Beyond Blame: An Essay/Prayer for Alec Baldwin

On August 8, 2021, Actor Alec Baldwin came to the lawn of our church in Orient, New York. He held an inaugural conversation in our series called Spirituality in light of…..His topic was Spirituality in the light of Covid.

Alec hit a kind of lecture circuit home run that evening. His theme was what the virus had done to him and his family. People who came for the celebrity appeal left with a new friend. Baldwin could easily have behaved badly in this Normal Rockwell scene. He did just the opposite. He knew nothing of sarcasm or condescension. Instead, he seemed like a regular guy who had come over to the North Fork from the South Fork to do a friend (me) a favor and talk about how he sees God and faith in the Covid mess.

I was the new pastor at the Orient, Long Island church and had known Alec in Greenwich Village, where I was also a pastor. We met talking about the Judson Memorial Church front sign, which he credits with having convinced him to come to NYU and the city long ago. The sign then read something now famous, “Beware the Military industrial Complex” by Dwight D Eisenhower. Since the sixties, the sign has quoted and misquoted a lot of famous people. It should have put up something on October 21, 2021, when the set of Rust endured an accidental real shooting, which was supposed to be pretend. That sign could easily have read that week, “I am so sorry, Alec Baldwin.”

Alec, that day, again moved out of the role of complex celebrity into the role of human. Yes, the police think he has an anger management…