Barb Oehlke’s memorial service will be Saturday, June 7, at 10:00 a.m. at the church.

Last night, I spoke at the retirement banquet for the Rev. Dr. Kendyl Gibbons in Kansas City. (Also present, by the way, was Rev. David Wiessbard, our Minister Emeritus. Dave was Kendyl’s internship supervisor, and Kendyl was mine).  Here is part of what I said: 

Good evening to you all – it is a pleasure to be back with you. 

Kendyl preached at my ordination in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 2003, using as her text the Phllip Larken poem “Churchgoing” – which reads in part as follows:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

In the sermon, she noted that I, the ordinand, literally robed, had answered that “hunger in himself to be more serious” and invited those gathered to consider the same: 
That the purpose of the religious life, shorn of superstition and artifice, was this: to grow more wise.  That it was deeply human, and thus deeply religious: For nothing human is alien to the religious – To seek more wisdom, to be more serious. She did all that under the elementary school gym basketball hoop, which is where we worshipped.  Yet she made it magical. . . . . 
Throughout this almost 50-year career in ministry, through teaching, preaching, and writing, she has argued that this is the purpose of our religious path, and of Humanism more generally: to be awake. To pay attention. To be mature in the face of the fullness of life.

Her humanism and theology were not, as was often the case in the 2nd generation of Humanism, which preceded her,  about denial, about running around and saying “there is no God, you fools!”  But instead it was an invitation: an invitation to be in the presence of mystery, of life, of all that is, to make meaning of what we find, and to, from that meaning, engage in the work of loving, healing, reforming, and improving this world we share together, this world sufficient to our efforts and our awe.  

In 2003, there was a great outcry among some Unitarian Universalist Humanists when the then President of the UUA said we needed “a language of reverence.” I remember that some called Kendyl and urged her to run for UUA President, to defend the atheists and agnostics, a chalice she let pass her by for good reason. Because she, too, believed we needed a language of reverence, a way to speak of our experiences of life, and the theological maturity to know the difference between metaphor and compulsion. In a 2006 essay, she put it this way: 

The language of reverence is, finally, the language of humanity. The human experience of finding ourselves in the presence of that intense, fleeting, and demanding moment when the dull surfaces of things become transparent to a significance almost greater than we can bear belongs to all of us. Only by not paying attention can we avoid it. It doesn’t need gods or angels or magical other worlds. The world we have is magical enough, holy enough, sacred enough.  . . The holy is nothing but the ordinary, held up to the light and profoundly seen. . . . It is the acknowledgment that we are formed by the earth from which we arise, and in which we live and move and have our being; and that we are, finally, not alone. 

This has been the invitation and the theological provocation she has offered us for a generation and a half: To pay attention, to be aware, to approach the fullness of life. 
See in the world – in one another – in art, and music, and science, in poetry, in the theater, in learning together, in the simple and glorious act of conversation between minds around a table with iced tea and 10 packs of sweetener, see in the world its realness, and that in that act seeing, the world becomes holy.  

Worthy, as each human life is, of reverence. Not from the outside, but from our choices, our intention, and integrity.  

Dear one, we are in your debt, and in recompense, we can pledge this: We shall keep at. To pay attention, to live with fullness, to be real and honest, to learn and be and become, for all the days we might be here, on this earth, together.  

Congratulations, my friend, my teacher, my colleague, and thank you.  

In faith,
Matthew

Malcolm and Margaret McFadyen – It must have been in the 1950s, I remember that as a kid we often stopped to visit these two 90 year old church members,  the McFadyens. Sitting out in their yard overlooking the river. Margaret made homemade lemonade, Malcolm wrote and read his poetry. Margaret lived to 103. She was the daughter of the first editor of the Rockford Morning Star. Malcolm was born in Scotland and had a touch of the accent and the wry humor that you might expect. Their gift to the church came just about the time that the church had used up all of it’s funds to build our current building.

Cousie Fox  –  Another 100-year-old lady, Cousie, died in 1984. When we joined the church, there was this group of really formidable elderly ladies. Cousie was one of them. She never married, and she shared a house with her brother. She tended her funds well and made quite an impact around Rockford. She was a named donor when the YMCA building was built. When the county built the Highland Retirement Center on Safford Rd, they designated the “Cousie Fox Wing” for memory care. As well as her generous gift to our church.

Jessie and Dorothy Frederick –   Dorothy was nice, Jessie had opinions. One opinion he (they) had was the importance of bringing up new UU ministers for the UU denomination. Dorothy and Jessie’s special interest was supporting the ministerial intern program so that we could afford to host an intern here in Rockford every year or two. That was a terrific benefit to us. We had some really outstanding young ministers pass through here for a year before they graduated. In recent years, intern ministry has faded from the ministerial curriculum. The other strong opinion that Jessie held. If it was Sunday morning and the sun was shining, he flew his plane. Maybe, the call of the Church of the Open Skies matched the call of our own church.

Martha Daniels –  Martha was a long-time language teacher at Guilford HS. Then started a second career as a pediatric family therapist. Whether it was dealing with the high school kids or with families needing therapy, one of her outlets was studying martial arts. Her gift to the church came to us right as Rockford Promise was starting up. Because of her generosity, we’ve been able to scholarship a student for 8 years now and running.