PUTTING DOWN THE MIGHTY FROM THEIR SEAT: HOW THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY INSPIRED ME TO PRACTICE LAW
As a teenager, my obsessions were not rock
music and beer, but choir singing and acolyting. Sunday mornings, I sang
countertenor at High Mass. Afternoons, I was thurifer at Evensong and
Benediction. One verse of the Magnificat stood
out: “He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble
and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent
empty away.” That verse was later to define me professionally as a lawyer.
But not before I fell into sin and became
subject to evil and death. Before I went to law school at age 40, I was an
insurance adjuster helping insurance companies avoid paying injured people.
Rather than practice the compassionate values of my grandmother, a social
worker, and my mother, an actress, I worshiped Ayn Rand. My goal was keeping
insurance premiums down and insurance company profits up. What I did not
apprehend at the time was human suffering I caused.
My father as an admiralty lawyer. My family
expected that I, too, would become a lawyer. However, I became a
different kind of lawyer than my father, whose clients were ship owners. Mine
are factory workers, mechanics, janitors, secretaries, dishwashers, and all the
other myriad occupations deemed so unimportant by many but without whom we
would not live life as we know it.
We Anglo-Catholics are commonly associated
with ritual. Exodus 30:6 and Malachai 1:11 command perpetual offerings of
incense, but Matthew 25:31-45 tells us that when Jesus comes to judge the
world, He will separate the sheep on His right from the goats on His
left. The sheep care for the hungry, sick and incarcerated, but the goats tell
the needy to take a hike. Those on His right hand will inherit the Kingdom Heaven Zanzibar
“You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the
Tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slums. .. Now go out into the
highways and hedges where not even the Bishops will try to hinder you. Go out
and look for Jesus in the ragged, in the naked, in the oppressed and sweated,
in those who have lost hope, in those who are struggling to make good. Look for
Jesus. And when you see him, gird yourselves with his towel and try to wash
their feet.”
Beginning with the slum parishes of
London as described in John Shelton Reed’s book, Glorious Battle,Anglo-Catholics were
known for their work in the slums beginning with John Mason Neale, Charles Fuge
Lowder, and Arthur Henry Stanton of St. Alban’s, Holborn and St.
Barnabas, Pimlico. Later in the United States St. John Boston Chicago
The essence of the Mass is death and
resurrection. It is about dying to sin and rising to life. “This is My Body
which is given for you” which we receive to commemorate Christ’s death,
resurrection, and coming in Glory. Just as Christ’s body was changed from
physical to spiritual as explained in I Corinthians 15:44, Eucharist is
about changing bread and wine into Christ’s Body and Blood. It is also
about changing us to become a holy people, a royal priesthood, and holy nation,
to proclaim the mighty acts of Him who called us out of darkness into his
marvelous light, to paraphrase 1 Peter 2:9. On December 12, 1995, the
insurance adjuster in me died and the lawyer in me arose, when I was admitted
to the California Bar. The task ahead was to transform the Magnificat from mere words into a
professional lifestyle, an incarnational
lifestyle, consistent with the Incarnational context of the Magnificat. To quote Conrad Noel, a
19th Century English Anglo-Catholic,
“For the Incarnation is more than a belief,
it is a principle of life and of transformation. The principle that salvation
and all spirituality comes through the flesh and through matter lie at the
heart of the entire Christian understanding. Spirituality which is rooted
in the Incarnation can never be world-denying or private. Nor can it be reduced
to the "imitation of Christ". Rather it is a call to be transformed
into the divine life.”
I like cases where I make a difference in
someone’s life, such as Workers’ Compensation, which is (supposed to)
benefit workers injured while producing profits for their employers.
Unfortunately, that system features insensitive adjusters denying claims
without considering that a weekly disability check for an injured worker is the
difference between shelter and homelessness, between food and hunger. I see
obtaining orders from a Judge to pay benefits and harassing adjusters with
letters and phone calls not just as my duty as an attorney, but as meeting a
moral imperative. In the words of James 2:15, “If a brother or sister is
naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace keep warm
and eat your fill’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the
good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”
One of my first civil cases was a car
salesman with a family who had, they thought, bought a home. However, they
didn’t really, because the seller didn’t tell them the truth about the
financing already on the property. Suddenly, my client was facing foreclosure
and eviction. The result of my militant approach was that my client
assumed the existing loan and remained in possession. The little money I earned
doing that meant more to me than the thousands I had earned helping insurance
companies deny claims because I had brought a family from the brink of
homelessness to their own home.
But their are limits to what I will do with
my legal talents, again, driven by my Anglo-Catholic values.
Within a month after I began practicing law,
a man brought his girlfriend to my office and asked my assistance in divorcing
his wife so he could marry the girlfriend. I asked him why. He had
been married for ten years. His wife was infertile, but he wanted to sire a
child. “What about adoption,” I inquired, as I would delight in placing an
unwanted child in a loving home. He was adamant that he wanted a
wife who could provide him a natural child. When I asked him how his wife felt
about a divorce, he told me it would hurt her feelings. How despicable!
The highest calling of human beings within the Sacrament of Marriage is not to
be a stock-farm animal, but to live faithfully to love, honor and cherish one’s
spouse. I advised him to treasure his wife and to enjoy the childfree lifestyle
God bestowed upon them.
Another man telephoned when he had been
accused of beating his sons with a belt. His children were in the custody of
the Department of Child Protective Services. His boys had told their
teacher about him and that the police had taken them away and arrested
him. He offered me $5,000 cash up front. As badly as I needed that money,
I told him I would not represent him because that’s not the way Jesus treated
children. He quoted Proverbs 23:13, that nonsense of, “spare the rold and spoil
the child,” to which I responded that we are people of the New Covenant, where,
in Mark 10:16, Jesus took children into his arms and laid His hand upon them to
bless, not hurt, them. I told the man to plead guilty, take a parenting class,
and apologize to his sons.
What these stories say is Anglo-Catholic
values are more important than money. We are called not only preach the Gospel,
but, to do it. As James
1:22 exhorts us, we are to be doers of
the word, not hearers only. In Matthew 7:24, Jesus tells us the difference
between the wise person who built a house on rock and the foolish one who built
on sand. The house on the rock withstood the storm but that built on sand did
not. The difference between the two is that a faith built on actions, not
words alone, will withstand life’s storms. I choose to build my faith on the
rock of concrete actions to serve Christ in others while joyfully adoring Him
in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar.
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