Prayers for Pacific Palisades
Like President Jimmy Carter, Pacific Palisades recently celebrated its 100th birthday. Founded to be a religious paradise by a dedicated group of churchmen, it succumbed this week to one of the worst urban fires in the history of the United States. In just twenty-four hours, high winds wiped out nearly half of all the homes and razed both the local Catholic and Methodist churches.
The town was a creation of the Chautauqua movement, which began in upstate New York as an educational program for Sunday-school teachers. By the turn of the twentieth century, three hundred “traveling Chautauquas” brought music, drama, culture, history, current events, and religion to towns across America.
But the effort reached a high polish under the Southern California Methodist Episcopal Conference, which envisioned a grand Chautauqua convening world leaders on breezy mesas overlooking the Pacific so they could iron out their differences after World War I. In the Palisades, Via de la Paz (“the way of peace”) and Monument Street were bridged by streets named after Methodist bishops and missionaries, and met at Peace Hill—the site of the annual Easter sunrise service beneath a large hillside cross.
It wasn’t just the Methodists who set their sights on these beautiful vistas. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, looking to build a college for women, made a play to buy the seaside Huntington Ranch. But as the Palisades Methodists acknowledged in a 100th-anniversary documentary, they did not want Catholics encroaching on their franchise. Borrowing heavily to purchase the land, they pushed the nuns into neighboring Brentwood where Mount St. Mary’s College was founded. The stock-market crash four years later doomed the Methodists’ master plan, and the Pacific Palisades Association went bankrupt. They were forced to sell their cherished conference grounds to the Presbyterians, and Peace Hill to the developers.
The Catholics made a comeback in the 1950s in the person of Fr. Richard Cotter, a buoyant Irishman from Cork and the director of the Catholic Youth Organization. He founded a new parish in Pacific Palisades, now a booming postwar community. Meeting first in what would become the local YMCA, the Catholics eventually built their own big-box church in the middle of town in the 1960s. Fr. Cotter envisioned the new building in a dream: an enormous, modernist, parabolic brick structure. He liked to say it was like the extended arms of the Lord, welcoming parishioners into Corpus Christi, “the body of Christ.”
Around that time, my parents bought a house on Chautauqua Boulevard and settled into an idyllic life. Surrounded by other Catholic children at Corpus Christi School, we also joined the Boy Scout troop, marched in the annual Fourth of July parade, and took for granted the local beach culture popularized in the Beach Boys’ 1963 hit, “Surfin’ USA,” whose lyrics mention the Palisades by name.
I have wonderful memories of my father dressed in a white alb, standing piously on the altar before he distributed communion, and my mother singing in the choir. As a child I served Mass many Sundays with my friend, Steve Woodland, including when Fr. Ted Hesburgh would come to town at Christmas to visit his family. Countless sacraments and graduations in that beautiful church followed.
But as chronicled in Sarah Kelly’s poignant documentary, “Palisades Parade,” there was suffering on the horizon. Corpus Christi stepped up in a big way when my eighteen-year-old brother was killed by a drunk driver. Both my mother and Msgr. Cotter died two years later. Another wily Irishman from Cork, Fr. Liam Kidney, eventually took over the parish and responded to our increasingly libertarian culture with wit and joy that lured people back. My son was baptized there by Fr. Woodland on Christmas Eve in 1999.
In 2019 came the death of a second brother, a nationally known musical theater star. Again Corpus Christi came to our aid, with a packed funeral that featured glorious music and a soulful sermon by the Jesuit president of Los Angeles’s oldest high school, Loyola, where, like many Palisades boys, my brothers and I had been educated.
On my way to New York for a memorial planned by my brother’s wife, I felt drawn in the wake of what had happened to take a detour to Georgia to attend President Carter’s Bible-study class. After camping all night in the parking lot of Maranatha Baptist Church, I joined a line of bedraggled Carter devotees who were ushered into the tiny building as two hundred others looked on.
President Carter, then ninety-five, had broken his pelvis just two weeks earlier. Moving gingerly with a walker, he perched in a white chair before the congregation and began to speak. His wife Rosalynn slipped in at 10 a.m. and sat down beside me. President Carter recounted falling ill while monitoring an election in Guyana in 2015. Subsequent testing showed he had metastatic melanoma that had spread to his liver and brain. Quoting from the Book of Job, he spoke about his conviction that there was no need to fear death. “Though I have doubted almost all my life,” he said, his Christian faith had given him “complete confidence in life after death.” He added, “Just be reassured that you have a wonderful eternal life to look forward to,” and then he launched into a speech about how we could all help make America “a superpower for peace.”
After a closing prayer, he shuffled down the aisle and sat down between his wife and me. He smiled later as he complimented my Save-the-Children tie, put his check in the collection plate, and passed it on to me. I had a chance later to tell him that I was traveling to New York to celebrate the life of my remarkable brother. Early the next year I received a note in the mail from the former president, expressing sincere condolences on behalf of himself and his wife.
Now, in the same week he was honored at the Capitol and buried in Plains, Georgia, Pacific Palisades suffered the catastrophic destruction of block after block of beautiful homes. Hundred-mile-per-hour winds led to the incineration of both Corpus Christi and the United Methodist Church. Heroic first responders helped ensure that virtually all the town’s thirty thousand residents escaped unharmed, and Msgr. Kidney brought the Catholic community together again in nearby Santa Monica for Mass just days later.
The Book of Job celebrates Job’s faithfulness to God despite all the suffering and unfairness of life. Both President Carter and my hometown celebrated and suffered through long and eventful lives. “Prayer is confronting the challenges of life in the presence of God,” he said that November day at Maranatha Baptist Church, in what proved to be the last of the hundreds of Bible studies he led there. I’m hopeful now that a prayerful and communitarian spirit will guide poor Pacific Palisades and prove that there is indeed life after death.
No comments:
Post a Comment