Summary: it has been a tough December. We’ve lost Archbishop Desmond Tutu, separated from us at the age of 90. Joan Didion died of Parkinson’s disease two days before Christmas at the age of 87, and yesterday morning we lost Betty White, at the marvelous age of 99. What a month.
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Cathedral City, December 31, 2021. The last week has been rather tough. Christmas this year has been bookended as it were by the separation from us of a number of individuals who enlarged the frontiers of humanity.
Two days before Christmas, Joan Didion passed away from Parkinson’s disease at the age of 87. Her life as a Californian, as a writer, and as a Californian writer, was in its way hugely significant. Joan was one of a stable, as it were, of Californian writers who, in various ways, helped to illustrate our Californian reality to a larger nation and indeed to the world upon which we have been so very influential during the last hundred years. Like John Steinbeck or William Saroyan, Joan Didion helped make California comprehensible to our larger American nation and to the world.
There is something profoundly Californian in Joan’s quotation about Blue Nights, from her book of the same name:
“During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone...Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.”
There is something in Didion’s writing that you can’t quite put your finger on, an apprehension of something unusual, yet quotidian. Anyone who has lived in California, whether as a native or as a long time immigrant from somewhere else, will understand, yet not necessarily be able to verbalize, what Joan Didion understood and could verbalize.
Yet, as much as Joan Didion could write about things that enlightened her readers about what it meant to be Californian, she could also remind her readers that California could be anything but hedonistic: “It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.”
There is something so utterly Californian in Joan Didion’s writing: influenced by Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, her writing is nonetheless sui generis. At some point some writer may come along and be compared to Joan Didion. But in reality, we shall not see her like again.
If, two days before Christmas we were somewhat taken aback to have been separated from Joan Didion, Boxing Day, the Feast of St. Stephen the Protomartyr, confronted us with the passing away of the Most Rev. Desmond Mpilo Tutu. Ironically, Archbishop Desmond Tutu is the only one of the three people I appreciate today whom I actually met. He was in Los Angeles and happened to visit my parish church, where on a quiet evening, he celebrated the sacrament for a small congregation. I shall not soon forget the experience of receiving the Body of Christ from Desmond Tutu’s archiepiscopal hands. He could not stay long, and left almost immediately after the service was concluded, but sometimes one’s memories come not from his moral witness to thousands, but from his simple, basic exercise of his priestly ministry.
That simple exercise of ministry has stayed with me across more than a quarter of a century. And it has stayed with me for the simple reason that in a way it is become a stay of my faith. Desmond Tutu did not know me from Adam’s house cat. In fact, very few, if any of the 12 or 13 people gathered that night in the Lady Chapel were known to Archbishop Tutu. But we were, black, white, Asian and Pacific Islander, gay and straight, abled and disabled, all the beloved people of God. And all of us shared in God’s gifts to God’s people that evening, gathered as we were around the Lord’s table, as if we were in the Upper Room itself. That sharing of that sacrament, that reminder that an archbishop can be in that moment a priest ministering to God’s people became, for all of us, a reminder that our faith in He who came to save the world is among us always: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” John 3:16
Yet, Desmond Tutu was not just a simple priest. To speak of South Africa, to understand the enormous, almost miraculous change that took place in that country without civil war, without violence, without repression, without the vast streams of refugees, without recrimination, and without reprisal, is necessarily to speak of the achievements of people such as Desmond Tutu.
When Nelson Mandela was rotting in jail on Robben Island under the apartheid regime, it was accepted that South Africa would become a black majority ruled country, but it was also accepted that the transition to black majority rule would be accompanied by bloodbaths, massacres, and metaphorical mountains of skulls. No one imagined that the transition from white minority rule to black-multiracial rule would happen easily or without bloodshed. The riots, the bombs, the “necklacings,” in which flaming tires would be placed over the heads of accused black collaborators, all of these seemed to be indicators of the horrors –the-thought-to-be-inevitable-horrors– that awaited South Africa.
But Madiba, as Nelson Mandela was affectionately known, and Mpilo, as Archbishop Tutu was known in Xhosa, between them engineered that peaceful transition that no one, not the Afrikaner South Africans, not the Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush administrations, nor Margaret Thatcher and her charisma-challenged successor, John Major, had thought possible. Against their belief that South Africa would descend into bloodshed and communism, Madiba and Mpilo brokered and oversaw that peaceful transition, that transformation of the Citadel of apartheid to the multi-racial democracy that is South Africa today, with its flaws, its quiddities, its issues, but also its promise.
Now, both Madiba and Mpilo have departed from us. Yet, they have left lessons, most particularly for us in the United States, who are descending into a form of tribalism made all the worse because it is covered up by what Winston Churchill, describing the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulags in 1938, described as “a veneer of scientific conveniences.”
What makes America’s tribalism all the worse is that it is not an organic form of tribalism, something which originates from a dim past all tribes of long residency contending for the same territories. Instead, America’s tribalism has been fostered and encouraged for political purposes by unspeakable individuals such as Donald Trump, whose own German origins ought to militate against ever again electing someone of such ancestry to the presidency. What made Madiba’s and Mpilo’s achievement in South Africa so significant was their ability to convince the various warring tribes, among them the Afrikaners, the Zulus, the Xhosa, the Matabele, the Sesotho, and the English, among others, that it were better if they all learned to make peace and live together.
South Africans are beginning to grow old now living in the reality of a multiracial South Africa. Yet, the achievement of growing old is not one that is necessarily restricted to countries such as South Africa. All of us who are vouchsafed years beyond twoscore and ten must, in our own time, learn what it is to grow older, and ultimately, to grow old. And in so doing, we have none to guide us except those who have themselves experienced the fullness of years.
Betty White was one of those who experienced the fullness of the fullness of years. She did not make a century; she was deprived by 17 days of having lived 100 years. Yet, Betty White showed us that growing older, and growing old was not something to be feared. We can appreciate Betty White, indeed, we can weep for Betty White not because he was taken from us in the flower of her youth or in the golden years of her middle-age. Rather, we can weep for Betty White because, by aging as beautifully and as gracefully as she did, she provided for us an example, a sense of what can be lived for.
In many of her roles, Betty White played a clever naïf, who was more attuned to reality than she let on. In her roles, Betty White reminded us that the naïf often possess a kind of understanding and wisdom that frequently evades the more “worldly” among us. Indeed, Betty’s was the naïveté of one whose simplicity transcends itself.
And, indeed, in that regard Betty also taught us another priceless lesson: sometimes listening with a simple, even naïve, approach can bring one insights which can evade the more cynical among us. Like all truly competent actors, Betty White imparted these lessons to us with a kind of effortlessness that we who find ourselves “teetering on the brink of an age range” would do well to internalize.
We shall not see the likes of Joan Didion, Desmond Tutu, or Betty White again. Yet, they have left to us priceless teaching. Rest Eternal grant to all them, O Lord, and may light perpetual shine upon them. May their souls and the souls of all the departed, through the Mercy of God, Rest in Peace, and may they rise again in glory at the Last Day.
