Getting Started

“Watts Towers.” The sign was austere, black letters on a faded white background. How many motorists drove by it every day, without even a second thought? Or maybe they thought, it’s a neighborhood, or a shopping area. But for me, just catching the sign as the Super Shuttle sped down the freeway, brought back that amazing day fifteen years ago when I was able to make a special pilgrimage to the Watts Towers.

Sam Rodilla emigrated from Italy at the very end of the nineteenth century and found his way to Southern California not much later. He was a construction man, working with stone and concrete, as his family had in the old country. In 1924, he bought a small lot on 107th Street in Los Angeles, and he began to build. In the evenings, after work and on weekends, with just a few simple hand tools, a window washer’s belt, and his prodigious creative energy, he began to build. He built tall, slender columns out of construction steel, covered them with concrete, and then, with what is best described as folk art extraordinaire, added bits of colorful ceramic, colored glass, seashells… anything he could find that fit his vision. He built towers, benches, and bird baths. One tower is ninety-nine and a half feet high, the tallest structure of its kind in the world. Whenever anyone asked him why he spent thirty-four years of his life doing it he would say, “I wanted to do something big.”

Walking into the vast cavern that is the Anaheim Convention Center today for the beginning of General Convention brought Sam Rodilla’s words back to me. Do we dare in these next ten days to try to do something big? Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Shori talked about the challenge of being a mission church in a time of crisis, in the Church’s life and in times of economic stress. She talked about the opportunity that comes with such a task and how we need to embrace that opportunity in the days ahead. Bishop Katharine warned the assembly to attend to the tasks of the national church and to leave to the home congregations the mission imperative best suited to us. Astute advice. Dr. Bonnie Anderson, President of the House of Deputies then spoke about the necessity for the Church to continue the aims of the Millennium Development Goals, to not lose sight of our responsibility to the poorest of the poor.

Today was a day of bumping into old friends, getting used to the fast pace of Convention, and figuring out how I can best help the Virginia Deputation in our work. David, an old friend and veteran of many a General Convention, said to me how much he loved the first day, “Nobody’s had time to get worked up yet,” he said.

Well, I hope we do get worked up in these next ten days, worked up enough to move this Church to a new place, a place of even greater strength, inclusivity and joy. Seems like the Church is kind of like the Watts Towers; made up of bits of this and that, things you would never think could go together, yet behold the result. A thing in all its fits and starts beauty, reaching to the sky.