Social-justice firebrand Coffin is anticipating a gentle, quiet death

[4-7-04]

by Alexa Smith, Presbyterian News Service

LOUISVILLE - April 7, 2004 - Having spent his life raging against bigotry, nuclear arms and economic excess, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin says he intends to die gently, without fuss, without fury.

"We should cooperate gracefully with the inevitable," he says pragmatically, acknowledging with some amusement that, while he's had a fiery public life, he is a man who picks his battles. "If you don't come to grips with death early on, but know you'll die, it will make you insecure. And that's the worst thing that humans can do, try to secure themselves against insecurity. With money. Or power. Pretending that life will go on forever. And it makes others pay a gruesome price.

"You see, you can't get rich without making someone else poor. You can't get power without disempowering somebody else. All of these things are forms of pride ... and are essentially corrupt."

At 79, Coffin's words still flow flawlessly. He is ever the preacher.

Coffin, who has been the voice of northern liberal religious dissent for a quarter-century, is a magnet for controversy. Ironically, he was an Army and CIA veteran in 1969 when he became a defendant in the "Boston 5" draft-resistance trial. He achieved fame while serving as chaplain at his alma mater, Yale University, as a lightning rod for opposition to the Vietnam War. A man born to privilege, he was jailed many times as a civil rights Freedom Rider, the first time in 1961. He was senior minister of Riverside Church in Manhattan for more than 10 years, and is president emeritus of SANE/FREEZE: Campaign for Global Security.

Since he suffered a stroke, Coffin's speech is slightly slurred; he sometimes must repeat a word or two. His voice doesn't boom like it used to, but he can still rant against what he finds intolerable - lately the duo of Bush and Cheney, men he believes are muddied by deception and are putting U.S. soldiers' lives at risk in a war with Iraq that shouldn't even be.

This morning, however, at his daughter's home in Oakland, CA, he is talking about death, and not just philosophically. He may not see another Easter this side of eternity. But he acknowledges death casually, like a man awaiting the first snowflake of the winter, not knowing its day or time.

He complains that he's short of breath before he even gets out of bed, and says his tennis-player legs are "pretty well gone." He can walk around the house, but needs a wheelchair to leave it, and usually needs his wife, Randy, the woman who helped him learn to speak again after his stroke, to push it. And there are grandkids always happy to push Poppy around. Without slapping a technical diagnosis on his condition, Coffin says that his heart is "thickening," which means that less and less blood gets pumped through it.

"I can do some things. I write a bit. ... I have not lost my marbles," he says, describing his good fortune to have a new book published by Westminster/John Knox Press, Credo, a compilation of quotes that is rapidly climbing the best-seller lists and on which he, happily, did little of the work.  [Click here for Gene TeSelle's review of Credo, and a link to order the book.]

His old friend Bill Moyers recently interviewed him on NOW, about his life, about his impending death. There's a documentary, "Coffin's Lover's Quarrel with America." Warren Goldstein has just published a biography, William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience, published, appropriately, by Yale University Press.  [Click here for a note about Goldstein's book.]

"I've got nothing to complain about," he says.

While Credo is rife with rage about a lack of justice in the world, the callousness of the rich, and Christians' reluctance to confront both, it is evident from its opening, Faith, Hope and Love, through the final chapter, The End of Life, that God is the central character in this volume - and Coffin's strength and comfort.

At its close, he contradicts the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, saying: "The only way to have a good death is to lead a good life. Lead a good one, full of curiosity, generosity, and compassion, and there's no need at the close of the day to rage against the dying of the light. We can go gentle into that good night."

There is no rage here, even though that may seem ironic to some.

Early on, Coffin got his mind around the core of a faith that has irony at its heart: Where love is the mightiest power, where unmerited good is as much a marvel as evil, and where a life put in God's good hands can instill hope and life even in the face of death.

It was out of such conviction that Coffin to delivered a now famous eulogy for his son, Alex, absolving God of any blame in his death in a car accident and rejecting the platitude that human suffering is part of God's will. "Nothing infuriates me as much as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn't go around this world with his fingers on triggers, his fists around knives, his hands on steering wheels," he says. "... 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. My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God's heart was the first of all our hearts to break."

So the man whose social conscience is easily offended by human callousness - especially in people in power - doesn't feel one ounce of anger toward God. "I just don't," he says flatly. "If I am lucky enough to see God one day, I'll have a few questions. But God will have many more to ask me, if he's keeping tabs."

He quotes Paul as his expert, reciting the verse, "Whether we live or die, we are the Lords's."

"Paul says: From God, to God, in God again," he says, adding: "People ask me whether I think I'll see my son again. ... But I do not ... know. I need to know I'll be in God's hands. To demand anything more belittles your faith."

Unmerited cruelty baffles Coffin, but he's more fascinated by the opposite question: How to explain unmerited good?

"You have to be very tough-minded about God," he says. "If love is the name of the game, then freedom is the only pre-condition. Love is self-restricting when it comes to power. The only way God can stop the barbarous things that happen on earth is to restrict our freedom." Something God won't do.

"We have to accept responsibility that the name of the game is love."

That's what teased him into faith in the first place - over time. "I've never had anything as dramatic as the Damascus Road," he says. "I've had mini-conversions, moments when I could see things more clearly."

As a not-particularly-religious college student, Coffin found himself listening to an Episcopal priest intone the liturgy for two friends who'd been killed in a car accident. While the clergyman's voice sounded nasal and smug (Coffin thought about tripping the man as he walked down the aisle), the words threw him slightly off-balance: "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." It was the "giveth" part that put his mind into motion, a corrective to his youthful pride. "I just thought, 'You know, Coffin, you're only a guest here. ... A guest, at best.'"

He realized, as he sang in the Yale choir, "All of our hearts are open, all of our desires known," that unless the heart is full of love, the mind can't think straight.

And it was on a whim that he signed up to go to Union Theological Seminary one Monday for a "call to ministry" visit, during which he was bowled over by the visions of justice held out by Reinhold Neibuhr and others. "It was all gradual," he says now.

His theology and his politics combined to push him to the forefront of the social movements that defined his times.

Death may be inevitable, he says, but atrocities and injustices are not.

Mention the war in Iraq, and he says that he wishes the military brass had quit in protest. "Bush, Cheney, Pearl ... (they're) intellectually in a bunker. They're lacking in imagination, and have misled the country, including the military. I feel sympathy for those who are in Iraq."

Coffin says the churches have grown too conservative, like the whole country, forgetting that the devil tempted Jesus with wealth and power. He thinks his thesis in a book published in the 1980s by Westminster/John Knox, A Passion for the Possible, still holds up - that the world the churches ought to be working to create is one without violent conflict, without pollution, and without "a yawning chasm" between rich and poor.

Some churches are "irrelevant(ly) righteous," he says, and others are "more concerned with free love than free hate." He says the answer to bad religion isn't no religion - it's good religion. He laments that much about church life is "management and therapy. There is so little prophetic fire."

"Anger has a very important spiritual benefit," Coffin says. "If you don't have anger, you end up tolerating the intolerable - and that's intolerable. I still have plenty of anger that is ready to be used at a moment's notice."

He pauses, then adds: "When you get older, you find that you don't miss as much as you thought you would. I was a damn good tennis player. Now, I can hardly walk ... I don't grieve that. I was a serious pianist. But I no longer have the energy to keep up my digital dexterity. So, I listen to music; I don't play it. If you adapt in this way, it is a positive thing. You're not in control anymore, less and less. And that's very nice. ...

"As I think I have said other places, it's a very good thing we don't live forever. ... If life were endless, we'd be bored to death. ... The fact that we're going to die gives meaning to life, gives meaning to our days. And that is a good thing."

also

A PresbyNet online chat is exploring Coffin's thoughts on social justice and faith, through a discussion of Credo.