Johnnie Cochran

During the OJ Simpson trial ten year ago I became infatuated with Johnnie Cochran, who died Monday of a brian tumor at 67. And with Marcia Clark, the prosecutor with whom he went mano a mano in Judge Ito's courtroom.

How is it that a white, late age, middle class American male would have become embroiled in a tabloid extravaganza?

First of all, I was on sabbatical from my job. Living in Charleston where my wife wanted to go to take part in the historic restoration movement, and I to try out writing as my life's vocation. Because Charleston time is three hours earlier than LA time, I could finish several hours of writing, get myself a hot dog, and settle in for a couple of hours of testimony in the trial.

I loved watching Johnnie Cochran and Marcia Clark spar. Marcia never really had a chance. I think she knew it. Johnnie held all the cards. He knew it. It was much more than a trial. It was some mysterious moment of geological shift in American culture. That's the way Johnnie played it, while Marcia was stuck with trying an accused murderer.

Johnnie was brilliant, outrageous. "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit," he rapped as OJ pretended to struggle to put on the gloves found at the murder scene, making them look too small for him.

Marcia looked disgusted, laughed scornfully through all the courtroom theatrics.

Everything changed in that courtroom. Or perhaps it was that what happened in that courtroom showed that everything had already changed. We guardians of the old morality cluck our tongues and deplore the disappearance of morality and standards. Reality is a bitter pill to swallow.

Easter Fire

The wonder of Easter is that it ever got coopted by a particular parochial religion, as if Christianity or the story of Jesus' death and resurrection was unique. It seems so to us thanks to the Roman Emperor Constantine who succeeded in doing what George W. Bush sems eager to do, make Christianity the official religion of the nation. When he did that many of the dreams and ceremonies of other religions and pagan peroples were translated into Christianity. I find this appropriate, even a good thing, until we Christians begin claiming exclusive rights to the reality they reflect.

The dying and rising god is, of course, about the daily appearance of the sun and its frightening disappearance every night. Which of us, in touch with the primoridal essence in us, does not know the dread of seeing the sun disappear, wondering if we will ever see it again.

Spring and passion, fertility, all combine to feed the odds against wish we humans cannot quell for some protection against the reality that all that lives must die. That every relationship ends in loss.

Then comes the heart of the Easter faith; that dying is the means to the end we most long for. That change and aging, which we fear, mysteriously provide richer new life than we previously imagined.

Wondering/Praying

While the world waits for Terri Schiavo to finally die (or is it more accurate to say that we are waiting for her body to finally follow her dissassembled self?) I talked with a friend whose eight day old grandchild has been born with brain damage that means he will never have any function other than what the brain stem can support, basically breathing.The parents agreed to remove the breathing tube and held the shell of their longed for baby, cooing and stroking him. So far the breath has not left him.

One wonders what makes a self. When did Terri Schiavo's self leave? Did the tiny brain damaged infant who may never have had a thought, have a self? Is surrender of the self the hardest, most sacred task ever put before us? Is there some flaw in the design that death is the conclusion to life? And then there are the claims, questions and wonderings about what happens to the atoms and molecules that assemble into this self when the self disassembles.

At 65 my curiosity and wonder have overtaken my fears. Perhaps there are hormones and secretions that move us in that way as we approach our inevitable end.

Every day I pray, meaning I offer names and places in some silent vigil, for family, friends, our animals, our country and its leaders, and the nations our country is vexing, our enemies, terrorists, Osama bin Laden and the miserable dictator who has wrecked the beautiful country Zimbabwe. It seems to dent that despair the self sponsors when it faces its limits.

The Decision

So the federal judge has proved as brave and faithful to the law as was the Florida State judge. Shame on the cynical politicians for raising the vain hopes of her parents and sibilings that they might prevail despite all the court decisions in the past. Of course they will now blame "activist" judges, but the real culprits here are those who refuse to accept the thorough, fair and rigorous way in which this case has been handled.

A friend has said he hopes this judge turns out to have been appointed by Reagan. I hope so too. It would buoy hopes that even judges appointed in hopes of partisan decision making often turn out to be fair and impartial. And rational.

Madness

Today the world, or at least our nation, feels as if it has descended into madness. The man whom the RC Church refused to bury was finally buried over the weekend from St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral in San Diego. In the mantime the RC Church has apparently issued a warning against parishioners reading "The Da Vinci Code". Not only is the book a work of fiction (though people constantly ask me what parts of it are true), but it is a thrilling, fanciful exploration of the sorts of things people of faith find fascinating. How dull is the Church to try to shut down, rather than encourage, our hunger to go on these journies of what no one, not even the Pope, can know this side of the grave?

Any time anyone poses as having bottled reality, that person is in serious error. No matter who.

Imax & Evolution

Now comes a story in today's NY Times saying some Imax theaters, mostly in the south, refuse to show a movie about undersea volcanoes because the story suggests the volcanoes are more ancient than biblical literalists believe the world to be. The theaters are afraid they will be dragged into the evolution controversy.

If the religious right manages to impose its agenda on our culture, we will become a third world country, or perhaps a pile of nuclear rubble, run by superstition and fear.

In 1964, when Barry Goldwater said, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," we all understood him to mean we should be prepared to nuke our enemies. Lyndon Johnson's campaign ran an ad admittedly aimed at emotions, showing a small child plucking the petals from a daisy, saying, "He loves me, he loves me not..." while a nuclear mushroom cloud rises in the background. The campaign came into focus around the issue of whether we were going to seek rational means of resolving our differences (then with the Soviets) or, in the name of righteousness ratchet up the confrontation to perhaps nuclear violence?

The country elected Johnson in a landslide, and I thought the issue of religious and national fanaticism had been put to bed. How wrong I was.

Religion in the hands of people seeking power is a formula for disaster.

Terri Schiavo

What do you make of this story? Surely, first, that it ought not to be a story at all. A family has been struggling with its grief for many years over the woman's seemingly irreversible brain damage and whether to withdraw life support. You can be sure when it gets into the US Congress, the issue has become something other than how best to resolve a terrible dilemma. The politicians, from Governor Bush to President Bush to the members of Congress bring shame on our political life and on themselves. People of conscience would have left it to the family to struggle with.

Now it seems the family is split. Her husband says Terri told him she did not want to be kept alive in a vegatative state. Her parents disagree. A family nightmare. The courts have ruled that her husband, I suppose as the person closest to her and therefore most likely to know, has the right to speak her wishes. Too bad she didn't write something down. I don't know if she had a living will. I do know that living wills can be ignored when family members make a fuss.

Many say that when things are unclear, always come down on the side of life. But that means different things to different people. I know a family in which a brain dead baby has just been born. They are choosing to remove life support even though they have bonded fiercely with the baby's body since it was born. They believe it is the most humane, life affirming choice.

My wife and I have living wills. I have told all my children dying is not the worst thing that can happen to me. Yes, it is akin to abortion in that it cannot be reversed. The Episcopal Church has called abortion a tragic necessity. Death seems to me a hard way for life to end. But it is the way. And when the time comes, I hope to embrace it.

John McCusker

Risky, because I only know what I have read about this on a Yahoo news site, but I'll take a run at it anyway. It seems the Roman Catholic Church has refused to bury John McCusker, a 1996 graduate of The University of San Diego (a Roman Catholic University), nor will they agree to his funeral being conducted in any other church in the San Diego Diocese. He died of a heart attack while skiing.

The Church says the issue is the nature of the business he ran. He owned gay bars. They said his business clashed with the church's moral teachings. How many mobsters have been buried from the Catholic Church? His friends say the issue is not his business but his being gay.

If this turns out to be true it strains belief. Has the Roman Catholic Church become so nuttily caught up in the sex hysteria in this nation that it would actually refuse burial to a gay Catholic?

The article said the funeral would be held at St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral. The Episcopal Church has been pretty timid on the issue itself. But St. Paul's has been welcoming of gay men and women for some years. Nice to be happy about something the Epsicopal Church is doing.

As I write I am hearing a report on NPR confirming this story.

Shame.

We have just passed the second anniversary of our nation's invasion of Iraq. I remember the relief I felt when it looked as if my fears about the carnage that might result were not going to be realized, as out troops raced toward Baghdad. Since then the chaos and blooshed have exceeded those fears. The election which we tout as proof that we succeeded in replacing a deadly dictator with a working democracy, have yet to produce either a constitution or a government. Not even the relatively benign symbolic appointment of President.

I read on some posts that things are better than we read and see on TV. I pray that may be so. But it still looks to me as if we are nearly alone in our determination to impose on the middle east with force what only the people of that region can finally choose for themselves.

In the meantime has anyone remembered Osama bi Laden's last communication in which he said his strategy was to defeat the US by bankrupting us? Has anyone stopped to calculate the imapct of our Iraq adventure, not to mention the spending on domestic security, on middle class America?

We are showing ourselves to be a reactionary nation. We have adopted, almost without debate, the fight against terrorism as if it were akin to WWII. Is it? No other nation has done that. And the nations of Europe and Asia have faced more terrorism longer than we.

Ups & Downs

The news today is that the Senate has narrowly voted for drilling in the Alasks Anwr Reserve despite oil companies saying they do not wish to do so. And the naming of Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank, a man associated with this administration's most hostile view of world opinion. Our newly named ambassador to the UN is on public record as having trashed the body to which he will now represent us. The Senate may be poised to use the "nuclear option", which is doing away with the ability of the Democrats to filibuster the President's judicial appointments, a tactic the Republicans were never reluctant to use when they were in the minority.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

One day, likely sooner than, in their arrogant posturing, they now imagine, public opinion and political fortune will turn, and the Republicans will find themselves scrambling for ways to exercise some authority as members of the minority.

If Republican tactics and appointments look small and punitive, like a sharp stick in the eye, it is because they are.

Life has a way of seeking balance. It is good to remember when one is up, that what goes up must come down.

Killing, Loving & Reason

Why all these killings? They seem to come in waves. Someone walks into someplace where they have worked, or gone to school or worshipped, and spray the people with gunfire. I used to think it was because we let people have guns so easily, and I still think we ought to make it harder. But recent studies of countries that make guns as widely available as we do but have nothing like our murder rate, seems to suggest it also has something to do with our national character.

I understand violence. I have felt angry enough to hurt someone. But I never have. We sometimes call it impulse control. And it is about how we manage passion. President Clinton lacked it in sexual matters. The irony is that often those we admire are those whose passion is barely managed.

What separates a person who gets angry and shouts or slams a door or pouts, from someone who shoots a gun?

Our culture has blurred the line between fantasy and reality. Not only in the sophisticated world of entertainment, but in our political life. Clearly we are more persuaded by appeals to our emotion than to mere words, like these.

And since that is unlikely to change, we had better figure out some new strategies for making our common life safer. Until we better understand human nature, how about gun control? It is too easy to kill with guns.

Shootings, Sex and Reason

Every so often we get a spate of these massacres in which someone takes a gun into someplace he has worked or gone to school or worshipped, and sprays the people there with gunfire. What to make of these and why is it that they seem to occur in bunches. Copy cats? Phase of the moon?

For years I have believed that making guns less accessible would cut down on the numbers of people who are shot in this country every year. I still believe that, but recent studies raise questions about whether our high murder rate is due entirely to the number of guns we carry, or to some part of the American character. Or both. There are countries that permit guns as much as we do and yet have far lower murder rates.

I can understand violence. I have felt angry enough to hurt someone, though I never have. I have had my share of near misses with what is called imulse control. That can refer to sexual urges, anger or even over the top excitement and celebration. What President Clinton was caught at is not hard to understand. Just about everyone has urges. What is hard for a well controlled adult to understand is giving in to the urge when it is liable to be so destructive. It only partly explains to say that a man can have blood in his brain or in his penis, but not both at once.

Not that killing and sex are equivalent, but they both have to do with passion and control. We ask soldiers to put aside the taboo against killing. We ask (allow?) actors to put aside the taboo against public sex.

Perhaps there is something about the blurring of fantasy and reality, entertainment and normal life, that accounts for people doing the sorts of things that make our common life sometimes seem unsafe. Since we are not likely to see that change, what with the power and money associated with entertainment, and the proof in our political life that slick advertising persuades us way more than words like these, we need to find ways to quell the damage.

Sane gun control that does not misuse the 2nd Amendment would be a start.

Dreaming

A couple of nights ago I had such a vivid dream that my wife's pocket book had been stolen, that when I woke I was relieved to realize it was a dream. For a long time I have wondered what to make of dreams. The Bible is full of them and, although Carl Jung among countless others has speculated about them in modern times, we still really know little more about them than we did when Jacob won his way out of an Egyptian jail in the biblical story by interpreting the Pharaoh's dreams when Pahraoh's wise men could not.

One thing I do believe is that dream reality, while perhaps of a different fabric and dimension, has as much claim to being authentic as does waking reality. This because I think there is only one reality and everything, no matter how hard to pin down, is part of it.

I am planning to write a Zone Note this week about having spent more time than usual this winter in the desert. For me the desert comes closest to dream life while I am awake. And the desert figures large in the lives of both ancient religious figures (John the Baptist, Jesus, Israel) and in the lives of modern ascetics. (If you do not receive the Zone Notes and would like to, email me at blayneyc@earthlink.net and I will send them to you).

I have a friend who has been a lawyer and business man his entire adult life and he is now trying to cover all the philosophical and spiritual ground he feels he missed by being immersed in what he calls the material world. I have assured him that hard science, notably particle and quantum physics, has brought the debate about the nature of reality almost full circle, so that the most sophisticated scientists now sound more like mystics than do most philosophers and theologians.

Remember the Everley Brothers' song? "All I ever do is dream, dream, dream...I'm dreaming my life away." Perhaps that is a strategy for going into the deepest dimensions of this mystery in which we swim.

Flotsam & Jetsam

For the second time in the past month there was a big deposit of bamboo on the west facing beach in La Jolla this morning. The last time this happened a friend told me it was debris from the Asian tsunami. My step-daughter, a marine biologist specializing in ocean currents, said she doubted it could have come that far that fast, if at all.

I have been fascinated since I was a small boy, at what washes up on beaches. My family had a house on Fire Island, a barrier island off Long Island, NY, and during WWII remnants of sunken ships would appear on the beach.

The ocean is the earth's blood stream. (A scientist once told me that sea water is close enough to human blood plasma that if someone had lost a lot of their blood volume you could keep them alive for a period by transfusing them with sea water until you could get blood.) What appears there tells us more than we sometimes want to know about what we are putting into our planet's life blood.

Who out there can tell me where this bamboo is coming from?

Violence and Non-violence

This morning listening to a report on the news about the Supreme Court's recent decision blocking the execution of people who committed murder before they were 18, I realized, again, that some people honestly view and understand the world differently from the way I do. Some people interviewed insisted that there are many 17 year olds who can wreak havoc like a fully grown adult and should face the death penalty. Others thought not. None questioned whether putting people to death might so corrupt the heart and soul of a culture that it perpetuates rather than stop the crime.

The idea of murder makes my skin crawl. The idea of murdering the murderer (usually, I suspect, more cold heartedly than the murder it is punishing) takes my breath away.

The people interviewed were thoughtful. They clearly had thought through their opinions.

I have never thought I have the discipline or moral courage to be a true pacifist, to turn the other cheek in the face of attack. If I or one of my children, my wife, or maybe anyone, was being threatened, I imagine I would retaliate without considering whether my response was too severe.

But my understanding of the forces of the universe makes me think this merely keeps the circle of violence going. The pacifism of Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, all of whom died at the hands of violence, is, I suspect, the only way to keep violence from continuing. Likely one reason our species is not a candidate for a long tenure.

Sermon at Dick Trelease's Funeral

Richard Mitchell Trelease, Jr.
April 16, 1921 - February 25, 2005

C. Blayney Colmore, III
St. John’s Cathedral, Albuquerque
Thursday, March 3, 2005

Lo, promises the prophet Isaiah to God’s discourage, disgraced, defeated, downcast people…Lo, I will make for all people’s a feast of rich food, a feast of well aged wines.

This is that feast.

“Did you know, Dick asked me one day, soon after he had hired me to be his curate in Akron, hoping to shake me loose from my parochial eastern Episcopal roots, “Did you know there are more Methodist churches in the State of Ohio than there are Episcopal churches in the entire United States?”

It would appeal to Dick’s sense of irony, of God’s stealth, that this Eucharist, in which we mark and celebrate his life, falls on the day our Church calendar remembers John and Charles Wesley, brothers, Anglican priests whose passionate preaching of God’s transforming love in the remote reaches of the southern frontier of colonial America became so powerful it could no longer be contained within the bounds of the Anglican Church, so it spilled, scandalously, into a new unseemly creation we now know as the Methodist Church.

What, one wonders, might it look like for Isaiah’s promise of power, of a sumptuous feast, formed from bitter defeat, from the remnants of our broken lives, to leap from the dusty leaves of our Bible into the consuming heat of human flesh?

Maybe it would look like the Wesley brothers in the wilds of Georgia, or like this Eucharist. And perhaps like the 84 years of the divine roller coaster ride we have gone on with Richard Mitchell Trelease, Jr., whose brazen, unbalancing sponsoring of God’s overpowering love stirred our hunger for a taste of God beyond boundaries. Of God beyond God.

For Dick Trelease, who taught me how to be a priest and made me glad I was, loved power passionately. His final skirmish was with the powers of darkness that threatened, if he refused to yield, to snatch from him his beautiful full head of hair. Dick, of course, refused to yield, and, he died with every hair, still numbered by God still intact on his handsome head.

So this homily is about power and passion, gifts entrusted to us by God, for a season, and about Dick’s lifelong, brave, sometimes reckless exercise of those gifts.

At first glance his passionate love of power looked to be for the usual reasons. Dick was a classy guy with classy appetites. Cars, (the Akron parish gave the Rector a new car every year, but in the interests of ecclesiastical modesty, insisted it be a Chevrolet. What the vestry may never have known is that Dick colluded with the local dealer, packing so much horsepower beneath the hood of that Chevy that he was finally driving a virtual Corvette in Caprice clothing) clothes, rich food and well aged wine, music, literature, success, professionally and in his personal dealings with people. Dick grabbed for the gold without apology, and often grasped it.

But to understand Dick and power, and passion, you must look at how he used it, and how it was for him when, by the world’s measure, he lost it.

Much as he loved power’s trappings, Dick understood his legendary energy and the way power seemed to seek him, as for God’s purposes even more than for his own. And he believed he was meant to use it to do what he could to battle injustice and unfairness. Set things right. Because he read the Bible as the story of God’s passionate love affair with the world, a drama in which God and God’s minions never rest so long as one person remains in anguish.

In 1966, Akron, like all America’s old industrial cities, was seething in its decaying core with unemployed African Americans who felt trapped. The Council of Churches wanted to run a full page ad in the Beacon-Journal calling for fair housing, for a bill that would require real estate agents to sell anywhere to anyone who had the money. Sounds pretty basic now, but in Akron in 1966 it was anything but. And when Dick came to the vestry and said he wanted St. Paul’s Church, St. Harvey’s-in-the Polo Field, to take the biggest piece of the ad, the Senior Warden, President of one of the nation’s major rubber companies, made it clear he would fight it to the end.

Though Dick was patient, compassionate and understanding, he was also resolute and crafty. He did his homework, lobbying other members of the vestry, spending endless frustrating and, as it turned out, futile, hours with the Senior Warden. In the end, Dick prevailed. He was a hero to me, but it was an expensive victory. He was anathema to that Senior Warden who never forgave him.

As the youngest, greenest curate, I got myself elected President of the Summit County Committee for Peace in Viet Nam. Only when I became a rector and had my own hot-headed curates, could I know what it must have cost Dick when my picture appeared on the front page of the newspaper the next day. To hear him tell it in the announcements the next Sunday, you would have thought I had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

When Dick Muir and I went to the March on Washington, the one best remembered for Norman Mailer’s drunken call from the steps of the Pentagon for revolution, our brave boss again stood on the chancel steps and announced that we represented him and the whole staff.

Dick died on the cusp of St. Matthias’ Day. All we know about Matthias is that he was chosen, by lot, to fill the spot left vacant by Judas’ suicide. Must have been a daunting assignment. It fell Dick’s lot to be tapped by God for the risky business of sponsoring God’s passionate, unrelenting engagement with the world, and Dick accepted the job willingly, eagerly, brilliantly, if sometimes intemperately.

Even after he was brought low, Dick’s conviction never wavered that his vocation had not been rescinded. I talked to him after he had taken his first job after bishop, managing the men’s accessories in a department store. I dreaded the conversation. I need not have.

“I love it,” he told me, with that trademark energy in his voice. “The people I work with have all been beaten up by the world in various ways, and they are hiding nothing from each other. We are a band of brothers and sisters, bound fiercely together by our wounds. I can’t wait to get to work every morning.”

Our enemies reveal as much about who we are as do our acolytes. Dick’s enemies were, inevitably, those determined to manage on their own terms the frightening embrace of God’s transforming love. Not that Dick, or any sane person welcomes, without reservation, the unmanageable encounter, but those who trust God with the kind of daring Dick did, are in for a wondrous ride.

You’ll have to ask Carol and Kolu and Chris and Phyllis, and others I don’t know about, what a ticket on that ride has cost those closest to Dick. There is always a price tag. For me it has proved as priceless as the prize we claim for the world in this unlikely feast, made from the failure of the one whom we call Christ. The broken body, the spilled blood. Soul food. Dick was the one who taught me that daring to come to this table will take us on an adventure none of us would likely sign on for knowing the full story. And that when the moment is offered, swallow hard, and seize it. Because, as Dick liked to say, it is the only game in town.

So, with a taste Dick’s daring, Lent be damned. (Sung) Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast.

Dick Trelease II

Just back from preaching at the funeral of my first boss and mentor, Dick Trelease. Dick taught his assistants to take risks, and when we fell on our faces, he first supported us, helped us clean up our mess, then sat down and looked at what could be learned. Dick led with his passion, for justice and for the life changing love of God.

He had what we now call boundary problems. Women were drawn to Dick and he to them. In the sermon, which I am going to try to post in a separate posting, I alluded to the problems that caused while applauding the wonderful excitement he provided for those of us who worked with him. His family, who paid the heaviest cost for his passion, were glad we talked openly about the wonderful life and the heavy cost. If I can get the sermon on a posting, you can judge.

The late Terry Holmes, Dean of an Episcopal seminary, wrote a small piece distinguishing the hot and cold sins. The cold sins, calculating, manipulating, controlling, are ones we tend to reward in our culture. The hot sins, of passion, chiefly, I suppose, for us, sex, are those we love to hate and punish.

Holmes said he imagined God had a harder time forgiving the cold sins than the hot ones, because the cold sins result from keeping our distance and holding tight to control, while the hot sins result from our getting out of control while trying to do what God commanded, love one another as I have loved you. That is, with abandon.

Judging

Two major decisions in the courts today, one from the Supreme Court, one an appeals court. The Supreme Court decision, was, as so many are now, 5-4, in deciding that executing someone who committed the crime before turning 18, violates the Constitution. The majority cited the "cruel and unusual punishment" prohibition as the basis. Anton Scalia wrote a scathing dissent in which he said the court had apparently decided the Constituion means something different from three years ago.

I find capital punishment not only abhorrent, but incredible in a country that considers itself a model for the reasonable humanity expected of civilized people. The only legal justification is to prevent the person from murdering again. Life without parole should suffice. And it doesn't put anyone in the terrible position of practicing legal murder, surely a stain on the conscience. I suspect the real reason is revenge, the sense that a wrong needs to be set right. But the glory of our legal system has been its keeping its distance from this motive, because it skews justice by appealing to emotion.

Interviews I have seen with relatives of the murdered allowed to witness the execution of the murderer has left me unpersuaded that it really does set those people at peace.

The other decision was by an appeals court judge who ruled that Jose Padilla, who was arrested in O'Hare airport in Chicago more than two years ago and held without charge, must either be charged with a crime or be released in 45 days. The government says it suspects Padilla of plotting to set off a dirty bomb in an American city. His lawyer says he was picked up in the hysteria following 9/11/01 and there was no basis for the arrest.

Now you and I cannot judge the evidence against him. And which of us would want the government to release someone who might do grevious harm to us? But, as the appeals court judge said, our Constitution requires that a person arrested be told the charges against him and given the opporunity to respond in a court of law. There is no doubt that presuming people innocent until proven guilty presents a risk that holding suspects without charge might prevent.

But, even if that protects us, it turns us into a different country, not the one our Constitution and Bill of Rights established.