The Diocesan Dialogue
Current Issue
November 2007
Al Colton Remembered—Leading Lawyer-Priest Left
Lasting Mark in Diocese and State
By Frederick Quinn
 He sped through the landscape like a meteor, striding
toward courtroom or pulpit, with a strong, confident voice, easy gestures,
and a deeply expressive face. He could have been an actor, but instead
Albert J. Colton became a leading figure in Utah's Episcopal
Church and the state's legal life. The attorney-priest would
have been 82 this Nov. 7, had he lived, but he died at age 63, at the
peak of a star-studded career.
Born in Buffalo, New York, on June 3,
1925, of Jewish roots but in a Roman Catholic family (his father was
a physician), Colton was an honors graduate of Dartmouth College and
Yale University Law School, and a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University
where one summer the young barrister-to-be fell instantly in love with
Elizabeth Wright, the visiting daughter of a prominent Salt Lake City
physician. They married in 1948 and Colton spent a busy decade locally
with Fabian and Clendenin, a major law firm.
Active as a lay leader
at St. Mark's Cathedral, he was drawn to ministry at the height
of a successful legal career, and left Utah to enter the Church Divinity
School of the Pacific, and was ordained on the Feast of Pentecost,
1963. He became Vice Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, and canon
chancellor (legal advisor) to Bishop James A. Pike, a formidable legal
presence himself.
Despite gravitating to increasingly important positions
in the church, Colton felt he could never make enough money to adequately
support his wife and two children, and in 1968 returned to his old
law firm, St. Mark's Cathedral, and to the role of legal advisor
to the Bishop of Utah, Otis Charles.
A Renaissance Presence
"He was a Renaissance man,
interested in everything. He couldn't get enough of life. He
cared about so many wonderful issues," Rosemary Beless, then
a young attorney hired by Colton, reflected recently. "Albert
was a gifted attorney, very careful not to let his church obligations
infringe on his legal obligations." Both the American Civil Liberties
Union and the Salt Lake Acting Co. were among his major pro bono interests.
With the former he helped win the lawsuit of a stubborn Davis County
librarian who was fired for not removing a book called Americana from
library shelves at the order of the County Commissioners. Colton staged
a virtuoso performance before the Davis County Merit Council, called
the charges a "flagrant, arbitrary and capricious disregard for
the rights of a public employee," and concluded with quotes from
John Milton and Thomas Jefferson.
Colton's sermons and courtroom
arguments were thoroughly prepared. "He was a very careful writer," Beless,
now a leading Utah natural resources attorney, recalled, "At
the law firm he created the 'Blue News', a binder with
all the blue carbon paper letters and filings of every attorney. Nobody
read it but Albert, but he corrected everybody's grammar and
circled all the problem phrases."
Bradley S. Wirth, former rector of All Saints',
Salt Lake City, remembered Colton, "The most extraordinary thing
about Al was during the week he worked in a world where you weighed
the facts and merits of a legal case, and then on Sundays morning he
lived in a wonderful world of grace. He had such a profound understanding
of being saved by grace, because the legal world was a world of adjudication,
not grace." Colton's pulpit humor was also memorable. In
those days first class air travelers were limited to two drinks, Colton
reminded his Cathedral audience. The preacher soon consumed his ration
and, seeing the man next to him wasn't drinking, asked for his
quota. "No," came the firm reply, "For two reasons,
I don't drink and also I am also president of Brigham Young University."
Although
Colton died in 1988, Cathedral parishioners still remember his 7 a.m.
Wednesday morning Eucharists, held for a congregation of five to ten
persons for many years, and his formidable Sunday presence. "He cared
about everyone, including people others would consider inconsequential,"
Beless remembered, adding, "He was not a big money maker for the firm,
but he was fascinated by every aspect of the law."
The Quotable
Colton
Wirth published forty-five of Colton's sermons in 1994
in a landmark book called A Grace Observed. Some memorable Colton quotes
include:
"Running a church is like dancing with a gorilla. You
don't stop when you are tired, you stop when the gorilla is tired."
"The
function of the preaching ministry is to afflict the comfortable and
comfort the afflicted."
"I became a Christian because it
presented the most realistic world views I could find to the facts
of life as I observed them. It dared to face the hard questions."
"Since
Easter, no great tombs are necessary. Pace: Agamemnon and Pharaoh,
and Hadrian, and Lenin. A pine box contains within it the power and
promise of eternity."
By early summer 1988 Colton was at the pinnacle
of success. A major presence in Utah civic life and the Episcopal diocese,
he had just been named director and president of his law firm. A few
weeks later he learned he had inoperable lung cancer. Colton had not
smoked until coming to Utah, but in Salt Lake City it was a sign you
were not LDS, and for him cigarettes became an addiction. After learning
of his impending death, he wrote St. Mark's parishioners a letter
still quoted by those who knew him:
"I do have a 'sure and
certain hope' that I will be accepted by a loving hand...We
will have an individual identity. We will again live in relationships...I
have avoided talk of judgment, hell, etc. This is because I believe
from my life as a Christian, in the way it is expressed in the Anglican
Communion, that judgment is certain, but hell is selfimposed. I have
been given the means of grace and the hope of glory."
He died on November
7, 1988.
The Rev. Dr. Frederick Quinn is a regular contributor
to the Diocesan Dialogue.
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