Always Special

Jean on vacation in Michigan, 1957

My mother was born in Detroit on the brink of the Great Depression. Her parents, Frank and Lily Sharley, met in the United States after emigrating from England. Jean and her elder brother, George, grew up in a house their father had built but couldn’t afford to finish once the darkness fell. You could see the tarpaper instead of siding. Frank found work as a hospital handyman. They had enough, but just barely.

You probably understand after hearing from Tom Johnson, my mom’s favorite boss ever, that Jean had a reporter’s ear for good stories and revealing details. She loved to tell people that her father, as a boy, once delivered a prescription to Buckingham Palace in the latter few years of Queen Victoria. Her mother’s family, from Lancashire, was about to sail for New York on the Titanic when the steamship company revoked their half-price tickets and resold them at full price to someone almost infinitely less lucky.

In her father’s case, a brush with greatness. In her mother’s, the touch of Providence. She loved her parents dearly, and their stories helped her understand, when life seemed grey, when poverty embarrassed her, that her life would always glitter in bright colors, that she would always be special.

With her mother, Lily

As a little girl, she went to church with her family and fell in love with the elegant language and cadences of the Book of Common Prayer. “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done.” It can’t really be said of Jean! She couldn’t afford to go to college, but the prayer book, her natural gifts as a writer, and her compassion and curiosity amounted to a graduate degree in journalism.

Her vocation, which is now undergoing sometimes heartbreaking change, provides its practitioners with constant brushes with greatness in the form of the events and people journalists cover. As for Providence, the church and prayer book worked their more customary magic with Jean as well. She never doubted the loving, saving grace of heaven -- not once. I have a million things to thank my mother for, none more important than an eternal if sometimes reckless optimism and an innate trust in God.

Greatness eluded her, however, at Redford Union High School in Detroit. As a freshman, she entered a contest to pick the new school fight song. The judges told her she would’ve won if she’d written the three verses they asked for instead of just two. As dementia overtook her at 89 or 90, this injustice, this outrage was one of the last things she forgot.

A 1950s fashion assignment

As a fashion writer for the Detroit Free Press, she traveled to New York for the fall shows. Audrey Hepburn, Renoir, the novelist Colette, and all beautiful people and things captivated her. Soon her editors wanted her working as a general assignment reporter. At the Free Press, the newsroom was male-only territory -- until Jean got there. One old-timer muttered that lace curtains on the windows would be next.

Her victories for women came before feminism had a name. Sometimes it was just a matter of making do. Covering a Tigers-Yankees game during 1961’s AL pennant race, she was barred from the Yankee Stadium press box. She put her portable typewriter on top of an overturned trashcan, found a chair, and made her deadline.

Jean’s writing was economical and lively, whimsical, smart, and fresh, occasionally sentimental but never mawkish – always the right word, never a word out of place. In 1965, Detroit civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo was murdered by a member of the Ku Klux Klan after the march from Selma to Montgomery. Jean visited the apartment Viola shared with her husband and children and described their small, neat bedroom and the family pictures, school books, and white-covered gold-leaf Bible that were arranged carefully on Viola’s desk. At the funeral in Detroit, Jean asked an African-American woman who didn’t know Viola why she was standing on the street in the rain, hoping to get into the church. “Because she died for me,” the woman said. These words ended Jean’s account of her city’s sad day in the next day’s paper.

She was a single working mother of a ten year old. Imagine how she felt when we received death threats after the Viola Liuzzo stories appeared. These callers deplored my mother’s sympathetic coverage of Viola’s murder and warned that they knew where I went to school. One evening, I noticed a police car by the curb outside our apartment. It came back the next night, and the next. My mother didn’t say why, because the last thing she ever wanted me or anyone to do was worry.

Harvey and Jean

But it was inevitable that I would worry, especially when my mother seemed lonely or sad. My father, Harvey, another brilliant newspaperperson, was the first love of Jean’s life. The only picture I have of them together, taken in the early 1950s, shows him in a blazer and tie, looking mischievously at the camera. Jean is sitting on the floor wearing a black cocktail dress and pearls, leaning on his knee and holding a drink, her happy face in profile, turned toward him.

While Harvey was an alcoholic, I don’t believe Jean ever uttered that word and his name in the same paragraph. The marriage essentially ended when I was two, though for the next ten years, Harvey came over for dinner almost every Saturday night. He sat at the end of the couch, drank martinis, smoked Chesterfields, laughed quietly at the conversation, and occasionally got up and went to the piano to massacre Beethoven sonatas.

In her office in Phoenix

In 1967, Jean and 12-year-old John headed to Phoenix so she could go to work on the Arizona Republic as women’s editor. Her brilliance as a journalist and her courage persisted. Her editor in Arizona was J. Edward Murray. Their publisher was Eugene Pulliam, uncle of a future vice president, Dan Quayle. One day, Mr. Pulliam told Mr. Murray that he had written an editorial in support of President Nixon’s actions in Vietnam and wanted it published on the front page. When Ed Murray told the owner of the newspaper that editorials went on the editorial page, Pulliam fired him. Learning of this during a meeting, Jean stood up and said, “A paper that has no room for Ed Murray has no room for me!” and walked out into 110 degrees of Phoenix unemployment – which didn’t last long, thanks to offers from the Timeses of New York and Los Angeles.

Tom has spoken beautifully of Jean’s years at the Los Angeles Times, Christle equally so about their adventures. Christle and my mother’s other close friends – Bobbie and Ed Justice, Bette Gillespie, George Mair, Miv and Alfred Schaaf, Frank Wylie and Judy Babcock, Sister Jenny, so many others – were all gifts to her.

In 1978, Jean married that gracious gentleman Dick Lescoe, who lent her his three daughters, Linda, Donna, and Debbie. In retirement, with Tomasa’s help, Jean helped Debbie with her children, Stephanie and Ricky, and was a devoted grandmother to my children, Valerie and Lindsay, and to my wife Kathy’s children, Dan and Meaghan.

Jean at the LA Times

The most important thing to know about my mother is that she believed she was called to reflect God’s grace, make the world better, see ways forward that others couldn’t, and never stop striving, even unto exhaustion. She took in tenants for free and took Thanksgiving turkeys and green beans to Union Station here in Pasadena. She helped build the columbarium in this beautiful church where she and Dick will cohabitate. She sacrificed her comfort and security to take care of those she loved, especially her parents and then Dick when he was afflicted with Parkinson’s disease. If you had a problem, she had an answer or an idea, and always an encouraging smile.

It made these gestures no less worthy or holy that Jean, even as she acted in love and justice, was observing and chronicling herself in the process. She was, after all, a reporter. She could have invented Facebook. I don’t know whether I’m curious or terrified about what might have happened if she had been healthy enough to establish an account. If my family and friends ever wonder why her son is a selfie junkie, now you know.

Jean could be stubborn. Tom has mentioned my time as an aide to Mr. Nixon. Jean and he were a formidable combination. They first met in Washington in 1985. She was in town to hear his talk to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and he asked me to invite her up to his suite so he could say hello.

She told him that she had covered a stop he had made in upper Michigan during his reelection campaign in 1972. The record is abundantly clear that neither my mother nor the 37th president got anywhere near upper Michigan in 1972. But Jean held her ground. Looking around frantically, Nixon saw a large box of Godiva chocolates that the hotel had given him. Pat Nixon preferred See’s. So he had suggested I take them home to the mother of my children. In the face of Jean’s intransigence, he grabbed Marcia’s chocolates, handed them to my mother, and bolted from the room. Nixon was less flummoxed by Mao and Khrushchev.

With Elizabeth, May 2015

Jean’s willfulness and my immature frustration sometimes made our relationship difficult. But not so our last two years. Dementia is terrible. But for my mother, it was also a kind of gift. It took away her need to try so hard to help. For the first time in the 60 years I’d know her, she was content. In the home in Yorba Linda where Elizabeth and Linda took such good care of her, Jean sat in the garden with the sun on her face and arms without feeling that she should be doing something historic instead.

I told her the stories, since she’d forgotten it all. I told her about Harvey and Dick and her grandchildren and about my godfather, Louis Cook, another handsome newspaperman who had loved her desperately. Hearing it all again, brand new each time, she’d always smile, and her blue eyes would gleam. And on a sunny Saturday morning last October – because she loved Saturday mornings best of all – she slipped peacefully into glory.

A Celebration of the Life of Jean Taylor Lescoe was held on April 16, 2016 at my mother's home parish, All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. My fellow eulogists were Jean's friends Christle Balvin and former LA Times publisher Tom Johnson.

Counter-Reformation

We think, and rightly so, that we have a lot to teach our young people. But just as often, as our wonderful St. John’s youth leaders will tell you, the wisdom flows the other way around.

The photo shows eight-year-old Sierra Schwarz at a recent meeting of the St. John’s Parish Council, on which her mother, Bishop’s Committee member Erin Schwarz, serves. Sierra just happened to be reading a biography of Elizabeth the Great, founder of the Anglican Church and royal protector of the Book of Common Prayer, which unites Episcopalians to this day.

In a just few years, Sierra will be eligible for youth group – whose middle and high schoolers recently gave me a lesson of their own in Anglican theology.

For a couple of years, I’ve experimented with a deconstructed Holy Eucharist service that puts enormous emphasis on congregational participation. I first used it when Thom’s, Orange County’s so-called emergent community, worshiped at St. John’s. For the 2013-14 year, I adapted it for our monthly Youth Eucharist services.

If you listen carefully to the Eucharistic prayer on Wednesday, Saturday, or Sunday, you’ll hear the whole history of human experience. The wording varies from rite to rite, but the story’s always the same. God’s creation began in unity and love and fell into disunity and sin, to be called back to oneness in Christ.

During my deconstructed service – you might have called it a messy mass -- I closed Elizabeth’s prayer book and invited worshipers to retell the creation story in their own words. They took turns elevating the bread and wine, and we said the prayer of consecration together. By your Holy Spirit, make this bread and wine into your body and blood. (Don’t worry. I had a bishop’s permission!)

I thought that by stepping back from the familiar liturgy and celebrant’s role, I was giving people a renewed sense of ownership and individual involvement in a powerful sacrament that Jesus Christ gave not to the church but to the whole people of God. Hoping to attract a younger generation of skeptical seekers, many churches are experimenting with this kind of liturgical democratization, giving congregations a larger voice in worship, deemphasizing the ordained orders, and setting aside the old prayers and music.

But as it turns out, my experiment wasn’t that popular with the new generation at St. John’s. During their postmortem meeting at the beginning of the summer, our young people said they wanted the old service back.

Don’t get me wrong: Before last year’s experiment, Youth Euch was hardly the drill from Sunday morning. Using music and other means, I did my best each month to vary the first part of the service, the Ministry of the Word, when we hear scripture, share a homily, and pray for our needs and those of others.

But when it comes to the second half, the young people missed the solemnity, piety, and predictability of the prayer book mass, the words we all know and the traditional roles we play. Whatever we’ve experienced in the course of our day, whatever sadness or joy, we come together and bind ourselves to Christ and one another just as we have for 2,000 years. The Lord be with you. And also with you.

Patti Peebles, our chaplain and youth leader, put it best when she gave me the kids’ verdict on my messy mass. “They’re Episcopalians,” she said.

Elizabeth would be proud. And so am I. 

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

Keeping Sabbath And Staying Home

Maybe I’m imagining it. I can’t give you hard data. But whether it’s because of the price of gas, the economy, or Orange County’s peerless weather this year, I’m pretty sure that more St. John’s congregants and school parents than ever have told me that they’re staying home this summer.

Staycation is a word, by the way – or technically, a neologism, which means a term that’s on the way to being accepted as a word. Its working definition is “no extra baggage charges or lost luggage, jet lag, jellyfish stings, or gaining five pounds on a cruise to Alaska.”

What staycation doesn’t mean is no fun, rest, or change of perspective. It doesn’t mean no Sabbath. The psalmist sings, “My boundaries enclose a pleasant land” [16:6]. We take our capacity for Sabbath wherever we go, just as we can ruin our vacations by packing our accustomed anxieties (and our e-mail-loaded iPhones) along with our sun block and swimsuits.

It’s the same with church. We don’t need to be in church to thank and praise God, talk to God from the depths of our heart, seek and obtain forgiveness for our sins, participate in sacrament, and live a more abundant life. But the discipline of regular attendance helps turn our minds toward the divine. By the same token, while we don’t need a folding chair, Corona with a wedge of lime, Daniel Silva novel, and stretch of beach on Maui to relax and enjoy life, they sure help set the stage.

If I’ve just described your vacation, you may not be even be reading this. If you are, put down that laptop get back to having fun. If not, here’s your guide to a five-star staycation:

Take little trips. Do we really need to be reminded of the diversions within a few hours’ drive? Since Kathy and I were on the St. John’s Holy Land pilgrimage, I decided not to take much more time away this summer. But I’m taking five or six days in August to drive to San Diego, see friends, and spend a couple of days on retreat, ending up at Camp Stevens in Julian to check up on my younger daughter, Lindsay, who’s on the staff. A six-day cruise to Mexico? Just fine. Spending six days (or six hours, if that’s all that’s available) doing exactly what I want? Priceless.

Do exactly what you want. A spiritual counselor told me that her definition of Sabbath was watching a whole season of “The West Wing” in one day. That’s because she loves “The West Wing.” Her point was that Sabbath is whatever you find enjoyable and reinvigorating – watching sports, baking cupcakes, playing video games, hiking, talking to friends, going to the movies by yourself, or just sleeping in. Above all, never feel guilty for indulging yourself. Remember that, at least in English, Sabbath doesn’t start with “sh” (for “should”).

Try something new in your life and at St. John’s. What I love most about vacations is the new or atypical: Seeing historic places, scuba diving, eating four meals a day. The staycation dictum is the same: “Just try it.” Rent a flute and sign up for a lesson. Download Scrabble or Angry Birds on your phone. Amaze and confound your grandchildren by learning to text or joining Facebook. Have a frozen yogurt with chocolate sprinkles. Have another.

At church, sample the noon healing service on Wednesday or the Saturday evening community Holy Eucharist. They only last about a half-hour, giving you more time for “The West Wing” or Angry Birds. Come to the fellowship dinner on Aug. 11 or yoga and the labyrinth on Aug. 16. Join a parish reading circle. If you’ve been tempted to try spiritual direction, what better time for a deeper conversation with God than the lazy days of summer? Call me and ask for a referral. If you’ve never tried the discipline of daily prayer by the hours, get out The Book Of Common Prayer and turn to pps. 137-140. Tell God I said hello.

Above all, if you’re not traveling this summer, remember why people go on vacation to begin with: For refreshment, reorientation, and (if we’re smart) relationship. We can fly around the world ten times without ever finding such comforts. We can rejoice in them without even leaving the house.

This post originally appeared in the Vaya Con Dios, the St. John's parish newsletter. My thanks to JP Allport for the labyrinth photo and sacredsandwich.com for this cartoon:

The Remembrance Of Them Is Grievous Unto Us

The Huffington Post (which has the best and most coverage of spirituality and religion of any mainstream publication) on the 350th anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer, which was yesterday. They used to say a properly educated newspaperman knew Greek mythology, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible. My newspaperwoman mother would add the prayer book, which she said taught her the glorious cadences of the English language (making May 2 the birthday of her composition professor). This bit of the General Confession is from the 1928 edition, which she gave me when I was confirmed on April 30, 1967 at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Detroit.

What's In A Holy Name?

Eternal Father, you gave to your incarnate Son the holy name of Jesus to be the sign of our salvation: Plant in every heart, we pray, the love of him who is the Savior of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen. BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

Ashes To Ashes, Finally

I kept them in my old 1928 Book of Common Prayer: Five crosses from Palm Sunday services I attended when I was a boy in Detroit during the 1960s.

My mother, Jean, gave me the leather-bound book, with its golf-leaf, onionskin pages, when I was confirmed in 1967. The crosses were pressed in the front, where she’d written her dedication. I’d finger them when I got the book down from the shelf to check an old prayer or service. They were dry but not as brittle as you might think, as though I’d put them there last year rather than during the Johnson administration.

Seeing them always made me think of going with my mother and grandparents to the Cathedral Church of St. Paul on Woodward Ave. On the way, we’d drive by the Vernor's ginger ale plant. Afterward we’d go to a diner for silver-dollar pancakes or the Art Institute for an egg salad sandwich and a peek at the famed Diego Rivera murals and an Egyptian mummy that was on display.

Every year at St. John’s Church, repeating the Altar Guild’s call to bring in last year’s crosses so we could burn them for Ash Wednesday, I’d feel a little guilty about my hoard of keepsakes.

But this year, driving to church on the morning of the last Sunday after the Epiphany, I thought about an Altar Guild member who was so eager to light the mighty pyre that she was coming to church in the throes of her recovery from surgery. I thought of my children or grandchildren finding the crosses on some occasion (far in the future, I trust) and wondering what to do with them. I realized that my memories were alive in my heart and spirit and that in any event my precious crosses, lent but not given, were a half-century overdue.

So I added my ancient crosses to our congregants' newer ones, to be formed into fateful black marks on a thousand foreheads Wednesday during four services at our Orange County Episcopal church and school. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

If anyone says he's thirsty after Ash Wednesday service, I'll recommend he try a Vernor's.

From Dead Into Life

When I arrived on Capitol Hill from Dulles early Wednesday evening, my dinner companion, who has a fascinating international portfolio that need not concern us further, slipped me a small shopping bag containing 12 CDs (actually, more than that; most are double albums). They ranged from 1967, when Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh spun and talked about their favorite records on a radio show in San Francisco (it's astonishing the tape of the show exists) to a concert Garcia and mandolinist David Grisman performed at San Francisco's Warfield Theater in February 1991. My friend said the recording of the second set would be one of his ten desert island discs. You know the concept: If you were stranded on a desert island forever, what albums would you take (in case you couldn't take your iPod)?

Garcia's first instrument was the banjo, which my friend said he took up during what he called "the Great Folk Scare" of the early 1960s. For several years he and Grisman tailed Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, and taped his concerts (the way people would later tape Dead shows). The 1991 set in question, which my friend played in the car, begins with "The Thrill is Gone," a 195os blues song popularized by B. B. King and belted out by Garcia in a husky but sonorous voice I'd never heard from him before. It continues with some country standards ("Old Rocking Chair"), a few Dead songs, and Irving Berlin's "Russian Lullaby."

So I have a feast of several weeks' music to listen to, including a Dead concert my buddy and I attended on Sept. 15, 1987 at Madison Square Garden. It includes "China Cat Sunflower">"I Know You Rider" (ask your local Deadhead what ">" means), which also appears on the Dead's commercially-released three-disc "Europe '72." My friend winces when I proclaim that the album captures them at the height of their powers. They played about 2,000 concerts, and he knows far better than I when the high points occurred. Indulgently, he also gave me a complete recording of a London show from May 1972 that comprises part of "Europe '72."

With the Dead dispatched, over a long dinner at a French restaurant about ten minutes' walk from the Capitol, we talked about friends, love, politics, Nixon, and synchronicity. Earlier in the week, I'd listened to a radio interview in which mandolinist Ricky Skaggs talked about performing with Bill Monroe, and here was my friend talking about Garcia's Monroe tapes. On my flight from Long Beach, I'd just read Terry McDermott's New Yorker profile of the enigmatic sociopath Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who dreamed up the Sept. 11 atrocity and marketed it to Osama bin Laden. In the original plan, he was going to hijack ten planes, use nine as bombs, and land the tenth safely, climb out, wave, and hold a press conference. McDermott writes that KSM also conferred with and helped fund the Jersey City-based architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. When I mentioned all this, my friend said that his and his wife's favorite picture was taken in Jersey City, with the World Trade Center in the background, and that while they'd been friends for years, their affection had deepened in the traumatic aftermath of the attacks, resulting in their marriage.

Once we'd turned to matters of faith, I learned that these little non-coincidence coincidences mean a little more to me than to my friend. When they occur I usually experience a frission of alertness, as if something has locked into place. I find, for instance, that if I think of someone and then call him, it was usually the right thing to do at just that time. That doesn't mean it's magic, since these days calling someone is probably always the right thing to do (instead of e-mailing or Facebooking or, worst of all, doing nothing). And yet I do see them as little evidences of the sovereignty of God. No less spiritual but perhaps somewhat more democratic, my friend is inclined to think that noticing any coherence amid the universe's seeming chaos and prevailing cruelty means that one has learned to observe creation "with the third eye open."

After dinner he dropped me at the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where I was due this morning for a meeting of the governing board of the National Association of Episcopal Schools. I'd never been here before and tried to find someone to guide me, but by 11 all the gentle seminarians appeared to have said their prayers and gone to sleep. I soon found my way across a broad, dark lawn to the snug campus guest house.

This afternoon, during a conversation about the challenges facing Episcopal schools and parishes, I remembered something else my friend had said at dinner. Once a daily-mass Roman Catholic, he's taking a break from Rome because of its handling of the sexual abuse scandals. He praised the Episcopal Church for facing up to issues of gender and sexuality that most of Christendom ignores. Since Episcopalians are sometimes more inclined to wring our hands than ring our own bell, I repeated to my colleagues what my friend had said as evidence that our beloved, sometimes beleaguered church may yet end up as the most logical safe haven for the west's substantial cohort of enlightened orthodox. "And the thing about my friend," I added, "is that he's a Republican!"

The seminary playing host to our two-day meeting has been training Episcopal priests, deacons, and laypeople for nearly 200 years. These eminences include my bishop diocesan and our St. John's rector, Jon Bruno, and second-year seminarian Shivaun Wilkinson, a postulant for Holy Orders in the Diocese of San Diego. She's shown here with her classmate Laura, a postulant from Nebraska. Shivaun's parents and sister attend St. John's, so I thought I'd better check up. Plus she and her husband, Chris, are expecting their first child in February, and I wanted to get caught up on all all the news.

We made arrangements to meet at the daily Evening Prayer service in the campus chapel. Those who planned the liturgy combined the beautiful service in The Book Of Common Prayer with folk-style songs led by a four-member combo featuring guitars, bass, and mandolin (could've been Garcia, Lesh, and Grisman about 40 years ago; coincidence? I don't think so). We were 25 worshipers in all. As we sang the verses from Ecclesiastes first set to music by Pete Seeger in his song "Turn Turn Turn" and made famous by the Byrds, my eyes met those of a four-year-old girl who'd come to church with her mother, and I felt that frission again, this time the grace of knowing as a matter of absolute certainty that I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing, and, this evening, doing it with the brave, talented, faithful young people who will lead our church far into this century. And what a church it is! Before we walked out of the beautiful old chapel into a warm September drizzle, we heard this old, beautiful prayer:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love's sake. Amen.

Awakening Hope For Text

Andrew Sullivan on the deep, not-techie roots of the word kindle, shrewdly chosen by Amazon for its revolutionary reading device. While we're at it, there's this, from the Book of Common Prayer:

Lord Jesus Christ, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is past. Be our companion in the Way, kindle our hearts, and awaken hope that we may know you as you are revealed in scripture and the breaking of bread. Grant this for the sake of your love.

Divine

For Episcopalians visiting New York City, all roads, streets, and avenues lead to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the world’s largest Gothic cathedral and the seat of the Bishop of New York, the Rt. Rev. Mark S. Sisk. It reopened last November after a devastating fire in December 2001. I first saw it nearly 30 year ago and remember it looking gloomy and in desperate need of a good sandblasting. Kathy said the same thing yesterday when we visited St. Patrick’s. Now the massive pillars in the St. John’s nave are clean and bathed in pale blue light; the eye follows them to the distant arched ceiling and beyond. I remember pews, but they’re gone now. Bas-reliefs in the floor depicting the signal places of Jesus’s life and ministry – Bethlehem, Nazareth, Cana, Bethany -- guide the visitor toward the altar, associating this grandest of structures with the far more modest-seeming but epochal places we St. John (Chrysostom) pilgrims visited during our pilgrimage in August.

“It’s Episcopal?” one stunned visitor asked a docent. “It’s not Catholic?” Only 2.5 million of us, but the most stunning cathedrals in New York and Washington. So there. This one’s famously unfinished, especially the spires that front Amsterdam Ave., which stonemasons are building the Middle Aged-fashioned way, brick by brick. Plus the gift shop, in which the fire started, has not reopened, and the volunteer in the narthex wasn’t sure it ever would. So where does a guy get a Book of Common Prayer in this town?

During our visit, someone was tuning the really high notes on the organ, which added to the ethereal impression of a building whose highest reaches have been newly thrown open to upwardly cast eyes. Outside, in the children’s garden between the cathedral and diocesan offices, there was…well, the kind of bird you don’t normally see in Manhattan. From the look on his face, I don’t think he recognized me, either.

Brian St. John (that name again), of Orange County, California, tells me it's a peacock -- or, as Flannery O'Connor called them, peahens. But I thought they had colored feathers? Oops: Over on Facebook (where there is considerably more attention being paid to this question) Nancy Larkin confirms it's a white peacock. Thanks, friends!

Red Sky At Night?

A Collect for Aid against Perils

Be our light in the darkness, O Lord, and in your great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of your only Son, our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

Maybe It Was Uncle Francis

This prayer is and has been a favorite of many Christians, including Mother Teresa, who said it every day:

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

Many believe the prayer was written by St. Francis of Assisi, who was born in the 12th century. Now the New York Times reports:

An article published this week in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, said the prayer in its current form dates only from 1912, when it appeared in a French Catholic periodical.

And it became wildly popular only after it was reprinted in L’Osservatore Romano in 1916 at the behest of Pope Benedict XV, who wanted a prayer for peace in the throes of World War I.

Although news to many, the truth about the prayer had apparently been hiding in plain sight.

Including in the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church, most recently revised in the 1970s, which calls it "a prayer attributed to [emphasis added] St. Francis." That's the BCP version above. Another supposedly Franciscan formulation that is a favorite of preachers but has always seemed a little too perfect to be true: "Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words."

Winners, Losers, And The Miracle Of Grace

It was quiet this afternoon outside the Cathedral Center of St. Paul, headquarters of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. But there was jubilation within as word came down from the California Supreme Court that three congregations which left the Episcopal Church after the ordination of the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson, a partnered gay man, as bishop of New Hampshire must return their properties to the Diocese.

My wife and colleague Kathy and I were downtown for a noon meeting. We visited the Cathedral Center in Echo Park afterwards. It seemed to be the place to be today, if only briefly. This news van was the first to arrive for a 2 p.m. news conference. It was national news several years ago when our congregations in Newport Beach, Long Beach, and North Hollywood voted to join the Anglican Province of Uganda. When they tried to keep their buildings and property, our Diocese sued.

Today's unanimous ruling is expected to complicate the lives of 100 other congregations around the country who have left TEC without leaving their buildings. It's not clear yet whether the dissenting LA churches will try to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Here's Bishop J. Jon Bruno's statement from the Cathedral Center:

"The Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles is overjoyed with the conclusive opinion of the California Supreme Court.

"We have prevailed in all areas of law addressed in this case.

"We look forward to the possibility of reconciliation with these congregations, and we assure that this Diocese and the people of The Episcopal Church that we will continue mission and ministry in the areas of these congregations.

"The mission of The Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Los Angeles continues, as our prayer book states, 'to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.' We will continue to seek this reconciliation with fellow Christians in the communities of Long Beach, Newport Beach, and North Hollywood, as well as La Crescenta, where Episcopal church properties continue as part of the Diocese of Los Angeles in accordance with the Court's opinion announced today.

"We acknowledge that this opinion establishes a precedent. We further note the pastoral concerns at this time within The Episcopal Church, which continues in its mission of service, especially in providing food, shelter, medicine, and pastoral care to those in greatest need locally and globally, respecting the dignity of every human being."

Political and legal entanglements are a fact of human life, including in the church. And yet neither elections nor legal rulings can settle theological disputes or heal spiritual or interpersonal wounds. Long after voters and judges leave off, the work of God's grace persists.

O God, by whom the meek are guided in judgment, and light rises up in darkness for the godly: Grant us, in all our doubts and uncertainties, the grace to ask what you would have us to do, that the Spirit of wisdom may save us from all false choices, and that in your light we may see light, and in your straight path may not stumble; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

A Prayer For The Gaza War

Eternal God, in whose perfect kingdom no sword is drawn but the sword of righteousness, no strength known but the strength of love: So mightily spread abroad your Spirit, that all peoples may be gathered under the banner of the Prince of Peace, as children of one Father; to whom be dominion and glory, now and for ever. Amen. BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

Prop. 8, Gay Marriage, And God's Blessing

As an example of how I'll persistently fail to take a definitive stand on any issue, an item I posted at The New Nixon a couple of weeks ago. If you like, go to TNN and read the critique that a self-described papist posted in response:

On Saturday, over 20,000 demonstrated against California’s Prop. 8. Melissa Etheridge says she’s keeping her $500,000 a year in state taxes now that her second-class citizenship has been affirmed.

Protesters may be hoping to influence the courts that will rule on lawsuits claiming that Prop. 8, which amends the constitution to ban gay marriage, is invalid. President Nixon used to say that judges read the papers and feel the political heat just like ordinary people, so we shall see. (He also predicted we’d have gay marriage by 2000.)

Opponents of gay marriage, including the President-elect, often say that they support civil union and domestic partnership laws instead. This primer shows how these expedients aim for but don’t match the sturdiness of the marriage contract. One can understand the frustration of those who object to society making that contract not impossible for them to get — just considerably more complicated and expensive. What is the point of giving a couple 60%, or 75%, or whatever percentage of a thing but then withholding the last bit on the basis of some immutable principle, especially when we’ve already ceded the principle by establishing civil unions in some states, including California?

The explanation for a paradox is usually in the heart, wrapped in people’s ideals and fears as well their foundational experiences. The mom-dad paradigm, dominant since the beginning of time, is at the root of most people’s definition of family. Pin me to the wall, and I’ll say it’s best for a child to have a mom and dad. The irony is that my father was almost never around, and my mother had to go back to work when I was three weeks old. I might have done better with two attentive moms or two dads. As it was, I went searching for replacement dads, not extra moms (though some men do that when they choose their wives). I needed a father in my life — because of my conception of the godhead, because I was male, or for some other reason.

Everyone else has their own set of experiences, beliefs, and sometimes pathologies. On Nov. 4, it added up to 52% of Californians being against same-gender marriage. You can blame it on funding from the Mormons if you like, but my guess is that relatively few voters needed help making up their minds. These were votes that came from the gut.

As for mine, I tried to think about being deprived of the right to marry the person I loved because I’d been born gay. Besides, as ex-Nixon speechwriter William Safire wrote several years ago, the gays are bound to do better with marriage than the straights. We may yet get back to the ideal of the traditional family, but in the meantime — and it will be a long time — men and women who beget children, both mindfully and not, will need significant help from nontraditional families to raise them.

In the end, I voted against Prop. 8, especially for the sake of the gay and lesbian people I care about, including mentors and partners in Christian ministry. I did so without being eager for the ban to fail. “Marriage” is a culturally defined term, and the best way a free people has to define their terms is at the ballot box. If the Holy Spirit was moving across the surface of the deep on this issue, I didn’t want my vote to be the one standing in her way. But as I voted, my heart and head were still tugging at one another.

Now that the measure has passed, gay and lesbian people are heartbroken and angry. Comparing their cause to civil rights for African-Americans and Hispanics, they criticize blacks for voting in favor of Prop. 8. It’s a harsh political reality that people’s visceral feelings about homosexuality run deeper than culturally and economically conditioned biases against ethnic groups. Instead of blaming those who voted yes, marriage equity advocates might look for new political and social partners. Those who oppose abortion also feel marginalized and unheard, not only by the majority of voters but the MSM, which at least is giving the anti-Prop. 8 demonstrators a fair hearing. Gay people and the unborn and their advocates — the last second-class citizens — may have the makings of an effective coalition.

As for how marriage is ultimately defined by secular society, my guess is that gay and lesbian people will soon be granted that last 40% or 25% of a durable legal contract. At that point, the debate will shift back to where the really difficult work is being done — the church and other faith communities.

Reformation scholars will tell you that the early Protestants didn’t think the church had any business solemnizing legal contracts between men and women or anyone else. The deed was done on the church steps, after which the couple came inside for the main event — the church’s mediation of God’s blessing, which God had envisioned for the couple at the beginning of all things. The church understands that the two people were meant for each other in the mind of God. In the marriage rites contained in the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer, the emphasis is not on the marriage itself, which the priest or bishop does as an agent of the state, but on God’s preexisting blessing.

That’s why the divisive debate in the Episcopal Church is over whether same-sex unions should be blessed. That debate won’t be any easier for churches, dioceses, or provinces just because polities decide to give all people access to the same durable legal contract.

For unchurched Californians, overturning Prop. 8, should that happen, will be the end of the drama. For the faithful, more scenes have yet to be played out, and on their stage, legislation, demonstrations, and court cases aren’t as helpful. The church won’t be of one mind on the subject until the preponderance of those in the pews have the epiphany experience of looking across the aisle at Fred and Ed or Alice and Grace (or perhaps across the table at the family Thanksgiving feast) and saying to themselves, “You know, I’m not wild about this whole gay marriage thing, but those two were meant to be together.” For the faithful, meant-to-be is in the mind of God, the source of all blessing.