"Al's" Funeral

A celebration of the life of our friend Al was held at the Unitarian Universalist church he attended most recently.

Even though it was the biggest day of Labor Day sale at the store, I was given permission to take off, to skip my manager's shift, to attend it.

We met Al in 1980 because he was about to marry a high school friend of ours. Though our friendship became one of the closest of our lives, we were always on the edge of each other's worlds...because our spiritual lives were so much at odds with each others'.

By the time he died, Al had been a UU for 60 plus years. In the spirit of his church, he happily tolerated every religion, every path to God, even Christianity...with the exception of born again/evangelical Christianity.

As far as people like Evie and me are concerned, he'd have been one of those people who would say, "I love Jesus but I hate (born again) Christians." At times, he was...to use the verbiage of the first-ever CGGC Strategic Plan..."daring" about it.

Yet, our friendship was as genuine, and our mutual affection was as real, as any relationship we have ever had.

Needless to say, attending the celebration of his life created mixed thoughts and feelings.

Listening to his eulogy, spoken by a member of the UU clergy, and hearing memories of his leadership in a number of UU congregations over the span of several decades, I learned things about him...and the world he was comfortable in...that I never knew.

Clearly, hanging with us would have stretched him as much as knowing him challenged us.

In the service, one of his UU friends even called Al a "religious institutionalist."

Al truly loved the UU church. He loved the committees and commissions and councils he served on. He revelled in being respected as a "lay leader" at the congregational and denominational level.

Two thoughts about that:

1. Evie said, as we drove home, that she couldn't distinguish between what the UU people said about their love and devotion to their church and what institutionalists in the CGGC say about ours. God, by definition, means less in the UU world than among other religious connections so the UU passion for the institution, the church, is understandable. I was swooning over how much affection the UUers had for the UU  institution itself. It was unashamed. Unrestrained. To us, that focus on church-above-God is neither understandable nor acceptable in the Church of God. But, the similarities were striking to both of us.

2. It occurred to me that that one source of tension between Al and us that I didn't apprehend until yesterday is his love for institutional religion and our increasing abhorrence of it. On the other hand, by virtue of our disdain for the institutional, we may have seemed less guilty of what Al saw as the sins of born againers. We are born again but not connected to, well, the politics of evangelicals.

Al's daughter, whom we'd never met, shared memories of her dad in the service. She concluded by quoting "verses" that spoke to her about her dad. I don't know the woman at all, so, at that moment, I expected her to recite poetry. What she quoted was, "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink...(and the four other things Jesus says to the "sheep.") I never actually saw that in Al but, in her eyes, it was there.

-----------------

As you might expect, yesterday was an emotionally powerful day.