Murray Kempton, R.I.P.: the journalist of original sin.

Several lives ago, when I was a graduate student working at Commonweal and living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I received Murray Kempton's copy of Commonweal, stuck to my own, in the mail.

I was, of course, thrilled. I was a relatively recent admirer of Kempton, won over by views that defied all categories of sixties' politics and a prose style that defied all expectations of any newspaper columnist, let alone one for a tabloid.

Like many others I was entranced by the serpentine twists and turns of his sentences, the sly comparisons in their coils, the sting in the tail, the play of allusion like the glints of light that those revolving spheres send dancing around a ballroom.

If his overall sympathies were liberal, it was a liberalism born out of resistance to prevailing powers, which often meant the prevailing liberalism as well. If his prose savored the deliberately archaic, that too was a happy contrast to the easy populism of his tabloid employer, the New York Post, or the breathless flow of the New Journalists.

I really don't remember what happened after I hand-delivered his copy of Commonweal to his apartment building a few blocks away. I think I had attached a note and received a gracious thanks in return. I was left with the glow of an archetypical New York Moment.

In the years that followed, sightings of Kempton at New York political gatherings or riding his bicycle around the neighborhood were frequent. What sticks in my mind, however, was a midtown press conference called by the Reverend Robert H. Schuller, pastor of the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California, inheritor of the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale's gospel of positive thinking, and the latest accessory of the Clinton White House.

Dr. Schuller was accompanied by George H. Gallup, Jr. The two were announcing the findings of a recent poll showing, as I recall, that religious faith was good for self-esteem and self-esteem was good for religious faith. The preacher and the pollster were elated.

About this time Kempton shuffled into the session. He seemed to be having a hard time picking up the thread. He admitted to not knowing much about polls and he made no pretense to piety, but wasn't Christianity supposed to impress us with our status as sinners, from which we had been mercifully redeemed? What was all this about self-esteem?

Schuller and Gallup did their best to relieve this ignorance, plying the newsman with more findings from the poll and more information about the value of self-esteem. The latecomer replied with a few phrases from the New Testament and, again, with some unpleasant references to sin. He may even have thrown in some wisdom gleaned from a Jamaican cab driver. He persisted in using words like pride, meek, guilt - and in suspecting out loud that what America needed was not more self-esteem but less.

For this obduracy Schuller and Gallup were totally unprepared; they seemed as uncomprehending of the puzzled gentleman's difficulties as he was uncomprehending of their enthusiasm. The exchange quickly took on a comic aspect. This was not disagreement. It was a gulf. It was, in fact, two parts of the American soul speaking completely past one another. Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. Henry Adams and Horatio Alger.

It could be said that Kempton was the journalist of Original Sin, not the half-doctrine that conservatives employ to dismiss the complaints of the dispossessed and their striving for a break, but the two-edged teaching that cuts even more against the established than the utopian. Richard Severo's superb obituary in the New York Times quoted Walter Goodman: "Whatever the politics of the case, Mr. Kempton can be counted on to choose the victims over their tormentors. His disgust with the uses of power," Goodman continued, "grows from a conviction that every society is so inherently unjust that all the winners may be suspect."

But Kempton was also a journalist of Wonder, and much of that wonder arose from the improbable signs of redemption that he kept spying in such a sinful world. The Introduction to his last collection of articles, Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events (Times Books, 1994), basks in his more than three-score-and-ten of "life's epiphanies." He typically sums up his good fortune by recalling a Basin Street conversation with Louis Armstrong about Armstrong's recording of "When You're Smilin'." Said Armstrong: "There's kicks everywhere."

It was a balance that Kempton not only maintained to the last but beyond. "I should like my burial service," he had petitioned the Episcopal Church of Saint Ignatius of Antioch on Manhattan's Upper West Side, "to follow as closely as its rector deems fit the Order of the Burial of the Dead prescribed by the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, which can be found in my bookcase."

So on May 6 there were Anglican chant and Mozart and William Byrd, but no eulogies. There was Job: "Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he flieth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay." And there was "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust" and the "sure and certain hope of resurrection," through Jesus Christ "who shall change our vile body that it may be like to his glorious body." The name of "our dear brother Murray, here departed" was mentioned but twice, only, as he had requested, where the prayers required.

Resurrection, redemption, and glory; nothing about self-esteem.

Peter Steinfels writes the "Beliefs" column in the New York Times and is a visiting professor of history at Georgetown University.