What Stings the Most

If you'll indulge me two parts of my history come to this moment.

After graduation from college I attended law school for one year; it was not for me so I joined the Army and soon I was a platoon leader in Vietnam. But I recall those legal meanderings of my 20's to say that before I left that post graduate venture the two courses I most enjoyed were Contracts and Property Law. I'm not making any statement on being knowledgeable now but that experience made me have wise and cautious eyes whenever such circumstances arose. Lease arrangements and tenancy are terms I know and respect; we spent many late hours together. "They" disposed me, at first, towards Trinity's position in this argument. But I am also aware of the discretion available to a primary lease holder.

The second part is when I returned to my hometown, New York, after having served churches in Virginia. I was in post graduate study at Union Seminary--using up my veterans benefits. I was the priest at a small parish which could only offer housing to me and my family. I needed another job and the church placement service noted openings at Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleums. Since I was a member of the St. Francis Burial Society--a non profit which offers guidance on death and dying--I thought this was a good fit. The position turned out to be a salesman to sell niches in the new columbarium Trinity had built on its cemetery property in upper Manhattan. We needed food money so I took the job. The Church had blundered into this industry as a novice hiring a slick character who recently had sold time shares in Florida as the head salesman. Soon things got very commercial, even cynical, under this guy's authority.

Attempts were made to market the niches to gay and lesbian couples (this was 1980) who sought the dignity--which they couldn't get in life--of being buried together. It was the rector, Robert Parks, who was outraged--not for the outreach to the gay community--but for the way it was pandered to. He fired the guy; I was never so proud to be an Episcopal priest. I remember that he said, "that's just not the way this parish is; I think spirited outreach to homosexual brothers and sisters is definitely who we are but re-characterizing them as a commodity is an indignity we will not do." The outreach to the gay community continued but now it wasn't done in a whispered, off-the-record way. That was the kind of Trinity Parish I knew. The Stonewall Riots were a decade before and rocky days were ahead for the Episcopal Church on the subject of gay ordination but I always thought this parish had led the way.

And it was that kind of leadership I had hoped for in this instance not necessarily that a wave of the hand and protesters would achieve some kind of rump tenancy but at least the dignity of a conversation. The Bishop of New York, Mark Sisk, told me that he meets regularly with groups he disagrees with "not that I expect to be converted but that I am in dialogue with them. You never know what else will happen when those conversations occur." The protesters never received this respect. This gets down to the meat and potatoes: someone did a disservice at Trinity--or it was the leadership's oversight--to appear patronizing and remote. The closest we came to countering that was Fr. Cooper's pastoral care of hunger strikers on that Saturday night (see "Trinity's Compassion" entry on this blog) but it never went further.

What would be the problem if such a meeting occurred, even standing around a table staring at the lease to the Duarte property and saying, "My friends, my hands are tied."? That such never was considered stings the most in this dreary episode. When this noble parish opted to do otherwise, to paraphrase Lawrence Lessig in his new book, Republic Lost, "there was no sin done here but a lot of harm."

This ends my comments about Trinity on this blog; OWS has more important things to confront now. As my fellow arrestees said in the holding cell, "This should be over with them; they had their chance." It was that chance I will miss because I'd seen it grabbed for meaning in the past.

Many of you are asking how Brook is. A little achy but she's fine and out in Ohio picking up Clara for Christmas break and I'm back here cleaning the house and anticipating their arrival. Rosie the rottweiler is still protecting the world from the tyranny of squirrels, to quote friend Lizzie Moses, "Dogs, keepin it real."