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.
