William Sloane Coffin sermon quotes

Last week my senior minister shared with me a sermon dated January 23, 1983 (Palm Sunday) written by William Sloane Coffin. The title of the sermon is "Alex's Death" and it comes on the heals of Rev. Coffin's son, Alex, tragic death in an automobile accident. While I believe the sermon is great on the whole and one should probably read the sermon in its entirety in order to 'get all the goodness out of it', I wanted to share some of the lines on this post which I though were examples of great use of language.

"My 24 year old Alexander, who enjoyed beating his old man at every game and in every race, beat his father to the grave."

"Among the healing flood of letters..." (It is provocative to me that he would use the image of a flood because from what I can tell in the sermon, Alex died by drowning. That Coffin would take this image and twist it a bit to accent Grace is quite profound.)

"love not only begets love, it transmits strength."

"The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is, "It is the will of God." Never do we know enough to say that."

"While words of the Bible are true, grief renders them unreal. The reality of grief is that absence of God - "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The reality of grief is the solitude of pain, the feeling that your heart's in pieces, your mind's blank and that "there's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away" (Lord Byron)"

"I felt some of my fellow reverends were using comforting words of Scripture for self protection, to pretty up a situation whose bleakness they simply couldn't face. But like God Herself, Scripture is not around for anyone's protection, just for everyone's unending support."

"When parents die, as did my mother last month, they take with them a large portion of the past. But when children die, they take away the future as well. That is what makes the valley of the shadow of death seem so incredibly dark and unending. In a prideful way it would be easier to walk the valley alone, nobly, head high, instead of - as we must - marching as the latest recruit in the world's army of the bereaved."

"interestingly enough, when I mourn Alex least I see him best."

"But it's a face: few of us are naturally profound; we have to be forced down."

"So I shall - so let us all - seek consolation in that love which never dies, and find peace in the dazzling grace that always is."

It is my hope that I too might learn how to be profound, but it is my prayer that I do not have to do through what William Sloane Coffin had to in order to arrive there.

Shared Moments of Trust

A few years ago, my wife gave me a collection of essays from the "This I Believe" project from NPR. If you are not aware of this project, I highly recommend you check it out. In a nutshell, the project invites people of all sorts to write their credo in about 300 words. What a discipline to begin to practice, and not just about what we believe about God or Jesus or the Church.

Here is one of my favorites from Warren Christopher who believes in "A Shared Moment of Trust". You can read or listen to Mr. Christopher's thoughts.

I invite you to poke around and see if you find a submission that speaks to you and share that in a comment to this post.

Grace and Peace.

What is prayer?

I was told to listen to an archived podcast of "Speaking of Faith" with Krista Tippett and could not get it out of my head. In fact on the way to doing the funeral of John Regan Vance I was without anything to say. I had never had the honor of doing a funeral from start to finish by myself and I was terrified. While listening to this podcast on prayer (which I highly recommend) my soul became calm and I began to consider what it prayer. My reflection on this podcast leaves me with two things about prayer that I will continue to hold with me:

1) Sanskrit is like Latin in that how you say the words is just as important as the words themselves. This idea made me consider that sometimes in my searching for just the right words in all situations and prayers, I forget that words are limited and the feeling and emotion is just as important as the words themselves. How I say what I pray makes a difference in me. The "om" of Hindu prayers is meant to focus the person on the vibrations of each of the three sounds. Sitting in the car prior to the funeral, I began to try our the "om" the podcast was talking about. After three of four of these "om" prayers, the vibrations and crescendo of the final "mmmm" made me feel like I had just been to a spa and got a back rub. What a prayer.

2) French poet Simone Weil is credited with this saying, "Absolutely unmixed attention is Prayer." Notice the emphasis is on the action of "attention" not on prayer. The important thing is attention. Thus, this could be used to argue that even non-religious people pray. The girl who hammers out a song on a piano is in prayer. The person who is learning to read and sounding out each syllable is in prayer. Prayer does not just happen in the Church and being in Church does not always mean we are in prayer.

So I continue to wonder at the vastness and yet simplicity of the human need to pray.