We lost the Reverend Forrest Church last week. He was the son of the late Senator Frank Church, and the long serving senior Minister of All Souls Unitarian Church of Manhattan, NY.
To those of you who know me at all, the title comes no surprise. It ranks up there with: I supported John Edwards, Martin Luther King, Jr. is my greatest hero, I strongly love and respect my wife, and that I am the classic besotted father.
Many, if not most, Unitarian Universalists will have little difficulty understanding my regard for Forrest - but when we lose someone of this import, I think we each need to tell our stories. Telling our stories doesn't just honor the one we've just lost - it helps all of us to think deeply about who we each may (and eventually will) lose. And in so doing, it grants us the potential gift of connecting with these people and thus an opportunity to express our appreciation in the present tense.
When I read that last paragraph, I see Forrest's fingerprints all over it. The words and thoughts are mine, but he helped me find these things which were already in me. His views about what really counts encouraged my better instincts.
Here's a bit of what his fellow Minister at All Souls, Galen Guengerich, observed:
As much as anyone, and more than most of us, Forrest had the courage to dive into the mystery of life—to luxuriate in uncertainty and cherish doubt, to wrestle with paradox and embrace irony.
In the pulpit as in the rest of his life, Forrest held up his failures as readily as he celebrated his successes; he acknowledged his errors as readily as he trumpeted his awards. He dove full in—nothing hidden and nothing held back. This approach to life made Forrest an inspiring preacher and reassuring pastor—precisely because we saw him as he saw himself: as fully human.
He could laugh at his own foibles, and often did. Time and again, Forrest recited his favorite etymology: "human, humane, humanitarian, humor, humility, humus. Dust to dust, the mortar of mortality binds us fast to one another. Truly we are one."
This too we have left. Beyond Forrest‟s eloquence on the page and in the pulpit, it was his humanity that kept him connected to the people and world around him.
also...
One afternoon last spring, Forrest and I spent several hours talking our way around the world of everything that mattered to us. We happened upon the topic of how sermons end, and Forrest explained why he always ends by saying, "Amen. I love you. And may God bless us all."
"I think people understand what I‟m trying to communicate when I say „I love you‟ from the pulpit," Forrest said. He listed the three kinds of love that are described in the New Testament: romantic love, friendship, and divine love—agape, in Greek.
"People know I‟m not saying „I love you‟ in the romantic sense," Forrest explained, "or even in the sense that friends would say „I love you‟ to each other." He went on to say, in a typically self-deprecating observation, that he thought some people found him rather reserved in person.
"But when I say „I love you‟ from the pulpit," he said, "something connects—I get connected to the congregation and they get connected to each other. It‟s almost like, for a moment at least, we are all part of each other—of something larger than ourselves. It‟s the human form of love divine, as Blake put it."
"And besides," he added, "someone once told me that I‟m the only person in her life who ever says „I love you.‟ She comes to church to hear someone say that she matters." Forrest urged me to continue this tradition as part of my ministry at All Souls.
Naturally, Rev. Guengerich does exactly that when he ends his sermon about Forrest Church.
Forrest Church is the reason I am a Unitarian Universalist. I'll close with some of the things he said that really reached me.
"We are a deeds, not creeds religion. We're in some ways the most humble of faiths, because we don't have a metaphysic that gives the final answers to what I believe are unanswerable questions. We tend to focus on being saved in this world and for this world, not from this world, and that means that we have lots of people with different specific theologies gathering together."
and
"The key is to open your heart to love, and there are so many factors that contest this desire. I mean, our hearts are broken. When you open your heart, it's vulnerable, and you are vulnerable. It can be broken by the loss of death of course, broken by another, and our instinct is to say, "That hurt, that really hurt. I'm going to armor myself up. I don't want that to happen to me again."
And the problem is the better we get at protecting ourselves from being hurt, the more invulnerable we become to meaning, which is the meaning that comes when we connect heart to heart, or when we build the empathy and compassion with others, when we grow beyond our own tiny, little self-protected circle."
and most of all...
"I've come to believe that life's purpose is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for."
He did that in spades.
Amen. I love you.
Here's a link to tributes to Forrest Church - there's some pretty beautiful stuff here. http://rememberingforrest.typepad.co...