The Rev. Canon Warner Traynham’s first conscious memory is hearing legendary radio announcer Gabriel Heatter describing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s funeral train making its way from Warm Springs, Georgia, where FDR died in April 1945, to Washington and then on to Hyde Park, New York.
A student of the presidency who consumes history and biography like mystery novels, Canon Warner can see good in almost every U.S. president. Meeting today for conversation at St. Paul’s Commons, Echo Park and over lunch in Chinatown, we swiftly agreed on the “almost.”
But our hope is in the name of the Lord, maker of heaven and earth. I didn’t know anything about Heatter until Canon Warner mentioned him. During the long years of the Depression and World War II, he would end his broadcasts by saying “There’s good news tonight” before offering a human interest story.
There’s good news today. It’s that wise priests and expert observers such as Warner are among us, cheerful notwithstanding the disturbances of life and able to imagine recovery and redemption. Which is not to say the conversation wasn’t intense, both about politics and our mutual grappling with family of origin drama and hearing and eyesight troubles.
Now 89, Warner was rector for 18 years of what we now call St. John’s Cathedral in Los Angeles. He lifts weights at the gym twice a week and spends plenty of time with family and friends. His longtime spouse, Phyllis, died five years ago. A gifted painter who has generously lent works for exhibits at St. Paul’s Commons, including his famed “Black Jesus,” he recently went shopping for canvases, which he described as an indispensable first step toward getting back to his easel. He assists at Holy Faith Episcopal Church in Inglewood, where he has been celebrating Holy Eucharist while the rector is away.
Warner was graduated from Dartmouth and Virginia Theological Seminary. Raised in Baltimore and formed at historic St. James Episcopal Church, to which he returned as a curate, Warner had both former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and longtime Los Angeles colleague the Rev. Canon Hartshorn Murphy as acolytes.
His mentor as the St. James rector, later bishop of the Virgin Islands, the Rt. Rev. Cedric Mills, put a ten-minute limit on sermons at the Sunday morning family service. Cedric look pointedly at his watch each time Warner took 15 minutes, which turned out to be each time. When I asked how, as a young curate, he had found the courage to break the rule, he smiled and said that he’d needed 15 minutes to say what he wanted to say — and 89 years and counting, one adds, to do what he wants to do.