xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Bill Coffin remembering his son
As almost all of you know, a week ago
last Monday night [Feb 11 1983], driving in a terrible storm, my son —
Alexander — who to his friends was a real day-brightener, and to his family
"fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky" — my
twenty-four-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 that followed his death was one carrying
this wonderful quote from the end of Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms":
"The world breaks everyone, and then some become strong at
the broken places."
My own broken heart is mending, and largely thanks to so
many of you, my dear parishioners; for if in the last week I have relearned
one lesson, it is that love not only begets love, it transmits strength.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Coffin's book, Credo
Second, I have decided with some
doubts to share a review I did of his wonderful CREDO that appeared
in the Christian Century (with perhaps a few edits) in December 2003.
I offer it because you should know about the book if you
don’t. And I touch there on what is most missing in the obits and tributes I
have seen so far. His extraordinary "lover’s quarrel" with his world—civil
rights, anti-Vietnam war, marches for gay rights, fight against the nuclear
threat—capture the attention of the obit writers.
But Bill Coffin was a great preacher, the best he ever
heard, says Joe Hough below. Riverside Church came alive during his ten
years there; 60 percent of its members when he left had joined during his
tenure. People arrived about 10 am to get a seat for the 11 am service. He
was great because had had such a command of issues, art, poetry, history. I
said to Bruce Hanson this week, "Bill would have had fun, probably as a side
bar, with the Judas Gospel story." But Warren Goldstein in his good
biography of Coffin points out how deeply Coffin plumbed the scriptures for
his sermons, especially at moments of crisis in the church.
And he was a profound evangelist. That was true because,
as novelist and former priest James Carroll said in the introduction to
Credo, of Coffin's "convictions that God exists and that God's existence
matters…"
Thank you Bill Coffin for pouring out so generously your
gifts, intimations of hope, faith, humor and courage to so many for so long.
Pax
Leon
P.S. The obits don’t mention the profound role Randy
Wilson Coffin played in his life the last 29 years, especially in the past
seven since his stroke and then heart failure. He said to many people, to
paraphrase, "After failures in the marriage arena, I finally got it right
with Randy."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Special to the Christian Century
December 2 2003
By Leon Howell
CREDO
By William Sloane Coffin, Westminster John Knox Press, 176
pp., $14.95
William Sloane Coffin – the noted preacher and social
justice advocate – is a master with words. He crafts phrases, sentences,
paragraphs that provoke, inspire, startle, amuse, convict.
Try this: "I love the recklessness of faith; first you
leap, and then you grow wings." Or this: "Fundamentalists forget that love
demands discernment as well as obedience." And this: "There is no smaller
package in the world than a man wrapped up in himself." One more: "The
Eucharist quenches my thirst for hope."
All of these appear in Credo, a verbal and
spiritual feast from Coffin's fertile mind and rich life.
This is not a book to read in one sitting. It can be
entered on any page. Like Dag Hammarskjold's Markings, the thoughts –
about 450 in all – rise up from the page to be pondered, argued with,
savored, meditated upon.
Here is a paragraph-length sample:
Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but
finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living. Descartes too was
mistaken; "Cogito ergo sum"-- I think therefore I am."? Nonsense. "Amo ergo
sum"-- I love therefore I am." Or, as St. Paul with unconscious eloquence
wrote, "Now abide faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these
is love." I believe that. I believe it is better not to live than not to
love.
Coffin finds the best translation of credo to be, "I have
given my heart to." And he affirms, "However imperfectly, I have given my
heart to the teaching and example of Christ…"
How thoroughly that is true may surprise some readers who
know Coffin primarily for his political fame. In fact, he is a consummate
evangelist. He conveys a faith of joy, risk, freedom, empowerment and
engagement. As novelist and former Roman Catholic priest James Carroll puts
it in an eloquent foreword, Credo derives its power from Coffin's
"convictions that God exists and that God's existence matters…"
A life of remarkable breadth and depth provides the grist
for Coffin's word magic. He was born to privilege and grew up in the Great
Depression. He trained in Paris to be a concert pianist. During military
service in World War II, he was liaison officer with the French and Russian
militaries, was General George S. Patton's Russian interpreter; and postwar
served in the CIA. He gained national notoriety during his 18 years as
chaplain at Yale University, participated in the dangerous Freedom Rides
during the Civil Rights Movement and protested the Vietnam War (including
facing criminal charges with Dr. Benjamin Spock for supporting resistance to
the draft). He became the model for the Rev. Sloan, the minister in the
comic strip, Doonesbury. After 10 years as senior pastor at New York's
Riverside Church, he headed SANE-Freeze, focused on the nuclear threat.
For more than a decade Coffin has journeyed from his base
in tiny picture-post- card lovely Strafford, Vermont, to teach, speak,
confer, agitate, marry, bury, console. In September Yale Divinity School
established the annual William Sloane Coffin Peace and Justice Award. When
he returned to preach at Riverside Church in October, UN General Secretary
Kofi Annan made a special visit to hear him. When Children's Defense Fund's
Marian Wright Edelman honored him with a dinner in Washington in November,
Andrew Young, Bill Moyers and Cora Weiss were among those who testified to
his influence. He was the subject of a New Yorker profile December 1.
Credo has a special poignancy.
As Coffin, 79, states in the preface, his "years appear to be hastening to
their end." A terminal heart condition does not leave him long to live. His
condition – he still husbands his energy to go forth and speak from time to
time, and to be honored – did not allow him to compile this book. So
Westminster John Knox editor Stephanie Egnotovich read through "a lifetime
of sermons and my unpublished speeches" to excerpt Credo's contents.
The categories also may strike some readers as unexpected.
Of course "War and Peace," "Social Justice and Civil Liberties," and
"Patriotism" are prominent. Item: "The Bible is less concerned with
alleviating the effects of injustice than in eliminating its causes."
But equal attention is paid to "Faith, Hope, Love," and
"The Church." Item: "It's often been said the church is a crutch. Of course
it's a crutch. What makes you think you don't limp?"
Coffin reports that he told Bill Moyers he feared Credo
would come across as too aphoristic. Moyers advised him not to fret.
"The Sermon on the Mount, after all, is simply a collection of very good
'sound bites.'"
Reviewers are supposed to choose something with which to
quibble. That's beside the point here. But I do have a suggestion for anyone
– preachers particularly come to mind – who wants a fuller grasp of how
Coffin engages with scripture, theology, the world and the reader. Add two
of his books – The Heart Is a Little to the Left: Essays on Public
Morality, and A Passion for the Possible: A Message to U.S. Churches
– to the Coffin section of your library.
The last category in Credo is "The End of Life."
Coffin concludes by describing a new peace that is his.
I'm less intentional than "attentional." I'm more and more
attentional to family and friends and nature's beauty. Although still
outraged by callous behavior, particularly in high places, I feel more often
serene, grateful for God's gift of life. For the compassions that fail not,
I find myself saying daily to my loving Maker, "I can no other answer make
than thanks, and thanks, and ever thanks."
--30—
We invite you to
look at our own Witherspoon review of
Credo, too.
There you'll also find a link to purchase the book from Amazon.com
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Tributes to William Sloane Coffin:
Dr. Joseph C. Hough, Jr., President of Union
Theological Seminary, New York:
Today, April 12, 2006, William Sloane Coffin died, and the Union community
will be saddened at the loss of this remarkable Christian leader. I have no
words to express adequately my own sense of loss. Bill Coffin was one of my
closest and most cherished friends. Nothing was ever better than an evening
with Bill and Randy Coffin in their home, and Heidi and I have been
fortunate to enjoy many of those evenings, especially in recent years. In
those precious times, we shared friendship strong enough to speak honestly,
love unreservedly, and with it all to fill our shared moments with laughter.
Bill was one of God's chosen prophets. He was a great patriot who loved his
country too much to leave it alone. His early and strong leadership in the
struggle against segregation and discrimination on the basis of race; his
pivotal role in organizing opposition against the war in Vietnam; and his
continuing personal investment and national leadership in the campaign to
abolish nuclear weapons from an increasingly dangerous world place him among
the most important Christian leaders in American history. He strode with
giant footsteps across this nation in extraordinarily turbulent times, and
his voice cried out for justice and peace, a justice and peace that in his
mind flowed directly from his deep and abiding personal faith in the God
made known to him in Jesus Christ.
That deep faith was the foundation for his preaching. He was among the most
effective and memorable of all of American preachers. No one preached
better! From his pulpits in Battell Chapel at Yale, the Riverside Church in
New York, and hundreds of pulpits all over the nation came extraordinarily
powerful sermons-- sermons that moved hearts, changed minds, and called us
all to change the world. He preached with passion and an inimitable style.
And in recent years, Bill wrote of his faith and hope reaching out thousands
of Americans with the same power and conviction that always characterized
his preaching. I especially loved Letters to a Young Doubter in which Bill's
profoundly pastoral side reached out to all of us.
Bill is dead, but I shall rely on the precious gifts of memory to continue
to live my history with him. Recollection, like anticipation, is as much a
part of the fabric of our lives as the present moment. In some ways it is
richer and allows for a generous and loving selectivity. And memories,
unlike anticipation, do not disappoint us. That is why the unwelcome
intrusion of death into life never is the final act. Death is but the
transition from the creation of new personal history to a time of enjoyment
of a cherished history that is now done. So that is how it is for me in this
day of sorrow and loss.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rev. Dr. Samuel Kobia, General Secretary, World
Council of Churches
I write to express my sympathy at the loss of William Sloane Coffin, who
will be profoundly missed by many of us throughout the world.
The Rev. Dr William Sloane Coffin, Jr., who died yesterday in the United
States, was one of the 20th century's great Christian pastors and activists
for peace and justice. His life reflected an understanding of ministry that
he once described in these words: "Every minister is given two roles, the
prophetic and the priestly." And so he sought racial reconciliation through
civil rights legislation, saw himself during the cold war years as "very
anti-Soviet, but very pro-Russian," conducted a "lover's quarrel" with his
own country's foreign and nuclear policies, opened the eyes of students,
parishioners and readers to the demands of the gospel on every aspect of
life. So, too, he taught that "the greatest danger each of us faces comes
not from our enemies, but from our enmity."
Dr Coffin was aware of the World Council of Churches from before its
inception in 1948. His uncle Henry Sloane Coffin, then president of Union
Theological Seminary in New York City, was one of the founding intellects
behind the Council and a guiding influence in the establishment of its
Ecumenical Institute for graduate study in Bossey, Switzerland. His
theological mentors, Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, led him to view God's
calling in a framework that transcended national, cultural and
denominational boundaries. William Sloane Coffin would continue these
traditions in ecumenical circles through his years as chaplain of Yale
University, pastor of Riverside Church in New York and leader of movements
including the civil rights struggle, anti-war protest and the lobby for a
nuclear freeze. His voice was one that we heard clearly, and heeded.
He was arrested several times in the pursuit of social
righteousness. On one of these occasions, while demonstrating for the
desegregation of an amusement park in Baltimore on July 4, 1963, he was one
of nine US religious leaders taken into custody. Arrested in company with
Coffin that day was Eugene Carson Blake, another minister of the United
Presbyterian Church in the USA. Less than three years later, Gene Blake
would become the second general secretary of the World Council of Churches.
They remained friends and confidants to the end of Blake's life. In fact,
William Sloane Coffin has been greatly admired by every one of the WCC's
general secretaries.
On behalf of the ecumenical fellowship represented by the World Council of
Churches, I offer thanks to God for the life, faith and courage of William
Sloane Coffin. Many of us who knew him only slightly, or through his
writings, or by report, join in prayer with those close friends and family
members who are experiencing sorrow at his death. May the hope of the
resurrection to eternal life, found at the heart of this Easter season, be
with us and reassure us of God's abiding love.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, "Mourning
Bill Coffin"
Just on the cusp of Pesach, I have received a call from my old friend Marc
Raskin that one of the greatest of our "prophetic voices," Bill Coffin, died
today, and that his funeral will be this coming week at Riverside Church.
I knew Bill from the draft resistance days of 1967 etc, and in the '80s he
and Cora Weiss and Rev. Channing Phillips arranged for me to lead a "Shalom
Seder" at Riverside.
And my wife, Rabbi Phyllis Berman, worked with him for years while he was
the minister of Riverside, since her Riverside Language School is housed
there.
What can we say? He was brave, bright, committed, and joyful. I learned from
him, while I was still a secular activist, what it could mean to be
prophetically committed. When God's opening came to me, Bill's teaching was
a great part of what I was able to bring.
Shalom, Arthur
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director
The Shalom Center
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Leon Howell says of himself:
"editor of the former christianity and crisis, honored to be a
friend of coffin's for 40 years; he was on c&c's board and once
participated in "discerning the signs of the times," my annual seminar at
ghost ranch. i do an ecelectic, episodic, idiosyncratic e-mail for a few
hundred acquaintances.
pax
leon
[4-12-06]