In Memoriam, Eric Gregg

Once upon a time, gentle reader, I was a regular church-goer. I was even an acolyte, which is what us (lapsed) Episcopalians called "altar boys." (All the fun of the liturgy without the downside of priestly anal rape, that's the Anglican way.) I suppose that I owe myself (not that I owe you anything, dear reader) a more formal accounting of this (long) chapter in my life, but tonight's not the night. Suffice it to say that I stood there, next to priests wearing frilly lace and embroidered silks, for most of life's major events. Weddings, funerals, easter, christmas, and everything in between. One of the things you realized, in close proximity, was the structure of religion: it isn't theology, it is praxis, the structure of daily (weekly) life. Get up, go to church, listen to the sermon, talk to rich white guys wearing summer suits; lather, rinse, repeat. Christianity, like Judaism, or any religion worth carring about, structures your year, mapping important nodal events (Christmas, Easter, etc.) within an extended narrative context. Every year, more of the same: repetition, structure, certainty. Every year the Jews walk themselves out of Egypt again, celebrate the resistance to dictators again, atone again. Every year Christians birth Christ, walk his career, kill and resurrect him (in the broadest narrative sense; every week Christians ritually kill and consume their God. I mention this only to give context. Regular churchgoing is not an experience of theophanic moments, epiphanies (for lack of a better term), but rather a gradual ritualization of narratological continuity, in which nodal events (such as the death of Christ) are continually rehearsed.

Enough of these generalities. Anglicanism is not authentically American (that honor belongs to the various etiolations of Puritanism and the great, rabid, growth of faith-based permutations of Evangelical religion) but rather imported, whole-cloth, from Britain. It is a religion, formally, of compromise, a via media between the authentic (if increasingly hysterical and abiblical) traditionalism of Roman Catholicism and the new textualism (based in new translations from source languages) of Calvinism. Anglican's, therefore, have the greater textual rigor of Calvinism (you'll find no transubstantiations or Marian apotheosisms in the catechism, for instance) with the liturgical focus (funny outfits on the priests, (occasionally) baroque ritual) of Catholicism. Like any good compromise, though, the Anglicans are accused of being lukewarm, society-based, and lacking true revolutionary fervor. Certainly that's an attraction: I would never want to be part of a church that didn't actively accept the unbelievers (and I'm aware this is a contradiction in terms.) But, as I said before, that's a story for another day.

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Good Shepherd, Rosemont was everything you'd want a high-church Episcopalian outfit to be: stone, historical, well-endowed, featuring relatively high profile but still quiet parishioners, staid, reflexively conservative (but in a banker's sort of nominally republican sort of way), and set on a well-landscaped but hardly outrageously fecund plot of land on the Main Line, prime real-estate on Lancaster Ave between a Ferarri dealership, a Restoration Hardware, a Borders and a couple well-heeled investment banks. Good Shepherd (henceforth GSR) was well-appointed, inside and out, cunningly crafted om a pleasingly grey stone, vaulted with respectably dark wood, pewed with authentically victorian pews, flagstoned with antique, ochre, paving tiles, and even featuring, in the chancel, the bronzed tomb of the foundational donors, continually underfood without the hope of (weekly) resurrection. In the summer, the nave was hot, though fans were in the rafters and the stained glass were opened, allowing the inspired to listen to Philadelphia insect life rustle and bray insectoid mating calls instead of the sermon, usually a dusty and inconsequential affair. Site this scence, then, in the summer, people sitting heavily in pews, sweating a little, women in hats, guys pretending they don't have the short sleeves on under the suitcoat, some of the daring yuppies with khakis, boat shoes, and a muffled polo. The cicadas drone outside, the cars can occasionally be heard in a bit of a woosh, and there's some fan noise, and creaking.

It should come as no surprise that we had a regular pew. I'm enough of a traditionalist (some would say "charmingly inflexible") to prefer assigned seating, and fortunately, the rest of humanity is the same way. We were left, front, about 4 rows back, on the center aisle side of the column. Behind us, to the left, on the other side of the column (side aisle side, row 5), was the Gregg family. And we reach, finally, the point of all this remembering. The Greggs were important. Eric Gregg, after all, was a major league umpire, and he had a wife, and kids, two sons, and a daughter. Eric was rarely there, because of his MLB commitments, but in this day, he's there, rotundedly filling out a suit procured at Big & Tall, sweating a lot, mopping his brow, as he sits next to his wife, and in the same row as the kids, everyone looking a little fatigued in the summer heat. I'll be honest: I don't really remember Eric Gregg as more than just an occasional presence, out of the corner of my eye, summer mornings, maybe the Phillies had the day off, weren't playing till later, bearded, sitting there, just a good guy. And that's all you can say, really, is Eric Gregg was a fundamentally good guy. Sure, he was fat (when he called the World's Series with the Marlins and decided that any pitch Livan Hernandez got within a bus fare of the plate was a strike the announcers kept quipping that "Gregg likes a full plate!") but that hardly mattered, not as much as I knew him, part of the landscape, behind and to the left.

So Eric Gregg is dead. Massive stroke; the battle against the bulge he waged his entire life is over. He was 55. And I knew him, parenthetially, but I knew his kids, and his wife, resolutely polite, often kind. He was a good man, so far as I knew. Made a terrible decision to get fired by MLB, which certainly cost him, personally and professionally, and maybe, just maybe, if he had kept his health in higher mind...but what-ifs are pointless. I'm going to remember Eric Gregg as I knew him, not on TV during the series, jovial, larger than life, defiantly calling it how he saw it, but mopping his brow on a sweaty summer afternoon, performing his religious duty, uncomfortable in a warm woolen suit, but there anyway, gamely participating with his family.

In Memoriam, Eric Gregg, Requiescat in Pacem