Proximate Causes

Mike, a longtime friend of Kathy and me, is a respected general contractor. Not long ago, he was finishing up a job for an Orange County family. Walking through their kitchen, he happened to notice one of their kids standing at the sink, rinsing backyard dirt and sand off a bucketful of LEGOs.

The next morning, Mike got a call from the homeowner, who asked, “What did you do to our garbage disposal?”

“It happens all the time,” Mike told me. “I add a spare room or a dig a hole for a Jacuzzi, something breaks anywhere in the house two hours, weeks, or months later, and they blame me.” In this case, the chagrined client called back and said he’d found a LEGO block right where Mike promised he would: Trapped in the frozen jaws of their garbage disposal.

At one time or another, each of us has indulged the temptation to assume that because A happened, then B did. The rational mind is on the lookout for what prosecutors and defense attorneys call the proximate cause – according to one online definition, “an act from which an injury results as a natural, direct, uninterrupted consequence and without which the injury would not have occurred.”

While identifying the proximate cause can help measure accountability and assess penalties, the work can be tricky, especially when both sides are pointing the finger. If my car is struck at an intersection by a truck whose driver was exceeding the speed limit, I may try to convince the traffic judge that I wasn’t at fault just because I happened to turn left into its path. If I get caught smacking my little brother, I’ll probably try to get out of trouble by saying that he hit me first, when mom wasn’t looking. In each case, while I may have a legitimate grievance, I’m still going to lose the argument, since my own action, not someone else’s, directly caused my predicament.

 In the public sphere, when politicians and media figures identify what they believe is the proximate cause of an event, it usually means they want to either mold public opinion or leverage or prevent some policy outcome. White supremacist Dylann Roof’s murder of nine African-Americans during a church Bible study in Charleston on June 17 was an especially striking example. Was his racism the proximate cause of the murders? Some said it was America’s institutional racism, including some people’s sentimental allegiance to the Old Confederacy. Others insisted that we have to consider Roof’s easy access to a handgun or the possibility of his being mentally ill. One presidential candidate said Roof was attacking religious liberty. Others made even more outlandish assertions.

Some talking heads accused others of politicizing the Emanuel AME Church massacre by stressing the wrong causes. In our polarized political and media worlds, these debates take on a wearyingly circular character. If I’m sure that I’m right, that I’m the one taking the morally superior stance, then I won’t necessarily be conscious of having political or tactical motives. When you disagree with my moral stance, I might be tempted to say that you’re the one who’s playing politics.

It would help if those raising their voices in such certitude would be more mindful of their prejudices and open about admitting them. This is not to argue that there’s never a correct answer in the search for proximate causes. It’s just that human affairs tend to be complicated, and those who have something to prove, or political capital or power to protect, are bound to be the enemies of nuance.

In Christian terms, of course, we might say that there is no nuance, only dark and light, death and life, evil and good. This frame of reference can lead to greater polarization when we insist that we are the ones on the side of the good. If we instead proceed out of humility, the Christian view promotes clarity and empowerment. June 17 was a day of ultimate darkness, an affront to the mind, heart, and spirit of God. Whatever we believe about its proximate causes, we can agree that it should never happen again. If we really want to do whatever it takes to prevent such horror, we should be willing to consider and work on multiple potential causes, even those that don’t match our predispositions. By definition, God’s love is wider than any horizon we may be able to glimpse. To see more of what God sees and desires, we may have to set out from the territory where we feel most at home.

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

Amid A Crowd Of Stars

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

With my mother at Easter

W.B. Yeats’ “When You Are Old” appears in A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, published in 1952 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. My copy has an inscription on the endpaper: “To Harvey on Christmas 1955 with deepest affection from Louis.” Harvey Taylor was my father, Louis Cook my godfather. Handsome Detroit newspapermen, for years they competed for the affections of my lovely newspaperwoman mother, Jean.

I was 14 months old that Christmas. Louis’s inscription expresses magnanimity in defeat. Still, he had probably guessed that alcoholism would destroy my parents’ marriage. Louis told me years later that he’d driven my father to more than one AA meeting. Six-foot-five in his stocking feet, gentle and strong, winner of the Bronze Star in World War II, Louis was biding his time.

In November, my mother moved to Yorba Linda, leaving behind the Pasadena house she bought half a lifetime ago when she got a job editing the old “View” section of the Los Angeles Times. A few years later, she became associate editor and one of the nation’s top female journalists. Kathy and I have been cleaning out her house, the work of many middle-aged children. There isn’t much left. Needing homes are the wrought-iron coffee table she loved and a long, Ponderosa-style dining room table and chairs she had made for the dinner parties she loved to throw.

All I really care about are the things she wrote. A commencement address she delivered at Mount St. Mary’s College. An article entitled “What Is An Episcopalian?”, which she wrote for the Detroit Free Press in 1961, when our General Convention was called in Motown. Her elegiac features about the 1965 murder of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo. Diary entries, including one on the date of my birth saying I weighed eight pounds, and it hadn’t gone easily. About a year ago, her advancing dementia robbed her of the pleasure of reading these aloud to visitors.

And then there are the letters. Especially Louis’s.

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true;

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

My mother wouldn’t marry Louis, which I always wanted her to do, since he was my father for all intents and purposes. She never really explained why, and now, she can’t. Her eyes sometimes glimmer when I mention him or my father. She doesn’t remember her devoted second husband, Richard Lescoe, at all.

The surpassing gift is that she saved about twenty of Louis’s love letters. They’re all written on old-fashioned newspaper copy paper. He never dated them. He wrote one, addressed “Dearest,” during his first visit to New York City, where it appears he was attending the famed Al Smith politicians’ dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria as a member of a Free Press delegation. It must’ve been about 1966, when he and Jean were in their forties.

“I have at last found the milieu for which I was born,” he wrote. “Nowhere in Manhattan can be found a gayer, more suave, more sophisticated man of the world than I. Especially since I stumbled out of a bar taking with me somebody’s Kuppenheimer overcoat. Unfortunately my victim’s gloves don’t fit me but they are Sak’s gray suede and I cut quite a figure dangling them carelessly in my left hand as I saunter down Park Ave.”

My mother loved John F. Kennedy, and at the black tie dinner at the Waldorf, lifelong labor organizer Louis encountered JFK’s nemesis and my future boss. He wrote, “I hesitate to mention this, darling, but Nixon is a fairly engaging character at close range.” Later, my mother managed to convince herself, but not me, that she had voted for Nixon, which made it easier to accept that her son was helping write his books. Her willfulness and my immature frustration made our relationship difficult. The dementia has taken all that away, too. I don’t think she’s ever been happier, nor have we ever been so close. And that is Easter.

And bending down beside the glowing bars

Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

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

Flyin' Shoes

In their book On Grief and Grieving, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler make an observation that is easy to accept in principle: “God gives us a life cycle that includes death.” But when our beloved dies, Kübler-Ross and Kessler write, “We can’t believe what has happened, because we actually can’t believe what has happened.” Denial, which Kübler-Ross made famous, is our psyche’s way of obscuring an unfathomable horror until we recover enough for her next stages: Bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance.

No one chooses to experience such loss – except us Christians, who revisit the birth, life, suffering, and death of Jesus Christ every year between Christmas and Easter.

Most of the time, of course, we’re retelling familiar Bible stories that aren’t especially traumatic, even when they’re sad. Otherwise people wouldn’t read sad novels or go to the movies. In worship, the stories can be so familiar or stylized that they lose their punch. The prayers in our Holy Eucharist liturgy encompass the whole history of God’s people, from creation through our alienation from God to reconciliation through Jesus Christ and his betrayal and Resurrection. The story is swirling, actually cinematic, and yet we’ve heard it in church so often that our attention is sometimes won by our worries and troubles and even grumbling stomachs (been to the new In-N-Out yet?).

Lent is supposed to bring the great epic back into frame and focus. We repent, fast, and prepare. We work harder at reconnecting with God and each other, trying to make more time for reflection and prayer. And we remember that soon we’ll pass from daylight into the gloaming and on to the midnight of Holy Week and humanity’s greatest loss.

When comparing terrible losses, a person mourning a parent, spouse, child, sibling, or friend is likely to feel that Christ has some competition. A comforting aspect of Christian doctrine is that Jesus Christ experienced suffering and death to give meaning to ours, to demonstrate that God had endured and transcended the worst life could offer. Might suffering even be our duty? “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34). The secular mind replies, “Since I don’t want to be your follower, I’d rather not take up my cross.” The secular mind would say that faith is denial – humanity’s way of obscuring the uncomfortable truth that life is loss and pain.

But the mature Christian doesn’t deny loss and pain but meets them head on, accepting humanity’s complicity in Christ’s death and the inevitability of our own. During our Sunday morning Grief and Grieving discussions this Lent, St. John’s members shared moving personal stories of loss and recovery – in Christian terms, death and resurrection. We may be so conscious of Christ’s divinity that we feel reluctant to appropriate his experience, afraid to compare our suffering to his or accept that we have the right and capacity to enjoy resurrection after the searing trauma of loss. But the very purpose of the Incarnation is to bring God close enough to touch, envelop, and comfort us. God indeed gives us a life cycle that includes death, and life’s seasons as well. Among many other things, Lent and Easter are seasons when we practice – literally practice, as in “get ready for and used to” -- both grief and hope.

This Lent, I watched a poignant documentary about a brilliant Texas songwriter, Townes Van Zandt, who died in 1997 at the age of 52. He suffered from alcoholism and bipolar disorder. His story made me think about my father, a talented writer and musician who died too young because of his drinking. It made me think about being in late middle age. It made me think of the imminence of loss and preciousness of life, especially in the St. John’s community. The life of our church and especially the implacable church calendar are great blessings, because I do sometimes deny the swiftly passing seasons. But as Townes wrote and sang:

Days full of rain
Sky’s comin’ down again
I get so tired
Of these same old blues
Same old song
Baby, it won’t be long
‘fore I be tyin’ on
My flyin’ shoes 

This post was first published in the Lent 2013 issue of the parish newsletter of St. John's Church, the Vaya Con Dios. 

Lazy Maze Of Summer

The labyrinth, awaiting mid-summer pilgrims at St. John's Episcopal Church

"David, Ryan, And Ben"

In one sentence, Ephesians 4:1-3, St. Paul teaches us how to make a lifetime of good decisions. Is it wise? Does it feel right? Does it promote unity? We can't always come up to Paul's standards, especially when these values come into conflict. David famously failed the test. This week at St. John's, though, we were thinking not of King David but teenaged David and two high school sophomores affiliated with out community, Ryan Janics and Ben Zauri, who are brimming with promise as David was while facing down the toughest challenges of their and their devoted parents' lives. My sermon for the 10th Sunday after Pentecost is here.

An Appealing Vision Of Adult Life

According to Madeline Levine, "authoritative parents" make the rules and provide a safe environment in which children can make their own mistakes, learn, and achieve -- making sure they do their math homework, for instance, instead of doing it for them. We also teach by the way we live:

Parents also have to be clear about their own values. Children watch us closely. If you want your children to be able to stand up for their values, you have to do the same. If you believe that a summer spent reading, taking creek walks and playing is better than a specialized camp, then stick to your guns. Parents also have to make sure their own lives are fulfilling. There is no parent more vulnerable to the excesses of overparenting than an unhappy parent. One of the most important things we do for our children is to present them with a version of adult life that is appealing and worth striving for.

Photo: St. John's Church youth group members at their mid-summer dinner

"It's The Cover-Up That Gets You"

"It's not the crime that gets you," Richard Nixon warned his White House aides 40 years ago this summer, after the Watergate break-in. "It's the cover-up." While he cited the Alger Hiss case as an example, the story of King David, Bathsheba, and her husband, Uriah, would've worked just as well. Most of us are covering something up. Since the morning of July 20 in Aurora, Colorado, we've experienced humanity at its worst and best. David embodies that tension as well. My sermon for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost is here.

Don't Mind The Gap

Eighteen-and-a-half has a powerful resonance for Americans who are at least two score and 18, since it's the length, in minutes, of a mysterious deletion in a Nixon White House tape that became part of the Watergate story. The volunteer sound technician at St. John's Episcopal Church, Dale Griffith, tells me my sermons average about that length -- a bit long for a highly liturgical service such as ours. While their political affiliations are naturally varied, the people of God at St. John's are gracious about my Nixon antecedents. But they probably sometimes wish that I would perform a deliberate erasure of a portion of these long, one-sided conversations, and do it beforehand.

The magic number came up again this week when historian and former Nixon archivist Maarja Krusten, a member of the National Archives foundation, attended an event at NARA in Washington featuring historical novelist Max Byrd and Cokie Roberts, the ABC News commentator who gave a talk about First Of Hearts: Selected Letters Of Mrs. Henry Adams, for which she wrote the introduction. As Krusten wrote at her blog NixoNARA:

As Bruce Guthrie’s photo shows, I was thrilled at the chance to tell Ms. Roberts that I was a member of the Foundation and how much I enjoyed and appreciated the wonderful work it does in partnership with the National Archives. Max Byrd and I exchanged some joking comments. When I told him I was a former NARA archivist who once worked with the Nixon tapes, he asked if he should tear out 18-1/2 pages from the book. I laughed and said, “No, no, we at the National Archives are all about preservation and disclosure. Gotta have the whole book!”