General Colin Powell died on Monday.
Like other leaders such as David Dinkins, Fiorello LaGuardia, and Francis Perkins, he represented the witness of active lay members of the Episcopal Church in the public sphere.
The media will highlight his accomplishments, ambitions, and mixed legacy. I do not have the capacity to judge them, and will leave that to the pundit circuit. He did impact my life incidentally. Powell visited Seoul the summer anticipating my fellowship to study Korean society. The general who interviewed me for that same fellowship shared that General Powell attended an English service and had remarked to him the cathedral was looking for an English-Speaking priest.
I served for two wonderful and formative years.
I don’t think it’s easy to evaluate how the church impacts any public servant. But what sort of public servants decide that the Episcopal church is for them? Powell, a child of the 1928 prayerbook, was a regular and committed Episcopalian. It was not just for show. He remained in the church even when other politicians left for more politically influential traditions. Certainly it was in part his cultural inheritance, but to stay was still a choice.
In part, the public commitment of the Episcopal tradition has been practical, if also committed to the common good. It tends to eschew mandates upon public servants, as it refrains from confusing the mechanisms of the state and church. This has a mixed history, as while it allows the faithful to participate in governing institutions, it can also lack the moral conviction that requires radical change.
That said, an inclination toward the pragmatic and careful, affirming loyalty and discipline above commerce, ideology, and libertinism were congruent with his personality. He was not easily outraged, which seems quaint in an environment that is perpetually offended and emotionally fragile. In my view, Colin Powell reflected the church’s practice of stability, presence and tenacity. He was one of the few responsible to truly reconsider his role in the Iraq catastrophe, and had the capacity to break with his political team when its politics became conspiratorial and authoritarian.
Powell flourished from strong public institutions aside from the military. He graduated from City College at a time when the public financed free education (free), before loans and US News and World Report rankings. City had been nicknamed the Harvard for the Poor, employed the finest professors in the country, educating the working class and immigrant population of NY. In this sense it provided a ladder of opportunity for those who would seek it, without burdening them with loans for three decades. This investment in a person exemplified the sense of shared possibility in America after WWII.
We are certainly in a different age, but perhaps we can still affirm this: that building a life takes a discipline, and that if done well it can help us lead when necessary, follow when called, confess our faults, and praise the good.
Blessings upon Colin, a faithful servant and child of God.
Rest in Peace and Rise in Glory.