[Oe List ...] 2/03/11, Spong: Milton Reese LeRoy, 1922-2010

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Milton Reese LeRoy, 1922-2010
He was competent, but gentle; successful, but not aggressive; genuine without being pretentious.  His name was Milton Reese LeRoy.  He graduated from Clemson University in South Carolina in 1943 as an engineer and, after a tour of duty in the armed forces during World War II, from Virginia Theological Seminary in 1950.  He was ordained to the priesthood in 1951.  He served as a missionary priest in Cuba; headed a training center for women church workers in California; worked on the staff of the National Episcopal Church in New York, and concluded his career as the Archdeacon of the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Virginia.  It was a noteworthy career and yet it still remains a fact that few people will recognize his name outside the local circles in which he lived.   For me, however, he was a friend of significance and depth, who led a life of quiet dignity and keen insight.  My readers have met him and in some ways have been influenced by him, even if they do not recognize it.  Let me tell you his story.
In 2006, when I was deep into my research that resulted in the publication of “Eternal Life: A New Vision,” I became aware that my friend Milton LeRoy, then residing in a retirement community in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, was living with what he believed were the final stages of a terminal disease.  His wife Jean was his chief support and best friend.  I had met him 40 years earlier when Jean served on my staff while I was the Rector of St. Paul’s Church in downtown Richmond, Virginia.  She was the architect of the best and most effective Christian Education program that I have ever known.  It embraced infants on one side and our elderly members on the other.  Milton was then serving as Archdeacon of the Diocese of Virginia, headquartered in Richmond, with responsibility for Christian Education in the 180 or so Episcopal congregations across north and central Virginia.  I saw Jean professionally almost every day for the seven years I was privileged to serve that church.  She was, quite frankly, the best theologian on our staff and that certainly included the Rector!  I would tell her a few weeks in advance that I wanted to tackle a particular subject in a forthcoming sermon and the next day on my desk would appear six or more books from the library of Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, marked with page numbers to read.  She would have distilled into about 50 pages of reading the most significant treatment of that subject by the best known and most highly respected theologians of our time.  My study life was thus enriched week after week by this wonderfully learned woman.  All during this time, Milton, as the Archdeacon, was guiding the life of the diocese in which St. Paul’s Church played a significant role.  He was supportive of his wife and of me and presumably St. Paul’s was supportive of the diocese and of his work.
This mutuality was particularly illustrated in 1974 when Rabbi Jack D. Spiro of Temple Beth Ahabah and I launched a public dialogue between our two congregations, seeking to increase and enhance Jewish-Christian understanding and to strike a blow against the latent anti-Semitism that was still prevalent in Richmond’s life.  This dialogue went through four Sabbaths at the Temple and four Sundays at St. Paul’s Church.  It was attended by congregations that at the Temple exceeded those that gathered on Rosh Hashanah and at St. Paul’s by those that gathered on Easter.  In our dialogue we sought to destroy the prevailing stereotypes that Christians have of the Jews and that Jews have of Christians.  This dialogue was covered extensively in the local media from front page stories in the Richmond Times Dispatch, to broadcasts by WRVA Radio, to the local news programs on television and even by PBS.  Inevitably, the dialogue turned to the person of Jesus, seen by Christians as messiah and Christ, and by the Jews as the source of severe persecution through the centuries in which they had frequently been defined as “Christ killers.”  When this dialogue was conducted we were only thirty-five years beyond the Holocaust.  My attempts on one Sabbath evening session to portray Jesus in understandable Jewish categories as the “Word of God” being spoken in the world and the “Will of God” being lived out, resulted in a Saturday morning newspaper headline that read “Jesus is not God, Local Rector Asserts.”  Newspaper headline writers are hardly theologically sensitive.  They tend to reflect the lowest common religious understanding present in the community and in Richmond fundamentalism was alive and well.  By Sunday morning a community-wide debate was on.  My church was picketed by placard-carrying demonstrators from the Jahnke Road Baptist Church of South Richmond that called on me to convert the Rabbi and suggested that my failure to do so was tantamount to my denial of “the divinity of Christ.”  Rabbi Spiro was also buffeted by his right wing, the local Orthodox synagogue.  They accused him of distorting Judaism just by entering into dialogue with a Christian.  Archdeacon LeRoy from his diocesan leadership position rose to our defense and sought to educate the public through a series of letters to the editor in the daily press.  The result was that he too was pilloried by the uninformed evangelicals of the area.  Milton and I had become comrades in arms.  That was only one of many other adventures he and I shared before I left Richmond for Newark.
Both Jean and Milton retired in the late 1980’s.  I retired in 2000, but we stayed in touch and our spiritual pilgrimages continued.  For Milton and Jean this meant a journey into an ever-deepening concept of God, which ultimately led them to move beyond the typical boundaries of institutional religion, ending in their very meaningful participation in a Quaker Meeting.  While we remained close, our contacts were not nearly as frequent as they had been previously.
When I learned of Milton’s sickness and his probable soon-to-be death, Christine and I made it a priority to stop by to see them in the late summer of 2008 on our way home from our vacation spot in the mountains of Western North Carolina.   Milton’s hope at that time was to live through Thanksgiving of that year. He was not depressed, but he was realistic.  As we talked, I told him about my research on death and life after death. I had wanted to enlist the services of people who were in the process of dying to be part of my research.  By this time I had already secured one person, a retired Australian Anglican bishop named Owen Dowling, who was terminally ill with cancer, but he had died that spring.  Now I asked Milton to help me in this task.  He agreed and began to write weekly, describing in these letters the process of dying.
It was to be a kind of internal diary of dying shared externally.  What things make dying easier?  What things make it harder?  I wanted him to help me understand the mental process involved in embracing mortality.  What are the signs that make you know when death is drawing near?  Who do you want around you and why?  When you are up against the final boundary, do any of the familiar images of life after death have real meaning?  I wanted him to share with me and ultimately with my readers all he could about what it means to die. He did so.  At our Thanksgiving visit of 2008 we found him not deceased, as he had assumed, but very much alive.  His writing regularly on his death experience had given him a new purpose, which he engaged enthusiastically.  We saw him again at Christmas that year and he was defying his doctor’s expectations.  We saw him again at Christmas of 2009 and once again in the summer of 2010.
I had planned when the book was published to have an “In Memoriam” page dedicated to these two people who had both been so helpful in thinking about death and life, but when the book came out in September of 2009, only Owen Dowling was on the “In Memoriam” page.  I described them both and their contributions in the preface and I quoted them both in the body of the book, but of Milton I could only say not “In Memoriam,” but “Live well!”
His letters were penetrating.  He shared his own journey deeply.  He never left the Episcopal Church officially but his spirit could not be confined to the limits that Christianity tends to manifest.  He felt free to move to new places.  His last letter, written in September of 2010, was never mailed.  He died before that could be accomplished.  He called this his “first last letter,” which represented both his realism and his hope. He thanked me for our friendship and then he referred to words in one of his previous letters that I had actually incorporated into the book; “If whatever attracts atoms and molecules to each other could also be called love, then the Source and Creator of all could be called love.  Dare we be so simple?”
I was in Atlanta doing a series of lectures when I received a call from Jean that Milton had died earlier that morning.  I was distressed that my commitments to Atlanta made it impossible to attend the Memorial Service held in his retirement home chapel. The service began with prayers from the Episcopal Prayer Book, but continued in the Quaker manner with silence and vocal offerings.  A longtime friend sang the Quaker Song, “Simple Gifts.”  Milton was 87 years old.  He lived long and well.  He had shared his dying with me in weekly letters over a period of almost two years.  “Eternal Life: A New Vision” reflected Milton’s contributions in a number of places.  I gave him a copy at Christmas of 2009.  I chided him about the fact that he was supposed to have died before the book came out and that his failure to do so had caused me to have to rewrite the preface.  He took that with good grace as only a close friend can do. Milton expanded my life by his life and even more by his death.  His letters will be placed along with all of my papers ultimately into the archives of the Episcopal Church.  They will be opened to the public ten years after my death.  Perhaps someone else will then be inspired by Milton once again. Few people can do what he has done, namely be introspective about his own death. He inspired others to live fully, love wastefully and be all that each of us can be while still alive.
So I introduce you, my readers, to this competent and genuine human being so that you can join me in appreciating his life and his death.  Rest in Peace, Milton and thanks for all you meant to me.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Norris Carmel, Indiana, writes:
Question:
Environmentalism, as measured by number of adherents, is the dominant religion in the United States today. Like all religions, it is based on myths masquerading as truth or fact. You are recognized as especially gifted in seeing through the fog of myth underlying Christianity. It is disappointing to note your inability, as demonstrated in the “Either Hogs or Hines” essay, to see through the mythical basis of Global Warming. There is voluminous scientific evidence refuting the claims that human activity, including carbon dioxide emissions, is causing climate variation. 
“Wisdom is the ability to distinguish truth from myth”. (Origin unknown) 

Answer:
Dear Norris, 

I find your letter so uninformed I hardly know where to begin. To suggest first that the number of people who are concerned about the damage being inflicted by human beings on our environment makes it the dominant religion in America borders on absurdity. Perhaps the number of environmentally-sensitive Americans is the result of the facts of environmental damage that confronts us every day. 

Then to move on to say that since “environmentalism” is a religion that is based, like all religion, on “myths masquerading as truth or facts” as if these two sentences actually follow in some logical pattern, makes no sense, whatsoever. 

Your claim that “voluminous scientific evidence” refutes the claims that human activity is the cause of climate change also needs to be exposed. That “scientific” evidence you cite is all but universally dismissed as fraudulent in scientific and academic circles the world over. There is a massive consensus on the part of the scientific community that there is an environmental crisis looming and that human beings are the major cause of it. The only people I have read that purport to offer “scientific” evidence to the contrary fall into two categories. They are either right wing politicians, who think environmental concerns are some sort of communist plot, or they are people in the employ of the oil and energy industries, whose vested interest is to keep oil profits high at the expense of our common environment. 

I was pleased that California voters just this past year defeated by a 61% majority a proposition financed by Tesora Oil and Valero Oil, both of Texas, which quoted the “evidence” to which you refer, and the Republican Governor of California called them on the dishonesty of their claims. 

Ignorance of fact can easily be overcome by learning the facts. When the ignorance manifests the reality that you have accepted as fact something that cannot be substantiated, the ignorance is far more profound. 

John Shelby Spong 






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