Scenes from a Slowly Disintegrating Social Contract
Technopoly and the Generation Gap
The little boy was screaming at the top of his lungs. His head was down on the seat of the booth, his feet flailing in the air across the counter and into the kitchen at the Baja Burrito restaurant. The cooks looked on with obvious irritation as did most of the diners around his table. His shrill voice was deafening, except, of course to his apparently stone deaf mother. The well dressed woman who had arrived with her child in an Escalade moments before appeared to be in her late 30s. She sat next to the squirming mass of six year old energy oblivious to his protestations and her own hardly touched lunch, her complete attention and both hands filled with her cell phone, thumbs furiously texting away.
Those of us who dare to commit the heresy in a Technopoly (Postman, 1992) of criticizing inappropriate use of technologies often get the common non-response that this is somehow a generational issue. Somehow, if one is young, it’s OK to be as self-focused and oblivious to others with your technological toys as you wish. Rude behaviors are somehow inoculated against being seen as such if you’re in the advertisers’ demographic target group. Any criticism of rudeness and inappropriate behaviors, no matter how obvious or well founded, can somehow be dismissed as the mark of generational resentment much like any recognition of the destructive elements of free market fundamentalism immediately draws charges of waging class warfare.
Of course, in this particular case, there was an observable generational gap. But the ordinary roles were decidedly reversed here. This was no adolescent consumer who saw herself as endowed with a blank check for use of technologies with no limits while her older parent sat nearby sighing about her behaviors. It was a 30 something parent in the role of the self-focused child, in complete abdication of her parental duties. And it was her first grade child who was protesting that self-focus and lack of appropriate parental attentiveness. Of course, given the rules of Technopoly, clearly the six year old’s irritation at being ignored and neglected, put on hold while Momma played with her technological toys, was a case of generational resentment.
So who functions as parent when the adults get stuck in adolescence?
Will Crusher’s Revenge
As I walked across the campus to my first class Monday, I had the eerie feeling that I had seen the scene unfolding in front of me before. All around me students emerged from classroom buildings, cell phones in hand, oblivious to their surroundings, texting furiously. Almost to the student, they were physically present but chances were they had little idea of where they were, much less who they were about to stumble into. It was a scene from The Invasion of the Text Zombies.
Suddenly I remembered why this scene gave me such a chill. About a decade ago, an episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation called “The Game” featured a computer game complete with a halo attachment that allowed the player to see the playing screen immediately in his or her face. The game had suddenly appeared on the Enterprise after a shore leave on one of the many life supporting planets in the Star Trek universe. As the crew began to play the game, its members almost immediately began displaying signs of addiction. Crew members stopped performing their duties and began to recruit fellow crew members to join in the game. As the episode neared its conclusion, the entire crew walked around oblivious to each other and their surroundings, addicted to the game and essentially lobotomized. It looked an awful lot like the text zombies staggering out of classroom buildings Monday morning.
Ironically, on the futuristic Enterprise, it was the non-human robot named Data who was required to save the human crew. But in our own place and time we have no one and no robot to save us from ourselves. And while we have no Romulans lurking behind our addictive activities involving our technologies, waiting their chance to take over the Enterprise, we do have commercial advertisers and their consumer technology employers to constantly encourage us to “talk (or text) all the time,” regardless of our circumstances or who else it might impact. And we increasingly reveal ourselves to be well-trained consumers.
But to what end? And at what cost? Who will save us from ourselves?
Bucking the Tide
As I came down the two-lane back road to the Lowe’s store Wednesday, I saw a man on a motorcycle, holding something in his hand. “Damn,” I thought, “It’s a cop with a radar gun.” In a state which increasingly discovers new lows in social responsibility, particularly when it comes to raising revenues in an equitable and just manner, fees and fines increasingly are emphasized as means to provide the necessary funds for our governments.
But, this is a story about leaping to conclusions and how wrong that can be. As it turns out, it wasn’t a cop. It was a young man in his mid-20s on a motorcycle. He had pulled over to the side of the road to talk on his cell phone. Now, while that sounds like a no-brainer (pardon the rather unintentional illusion to riding motorcycles without helmets here), I’ve seen an awful lot of bikers talking on their cell phones mid-chop and even a few texting while driving, throttle, brakes and direction all relegated to a single hand.
In all honesty, it’s so refreshing to see people behaving in a mature, considerate and responsible manner with their technological devices, I almost didn’t know what to think. But I’d like to congratulate that young man for the way he conducted himself. And I particularly appreciate the fact he was so highly visible, there on the road side, in modeling that behavior.
Maybe some of the rest of us will catch a clue. Because, contrary to our tendency to dismiss any criticism of our use of technology as generational conflict, thus avoiding the moral and character questions they raise, in all honesty, rudeness, inappropriate and dangerous uses of technologies are hardly relegated to any given generation.
We could all learn something of value from that young man on the side of the road. But will we?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
An Indispensable Element
OK, quick. Which leftist pundit said the following:
“Labor unions are an indispensable element in social life…indeed a mouthpiece for the struggle for social justice.”
You might ask yourself who came to mind. Michael Moore? Russ Feingold? Karl Marx?
The answer is Pope John Paul II. This quotation comes from his encyclical Laborem Exercens. And, as the editorial in this month’s Christian Century notes, “Having seen how Poland’s workers fared under capitalism and communism, John Paul knew firsthand that neither the market nor the state can be counted on to automatically deliver justice for workers."
Of course, that vision is being vindicated in spades in today’s America. From Tallahassee to Madison, Wisconsin, workers have become the targets of state legislators and governors and the new robber barons they serve in their attempts to emasculate any kind of ability public workers have to protect their own interests. This occurs in a context where their abilities to fight back are already constrained. Most public employees are legally barred from ever going on strike, the only real power a union has, and have been relegated to largely perfunctory roles in negotiating contracts, negotiations in which binding arbitration conducted before agents of management largely rule in favor of their suzerains. It’s not terribly difficult to win in a contest in which one side gets to set all the rules of the game. And it’s not terribly difficult to exploit workers when they’ve been legally prevented from fighting back.
One of the primary residual protections public workers have had is due process requirements in terminations. Due process requires fairness in treatment of employees. That includes being able to demonstrate plausible and demonstrable reasons why workers should be demoted, not promoted, fired and not hired. What the wealth of new laws which cynically paint themselves as “reforms” create is a privilege for management to simply fire employees at will. What would be reasonable about such a method of governance? More importantly, how does the arbitrariness of such an approach further the interests of the public which public workers are pledged to serve?
So what happens when an “indispensable element in social life” is dismantled and the members of that element publicly dehumanized? What happens when “the struggle for social justice,” indeed, the ability to even conceptualize notions of the common good, is aborted? Finally, what happens to a country whose children learn to pledge allegiance with words which celebrate “liberty and justice for all” grow up to find that unless one is a thrall or a beneficiary of the oligarchy, there is neither liberty nor justice?
These are dark days for America in which we are deciding our very future as a people. I share Jefferson’s foreboding when he said, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
OK, quick. Which leftist pundit said the following:
“Labor unions are an indispensable element in social life…indeed a mouthpiece for the struggle for social justice.”
You might ask yourself who came to mind. Michael Moore? Russ Feingold? Karl Marx?
The answer is Pope John Paul II. This quotation comes from his encyclical Laborem Exercens. And, as the editorial in this month’s Christian Century notes, “Having seen how Poland’s workers fared under capitalism and communism, John Paul knew firsthand that neither the market nor the state can be counted on to automatically deliver justice for workers."
Of course, that vision is being vindicated in spades in today’s America. From Tallahassee to Madison, Wisconsin, workers have become the targets of state legislators and governors and the new robber barons they serve in their attempts to emasculate any kind of ability public workers have to protect their own interests. This occurs in a context where their abilities to fight back are already constrained. Most public employees are legally barred from ever going on strike, the only real power a union has, and have been relegated to largely perfunctory roles in negotiating contracts, negotiations in which binding arbitration conducted before agents of management largely rule in favor of their suzerains. It’s not terribly difficult to win in a contest in which one side gets to set all the rules of the game. And it’s not terribly difficult to exploit workers when they’ve been legally prevented from fighting back.
One of the primary residual protections public workers have had is due process requirements in terminations. Due process requires fairness in treatment of employees. That includes being able to demonstrate plausible and demonstrable reasons why workers should be demoted, not promoted, fired and not hired. What the wealth of new laws which cynically paint themselves as “reforms” create is a privilege for management to simply fire employees at will. What would be reasonable about such a method of governance? More importantly, how does the arbitrariness of such an approach further the interests of the public which public workers are pledged to serve?
So what happens when an “indispensable element in social life” is dismantled and the members of that element publicly dehumanized? What happens when “the struggle for social justice,” indeed, the ability to even conceptualize notions of the common good, is aborted? Finally, what happens to a country whose children learn to pledge allegiance with words which celebrate “liberty and justice for all” grow up to find that unless one is a thrall or a beneficiary of the oligarchy, there is neither liberty nor justice?
These are dark days for America in which we are deciding our very future as a people. I share Jefferson’s foreboding when he said, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Friday, March 18, 2011
Saying Goodbye with Gratitude for a Precious Gift
He came by during my office hours on his last Friday in town, his one year old little girl in hand. He had come by to say goodbye after seven years. They were on their way to a new life in southwest Florida, his school teacher wife to follow at the end of the school year.
It was a bittersweet moment, We celebrated the job he had just landed with the Nature Conservancy, a job made possible by his determination to add a second bachelors in environmental science to the BA in religious studies he had earned from us. He thanked me for the reference I had provided him and said he thought that had been the deciding factor in him getting the job. He laughed when he emphasized it had been a really nice reference letter, subtly suggesting that perhaps I had been a bit profuse in my praise as I am sometimes wont to be for my students. Of course, everything I had said about him was true. And over a six year period, I’d had a long time to observe him. He simply is that good.
We smiled about his many years working in the fresh produce section at the Target Superstore, a job that kept the roof over the head of the young couple during his six years of college. We laughed about his early ID photo at the university when he’d come to Orlando sporting a fire engine red Mohawk, a look quickly superseded by a sort of Paul Bunyan beard and short trim hair cut more true to his Minnesota roots. And we delighted in the squirming mass of one year old energies embodied in his beautiful daughter, hair the color of honey and those same ice blue Norwegian eyes of her daddy.
But at the end it remained time to say goodbye. Having never had children of my own, one of the great sorrows of my life, I felt just a flicker of what it must feel like to watch your child leave home to go begin a life of their own. There was an emptiness in the pit of my stomach as I watched the two of them walk down the hall and out the front door of the department. I found myself sliding into my usual gay Jewish mother mode, silently praying, “O G-d, watch out for them. Help them do as well as they are so very capable of doing.”
He had come to my class the first time as a freshman six years ago. He was quiet and serious, diligent and punctual. He sat on the front row and his face never failed to betray when he did not understand something I’d said in class or when he found an idea troubling. He made the mistake of admitting to being Lutheran early on in the class and his usually serious if not grim expression often drew a response of “Dour Lutheran!“ from his Episcopal priest instructor, a comment that always managed to evoke at least a flicker of a grin.
Toward the end of the semester in the Humanistic Traditions II course, we cover material on Existentialism. I particularly like Existentialism in all of its forms. I sense it is one of the few completely honest philosophical approaches human beings have articulated. Sartre pounds his fellow post-war survivors with charges of “bad faith” in making assertions that we have no choice but to do any given thing. His contemporary Erich Fromm would write a masterpiece detailing humanity’s inclination to seek an Escape from Freedom and the responsibilities it inevitably entails.
In reality, Sartre says, we always make choices, even when we don’t like the options we’re presented, and our choices impact ourselves and the world we live in. We don’t get to default to religion, tradition or even reason to make our choice for us. Our best reason produced the Holocaust of Nazi Germany amidst WWII and two nuclear holocausts in Japan which ended that war while in turn inaugurating a Cold War in which nuclear annihilation became the human race’s perpetual elephant in the room. G-d did not save us from ourselves in the mid 20th CE despite our most urgent supplications and our traditions ultimately proved inadequate - if not toxic - in providing answers for humanity. And yet, Sartre insisted, we still must make choices and be responsible for them.
That’s a heavy understanding for freshmen in college to grapple with. His expression was more serious than usual when he came to my office hours after class that day. I was afraid something traumatic had occurred in his own life. Instead, he had come to talk about existentialism.
“This seems so pessimistic,” he said. “Where is the hope?” I reminded him of the importance of context in considering any text – this particular philosophy coming out of the ashes of Europe in WWII. I asked him to compare this view to the pre-WWI Progressive Era optimism (Every day, every way, things are getting better) we had just studied or to the neo-romanticism we would see in the rhetoric of the 1960s (“We can change the world, rearrange the world…”). I reminded him, “Any text without a context is a pretext,” echoing Jesse Jackson and thousands of others before me demanding critical, contextual consideration of any idea worth considering.
“But that doesn’t help,” he said. “It seems to me that Sartre is right. I don’t want to operate in bad faith. I don’t want to escape from freedom. But this is an incredible responsibility.” I agreed with him and told him I had no way to make it any less heavy. I then reminded him of my occasional question in class of where we all will be in 20 years. Sometimes I get the smart ass kid who suggests I’ll be dead (and with many more like him, he may be right) to which I respond that I’m hoping I’ll at least be down the street in the Happy Valley Home in a wheelchair with the drip-bag. But the gravitas of the question to my students quickly becomes apparent: “So who’ll be in charge?”
“I’ll have to think about that,” he said. And he did, returning to my office hours over the next six years, occasionally stopping me on campus to update me on his life, the questions with which he was currently wrestling and the career he was trying to piece together from his twin concerns for ethics and the environment.
He also kept me posted on his brother who had lived with him near campus, had run into trouble and had to return to southwest Florida, a brother of whom he was both immensely protective and very proud when the brother managed to right himself once safely back home. We celebrated his summer abroad in Italy with his then-future wife, their marriage and the birth of their beautiful daughter. I often found myself heading to Target on the way home from the university to buy the materials for that night’s supper just hoping to run into him and get the latest updates.
So it was sad to see him go. Frankly, he is precisely the kind of student to whom I have devoted my life energies and several lifetimes of scholarship and life experience. A student who truly engages his studies, who wrestles with the hard questions of life, who connects those ideas to the world around him and devotes his life to addressing them is a rare find, indeed. And I consider it a great privilege to teach and mentor such an unusual human being. Above all, I consider it a rare gift to come to know him as peer and friend.
I have not used this young man’s name in this entry primarily because I know it would embarrass him to have these things said about him, true as they are. I have no doubt he is aware of my great admiration for him professionally and my great affection for him personally. But what he does not know is that when he left my office late that Friday afternoon, I closed down my office hours and went home. And on the way home, I cried.
Here’s why.
As he rose to leave the office, young daughter doing pirouettes on the floor under his restraining arm, he crossed behind my desk to embrace me. “Goodbye,“ he said and then added, “You know, I’m sure I could not have done any of this without you. Thank you.” I blubbered something about being glad to have been helpful, hugged him, shook his hand and escorted them to the door, watching them walk down the long hallway and out the front door. And then they were gone.
His visit had come at the end of a lackluster but increasingly common day here at the factory. It was immediately obvious that the students in my morning Honors Humanities course had not read the material they were assigned to discuss, even with the questions designed to develop the reading divided into individual shares of 3-4 questions apiece requiring perhaps 15 minutes of prep time at most. Worse yet, I overhead my best student upon whom I can usually depend to be prepared saying to group mates, “I didn’t read any of this.” (I frequently have to remind these students that their instructor may be getting old but he’s not yet deaf and that the room’s acoustics are excellent.)
The next hour, a philosophy student walking me back to my office after class managed to blurt out that one of his classmates “still hasn’t bought the text,” this at midterm with an exam approaching, a trend that is sadly becoming more and more prevalent in college classes generally. That afternoon, a third of the Honors World Religions students skipped their 1:30 PM class.
I returned to my office hours afterward to find two emailed demands for references from students who had not come to ask for them in person or even called and whose deadlines were the following week. One would surmise from such a day that instructors are only as good as their ability and willingness to ignore sloth, richly reward minimal effort no matter how substandard its quality and provide instant glowing references for consumers demanding them regardless of the imposition on the reference provider.
It’s amazing how just two little words – thank you - can make the endurance of an awful lot of mediocre performance, attitudes of inordinate entitlement and an inexplicable lack of respect worthwhile. I will truly miss my fine young former student even as I know the world desperately needs the thoughtful, well-educated person he has become to deal with some of the greatest challenges our world has ever faced. And I give thanks for all his hard work, for the depth of integrity that he reflects, for the willingness to wrestle with hard questions without escaping from freedom that he embodies and for the very fine human being he has become. Most of all I give thanks that he was willing to share the precious gift of that extraordinary humanity with me.
It’s almost a cliché response to the thanks he offered me upon leaving, but I feel compelled to answer him this way: “No, my friend, thank you, for all you have been, all you have become and all you will be. My life is better for having known you. It is people like you who keep me working as hard as I do in a profession that I once loved but which has devolved into something nearly unrecognizable – and far too often unlovable - as I near the end of my time within it. And it is the few young people like you who give me hope for a future that increasingly looks bleak and foreboding as my life heads toward its twilight.”
Farewell, my young friend. Live long. Love deeply. Work hard. Do well. Somehow I have no doubts that you will.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ‘
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
He came by during my office hours on his last Friday in town, his one year old little girl in hand. He had come by to say goodbye after seven years. They were on their way to a new life in southwest Florida, his school teacher wife to follow at the end of the school year.
It was a bittersweet moment, We celebrated the job he had just landed with the Nature Conservancy, a job made possible by his determination to add a second bachelors in environmental science to the BA in religious studies he had earned from us. He thanked me for the reference I had provided him and said he thought that had been the deciding factor in him getting the job. He laughed when he emphasized it had been a really nice reference letter, subtly suggesting that perhaps I had been a bit profuse in my praise as I am sometimes wont to be for my students. Of course, everything I had said about him was true. And over a six year period, I’d had a long time to observe him. He simply is that good.
We smiled about his many years working in the fresh produce section at the Target Superstore, a job that kept the roof over the head of the young couple during his six years of college. We laughed about his early ID photo at the university when he’d come to Orlando sporting a fire engine red Mohawk, a look quickly superseded by a sort of Paul Bunyan beard and short trim hair cut more true to his Minnesota roots. And we delighted in the squirming mass of one year old energies embodied in his beautiful daughter, hair the color of honey and those same ice blue Norwegian eyes of her daddy.
But at the end it remained time to say goodbye. Having never had children of my own, one of the great sorrows of my life, I felt just a flicker of what it must feel like to watch your child leave home to go begin a life of their own. There was an emptiness in the pit of my stomach as I watched the two of them walk down the hall and out the front door of the department. I found myself sliding into my usual gay Jewish mother mode, silently praying, “O G-d, watch out for them. Help them do as well as they are so very capable of doing.”
He had come to my class the first time as a freshman six years ago. He was quiet and serious, diligent and punctual. He sat on the front row and his face never failed to betray when he did not understand something I’d said in class or when he found an idea troubling. He made the mistake of admitting to being Lutheran early on in the class and his usually serious if not grim expression often drew a response of “Dour Lutheran!“ from his Episcopal priest instructor, a comment that always managed to evoke at least a flicker of a grin.
Toward the end of the semester in the Humanistic Traditions II course, we cover material on Existentialism. I particularly like Existentialism in all of its forms. I sense it is one of the few completely honest philosophical approaches human beings have articulated. Sartre pounds his fellow post-war survivors with charges of “bad faith” in making assertions that we have no choice but to do any given thing. His contemporary Erich Fromm would write a masterpiece detailing humanity’s inclination to seek an Escape from Freedom and the responsibilities it inevitably entails.
In reality, Sartre says, we always make choices, even when we don’t like the options we’re presented, and our choices impact ourselves and the world we live in. We don’t get to default to religion, tradition or even reason to make our choice for us. Our best reason produced the Holocaust of Nazi Germany amidst WWII and two nuclear holocausts in Japan which ended that war while in turn inaugurating a Cold War in which nuclear annihilation became the human race’s perpetual elephant in the room. G-d did not save us from ourselves in the mid 20th CE despite our most urgent supplications and our traditions ultimately proved inadequate - if not toxic - in providing answers for humanity. And yet, Sartre insisted, we still must make choices and be responsible for them.
That’s a heavy understanding for freshmen in college to grapple with. His expression was more serious than usual when he came to my office hours after class that day. I was afraid something traumatic had occurred in his own life. Instead, he had come to talk about existentialism.
“This seems so pessimistic,” he said. “Where is the hope?” I reminded him of the importance of context in considering any text – this particular philosophy coming out of the ashes of Europe in WWII. I asked him to compare this view to the pre-WWI Progressive Era optimism (Every day, every way, things are getting better) we had just studied or to the neo-romanticism we would see in the rhetoric of the 1960s (“We can change the world, rearrange the world…”). I reminded him, “Any text without a context is a pretext,” echoing Jesse Jackson and thousands of others before me demanding critical, contextual consideration of any idea worth considering.
“But that doesn’t help,” he said. “It seems to me that Sartre is right. I don’t want to operate in bad faith. I don’t want to escape from freedom. But this is an incredible responsibility.” I agreed with him and told him I had no way to make it any less heavy. I then reminded him of my occasional question in class of where we all will be in 20 years. Sometimes I get the smart ass kid who suggests I’ll be dead (and with many more like him, he may be right) to which I respond that I’m hoping I’ll at least be down the street in the Happy Valley Home in a wheelchair with the drip-bag. But the gravitas of the question to my students quickly becomes apparent: “So who’ll be in charge?”
“I’ll have to think about that,” he said. And he did, returning to my office hours over the next six years, occasionally stopping me on campus to update me on his life, the questions with which he was currently wrestling and the career he was trying to piece together from his twin concerns for ethics and the environment.
He also kept me posted on his brother who had lived with him near campus, had run into trouble and had to return to southwest Florida, a brother of whom he was both immensely protective and very proud when the brother managed to right himself once safely back home. We celebrated his summer abroad in Italy with his then-future wife, their marriage and the birth of their beautiful daughter. I often found myself heading to Target on the way home from the university to buy the materials for that night’s supper just hoping to run into him and get the latest updates.
So it was sad to see him go. Frankly, he is precisely the kind of student to whom I have devoted my life energies and several lifetimes of scholarship and life experience. A student who truly engages his studies, who wrestles with the hard questions of life, who connects those ideas to the world around him and devotes his life to addressing them is a rare find, indeed. And I consider it a great privilege to teach and mentor such an unusual human being. Above all, I consider it a rare gift to come to know him as peer and friend.
I have not used this young man’s name in this entry primarily because I know it would embarrass him to have these things said about him, true as they are. I have no doubt he is aware of my great admiration for him professionally and my great affection for him personally. But what he does not know is that when he left my office late that Friday afternoon, I closed down my office hours and went home. And on the way home, I cried.
Here’s why.
As he rose to leave the office, young daughter doing pirouettes on the floor under his restraining arm, he crossed behind my desk to embrace me. “Goodbye,“ he said and then added, “You know, I’m sure I could not have done any of this without you. Thank you.” I blubbered something about being glad to have been helpful, hugged him, shook his hand and escorted them to the door, watching them walk down the long hallway and out the front door. And then they were gone.
His visit had come at the end of a lackluster but increasingly common day here at the factory. It was immediately obvious that the students in my morning Honors Humanities course had not read the material they were assigned to discuss, even with the questions designed to develop the reading divided into individual shares of 3-4 questions apiece requiring perhaps 15 minutes of prep time at most. Worse yet, I overhead my best student upon whom I can usually depend to be prepared saying to group mates, “I didn’t read any of this.” (I frequently have to remind these students that their instructor may be getting old but he’s not yet deaf and that the room’s acoustics are excellent.)
The next hour, a philosophy student walking me back to my office after class managed to blurt out that one of his classmates “still hasn’t bought the text,” this at midterm with an exam approaching, a trend that is sadly becoming more and more prevalent in college classes generally. That afternoon, a third of the Honors World Religions students skipped their 1:30 PM class.
I returned to my office hours afterward to find two emailed demands for references from students who had not come to ask for them in person or even called and whose deadlines were the following week. One would surmise from such a day that instructors are only as good as their ability and willingness to ignore sloth, richly reward minimal effort no matter how substandard its quality and provide instant glowing references for consumers demanding them regardless of the imposition on the reference provider.
It’s amazing how just two little words – thank you - can make the endurance of an awful lot of mediocre performance, attitudes of inordinate entitlement and an inexplicable lack of respect worthwhile. I will truly miss my fine young former student even as I know the world desperately needs the thoughtful, well-educated person he has become to deal with some of the greatest challenges our world has ever faced. And I give thanks for all his hard work, for the depth of integrity that he reflects, for the willingness to wrestle with hard questions without escaping from freedom that he embodies and for the very fine human being he has become. Most of all I give thanks that he was willing to share the precious gift of that extraordinary humanity with me.
It’s almost a cliché response to the thanks he offered me upon leaving, but I feel compelled to answer him this way: “No, my friend, thank you, for all you have been, all you have become and all you will be. My life is better for having known you. It is people like you who keep me working as hard as I do in a profession that I once loved but which has devolved into something nearly unrecognizable – and far too often unlovable - as I near the end of my time within it. And it is the few young people like you who give me hope for a future that increasingly looks bleak and foreboding as my life heads toward its twilight.”
Farewell, my young friend. Live long. Love deeply. Work hard. Do well. Somehow I have no doubts that you will.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ‘
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Sunday, March 06, 2011
Don’t Mess with Texas? Who wants to?
From Today’s Houston Chronicle:
AUSTIN — The Texas Nationalist Movement marked Texas Independence Day with a rally on Saturday at the Capitol urging Texans to save the state by seceding from the United States.
A small but enthusiastic group of Texans gathered on the steps of the Capitol, as an assortment of massive Texas flags blew above them in the chilly afternoon breeze. Outrage was spread evenly toward Democrats and Republicans as leaders of the movement expressed their disgust for the growing national debt and the federal government's treatment of Texas.
"Texas can take better care of itself than Washington," said Lauren Savage, vice president of the movement. "We are here to raise interest in the Legislature of the possibility of secession to cure the ills of America." Members are demanding that state lawmakers introduce a bill that would allow Texans to vote on whether to declare independence.
It’s interesting that Texans are suddenly worried about the national debt. When their former governor was busy invading the world and paying private companies and foreign governments to torture people in dark prison cells around the globe while running up that enormous debt, nary a word was uttered in Texas.
Now, all of a sudden, America has a black (gasp!) president who actually voted against those invasions and is trying to clean up the same mess that George the Unready made in Washington (including the near depression averted only by debt-incurring federal spending) that he made of the companies given him. Now that debt so willingly entered into has suddenly become a big problem. And the only solution is for Texas to secede! Go figure.
Of course, the steady stream of mindless rhetoric coming out of Texas prompts many of us living outside its borders to wonder what we can do to help Texas pack. Would it be so bad if this Tribe of Texas Troglodytes actually departed company with the rest of the nation? Would our nation not be better off without the Tom Delays and Ron Pauls of the world?
Many of us already see Texas as virtually a foreign country to be avoided at all cost, fly over country on a good day. The George Bushes and Rick Perrys of the country could all find asylum (in both senses of that word) in Texas and perhaps Austin could simply be moved to Arkansas improving the latter and freeing the former from the tyranny of heavily armed, frequently intoxicated ideologues.
On the other hand, the thought of the flood of refugees that would no doubt pour out of Texas might overwhelm the rest of the country, particularly those bordering states which decide not to drink the koolaid and go with Texas. I also worry about the possibility of having a nation run by fundamentalists complete with their own version of Sharia law and revisionist history in the middle of our own country. Fly over country could become fly around country increasing travel time and fares. And the chances that Texans might ultimately feel the need to follow their own history and invade the surrounding countries might be too tempting to pass up.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
But I also wonder how realistic it is to continue believing America is one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all given the examples of Texas, Arizona, et al. Increasingly, Americans seem to be saying “I don’t need you.” Indeed, though this blog entry is more than a little tongue in cheek, there’s certainly some degree of that feeling present here much as I regret it. Can we hold it together? Should we? Maybe we all need to go our separate ways. Indeed, maybe we will have little other choice before this is all over.
One of the readers of the Chronicle story mourns the Texas he grew up loving. As a Floridian under the iron fist of the best governor $76 million defrauded from medicare and white wealthy retiree/Southern bible thumper votes can buy, I can certainly relate. But I think of all the things I miss, it is the America I grew up in the 1960s loving and believing in - liberty, justice for all. Asking not what my country ought to do for me but rather what I owe my country.
That America seems to have been left in the dustheap of Reagan's legacy - "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Increasingly, the answer to Reagan’s question is clear “No, things have only gotten worse since you opened the floodgates for selfishness and tribalism. And America is all the worse for it.” Indeed, it's precisely the shift in reasoning from the idealism of Kennedy's 1961 inaugrual to the cynicism of Reagan's 1980 election ploy that may ultimately prove to be the death knell for a once noble experiment in seeking a more perfect union.
Somewhere James Madison no doubt weeps.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
From Today’s Houston Chronicle:
AUSTIN — The Texas Nationalist Movement marked Texas Independence Day with a rally on Saturday at the Capitol urging Texans to save the state by seceding from the United States.
A small but enthusiastic group of Texans gathered on the steps of the Capitol, as an assortment of massive Texas flags blew above them in the chilly afternoon breeze. Outrage was spread evenly toward Democrats and Republicans as leaders of the movement expressed their disgust for the growing national debt and the federal government's treatment of Texas.
"Texas can take better care of itself than Washington," said Lauren Savage, vice president of the movement. "We are here to raise interest in the Legislature of the possibility of secession to cure the ills of America." Members are demanding that state lawmakers introduce a bill that would allow Texans to vote on whether to declare independence.
It’s interesting that Texans are suddenly worried about the national debt. When their former governor was busy invading the world and paying private companies and foreign governments to torture people in dark prison cells around the globe while running up that enormous debt, nary a word was uttered in Texas.
Now, all of a sudden, America has a black (gasp!) president who actually voted against those invasions and is trying to clean up the same mess that George the Unready made in Washington (including the near depression averted only by debt-incurring federal spending) that he made of the companies given him. Now that debt so willingly entered into has suddenly become a big problem. And the only solution is for Texas to secede! Go figure.
Of course, the steady stream of mindless rhetoric coming out of Texas prompts many of us living outside its borders to wonder what we can do to help Texas pack. Would it be so bad if this Tribe of Texas Troglodytes actually departed company with the rest of the nation? Would our nation not be better off without the Tom Delays and Ron Pauls of the world?
Many of us already see Texas as virtually a foreign country to be avoided at all cost, fly over country on a good day. The George Bushes and Rick Perrys of the country could all find asylum (in both senses of that word) in Texas and perhaps Austin could simply be moved to Arkansas improving the latter and freeing the former from the tyranny of heavily armed, frequently intoxicated ideologues.
On the other hand, the thought of the flood of refugees that would no doubt pour out of Texas might overwhelm the rest of the country, particularly those bordering states which decide not to drink the koolaid and go with Texas. I also worry about the possibility of having a nation run by fundamentalists complete with their own version of Sharia law and revisionist history in the middle of our own country. Fly over country could become fly around country increasing travel time and fares. And the chances that Texans might ultimately feel the need to follow their own history and invade the surrounding countries might be too tempting to pass up.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
But I also wonder how realistic it is to continue believing America is one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all given the examples of Texas, Arizona, et al. Increasingly, Americans seem to be saying “I don’t need you.” Indeed, though this blog entry is more than a little tongue in cheek, there’s certainly some degree of that feeling present here much as I regret it. Can we hold it together? Should we? Maybe we all need to go our separate ways. Indeed, maybe we will have little other choice before this is all over.
One of the readers of the Chronicle story mourns the Texas he grew up loving. As a Floridian under the iron fist of the best governor $76 million defrauded from medicare and white wealthy retiree/Southern bible thumper votes can buy, I can certainly relate. But I think of all the things I miss, it is the America I grew up in the 1960s loving and believing in - liberty, justice for all. Asking not what my country ought to do for me but rather what I owe my country.
That America seems to have been left in the dustheap of Reagan's legacy - "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Increasingly, the answer to Reagan’s question is clear “No, things have only gotten worse since you opened the floodgates for selfishness and tribalism. And America is all the worse for it.” Indeed, it's precisely the shift in reasoning from the idealism of Kennedy's 1961 inaugrual to the cynicism of Reagan's 1980 election ploy that may ultimately prove to be the death knell for a once noble experiment in seeking a more perfect union.
Somewhere James Madison no doubt weeps.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Friday, March 04, 2011
Requiem for a Very Human Bishop
News came to me this week that Bishop Richard Shimpfky had died. It is ironic that this news arrives in this month after the retirement of John Howe here in Central Florida. Shimpfky, then bishop of El Camino Real of the central California coast, often squared off against Howe in the Episcopal House of Bishops particularly over issues involving LBGQT people. Indeed, I am clear that I owe my priesthood in part to that antagonism; Shimpfky was willing to accept me, an out of diocese seminarian, for the process to the priesthood based in part upon my inability to pursue the same in my home diocese of Central Florida. And, truth be told, upon my ordination, Bishop Shimpfky quickly let Howe know he had ordained me. No doubt that gigged the good bishop of Central Florida.
But their conflict proved to be a gift to me. In August 1991, I left Orlando in my 1990 blue Mazda (Imogene, the mean blue lovin’ machine) loaded to the ceiling with my clothes, books, computer and aquarium. I headed out across America toward a promised land called Berkeley. But I had no promise of anything. Indeed, anything but. And that message was hardly lost on me as I headed north through the grey Mississippi Delta, turning west across the Dakotas, crossing the Rockies, the Bonneville Salt Flats and eventually over the Sierra into California.
While my seminary, the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, had accepted me for its masters of divinity program, I had not been sent to seminary by any diocese and was not in a process of ordination anywhere. At 40 years of age, I had walked away from my law career, my home, the vast majority of my friends, my partner of then 17 years and the state in which my family and had lived for five generations with nothing more than the conviction that G-d had called me to ordained ministry and the hope that before this was all through, I would be an Episcopal priest with a Ph.D. in hand.
Upon arriving in Berkeley, I began to visit churches. I knew that my best chances of being able to enter into an ordination process were either in the Diocese of California, essentially San Francisco Bay, or in El Camino Real, which began in the South Bay at Palo Alto and San Jose and extended south to San Luis Obispo. The process in California sounded intimidating and not terribly promising. The process in El Camino included a number of gay seminarians and my friends from the Integrity organization indicated that it was a healthy place to be.
When I first encountered St. Philips Church in San Jose, I felt I had come home to a place I’d never been before, in the words of John Denver. St. Philips was an intentionally multicultural parish. The liturgies were conducted in the languages of the congregation – at least eight different languages including English. The seating was arranged in a circular fashion around a simple wooden altar, its stone tile top from Jerusalem, and a giant hollow geode used for a baptismal font. On the walls of the parish were the symbols of its many peoples – a Lao altar included a reclining Buddha, a Latin American altar featured a tapestry of the Guadalupano, a Native America altar contained sacred rocks laid out in the four directions, an African-America altar featured broken chains and African weaving and in the background of the parish, a giant San Damiano cross reflecting its European heritage loomed over the entire room. It was a magical place. And it looked a lot like what I understood Jesus’ Kingdom of G-d to be.
St. Philips was an hour from Berkeley and I commuted each Sunday my first year there. When Andy finally had sold our house in Orlando and followed me across the country, we settled in Fremont, a half hour north of San Jose, a 45 minute BART ride from Berkeley and an hour drive (if one got there before rush hour) to Andy’s job over in Silicon Valley. St. Philips welcomed us with open arms. We quickly became members of the parish family. The parishioners supported my vocation to ministry. And so very soon it became time to go and talk with the bishop.
That was a very long day for me. I had left Berkeley with plenty of time, dressed in my best lawyer drag complete with the blue blazer, maroon power and tie and my shined up penny loafers. Not wanting to show up too early, I drove across the Loma Prieta range into Santa Cruz, listening to the UCSC radio station and its Out of the Closet Hour which began with an abrasive number entitled “I’m a Screaming Dyke from Hell,” the lyrics of which consisted of the title repeated over and over to a screeching punk rock setting. What might this portend?
As I drove down the Pacific Highway into Seaside, a suburb of Monterey, through what was left of Fort Ord, now a UC campus, I was struck by the incredible beauty of the Pacific coast and the cool salty air and mist which blew in from the ocean. Was this to be my new home?
Almost visibly trembling, I sat in the waiting room at the diocesan offices awaiting my turn with the bishop. The door opened and a friend of mine who was the national treasurer for Integrity, the Episcopal Church’s organization for LBGQT people, emerged with the bishop. She saw me and smiled, turning to the bishop and saying, “Be nice to this guy. We need him.” I smiled a grateful smile at her and entered the bishop’s office.
Having requested the meeting by letter which included my resume and a bit of my life history, the bishop already had a starting place for doing a background check on me. He had done his homework and seemed to know much about my life, my partner and the conflict with Bishop Howe in Central Florida that had prevented me from seeking ordination there. My heart fell into my penny loafers when he began “I hate it you had to drive all the way down here….” fearing the worst, only to hear him finish, “for me to tell you it’s time for you to begin the process for ordination.”
Had I heard correctly? Was this a dream? But the bishop continued, telling me who I needed to see to get into the process, what steps were next, when my ember letters reporting my progress to him were due. And within 15 minutes, he was escorting me out the door, patting me on the back and I was off to become an Episcopal priest. And that, in the words of Robert Frost, “has made all the difference.”
What always struck me about Bishop Shimpfky was his kindness. He cared about the difficulties we seminarians were having, occasionally coming to Berkeley to take us to dinner. He advocated for LBGQT people at General Convention even in the face of the virulent homophobia confused with religion still infesting many quarters of the Episcopal Church. His efforts prompted speculation about the bishop’s sexual orientation and led many of his foes to call El Camino Real “the gay diocese.” Clearly these were folks who had never been to the diocese. I think Shimpfky saw himself as a warrior for justice in some ways. But even noble warriors have their blind spots.
One of the most anguished moments of my life came at a parish meeting at St. Philips where the bishop was visiting. Within the six months previous, a major altercation had occurred between the clergy of our parish and the bishop. The assistant at St. Philips – later to be consecrated archbishop of the Anglican Church in his native Belize - was a wonderful man whose heritage of African, Spanish and indigenous ancestry made him a perfect coordinator for the diocese’s multicultural ministries. He had received a stellar assessment from the bishop the previous year. But for some reason, the bishop had called him into his office a year later and fired him for unspecified concerns about his competency. To make matters worse, the priest’s son was meeting with the bishop the same day to begin the process for ordination and saw his father leaving the office in tears on his way in to talk with the bishop.
The reaction in the parish was immediate and angry. When the bishop came to the parish for his annual visitation, he was confronted with parishioners wanting to know why he had fired their beloved priest from his diocesan ministry. One of the most painful memories I have of that day was my fellow parishioners whom I trusted and loved, standing in back of the parish screaming “You just don’t get it!” at the bishop who had shown me so much kindness. It was an incredibly bad place to be as a seminarian from that parish.
The bishop called me later that week to reassure me that nothing had changed regarding my ordination process. He repeatedly said that whatever conflict he had with the parish was not with me and not to worry. It would not be the last time he demonstrated that pastoral skill.
On the winter solstice in 1994, the Feast of St. Thomas (the doubting apostle), I was ordained deacon. Bishop Shimpfky came to St. Philips to ordain me. The Gospel was read in five languages. The reclining Buddha was processed into the parish by the Lao congregation complete with incense. The Lady of Guadalupe banner came up the aisle borne by Latin American congregants. And the American Indian congregation offered me an honor song sung by Crazy Horse’s grandson. The Buddhist nun who operated the sangha whose meditations and lessons we had attended for the past two years was present. My Jewish friend who argued with me via internet and had occasionally attended classes with me at the seminary was there. It was a magical evening, as one would expect from St. Philips.
But what I will never forget from that evening came from a most unexpected moment. Just before the Peace, the bishop asked people to be seated and began, “No one gets through this process alone. And I know that one of the main reasons Harry is here today is because of his partner, Andy. So I’d like to call him to stand here with Harry and let us offer him our thanks for his role in the process.” Andy came to stand by me and the entire parish rose to give us a standing ovation. The tears brimmed in both our eyes as we looked out into that crowd of people affirming a gay couple, one of whom had just been ordained a transitional deacon enroute to priesthood in the Episcopal Church, the other whose role in that process had proven vital to its success. As long as I live, I will always be grateful for that moment.
As my graduation from seminary approached, I had applied to the General Theological Union/Cal Berkeley program for a Ph.D. in religion and society/ethics. I was one of 43 applicants in a process which told its applicants up front it gave some preference to women applicants. The program took four applicants (three of them women). I was not among them. Later I was told by a committee member that my bid had not been helped by the presence on the committee of a Jesuit professor opposed to the liberation theology that had been the focus of much of my M.Div. coursework.
Knowing that my chances were not good for admission given that context, I applied at Florida State University’s brand new Ph.D. program not thinking I had much of a prayer but figuring it would be OK to be back in Florida and near my family should I be admitted. On March 13, 2005, I was awakened at 5 AM with a call from Tallahassee (it was 8 AM Eastern time) notifying me that I’d been admitted to FSU’s program. At this point, my partner, Andy, dissolved into tears and left for work without even saying goodbye. Andy did not want to leave California. And he did not want me to once again be separated from him.
Later that morning I headed out to Berkeley for classes, both exhilarated with my admission as well as depressed by the prospect of once again leaving my grieving, beloved partner behind. I returned to an empty house, my partner attending a computer science class for his certificate program at UC that night. And so I headed out to a bar in nearby Hayward to find someone – anyone - to celebrate with me.
It was a terrible failure of judgment on my part. I had had little to eat that day. I had had only five hours of sleep, having been awakened at 5 AM by the Tallahassee news. Upon announcing to the folks sitting around the bar my admission to the Ph.D. program, they began buying me rounds of drinks. At the point I realized I was in trouble, it was too late. I was nearly home when the combination of the fatigue and alcohol overcame me. I woke up with my car plowed up under a semi-truck parked on the side of Mission Drive. It was a miracle I had not harmed anyone and escaped with only minor scratches and bruises myself. Poor Imogene was a total loss.
Among the calls I received that first day home from the hospital was a call from Bishop Shimpfky. His first concern was that I was OK. His second was that I not worry but that I did need to come see him and explain this event. Because I was already a deacon and so close to being ordained , he wanted me to speak with him and the Standing Committee who would make the final decision on my priestly ordination. It was a very pastoral handling of a situation in which I was already convinced that everything I had worked for was down the drain in a single night of indiscretion.
By the time I met with the Committee and bishop, I had already been to court, completed my public service and the court ordered DUI class. I had a record of attendance at the SMART Recovery (alternative to AA) program and a letter from my psychiatrist certifying that I had dealt with this event appropriately and was suitable for ordination. And, to be honest, there was no doubt in my mind that while I had a problem I needed to deal with directly, I had taken it very seriously.
The bishop had explained the situation to the Standing Committee and they treated me with compassion even as they sought my assurance that their institution would not be endangered by my presence. By the meeting’s end, my priestly ordination was back on track. And two months later, I would be ordained priest. Sometimes there actually is forgiveness in the institutional church.
Overall, I think Bishop Shimpfky would have to be seen as a good bishop. His commitment to inclusivity bore fruit in a diocese that, while its overall numbers shrank like many dioceses across the country, often looked like the United Nations at prayer. And that same commitment was instrumental in changes in the Episcopal Church nationally that ultimately said to the misogynist dioceses that their time was up on ordaining women and paved the way for gay bishops who now serve in the House of Bishops and same sex marriage rites which are currently being created by the liturgy and music commission of the church.
Within his own diocese, he had many opponents by the time he left office, a departure that ultimately had to be legally negotiated between the bishop and his clergy. It was not a friendly passing of the guard. Frankly, I would not be a bishop for even one day given the headaches implicit in that job. But even with his failures, I think Shimpfky’s bishopric must be seen as a success in the larger picture.
Bishop Shimpfky was not a perfect man. None of us are. He made mistakes, some of them deeply injurious to people I loved and respected. He was a very human bishop. But, on the whole, I believe he was a good bishop. And I believe he was a good man. His generosity of spirit and willingness to take a chance on me changed me life.
My ordination opened the door to the many unforeseen experiences and changes in my life that have led to a life of service of G-d’s people that continues to this day. I could never have imagined that a mere four years previously as I sat trembling in that diocesan waiting room. And so I am greatly in his debt. And his passing grieves me all the more in that I never had the opportunity to fully tell him how much I appreciated all he did for me.
So, join me in a prayer of gratitude this day for the life of a decent man and for the soul of an imperfect but ultimately good bishop. May Richard Shimpfky and souls of all the departed rest in peace. May he be greeted in heaven with the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
News came to me this week that Bishop Richard Shimpfky had died. It is ironic that this news arrives in this month after the retirement of John Howe here in Central Florida. Shimpfky, then bishop of El Camino Real of the central California coast, often squared off against Howe in the Episcopal House of Bishops particularly over issues involving LBGQT people. Indeed, I am clear that I owe my priesthood in part to that antagonism; Shimpfky was willing to accept me, an out of diocese seminarian, for the process to the priesthood based in part upon my inability to pursue the same in my home diocese of Central Florida. And, truth be told, upon my ordination, Bishop Shimpfky quickly let Howe know he had ordained me. No doubt that gigged the good bishop of Central Florida.
But their conflict proved to be a gift to me. In August 1991, I left Orlando in my 1990 blue Mazda (Imogene, the mean blue lovin’ machine) loaded to the ceiling with my clothes, books, computer and aquarium. I headed out across America toward a promised land called Berkeley. But I had no promise of anything. Indeed, anything but. And that message was hardly lost on me as I headed north through the grey Mississippi Delta, turning west across the Dakotas, crossing the Rockies, the Bonneville Salt Flats and eventually over the Sierra into California.
While my seminary, the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, had accepted me for its masters of divinity program, I had not been sent to seminary by any diocese and was not in a process of ordination anywhere. At 40 years of age, I had walked away from my law career, my home, the vast majority of my friends, my partner of then 17 years and the state in which my family and had lived for five generations with nothing more than the conviction that G-d had called me to ordained ministry and the hope that before this was all through, I would be an Episcopal priest with a Ph.D. in hand.
Upon arriving in Berkeley, I began to visit churches. I knew that my best chances of being able to enter into an ordination process were either in the Diocese of California, essentially San Francisco Bay, or in El Camino Real, which began in the South Bay at Palo Alto and San Jose and extended south to San Luis Obispo. The process in California sounded intimidating and not terribly promising. The process in El Camino included a number of gay seminarians and my friends from the Integrity organization indicated that it was a healthy place to be.
When I first encountered St. Philips Church in San Jose, I felt I had come home to a place I’d never been before, in the words of John Denver. St. Philips was an intentionally multicultural parish. The liturgies were conducted in the languages of the congregation – at least eight different languages including English. The seating was arranged in a circular fashion around a simple wooden altar, its stone tile top from Jerusalem, and a giant hollow geode used for a baptismal font. On the walls of the parish were the symbols of its many peoples – a Lao altar included a reclining Buddha, a Latin American altar featured a tapestry of the Guadalupano, a Native America altar contained sacred rocks laid out in the four directions, an African-America altar featured broken chains and African weaving and in the background of the parish, a giant San Damiano cross reflecting its European heritage loomed over the entire room. It was a magical place. And it looked a lot like what I understood Jesus’ Kingdom of G-d to be.
St. Philips was an hour from Berkeley and I commuted each Sunday my first year there. When Andy finally had sold our house in Orlando and followed me across the country, we settled in Fremont, a half hour north of San Jose, a 45 minute BART ride from Berkeley and an hour drive (if one got there before rush hour) to Andy’s job over in Silicon Valley. St. Philips welcomed us with open arms. We quickly became members of the parish family. The parishioners supported my vocation to ministry. And so very soon it became time to go and talk with the bishop.
That was a very long day for me. I had left Berkeley with plenty of time, dressed in my best lawyer drag complete with the blue blazer, maroon power and tie and my shined up penny loafers. Not wanting to show up too early, I drove across the Loma Prieta range into Santa Cruz, listening to the UCSC radio station and its Out of the Closet Hour which began with an abrasive number entitled “I’m a Screaming Dyke from Hell,” the lyrics of which consisted of the title repeated over and over to a screeching punk rock setting. What might this portend?
As I drove down the Pacific Highway into Seaside, a suburb of Monterey, through what was left of Fort Ord, now a UC campus, I was struck by the incredible beauty of the Pacific coast and the cool salty air and mist which blew in from the ocean. Was this to be my new home?
Almost visibly trembling, I sat in the waiting room at the diocesan offices awaiting my turn with the bishop. The door opened and a friend of mine who was the national treasurer for Integrity, the Episcopal Church’s organization for LBGQT people, emerged with the bishop. She saw me and smiled, turning to the bishop and saying, “Be nice to this guy. We need him.” I smiled a grateful smile at her and entered the bishop’s office.
Having requested the meeting by letter which included my resume and a bit of my life history, the bishop already had a starting place for doing a background check on me. He had done his homework and seemed to know much about my life, my partner and the conflict with Bishop Howe in Central Florida that had prevented me from seeking ordination there. My heart fell into my penny loafers when he began “I hate it you had to drive all the way down here….” fearing the worst, only to hear him finish, “for me to tell you it’s time for you to begin the process for ordination.”
Had I heard correctly? Was this a dream? But the bishop continued, telling me who I needed to see to get into the process, what steps were next, when my ember letters reporting my progress to him were due. And within 15 minutes, he was escorting me out the door, patting me on the back and I was off to become an Episcopal priest. And that, in the words of Robert Frost, “has made all the difference.”
What always struck me about Bishop Shimpfky was his kindness. He cared about the difficulties we seminarians were having, occasionally coming to Berkeley to take us to dinner. He advocated for LBGQT people at General Convention even in the face of the virulent homophobia confused with religion still infesting many quarters of the Episcopal Church. His efforts prompted speculation about the bishop’s sexual orientation and led many of his foes to call El Camino Real “the gay diocese.” Clearly these were folks who had never been to the diocese. I think Shimpfky saw himself as a warrior for justice in some ways. But even noble warriors have their blind spots.
One of the most anguished moments of my life came at a parish meeting at St. Philips where the bishop was visiting. Within the six months previous, a major altercation had occurred between the clergy of our parish and the bishop. The assistant at St. Philips – later to be consecrated archbishop of the Anglican Church in his native Belize - was a wonderful man whose heritage of African, Spanish and indigenous ancestry made him a perfect coordinator for the diocese’s multicultural ministries. He had received a stellar assessment from the bishop the previous year. But for some reason, the bishop had called him into his office a year later and fired him for unspecified concerns about his competency. To make matters worse, the priest’s son was meeting with the bishop the same day to begin the process for ordination and saw his father leaving the office in tears on his way in to talk with the bishop.
The reaction in the parish was immediate and angry. When the bishop came to the parish for his annual visitation, he was confronted with parishioners wanting to know why he had fired their beloved priest from his diocesan ministry. One of the most painful memories I have of that day was my fellow parishioners whom I trusted and loved, standing in back of the parish screaming “You just don’t get it!” at the bishop who had shown me so much kindness. It was an incredibly bad place to be as a seminarian from that parish.
The bishop called me later that week to reassure me that nothing had changed regarding my ordination process. He repeatedly said that whatever conflict he had with the parish was not with me and not to worry. It would not be the last time he demonstrated that pastoral skill.
On the winter solstice in 1994, the Feast of St. Thomas (the doubting apostle), I was ordained deacon. Bishop Shimpfky came to St. Philips to ordain me. The Gospel was read in five languages. The reclining Buddha was processed into the parish by the Lao congregation complete with incense. The Lady of Guadalupe banner came up the aisle borne by Latin American congregants. And the American Indian congregation offered me an honor song sung by Crazy Horse’s grandson. The Buddhist nun who operated the sangha whose meditations and lessons we had attended for the past two years was present. My Jewish friend who argued with me via internet and had occasionally attended classes with me at the seminary was there. It was a magical evening, as one would expect from St. Philips.
But what I will never forget from that evening came from a most unexpected moment. Just before the Peace, the bishop asked people to be seated and began, “No one gets through this process alone. And I know that one of the main reasons Harry is here today is because of his partner, Andy. So I’d like to call him to stand here with Harry and let us offer him our thanks for his role in the process.” Andy came to stand by me and the entire parish rose to give us a standing ovation. The tears brimmed in both our eyes as we looked out into that crowd of people affirming a gay couple, one of whom had just been ordained a transitional deacon enroute to priesthood in the Episcopal Church, the other whose role in that process had proven vital to its success. As long as I live, I will always be grateful for that moment.
As my graduation from seminary approached, I had applied to the General Theological Union/Cal Berkeley program for a Ph.D. in religion and society/ethics. I was one of 43 applicants in a process which told its applicants up front it gave some preference to women applicants. The program took four applicants (three of them women). I was not among them. Later I was told by a committee member that my bid had not been helped by the presence on the committee of a Jesuit professor opposed to the liberation theology that had been the focus of much of my M.Div. coursework.
Knowing that my chances were not good for admission given that context, I applied at Florida State University’s brand new Ph.D. program not thinking I had much of a prayer but figuring it would be OK to be back in Florida and near my family should I be admitted. On March 13, 2005, I was awakened at 5 AM with a call from Tallahassee (it was 8 AM Eastern time) notifying me that I’d been admitted to FSU’s program. At this point, my partner, Andy, dissolved into tears and left for work without even saying goodbye. Andy did not want to leave California. And he did not want me to once again be separated from him.
Later that morning I headed out to Berkeley for classes, both exhilarated with my admission as well as depressed by the prospect of once again leaving my grieving, beloved partner behind. I returned to an empty house, my partner attending a computer science class for his certificate program at UC that night. And so I headed out to a bar in nearby Hayward to find someone – anyone - to celebrate with me.
It was a terrible failure of judgment on my part. I had had little to eat that day. I had had only five hours of sleep, having been awakened at 5 AM by the Tallahassee news. Upon announcing to the folks sitting around the bar my admission to the Ph.D. program, they began buying me rounds of drinks. At the point I realized I was in trouble, it was too late. I was nearly home when the combination of the fatigue and alcohol overcame me. I woke up with my car plowed up under a semi-truck parked on the side of Mission Drive. It was a miracle I had not harmed anyone and escaped with only minor scratches and bruises myself. Poor Imogene was a total loss.
Among the calls I received that first day home from the hospital was a call from Bishop Shimpfky. His first concern was that I was OK. His second was that I not worry but that I did need to come see him and explain this event. Because I was already a deacon and so close to being ordained , he wanted me to speak with him and the Standing Committee who would make the final decision on my priestly ordination. It was a very pastoral handling of a situation in which I was already convinced that everything I had worked for was down the drain in a single night of indiscretion.
By the time I met with the Committee and bishop, I had already been to court, completed my public service and the court ordered DUI class. I had a record of attendance at the SMART Recovery (alternative to AA) program and a letter from my psychiatrist certifying that I had dealt with this event appropriately and was suitable for ordination. And, to be honest, there was no doubt in my mind that while I had a problem I needed to deal with directly, I had taken it very seriously.
The bishop had explained the situation to the Standing Committee and they treated me with compassion even as they sought my assurance that their institution would not be endangered by my presence. By the meeting’s end, my priestly ordination was back on track. And two months later, I would be ordained priest. Sometimes there actually is forgiveness in the institutional church.
Overall, I think Bishop Shimpfky would have to be seen as a good bishop. His commitment to inclusivity bore fruit in a diocese that, while its overall numbers shrank like many dioceses across the country, often looked like the United Nations at prayer. And that same commitment was instrumental in changes in the Episcopal Church nationally that ultimately said to the misogynist dioceses that their time was up on ordaining women and paved the way for gay bishops who now serve in the House of Bishops and same sex marriage rites which are currently being created by the liturgy and music commission of the church.
Within his own diocese, he had many opponents by the time he left office, a departure that ultimately had to be legally negotiated between the bishop and his clergy. It was not a friendly passing of the guard. Frankly, I would not be a bishop for even one day given the headaches implicit in that job. But even with his failures, I think Shimpfky’s bishopric must be seen as a success in the larger picture.
Bishop Shimpfky was not a perfect man. None of us are. He made mistakes, some of them deeply injurious to people I loved and respected. He was a very human bishop. But, on the whole, I believe he was a good bishop. And I believe he was a good man. His generosity of spirit and willingness to take a chance on me changed me life.
My ordination opened the door to the many unforeseen experiences and changes in my life that have led to a life of service of G-d’s people that continues to this day. I could never have imagined that a mere four years previously as I sat trembling in that diocesan waiting room. And so I am greatly in his debt. And his passing grieves me all the more in that I never had the opportunity to fully tell him how much I appreciated all he did for me.
So, join me in a prayer of gratitude this day for the life of a decent man and for the soul of an imperfect but ultimately good bishop. May Richard Shimpfky and souls of all the departed rest in peace. May he be greeted in heaven with the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Cops and Robbers
This morning as I did my 1.75 mile walk around Lake Underhill before heading out to classes on this last day before spring break, I notice what I first presume to be two broken down vehicles. The two SUVs were stopped in the far right lane of the bridge over Lake Underhill, the lane that serves as entrance from Lake Underhill Drive and the exit for Conway Road. One of the SUVs appeared to be brand new, completely black with dark tinted windows, the other an older tan colored SUV that needed a wash.
As I got closer, I see the driver of the black SUV standing at the window of the tan SUV, exchanging something with the driver in the tan SUV then walking back to his car. He’s dressed in t-shirt and sun glasses. Good Lord, I think to myself, is this a drug deal going down in broad daylight right here on the expressway?
It’s only then that I see the flashing lights barely visible at the top of the black SUV’s windshield. So, the cops have taken to using expensive new SUVs and dressing like drug dealers for their traffic stops? Wonder how much that SUV set back the local taxpayers even as our fascist governor seeks to take a meat axe to any program that might actually help Florida residents under the rubric of “We can’t afford that” (as if Republicans somehow speak for all Floridians).
On days like these, the wisdom of my late, crazy cousin, Ansel, comes back to me: “The only thing separating the cops from the robbers is the badge,” he said. And at a very basic level, that was certainly true in this morning’s incident.
Florida criminal law has created a presumption of criminal intent when individuals enter onto property in a stealthy manner. At some level, the presumption makes sense. If someone is hiding in the bushes outside your house, the chances are not good that they’re there to offer you a copy of the Watchtower. But what about cops who disguise themselves as drug dealers, who hide in bushes with radar guns. Certainly these behaviors speak to stealth. Are their intentions criminal? How can we tell?
As I’ve said many times, if a LEO wants the traffic to slow down, all s/he has to do is be visible. A police car in traffic inevitably slows the pace of the traffic to the posted speed limit. A LEO on the side of the highways always prompts drivers to slow down and begin looking around for the speed limit signs. Indeed, how many LEOs have testified that the fronts of vehicles suddenly move downward as the drivers brake them upon spotting the LEO?
If the goal of traffic law enforcement is to get drivers to obey the speed limits, all they have to do is be visible. If, on the other hand, the goal is to collect revenue in a state which has proven criminally irresponsible in creating and maintaining and adequate revenue basis (translation: them rich folks don’t pay no taxes), LEOS engaging in presumed criminal behaviors and dressing up like drug dealers may certainly prove effective fund raising tactics. But at what cost to the credibility of law enforcement? At what cost to the integrity of the state? And what happens when the citizenry no longer see the law, its makers and its enforcers as legitimate?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This morning as I did my 1.75 mile walk around Lake Underhill before heading out to classes on this last day before spring break, I notice what I first presume to be two broken down vehicles. The two SUVs were stopped in the far right lane of the bridge over Lake Underhill, the lane that serves as entrance from Lake Underhill Drive and the exit for Conway Road. One of the SUVs appeared to be brand new, completely black with dark tinted windows, the other an older tan colored SUV that needed a wash.
As I got closer, I see the driver of the black SUV standing at the window of the tan SUV, exchanging something with the driver in the tan SUV then walking back to his car. He’s dressed in t-shirt and sun glasses. Good Lord, I think to myself, is this a drug deal going down in broad daylight right here on the expressway?
It’s only then that I see the flashing lights barely visible at the top of the black SUV’s windshield. So, the cops have taken to using expensive new SUVs and dressing like drug dealers for their traffic stops? Wonder how much that SUV set back the local taxpayers even as our fascist governor seeks to take a meat axe to any program that might actually help Florida residents under the rubric of “We can’t afford that” (as if Republicans somehow speak for all Floridians).
On days like these, the wisdom of my late, crazy cousin, Ansel, comes back to me: “The only thing separating the cops from the robbers is the badge,” he said. And at a very basic level, that was certainly true in this morning’s incident.
Florida criminal law has created a presumption of criminal intent when individuals enter onto property in a stealthy manner. At some level, the presumption makes sense. If someone is hiding in the bushes outside your house, the chances are not good that they’re there to offer you a copy of the Watchtower. But what about cops who disguise themselves as drug dealers, who hide in bushes with radar guns. Certainly these behaviors speak to stealth. Are their intentions criminal? How can we tell?
As I’ve said many times, if a LEO wants the traffic to slow down, all s/he has to do is be visible. A police car in traffic inevitably slows the pace of the traffic to the posted speed limit. A LEO on the side of the highways always prompts drivers to slow down and begin looking around for the speed limit signs. Indeed, how many LEOs have testified that the fronts of vehicles suddenly move downward as the drivers brake them upon spotting the LEO?
If the goal of traffic law enforcement is to get drivers to obey the speed limits, all they have to do is be visible. If, on the other hand, the goal is to collect revenue in a state which has proven criminally irresponsible in creating and maintaining and adequate revenue basis (translation: them rich folks don’t pay no taxes), LEOS engaging in presumed criminal behaviors and dressing up like drug dealers may certainly prove effective fund raising tactics. But at what cost to the credibility of law enforcement? At what cost to the integrity of the state? And what happens when the citizenry no longer see the law, its makers and its enforcers as legitimate?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Morning Reveries
This morning just before waking, I found myself dreaming of the Vicar of Dibley, the rotund woman vicar in the fictional village of Dibley, England on the BBC sitcom bearing her name. In my dream, the vicar was leading the eucharist in her most beautiful Elizabethan English. Sunlight poured through stained glass windows of the ancient chapel into pools of color on the slate floor. The sounds of sanctus bells rang in the background and gray curls of smoke and fragrance from fine incense filled the air around me. It was simple but simultaneously magnificent.
I awoke to the sound of the wind chime ringing in the breeze over my head, its colored glass producing flashes of colored light dancing across my face. The smell of woods fire from the Iron Horse wildfire burning in nearby Brevard County mixed with the heavy perfume of orange blossoms from trees in my yard, filling the air with its fragrance. The warmth of nine o’clock spring morning sunshine poured through the window I had left open last night to enjoy the cool evening breeze.
My centenarian dachshund, deep under the covers, did not stir by my feet but Daisy, our three year old beagle, did not miss her opportunity to leap to the bed and bathe my face with wet hound dog good morning kisses. As I looked from my bed across the room to the many photos of family of birth and family of choice which adorn the wall over my family altar, I thought to myself what a rich life I have led. And I reflected on what a fortunate – and grateful - man I am.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This morning just before waking, I found myself dreaming of the Vicar of Dibley, the rotund woman vicar in the fictional village of Dibley, England on the BBC sitcom bearing her name. In my dream, the vicar was leading the eucharist in her most beautiful Elizabethan English. Sunlight poured through stained glass windows of the ancient chapel into pools of color on the slate floor. The sounds of sanctus bells rang in the background and gray curls of smoke and fragrance from fine incense filled the air around me. It was simple but simultaneously magnificent.
I awoke to the sound of the wind chime ringing in the breeze over my head, its colored glass producing flashes of colored light dancing across my face. The smell of woods fire from the Iron Horse wildfire burning in nearby Brevard County mixed with the heavy perfume of orange blossoms from trees in my yard, filling the air with its fragrance. The warmth of nine o’clock spring morning sunshine poured through the window I had left open last night to enjoy the cool evening breeze.
My centenarian dachshund, deep under the covers, did not stir by my feet but Daisy, our three year old beagle, did not miss her opportunity to leap to the bed and bathe my face with wet hound dog good morning kisses. As I looked from my bed across the room to the many photos of family of birth and family of choice which adorn the wall over my family altar, I thought to myself what a rich life I have led. And I reflected on what a fortunate – and grateful - man I am.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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