Notes On A President's Notes

By Kathy O'Connor

Tomorrow is the 19th anniversary of the death of Richard Nixon, whom I served for 14 years as his personal secretary and last chief of staff. I can hardly believe it has been almost two decades since I held his hand and kissed him on the forehead while saying goodbye in a small, dark room in the ICU at New York Hospital. Those private moments remain fresh in my mind because of the sacred separation of his spirit from his body that I felt as his heart monitor went flat.

Because of the passions of the Cold War, Vietnam, and Watergate, and especially the secret White House tapes, history’s assessment of him will always be complicated. Some of his worst moments and those of felonious assistants such as Bob Haldeman are on display in tonight’s documentary on the Discovery Channel. But there was another side of our former president that I was privileged to see as he traveled the world, wrote many books and articles, and advised all of his successor presidents.

The days before his devastating stroke were full and joyful. He worked on his final book, Beyond Peace. Two days before he was stricken, he was among friends and family at the wedding of a family friend in Westchester County. The day before, his younger daughter Julie Eisenhower spent the day at his home in Park Ridge, New Jersey, which had felt empty indeed since Mrs. Nixon’s death in June 1993.

On Monday, April 18, he decided to work at home weighing book promotion options and answering correspondence. We were on the phone all day. He had his stroke just before dinnertime, about an hour after our last conversation. He was rushed to the hospital, where he died on April 22.

I’ve thought of him each day since. To focus his own thoughts, President Nixon wrote notes to himself constantly, including daily Kathy-dos. Here are the two from April 18. When we’d covered a matter, he crossed it off the list. On the shorter list are a couple of items he never had a chance to ask me about. Maybe later, Mr. President!

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. 

Justice And Blood

In Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” Jamie Foxx portrays a slave named Django (“The D is silent,” he tells another character) who frees his wife from a sadistic plantation owner. (Spoiler alert!)  In the process he kills every white person on the farm, including the owner’s unarmed sister. Among Django’s victims is Tarantino himself, appearing as a minor character so debased and irredeemably stupid that I’m sure even the Pope would say he deserved to die.

I can’t account for everyone’s reaction to the half-hour of airborne intestines at the end of “Django Unchained.” Priest of God and follower of the Prince of Peace, I was rooting for Django all the way. You know the feeling when the bad guys are getting what they deserve. If filmmakers have done their jobs, few in the audience are hoping the suspects will be read their Miranda rights and given the opportunity to reflect on their poor decisions. Something deep in us aches for instant justice. We want to see righteous vengeance in the flash of steel and gunpowder. We want blood.

If you really want to see a bloody mess, ask screenwriter and director Tarantino to justify Django’s mayhem in the context of the Newtown massacre. In one TV interview in early January, he refused to answer. But a few weeks before, on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” he made a useful distinction. The worst moments in “Django Unchained” are depictions of savagery against slaves. They’re not stylized, and Tarantino doesn’t dwell on them. It’s this documentary violence, the vicious reality of slavery, which provokes Django and his friend, played by Christoph Waltz, into an orgy of what Tarantino called “the fun violence.”

Fun violence is the concept I’ve been wrestling with since seeing Tarantino’s entertaining movie (not suitable, in my perhaps too conservative view, for most under 15 or 16). Some think that his movies could inspire real-life attacks by sick people. Others just believe they’re in poor taste. But most critics miss the point, which is that the blood lust is in us already, an integral aspect of our nature. Tarantino is showing us exactly what we’ve come to see, which is also what we came to see when Bruce Willis battled terrorists in "Die Hard" and Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star. Fictional violence against the unquestionably evil gives our animal instincts a chance to bubble deliciously to the surface under carefully controlled conditions.

Owning our instincts, including our taste for violence, is vital to our formation as Christians. Especially as we prepare for Lent and Good Friday, it helps us understand how we might have been persuaded to add our voices to those who shouted “Crucify him!” Jesus’s antagonists concocted a narrative about his blasphemy and pretensions to kingship that triggered the audience’s craving for a spectacle of torture and death. During the long era of public executions in the U.S., people also gave themselves permission to enjoy watching someone die.

It’s up to the experts to say what came first, our hunger for righteous payback or for sheer blood, and how they’re intrinsically bound. But understanding how deeply we want vengeance can help us make better decisions about dilemmas in the world and our lives. Do we ever catch ourselves rushing to judgment, deciding too quickly who’s right and wrong so some sentence can be speedily pronounced? We leave behind the vivid colors and moral clarity of a Tarantino movie and rediscover gray areas and stubborn facts. In a complicated world, give me “Django Discerning” on the judicial bench and in corridors of power, hungry for justice but with a lust for due process.

Movie violence can also deepen our understanding of biblical violence – the massacre of the priests of Baal by God’s prophet Elijah on Mt. Carmel as depicted in 1 Kings or, as described in Exodus, God’s killing of the Egyptian firstborn to free his people from slavery. In their time, these events were portrayed not as fun but as good violence, leading to righteous worship in 1 Kings and freedom in Exodus. God’s role in bloody biblical acts is a question for another time. But God does say this much to his violence-prone people: “Promote justice. Strive to walk in peace. Vengeance is mine, and never yours.”

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

Our Little Sphere

The morning after the Newtown massacre, I heard a fire engine coming from behind as I drove along Rancho Santa Margarita Parkway toward the church I serve in south Orange County, California. I pulled over and watched it roar past, a blur of Christmas red.

At such moments, does your mind work like mine? If I’m near home, at first I think, “Maybe they’re going to our house!” If I’m near work, I think, “I hope there’s nothing wrong at St. John's!” Once these brief visions of incendiary toasters or Advent wreaths recede, I pray that everyone is okay wherever the firefighters are headed and give thanks for all the people in the world who make a vocation out of rushing toward danger.

We’re usually not the victims when horror strikes – until we are. On the Monday after Newtown, I tried to imagine what St. John’s School parents were feeling at drop-off. Their heads probably assured them that their children would be safe on our campus. Their hearts warned that the parents of Sandy Hook Elementary School had made the same assumption.

To the extent that safety is a state of mind, we’re in more a dangerous state this Advent and Christmas. That same Monday at least enabled St. John’s School to thank some of those who risk their lives on our behalf. U.S. Marines and their families visited campus for a chapel service and meetings with our students. Kristen Lanham, Cindy Farnum, and other organizers of our annual Operation Christmas Spirit sent our guests back to Camp Pendleton with presents, food, and clothing.

Preaching in a church packed with students, colleagues, and our guests, I told my fire engine story in the hope of reassuring children who had been hearing about Newtown all weekend. While bad things do happen, we’re pretty safe. If we’re still worried or scared, it helps us feel better when we count our blessings, care for someone else who’s suffering, and give thanks for those from Afghanistan to the neighborhood firehouse who pledge themselves to safety and service.

Worry and fear won’t keep tragedy away, but planning and preparation may. At St. John’s School, we have regular fire and lock-down drills. At the national level, an urgent conversation is underway about the gun violence that marred this year more than any in recent memory. What can we do as one nation under God to deter such acts? It won’t be a thorough conversation unless everything’s on the table, including mental health education and treatment, the prevalence of semiautomatic weapons, and the way video game and television violence influences troubled people.

What might help most of all would be paying more and better attention to one another in our fractious, individuated society. Faith communities such as St. John’s can contribute by modeling how to conduct civil dialogue on difficult issues, build and sustain mutually supportive communities, and care for the lonely, despondent, and marginalized.

Thinking there’s nothing we can do after a moment like Newtown would inflict tragedy on tragedy. As Charles Dickens wrote in A Christmas Carol, “Any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness.” Every one of us is part of the solution, capable of accomplishing far more of God’s just and righteous purposes than we usually imagine. But how could it be otherwise at Christmas, as we prepare to celebrate our enlightenment and empowerment in Emmanuel, God with us?  

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

Tending Upscale

I'm grateful to Ann Mellow for asking me to write a post for the blog at the National Assn. of Episcopal Schools.

Big Ben

In early August, Ben Zauri, 15, was badly burned as the result of teenaged hijinks of which no more need be said. You can follow his story here. After weeks in isolation and a series of painful surgeries, he was released from the hospital a week ago. He came to church on Sunday with his mother, Missy, and father, Sean. He's in a wheelchair as the burns on his legs continue to heal. All in all, brave Ben (younger brother of Chris, active in the St. John's youth ministry) is doing magnificently, through the grace of God, the love of his family, his own resources of strength, faith, and hope, and the good people at the Grossman Burn Center at Western Medical Center in Santa Ana.

With that, The Episconixonian -- with books to read, songs to learn, and weddings to conduct (especially my elder daughter's on Oct. 6) and to ensure that during the next nine weeks an obsession with politics doesn't crowd out attention to ministry -- begins a campaign-season hiatus.

I'll conclude by saying I was surprised that the Republicans risked reprising Ronald Reagan's 1980 question -- "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" -- and also that the Democrats took a couple of news cycles to figure out how to answer it. I unhesitatingly answered yes, since four years ago, I was considering signing up for firearms training in preparation for the apparently imminent meltdown of the global financial system and the return of a hunter-gatherer-barter-based economy. But I'm a worrier.

For now, it's good enough for me that Ben is better off than he was four weeks ago. God is good!

In Dutch With The Dutch

Why the Netherlands' punctiliousness about politicians' claims won't work here.

Say "Thessalonians" Three Times Really Fast

The 27 books of the New Testament begin with Matthew and end with the Revelation to John. Marcus Borg rearranges them according our best understanding of when in the first century the texts were actually written. He starts with St. Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians (generally understood to be the oldest Christian document) and ends with 2 Peter. Teaching all these books to seventh graders at St. John's, the most radical thing I do is have students read Mark (the earliest gospel) before Matthew.

Denial From Day One

Karl Rove's talking point for Republicans is to treat Barack Obama respectfully to woo millions who voted for him in 2008. That requires a new narrative in which Republicans treated him respectfully when he was elected. But who can deny the truth of this New York Times editorial this morning?:

Mitt Romney wrapped the most important speech of his life, for Thursday night’s session of his convention, around an extraordinary reinvention of history — that his party rallied behind President Obama when he won in 2008, hoping that he would succeed. “That president was not the choice of our party,” he said. “We are a good and generous people who are united by so much more than divides us.”

The truth, rarely heard this week in Tampa, Fla., is that the Republicans charted a course of denial and obstruction from the day Mr. Obama was inaugurated, determined to deny him a second term by denying him any achievement, no matter the cost to the economy or American security — even if it meant holding the nation’s credit rating hostage to a narrow partisan agenda.

All Nixon's Fault

Juliet Lapidos on the one-time mainline Republicans who became odd ducks when their party and conservative evangelical Christianity converged sometime during the post-Watergate wilderness. For instance:

Kellie Ferguson, the executive director of Republican Majority for Choice, would like to see the GOP shift from banning abortion to finding common ground in order to reduce the number of abortions. She’s been dismayed by recent GOP attacks on family planning (the attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, for instance), which she finds irrational. “If you make it more difficult for women to access planning services, you end up with more unintended pregnancies and more abortions, which ends up costing taxpayers money. So, among other problems, it’s not fiscally conservative.” (The Guttmacher Institute estimates that every dollar spent on family planning saves taxpayers $4.)