The Rev. Michael Rollie Jones
It must be around the anniversary of Rollie’s death. I admit to that much of a superstitious streak. Why else the convergence of so many things? I haven’t listened to Mahler’s #2 in years. It was only at the fourth movement that memories of Rollie and his fondness for this symphony came flooding over me.
Rollie was my spiritual director and a wonderful friend. A wise counselor, scholar, and a mighty, prophetic, homelist. I guess this is a cue to dig out my trove of his sermons (some in his handwriting). I have his mother’s Bible. I’ll be reading from that tonight!
His one and only parish was Holy Innocents (Episcopal) in San Francisco.
I remember his investiture. He was so happy. We were all so happy for him. He was raised Catholic, but never entered the Catholic priesthood. At the last quarter mark of his life, I think, he was received and ordained into the Episcopal church at Grace Cathedral. But prior to that—indeed, long, long, before—he was quite a rabble rouser. He marched with and was a friend of Dorothy Day. I had the sad honor to process with his casket at his funeral mass at Grace Cathedral.
Typical story: Rollie (it probably was after he was newly priested) and some priests (probably Catholic and Episcopal) went down to the Great Highway in San Francisco, waded out a bit into the Pacific Ocean and proceeded to bless the water. They thus reaffirmed the ocean’s holiness and made it doubly sinful for the US to launch warships, upon that very water, to Vietnam.
I just Googled him and found this letter he wrote to TIME in 1962. I’ll have to do some research to find out to what, exactly, he was referring. His outrage eerily presages our own outrage at Wall Street and the banking CEO’s that has only grown the past few days.
Anyway, I’m just awash with memories.
