At his and Geri’s Manhattan Beach home this afternoon, it was my blessing to make David Stuart Eisen an honorary canon of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. His schedule did not permit him to accept in person at convention in Riverside on Nov. 7. His excuse, that he and Geri had plans to host ten friends at the USC-Northwestern football game, tells you a lot about David as alumnus, fan, and friend.
Since 2017, he and his gracious Wilson Elser colleague William Gay have provided the diocese with pro bono counsel on a wide range of property, personnel, process, and misconduct matters. The full extent of their gifts to our common life is probably incalculable. David is a highly regarded litigator as well as a prophet of avoiding litigation when possible. Mediation is his passion. When someone gets an angry letter or email, his advice is sometimes to write back calmly but just as often to place a phone call, try to see what’s really going on, acknowledge a strong feeling that may need to be expressed, and effort a middle way.
If you think that makes Canon David sound Anglican, he’s Jewish, so you’re close. He and his sister grew up in Whittier, children of the superintendent of schools. We became friends in the mid-seventies as undergraduates at UC San Diego. I was editor-in-chief of the school paper. He was sports and later executive editor. His column was called “Dave On Sports.” He and I are among a group of five campus journalism veterans, along with Cynthia, Mark, and Shauna, who have been Zooming biweekly since Covid.
David got his law degree and left his heart at USC. He’s the kind of Dodger fan who bid on and won some of Vin Scully’s office furniture. When I threw out the first pitch at diocesan Dodger night in September 2022, David caught it on the first bounce. Framed on his study wall at home is a photo of him as “Seinfeld” extra. The only time I experienced him as being envious of another human being was when I said that I met the great Linda Ronstadt at a Zoom event.
He and his first spouse have two sons, Mark and Scott, both attorneys, to whom, with their growing families, he is deeply devoted. We had our longest theological conversation at an El Torito off the 60. It took about a minute and a half. Learning I was in discernment for Holy Orders, he asked if I could reconcile Christianity with his conception of Judaism. I asked if his cosmology had room for a God who created all things, bathed all things and events with a ineffable sense of being connected to the divine if you looked hard enough, and gave us inspiration and authority to do the right thing.
Sure, he said. He shows how it works all the time. When a friend was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, David devoted himself heroically to their care. Many years ago, when one of our children was falsely accused of plagiarism, he drove to Yorba Linda and sat at their side as they set the record straight. They were absolved, with an apology. His kindness to me has been a small miracle.
He and Geri, shown here, who comes from a large Roman Catholic family in Los Angeles, asked me to preside at their 2014 wedding without mentioning Jesus or leaving him out, which was easy peasy in view of the mighty work God had already done by making one body from two faiths. David goes to mass with Geri at Easter and Christmas. She and her sister were among Kathy’s and my fellow Holy Land pilgrims in 2023.
I invite your prayers for Canon David, who is contending with serious health challenges with his usual blend of cheerful common sense and unsentimentality. When he’s feeling better, he’ll resume his weekly basketball games, making full use of the new knees he got not long ago. He and I will also get back to our periodic lunches at the Hat in Pasadena. Our political conversations, including today, reveal our stubborn pragmatism, with too few disagreements to mention.
He will keep finding ways to remind me that I was kind of a jerk at the college paper and that he prefers Kathy, who attended today’s informal ceremony and loves him like a brother, and the Rev. Canon Melissa McCarthy, with whom David worked closely these eight or nine eventful years for the glory of God and the sake of God’s people.