Forrest Church: Life from the Prospective of Death |
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By Dr. Bruce T. Marshall
January 22, 2012 “Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.” This is Forrest Church’s definition of religion and also the statement of his central theme in ministry. Such is the human condition, he said. We know that we are alive; we also know that life in this world does not go on forever. The purpose of religious community—the purpose of belief and faith—is to help us address the anxiety this awareness brings as well as help us discern life’s beauty. Forrest died just over a year ago after a three-year battle with cancer. The period between his diagnosis and death was remarkably productive—he continued to write, to speak, to be part of the life of his congregation. Forrest called the illness his “final exam” as a minister. If, as he conceived it, the essential challenge of human life is to live with affirmation and hope even as we are faced with death, he was determined to do it right. Forrest Church was this generation’s most prominent Unitarian Universalist minister. He served over 30 years as minister of New York City’s All Souls Church, which during his tenure became the largest congregation in our association. He somehow also found the time to write or edit 25 books and become a public figure addressing an audience far larger than his own congregation and far larger than the community of Unitarian Universalists. He took on the roles of pastor, theologian, and public intellectual as he offered a passionate liberalism, often drawing his own views in contrast to the conservatism that was ascendant during his professional years. He was an advocate of our faith and a critic of orthodoxy and fundamentalism, but he could also be critical of Unitarian Universalists, chiding us for our own short-sightedness, our own closed-mindedness, our own failures of nerve and spirit. A few months ago, a biography came out called Being Alive and Having to Die: The Spiritual Odyssey of Forrest Church, published by St. Martin’s Press in New York. The author is Dan Cryer who is a member at All Souls, also for many years the book reviewer for Newsday, which is the Long Island daily newspaper. Full disclosure: Dan is a friend, was a member of the congregation I served on Long Island before he moved to Manhattan, and he gave me a nice back page blurb for my first book, A Holy Curiosity. Two weekends ago, Dan stayed with Amy and me when in the DC area, publicizing the book. That said, I think Dan has done really good job. The book is gracefully written and thoroughly researched, drawing on over 200 interviews, including 17 interviews with Forrest himself. Dan also read widely in preparation for this book, including all of Forrest’s 25 books. The result places Forrest’s theology into the context of his life. Theology is spun out of everyday experience, though it often doesn’t read that way. In this book, we see Forrest’s life unfold as he seeks his own meaning and direction. To me, this is a better introduction to Forrest’s work than are Forrest’s own books because Dan steps back and takes a long view. Forrest was, by his own admission, a “serial enthusiast.” He would become interested in something and go completely into it. Then he would get interested in something else, and throw himself into that. And then a new topic would claim his attention—you get the idea. Dan’s book takes the various enthusiasms and periods of Forrest’s life and gathers them into a coherent account, which does not shy away from Forrest’s blemishes and inconsistencies. Dan proposed writing this biography after Forrest had been diagnosed as terminally ill. He told Forrest that his approach would be sympathetic but not sycophantic. (I admit, I had to look up that word sycophantic. Synonyms include ingratiating, flattering, apple polishing, kowtowing, backslapping, and obsequious.) So, sympathetic but not uncritical. Forrest’s response was that it’s exactly the approach he wanted. Dan said that in their 17 conversations, Forrest was remarkably open. I asked Dan if he thought that openness was because Forrest knew he was dying. But Dan said no. That’s just the way Forrest was. ● ● ● Frank Forrester Church IV was the oldest child of Bethine Clark Church and Frank Forrester Church III. Bethine hailed from a family with deep roots in Idaho politics; her father Chase had served as governor of that state. Frank Church embarked upon a political career after practicing law and was elected senator from Idaho at age 32, serving four terms. He was the only Democrat ever reelected to the Senate from Idaho and the last Democrat to represent Idaho in the Senate. Senator Church was an early opponent of the War in Vietnam, served as chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, chaired the Church committees that investigated the FBI and the CIA, and ran for president during the 1975 primaries, ultimately losing to Jimmy Carter. When Frank Church was in his early 20s, newly married, a student at Stanford Law School, he was diagnosed with cancer, told he had only months to live. Experimental treatments unexpectedly saved his life, and he was given what he called a second chance. This brush with mortality helped shape Frank Church. As he put it, “life itself is such a chancy proposition that the only way to live is by taking great chances.” ` Forrest had been born in 1948 when his father was a student at Stanford and just before his diagnosis with cancer. And so the awareness that life is tenuous was part of Forrest’s growing up. He remembered childhood fears and dreams that often involved losing his parents. Yet Forrest was a lively, gregarious, happy, optimistic child. He often remarked that he was born, “sunny side up,” which accurately describes his personality. By nature, his inclination was to look on the bright side. Forrest’s early school years were spent bouncing back and forth between Boise, Idaho, and the DC area, ultimately Bethesda where the Church’s bought a home. In those years, the Senate term started in January and continued through the summer, so Forrest spent part of the school year in Idaho, part in Bethesda. His grades in Idaho schools were pretty good, not so much so in Bethesda. But he also didn’t apply himself unless something happened to catch his interest, at which point he would become fully focused. His parents adored him but were also distracted. There were preparations to run for political office and then the responsibilities of helping govern the nation. Forrest was pretty much left to his own devices. Later, he reflected, “Since rules weren’t imposed at home, I’ve always been resistant to rules.” Another challenge to Forrest was that of growing up the son of a famous father, surrounded by well-known and powerful people: senators and congressmen, policy-makers, even the occasional actor. Marlon Brando used to stop by their Bethesda home and play pool in the basement; apparently he was a better actor than pool player. Forrest was a smart and engaging child with many advantages given to him and so felt the expectations that he too would do something spectacular with his life. Except that he resisted that expectation. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, he drifted and rebelled. By high school, he cut quite the figure with long hair and a beard, smoking a pipe or, alternately, bringing his knitting to meetings. Politics was the family business and so it did rub off. Forrest became skilled at debate, at discussions of policy, at witty give and take around the dinner table. Despite his spotty academic performance, he seemed to be headed for a career in politics. He participated in student government, served as a page in the Senate during the summer, became adept in the skills of working a crowd. But there was another influence too. In those days, every United States Senator was presented a copy of what is known as the Jefferson Bible. Thomas Jefferson created his own version of the Bible by going through the Gospel stories in the New Testament, literally scissoring out parts that seemed to him unreasonable. He removed the miracles, he removed the virgin birth, he removed the resurrection, leaving the story of a human Jesus who lived and taught and died a man. In Jefferson’s bible, Jesus was a great moral leader, not the savior. Forrest was fascinated, took the family Bible, highlighted in yellow passages from the Jefferson Bible, comparing what was left out with what remained. He reflected that perhaps a seed was planted here because years later, after college, Forrest enrolled in Harvard Divinity School to pursue a Ph. D. in early church history. He had set himself upon the path of the scholar, intending to spend his life in research and teaching. By this time he was married to Amy Furth Church. Amy also entered Harvard Divinity School seeking a Master’s Degree in theological studies. ● ● ● Up to this point, Forrest Church knew next to nothing about Unitarian Universalism. He also had no particular interest in church, despite his last name. He had grown up in a family that was secular humanist in outlook. His parents believed deeply in values such as justice, fairness and equality in human relations, but there was little formal church involvement. So Forrest came to his religious studies as a novice, wanting to soak up as much as he could. Now the wheels of fate begin to turn. Harvard Divinity School is non-denominational but has a historic relationship with Unitarianism. Forrest’s faculty advisor, George Hunston Williams, was from an old Unitarian family. And when Forrest was placed as an intern—one of the Div School’s requirements—he found himself in Boston’s First and Second Church, the oldest Unitarian congregation in the city whose minister, Rhys Williams, just happened to be the cousin of Forrest’s faculty advisor. (It is a small UU world.) Forrest’s primary duties at First and Second Church involved researching a history of that institution that dates back to the year 1630. But Rhys Williams (who Forrest referred to, affectionately, as a “sly old fox”) spotted something in Forrest. The combination of academic skills with political instincts suggested that he might make an outstanding Unitarian Universalist minister. But Rev. Williams was quiet about his plans for Forrest, not wanting to scare off the young man. Then an opportunity appeared. The longtime minister of All Souls Church, located on Manhattan’s upper east side, announced his retirement. A search committee was formed, and candidates lined up for a shot at that post. All Souls at the time was in a slow and gentile decline, the congregation aging and shrinking. Nevertheless, it represented a wonderful opportunity—the capstone of a ministerial career. The best and the brightest and most successful UU ministers applied to be considered—almost thirty candidates in all. Rhys Williams suggested that Forrest consider that position which on the face of it made no sense at all. He was 28 years old, preparing for a career in academia, had never even taken a course in Unitarian Universalism, was not in the ministry program at Harvard, did not have the credentials required of a Unitarian Universalist minister. So when the chair of the search committee called Forrest and asked if he would be interested, Forrest said no. His mentor responded, well, you might want to keep your options open. So when a second call came, Forrest agreed to meet with the committee. As the interview began, the first question was, “Young man, I understand you’re not interested in this position. So why are you wasting our time?” Forrest said that didn’t remember his reply, but it engaged his competitive instincts. And when the time came to choose a candidate among those who had applied, I imagine that the committee took a collective deep breath as they chose Forrest Church. As Forrest said later, “I was by far the least qualified of the candidates.” And there certainly was resentment among those who were passed over, even among those who were not in the running. Preparation for the Unitarian Universalist ministry is a long arduous process. Forrest skipped past it to land one of the most coveted pulpits in the UUA. And yet, there was something here—a spark—that seemed worth the risk. The one person whose approval made the most difference to Forrest was his father. Senator Frank Church liked this new direction, despite his lack of participation in organized religion. Forrest reported that he had sent articles he had written for academic journals to his father who would reply, “I’m sure it’s very impressive, but I didn’t understand a word.” The life of public service in the church, however, made sense to his father. It seemed a worthy living. ● ● ● Forrest plunged with characteristic enthusiasm into the ministry at All Souls. He had not written much in the way of sermons so he spent the summer before starting this position reading the sermons of the two famous ministers. One was Harry Emerson Fosdick, a liberal Baptist who served New York’s Riverside Church. The other: A. Powell Davies, a debt Forrest acknowledged later when he edited a book of excerpts from Davies’s sermons: a little book called Without Apology: Collected Meditations on Liberal Religion. You might recognize that volume because we give it to new members here at Davies when we formally welcome them into the congregation. During his first years in ministry, Forrest made many of the mistakes of inexperience. Coming from an academic background, he said, his sermons were too heady, didn’t engage the heart. He recalled one Sunday when he noticed a woman in tears who during his sermon, simply got up and left—he never saw her again. He imagined that this woman was not in church for whatever academic treatise he was offering that morning. She needed something that spoke directly to her life, to the fear and the uncertainty and whatever was causing her tears that morning. Forrest began to change his style, speaking from his heart, from the struggles of his life and those that he perceived in his congregation. Coming in as Forrest did from outside the UUA turned out to be an advantage because it enabled him to take a fresh look at who we are. Early on, Forrest perceived that the traditional UU trademarks—openness, tolerance, reason, freedom from dogma—these weren’t enough. They weren’t enough to feed his congregation; they weren’t enough to feed him. So Forrest encouraged his congregation to look again at the old questions that religions address. As Dan expressed these, “What is the good life? What is the good person? What is my responsibility to my brothers and sisters? What is my relation to death? If the answers from other religions did not satisfy, that hardly negated the importance of the questions.” Forrest ventured where few UUs dare tread, taking a fresh look at concepts like “sin” and “salvation.” Even Jesus, not the death and resurrection, but the power of Jesus’ life. As Forrest put it, “the power of his love, the penetrating simplicity of his teachings, the force of his example of service on behalf of the disenfranchised and downtrodden.” He didn’t shy away from the word, God, either. He issued this challenge to those who took issue with God language. “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in,” he said, “and in all probably I don’t believe in that God either.” “God” Forrest said, “is not God’s name. God is our name for...the genius of the life force, that which is greater than all and yet present in each.” While such language might have—and did—turn off some Unitarian Universalists, it built bridges back into the conversations in which most religious communities were engaged. It gave Forrest a wider audience that he could have had staying within the boundaries of Unitarian Universalist orthodoxy. Forrest hoped, “to move liberal religion from the margins to take its place at the larger American religious table.” It is an interesting question: how much Forrest created All Souls Church in the years he served that congregation—and how much All Souls created him. All Souls traces its beginnings to the year 1819 when William Ellery Channing traveled from Boston to Baltimore to preach a sermon called “Unitarian Christianity” which offered a distinct liberal religious vision and led to the creation of Unitarianism as an organizational entity. On the way from Boston to Baltimore, Channing spent the night at his sister’s home in New York where he engaged with a group of her friends who were so excited by what they heard that they organized a church containing these ideas. The result was a dynamically diverse congregation described in 1823 by one member. “They are stranger here from inland and outland, English radicals and daughters of Erin, Germans and Hollanders, philosophic gentiles and unbelieving Jews...In this our association, there is at least one of every sort.” But All Souls was not a radical congregation. It occupied a place that we might call the “center right” of our association, offering a liberal voice within the larger religious community but never drifting so far that it left the conversation. Forrest occupied that same center right position for which his church had always stood. He was an enthusiast for liberal religion in general and Unitarian Universalism in particular but not a rabble rouser. He always sought ways for those of our theological outlook to participate, to make a contribution. ● ● ● Up to this point, Forrest’s life had been remarkably easy, even charmed. He fell into his position as minister of our of our foremost churches, his successes came early and without extraordinary effort, he was gifted with both intelligence and an easy way of being with people. He possessed a burning ambition that he was able to turn into accomplishments: a growing church, a series of books, a voice that was heard nationally. At one point he observed that he hadn’t experienced a really big failure. That was to change when he fell in love with a member of his congregation. At the time, Forrest was married as was the woman with whom he fell in love. When Forrest and Carolyn revealed their intention to make a life together, all hell broke lose—hell like only those who don’t believe in hell can produce. There is, I think, a difference between how those of us who are ministers view ourselves and how we are perceived by congregation members and the world at large. The world at large sees the clergy’s roll as setting a high moral standard. The clergy person is viewed as the ideal parent who gives but does not need to receive, whose calling in life is to do the right thing. And so when one of us doesn’t live up to that standard, there is both anguish from those who believed and delight from the cynics. From the point of view of clergy, just about none of us wants the roll of moral exemplar or super parent. What draws us into ministry is something different, which is expressed in a quotation with which Dan begins his book. This is by the author Karen Armstrong, “The religious quest is not about discovering the truth or the meaning of life, but about living as intensely as possible here and now. The idea is not to latch onto some superhuman personality or to get to heaven but to discover how to be fully human.” Sometimes the process of becoming fully human goes hand in hand with following the rules in the ways we’re expected to. And sometimes it doesn’t. So when Forrest fell in love, he described a his own sense of coming into full personhood. But in the congregation who had invested itself in an ideal of who their minister was, it broke a lot of hearts. It also created a huge controversy which bled out of the church and into the UUA. Long story short: Forrest survived at All Souls and stayed on to pick up the pieces. He married the woman with whom he had fallen in love. By all accounts, Forrest and Carolyn’s was a strong and enduring bond that gave him what he needed both during times of success and in the final years when he was dying. All Souls Church, after encountering this speed bump returned to prosperity, and Forrest produced some of his best work, particularly in his books. But for some, his standing was forever tarnished. They couldn’t look up to him as they once sought to do. ● ● ● Death was always part of Forrest’s life. There was his father’s early brush with cancer that seemed to drive him to accomplish what he could in the time he had. Cancer finally caught up with Frank Church at age 59, dying at the same age as his father—Forrest’s grandfather—age 59. So when at age 58, Forrest was diagnosed with incurable cancer, he was not surprised. He said that he skipped all those stages—denial, anger, bargaining—and went straight to acceptance. Throughout his life, Forrest had lived with an intensity that was perhaps driven by a sense that his time too would be limited. “The purpose of life,” he said, “is to live in such a way that our lives will prove dying for.” Does life continue after death in some form? “I don’t know,” Forrest said. “About life after death, no one knows. But about this we surely know: there is love after death. Not only do our finest actions invest life with meaning and purpose, but they also live on after us.” Hence his final answer to death: love. The love that lives on, even after we have died. I got to know Forrest when I served a congregation on Long Island, during the period when he was in his ascendancy. I have always respected him, learned from him—and I liked him. He could have been intimidating but wasn’t. Forrest had the ability to make you comfortable without feeling like he was lowering himself to do so. And he was, I think, genuinely interested in the people he encountered. I also found much in his writings that spoke to me: the hallmark of an effective minister. Forrest did us the favor of summarizing his work in a few succinct sentences, thereby exhibiting a politician’s skill in the art of the sound bite. Fact is, I remember these. “Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.” “The goal of life is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.” “God is not God’s name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each.” And his essential guideline for living, “Want what you have. Do what you can. Be who you are.” Even as Forrest was dying, these still held true: Want what you have. Do what you can. Be who you are. ● ● ● |
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