from Bethany, on the Mount of Olives (to our left)? Pretty likely. So you have 2,500 years of religious history and explosive interfaith rivalry inside a few square feet. For the faithfully political (or the politically faithful), it's pretty much the center of the world.

Since pilgrim Kathy, junior archaeologist, was helping injured pilgrim Pam prepare for her much-regretted early departure for the U.S. tonight, she didn't go with our group this morning. I retraced our footsteps with her this afternoon. That's she amid the massive stones that Roman soldiers threw down from the Temple Mount when they destroyed the Second Temple in A.D. 70 -- the very ones of which Jesus said in Mark 13:2b, "Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down." You can't get much closer to history than that, in this place where peace sometimes feels as far away as it can be.

The Al-Aqsa mosque and Mount of Olives, from the Jerusalem Archaeological Park

About To Row Mike's Boat Ashore?

From OC Weekly back in the New World, props for Andy Guilford (show at right yesterday afternoon on the Sea of Galilee with his fellow St. John's Church pilgrims):

[T]hough [ex-Orange County sheriff Mike] Carona had numerous establishment types (and, for far too long, a protective, gullible Orange County Register newsroom) working behind-the-scenes to shield him from accountability, they weren’t able to overcome the work of journalists like myself and Christine Hanley at the Los Angeles Times, the relentless determination of Sagel in the U.S. Attorney’s office, and the untainted manner in which federal Judge Andrew J. Guilford runs his courtroom. Make no mistake: In the hands of other reporters, prosecutors and judges, Carona likely would still be in control of the $800 million-per-year agency.

In coming weeks, Guilford will set a date for Carona to surrender.

Why Was That Man Laughing?

Convicted of jury-tampering two years ago, former Orange County sheriff Mike Carona was jubilant about being acquitted on the other counts of his indictment. But one count was plenty, as Chuck Colson will tell you. In April 2009, U.S. District Court judge (and my St. John's Church friend) Andy Guilford gave him five and a half years. Today, the news comes that he's lost his appeal.

Andy On The Eve Of St. Andrew's Day

With his beloved Winston Churchill, Kathy's and my St. John's friend Andy Guilford this afternoon at a surprise birthday party in his honor at the Ronald Reagan federal courthouse in Santa Ana. Andy was 60 yesterday; Sir Winston would've been 136 tomorrow (the feast of St. Andrew, as it happens). Preserving the element of s. required careful coordination among Andy's wife, Loreen; his assistant, Pam; his courtroom clerks; the Very Rev. Canon Peter Haynes, who distracted him over lunch as arrangements were finalized; and a fellow federal judge who summoned him to an emergency meeting in a third-floor conference room that was brimming with well-wishers.