[Dialogue] Remembering Bill Coffin

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Friday, April 21, 2006 by CommonDreams.org 

Remembering Bill Coffin 

by Bill Moyers

 

The following remarks were delivered by Bill Moyers at the funeral service
for William Sloan Coffin on Thursday, April 20, at Riverside Memorial Church
in New York City. 

There are so many of you out there who should be up here instead of me. You
rode with Bill through the Deep South chasing Jim Crow from long impregnable
barriers imposed on freedom. You rose with Bill against the Vietnam War,
were arrested with him, shared jail with him, and at night in your cells
joined in singing the Hallelujah Chorus with him You rallied with him
against the horrors of nuclear weapons. You sang with him, laughed with him,
drank with him, prayed with him, grieved with him, worshipped and wept with
him. Even at this moment when your hearts are breaking at the loss of him,
you must be comforted by the balm of those memories. I envy your life-long
membership in his beloved community, and I am honored that Randy, his wife,
asked me to speak today about the Bill Coffin I knew. 

I saw little of him personally until late in his life. We met once in the
early 60s when he was an adviser to the Peace Corps which I had helped to
organize and run. He spoke to the staff, inspired us to think of what we
were doing as the moral equivalent of war, and told us the story of how as a
young captain in the infantry following military orders at the end of World
War II. he had been charged with sending back to the Soviet Union thousands
of Russian refugees made prisoners by the Germans. Some of them he had
deceived into boarding trains that carried them home to sure death at the
hands of Stalin. That burden of guilt sat heavily on Bill's heart for the
rest of his life. He wrote about it in his autobiography, and raised it
forty years later when we met in the waiting room of the television studio
where I was about to interview him. That's the moment we bonded, two old men
by now, sharing our grief that both in different ways had once confused duty
with loyalty, and confessing to each other our gratitude that we had lived
long enough to atone -- somewhat. "Well," said Bill, "we needed a lot of
time. We had a lot to atone for." 

I had called him for the interview after learning the doctors had told him
his time was now running out. When he came down from Vermont to the studio
here in New York, I greeted him with the question, "How you doing?" . He
threw back his head, his eyes flashed, and with that slurred (from a stroke)
but still vibrant voice, he answered: "Well, I am praying the prayer of St.
Augustine: Give me chastity and self-restraint..but not yet." 

He taught me more about being a Christian than I learned at seminary. 

His witness taught me - he preached what he practiced. But his writings
taught me, too -Once to Every Man, Living the Truth in a World of Illusion,
The Heart is a Little to the Left, Credo, Letters to a Young Doubter, and of
course that unforgettable eulogy to his drowned son, Alex, when he called on
us to "improve the quality of our suffering." During my interview with him
on PBS I asked him how he had summoned the strength for so powerful a
message of suffering and love. He said, "Well, we all do what we know how to
do. I went right away to the piano. And I played all the hymns. And I wept
and I wept, and I read the poems, like A.E. Houseman - 'To an Athlete Dying
Young.' Then I realized the folks in Riverside Church had to know whether or
not they still had a pastor. So I wrote the sermon. I wanted them to know." 

They knew, Bill, they knew. 

This will surprise some of you: Not too long ago Bill told Terry Gross that
he would rather not be known as a social activist. The happiest moments of
my life, he said, were less in social activism than in the intimate settings
of the pastor's calling - "the moments when you're doing marriage
counseling.or baptizing a baby.or accompanying people who have suffered loss
- the moments when people tend to be most human - when they are most
vulnerable." 

So he had the pastor's heart but he heeded the prophet's calling. There
burned in his soul a sacred rage - that volatile mix of grief and anger and
love that produced what his friend, the artist and writer Robert Shetterly,
described as "a holy flame." During my interview with him he said, "When you
see uncaring people in high places, everybody should be mad as hell." If you
lessen your anger at the structures of power, he said, you lower your love
for the victims of power. 

I once heard Lyndon Johnson urge Martin Luther King to hold off on his
marching in the south to give the President time to neutralize the old guard
in Congress and create a consensus for finally ending institutionalized
racism in America. Martin Luther King listened, and then he answered (I
paraphrase): Mr. President, the gods of the South will never be appeased.
They will never have a change of heart. They will never repent of their sins
and come to the altar seeking forgiveness. The time has passed for
consensus, the time has come to break the grip of history and change the
course of America." When the discussion was over Dr. King had carried the
day. The President of the United States put a long arm on his shoulder and
said, "Martin, you go on out there now and make it possible for me to do the
right thing." Lyndon Johnson had seen the light: For him to do the right
thing someone had to subpoena the conscience of America and send it marching
from the ground up against the citadels of power and privilege. 

Like Martin Luther King, Bill Coffin also knew the heart of power is hard;
knew it arranged the rules for its own advantage, knew that before justice
could roll down like water and righteousness like a flowing river, the dam
of oppression, deception and corruption had first to be broken, cracked open
by the moral power of people aroused to demand that the right thing be done.
"In times of oppression," he said, "if you don't translate choices of faith
into political choices, you run the danger of washing your hands, like
Pilate." So he aimed his indignation at root causes. "Many of us are eager
to respond to injustice," he said, "without having to confront the causes of
it.and that's why so many business and governmental leaders today are
promoting charity. It is desperately needed in an economy whose prosperity
is based on growing inequality. First these leaders proclaim themselves
experts on matters economic, and prove it by taking the most out of the
economy. Then they promote charity as if it were the work of the church,
finally telling troubled clergy to shut up and bless the economy as once we
blessed the battleship." 

When he came down from Vermont two years ago for that final interview, we
talked about how democracy had reached a fork in the road - what Tony
Kushner calls one of those moments in history when the fabric of everyday
life unravels and there is this unstable dynamism that allows for incredible
change in short period of time - when people and the world they are living
in can be utterly transformed for good or bad. 

Take one fork and the road leads to an America where military power serves
empire rather than freedom; where we lose from within what we are trying to
defend from without; where fundamentalism and the state scheme to write the
rules and regulations; where true believers in the gods of the market turn
the law of the jungle into the law of the land; where in the name of
patriotism we keep our hand over our heart pledging allegiance to the flag
while our leaders pick our pockets and plunder our trust; where elites
insulate themselves from the consequences of their own actions; where "the
strong take what they can, and the weak suffer what they must." 

Take the other fork and the road leads to the America whose promise is
"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" for all Bill Coffin spent his
life pointing us down that road. in that direction. There is nothing utopian
about it, Bill said; he was an idealist but he was not an ideologue. He said
in our interview that we have to keep pressing the socialist questions
because they are the questions of justice, but we must be dubious about the
socialist answers because while Amos may call for justice to roll down as
waters, figuring out the irrigation system is damned hard! 

He believed in democracy. There is no simpler way to put it. He believed
democracy was the only way to assure that the rewards of a free society
would be shared with everyone, and not just elites at the top. That last
time we talked he told me how much he had liked the story he had heard
Joseph Campbell tell me in our series on "The Power of Myth" - the story of
the fellow who turns the corner and sees a brawl in the middle of the block.
He runs right for it, shouting: "Is this a private fight, or can anyone get
in it?" 

Bill saw democracy as everyone's fight. He'd be in the middle of the fork in
the road right now, his coat off, his sleeves rolled up, his hand raised -
pointing us to the action. And his message would be the same today as then:
Sign up, jump in, fight on." 

Someone sidled up to me the other night at another gathering where Bill's
death was discussed. This person said, "He was no saint, you know." I wanted
to answer: "You're kidding?" We knew, alright. Saints flourish in a mythic
world. Bill Coffin flourished here, in the cracked common clay of an earthly
and earthy life. He liked it here. Even as he was trying to cooperate
gracefully with the inevitability of death, he was also coaching Paul Newman
to play the preacher in the film version of Marilynn Robinson's novel
Gilead. He enjoyed nothing more than wine and song at his home with Randy
and friends. And he never lost his conviction that a better world is
possible if we fight hard enough. At a dinner in his honor in Washington he
had reminded us that "the world is too dangerous for anything but truth and
too small for anything but love." But as we left he winked at me and said,
"Give'em hell." 

Faith, he once said, "is being seized by love." Seized he was, in
everlasting arms. "You know," he told me in that interview, "I lost a son.
And people will say, 'Well, when you die, Bill, Alex will come forth and
bring you through the pearly gates.' Well, that's a nice thought, and I
welcome it. But I don't need to believe that. All I need to know is, God
will be there. And our lives go from God, in God, to God again. Hallelujah,
you know? That should be enough." 

Well, he's there now. But we are still here. I hear his voice in my heart:
"Don't tarry long in mourning. Organize." 

### 

 

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