Lunch With Dick And Richard

A guilty pleasure read in August, when it comes out, will be Kati Marton's book about the love of her life, the late Richard Holbrooke. Susan Cheever has a preview:

In a bookstore after saying goodbye to Holbrooke [before one of his diplomatic missions], Marton picks up Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, flips to her husband’s name in the index, and finds an infuriating story. She writes, “The President soured on Richard when my husband asked him to call him Richard, not Dick, at the ceremony appointing him special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Holbrooke had explained to the president that Kati, who was in the audience, did not like the nickname Dick. Standing in a Paris bookshop, Marton is furious—how can Obama, who doesn’t like to be called by his nickname, Barry, be irritated that she doesn’t want people to call her husband Dick?

The rich are different from you and me—they are a lot more fun to read about. Marton and Holbrooke’s first date was a three-day jaunt to Chartres and the Chateaux of the Loire Valley at Christmastime in 1993. He was in his 50s, the American ambassador to Germany taking a few days off; she in her 40s was just barely separated from anchorman Peter Jennings, one of the most famous men in the world. They talked about Gothic vs. Romanesque, spoke perfect French, and ate at Chez Benoit where they ran into Holbrooke’s friend Pamela Harriman, the ambassador to France. (Harriman snubbed Marton.) No sweaty groping in cheesy hotel rooms for these two! Holbrooke’s most excited moment was when he and Marton sat side by side in a pew of the great Chartres cathedral. “Just imagine,” he whispered urgently, “the pilgrims’ first reaction to these windows! The power of this place for medieval peasants.” At the end of five days together, they held hands.

Kathy and I met Holbrooke in Bonn in March 1994, when we accompanied Richard Nixon on his last visit to Russia, she as his chief of staff, I as director of his presidential library. On the way back, we stopped in London and caught a performance of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Carousel," then enjoying a West End revival. He and Mrs. Nixon (who had died the previous June) had seen it in New York right after World War II with their friend John Raitt (blueswoman Bonnie's father) as Billy Bigelow. In London, we got the last five or six seats in the balcony. When Billy's ghost broke through to his widow, Julie Jordan, and their embittered daughter, Louise, and they both stood to sing "You'll Never Walk Alone," Nixon was mopping his face with his raincoat.

We also popped back to West Germany for a meeting with Chancellor Helmut Kohl. You're allowed to say "popped" when you're riding in the private jet ADM's Dwayne Andreas had lent Nixon for his trip.

Holbrooke, as U.S. ambassador, met us at the airport. Since the Red Army Faction was still a threat, he had a half-dozen men around him toting semiautomatic weapons. We'd been a little late leaving London, and Holbrooke's apparatus was determined to get Nixon to Kohl's office on time. We were in four black Mercedes, virtually bumper to bumper, driving about 120 mph, the cars in front and back bristling with armament.

Afterward we went to Holbrooke's residence for lunch, where Nixon briefed him on his Moscow meetings (which had not included one with President Boris Yeltsin, who got angry at Nixon for visiting one of his political enemies). They had in common their enlightened realism in foreign policy and Diane Sawyer, Nixon's former aide, Holbrooke's one-time lover. Her name did not come up, so far as you know.

W. D. J. Really Think?

The Rt. Rev. Stacy F. Sauls, former bishop of Lexington, Kentucky, now serves as CEO of The Episcopal Church. In a letter published today in the Wall Street Journal rebutting a column by a disgruntled New York layman, Bishop Sauls writes:

The church has been captive to the dominant culture, which has rewarded it with power, privilege and prestige for a long, long time. The Episcopal Church is now liberating itself from that, and as the author correctly notes, paying the price. I hardly see paying the price as what ails us. I see it as what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

Many years ago when I was a parish priest in Savannah, a local politician and disaffected Episcopalian began a conversation with me. In that case the subject was homosexuality. It could have been any of the things mentioned last week as our ailments. "I just think the church should not be governed by the culture," he said. I replied that I agreed with him, but that "I just hadn't noticed that the culture was all that hospitable toward gay people." He stammered. "Well, maybe not here in Georgia."

The Episcopal Church is on record as standing by those the culture marginalizes whether that be nonwhite people, female people or gay people. The author calls that political correctness hostile to tradition.

I call it profoundly countercultural but hardly untraditional. In fact, it is deeply true to the tradition of Jesus, Jesus who offended the "traditionalists" of his own day, Jesus who was known to associate with the less than desirable, Jesus who told his followers to seek him among the poor.

The bishop's argument is eloquent but a little off point. Back in Georgia, he delicately maneuvered his friend into admitting that their state was hostile to gays and lesbians. Since then, the U.S. public, led by our young people, has grown far more accepting. Americans' support for gay marriage appears to increase month to month. The elite culture, especially opinion leaders in the media and popular culture, is militantly hostile to homophobia, and rightly so. And though we haven't fully lived into the democratic imperative of honoring the dignity of each individual and offering opportunity to all, it's also an exaggeration to say that our society marginalizes ethnic minorities and women.

Anyway, in our common struggle for human dignity, it's hard to say who's governing whom. Church people have been part of all our great civil rights movements, as have the unchurched. In formalizing equity in law and canon, sometimes secular society has led the way, other times the church. Today, TEC and what Bishop Sauls calls the dominant culture (especially its judges, DAs, and civil rights divisions) are essentially synchronizing.

So with apologies to the bishop, we actually haven't liberated ourselves from the culture. We have, however, pretty much liberated ourselves from members of our own covenant. He appears to be putting the best possible face on what amounts to us Christians' failure to remain in dialogue and community -- left and right, progressive and conservative, gay- and women-friendly and not. One may assign the blame for our separations and schisms however one wishes. But a failure is a failure. Alienation is alienation. While we honor Christ by welcoming all into his body, there are members of the body we don't much care for. The left hand is often appalled by what the right hand is doing, and vice versa. Christianity is a divided house, and we may remember what our LORD said on that subject.

We're all hopeful that the mainline church's center of gravity is shifting to a place where it will attract those who would never have worshiped with us 30 years ago. But will the secular-minded elites who in all sincerity applaud our enlightenment on identity and gender actually come on Sunday morning to participate in our communities, in the sacraments, in practices and disciplines that call everyone, even the exceptionally enlightened, to humility, repentance, and amendment of life? We may say that it's all up to God. But unless they do come, we will also have also liberated ourselves from the imperative of evangelism.

The Episcopal Church is doing better than its critics claim. Many of our parishes and missions are thriving as inclusive, loving, service-driven communities. And yet I fear our secular political partners on a whole array of issues view us progressive Christian soldiers as objects of curiosity and sympathy as much as sources of inspiration. From a secular perspective, Christ's whole church appears to be diffuse in its core message, even dying, in large part as a result of its failure to transcend its internal tensions and contradictions and keep both left and right wings under the mighty shadow of our Creator and the abiding hope of the Resurrection. In the end, Jesus -- who loves unity as well as justice -- might not be quite as pleased with any of us as we may think.

Keep Watch With Those Who Weep This Night

Jacob Stevens, 18, hugs his mother Tammi Stevens after being interviewed by police outside Gateway High School where witness were brought for questioning after a shooting at a movie theater in Denver today. A gunman wearing a gas mask set off an unknown gas and fired into a crowded movie theater at a midnight opening of the Batman movie "The Dark Knight Rises," killing at least 12 people and injuring at least 50 others, authorities said.
AP Photo/Barry Gutierrez

That's Resurrection For You

Reviewing Geza Vermes's new book about the early church, Rowan Williams argues that theologians, participants in ecumenical councils, and other architects of the church in its first three centuries weren't so much making it up as they went along as doing their best to describe the astonishing mystery of the Christ event:

Someone reading the convoluted texts of early Christian argument might well see them less as a series of baroque elaborations on a theoretical theme than as a series of attempts to capture an elusive but inescapable insight. Each effort generates more unfinished business; and the impetus is not to clarify ideas for their own sakes but to do justice to the sense that whatever Jesus introduces into the world is new and awkward enough to need a new vocabulary.

Hat tip to Norris Battin

Blessings On Blessings

Kathy and I celebrated our 10th anniversary on July 6, and that weekend the kids popped for dinner. That's why I'm talking about. Because my younger daughter, Lindsay, couldn't be present -- she was at work down at Camp Stevens in Julian -- it wasn't quite perfect. But nearly so, thanks to (beginning over my bald head) stepson Dan, future son-in-law Mark, stepdaughter Meaghan, honorary daughter Ciara, Meg's friend PJ, and my elder daughter, Valerie. What can I say but that blessings abound?

Israel's Ring Of Fire

In a tour d'horizon of Israel's borders, Daniel Pipes argues that an age of anarchy may succeed the age of Arab despotism.

Giving Faith A Chance In Syria

My Diocese of Los Angeles colleague the Rev. Canon F. Brian Cox is at work promoting faith-based reconcoliation in Syria. Hat tip to the weekly e-mailed Episcopal News for this link to Christianity Today:

Over the years, Cox has traveled to the world's hotspots to introduce more leaders to faith-based reconciliation. Cox and others worked for eight years before making significant progress in reconciling Pakistani Muslims and Indian Hindus in Kashmir. In the Mideast, he has already worked with Israelis, Palestinians, and Muslim Brotherhood members.

This intensive approach has little competition and gains little official support from government diplomats. In a 2010 report, Cox noted that a high-level official in the U.S. State Department paid his Asian program an unexpected compliment, saying, "Well, nothing else has worked in Kashmir. We might as well give faith a chance."

Cox's model of faith-based reconciliation centers on eight core values: pluralism, inclusion, peacemaking, social justice, forgiveness, healing historical wounds, sovereignty, and atonement. In the Syrian context, it potentially lays groundwork to assist activists in creating and implementing a strategic plan for national healing and reconciliation.

Uncomfortably One

Maggie Shipstead on mayhem at the modern American wedding:

I wonder...if the freewheeling merriment isn’t...rooted in a kind of doomsday solidarity. Binding yourself to another person with the intention of fidelity and the hope of lasting happiness is a daredevil leap of faith, and perhaps the momentum of nuptial risk-taking is contagious, inspiring guests to throw caution to the wind at the table or the bar or in bed. My friends’ weddings have been joyful and optimistic, but we’ve heard so many ominous statistics about the divorce rate that these days a distant rumble of anxiety can be heard at even the most determinedly perfect celebrations.

As a pastor, I experience weddings (also funerals, actually) as blessed foreshadowings of the perfect unity with one another and all creation from which and to which God has summoned us. For an hour or two,we may give ourselves permission to ignore the world's alienation and suffering, all the score-keeping and -settling of our lives, and imagine how God wants us to be and live. That's enough to make anyone go nuts.

10,000 Holes In The Hoover Building

Reviewing Max Holland's Leak, Athan Theoharis shows how Watergate leaker W. Mark Felt helped destroy both the Nixon presidency and the culture of secrecy at the agency he professed to love, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI:

The investigation of Nixon's role in the Watergate cover-up led to the exposure of his more serious abuses of the U.S. intelligence agencies: wiretapping prominent reporters, covert actions by the White House Plumbers, and, under the proposed Huston Plan, authorizing the use of illegal investigative techniques. In response, Congress in 1974—overriding President Gerald Ford's veto—enacted key amendments to the Freedom of Information Act that allowed reporters, activists, and scholars to obtain highly secret and revealing FBI records. That same year it enacted the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, which ensured the preservation of the Nixon Oval Office tapes and transferred control over Nixon's presidential papers to the National Archives, and in 1978 it passed the Presidential Records Act, which defined presidential papers as public property and established the conditions and timing for giving the public access to them. And in 1975 it established special House and Senate committees that investigated and then publicized the abusive practices of the U.S. intelligence agencies from the 1930s through the '70s.

Combined, these actions ended FBI officials' absolute control over their agency's records, a change that eventually benefitted the research of Holland and others. Such research has expanded our awareness of how secrecy emboldened officials to violate privacy rights and the rule of law, and as such it offers a powerful, still relevant lesson in the adverse consequences inherent in blind deference to claims of "national security."

St. John's Sky

About 7:30 p.m.