The following remarks were delivered by Bill Moyers at the funeral service for William Sloane Coffin on April 20, 2006, 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 lifelong 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 40 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 his 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 a 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, all right. 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.”

KIM LAWTON, guest anchor: Now, the legacy of a veteran activist for peace. The growing faith-based mobilization against the war in Iraq is reminiscent of religious action against the Vietnam War. One key leader in that effort was the late Reverend William Sloane Coffin (1924-2006).

As chaplain of Yale University in the ’60s and ’70s, Coffin be came one of the best known — and most controversial — figures not only against the war, but also in the civil rights movement and the campaign for a freeze on nuclear weapons. Throughout his life, Coffin preached that social justice was central to Christianity. He died last year at the age of 81. Bob Abernethy interviewed Coffin in 2004.

“Justice is at the heart of religious faith.”

BOB ABERNETHY: Toward the end of his life, in the summer of 2004, I interviewed Coffin for this program.Coffin had retired to the little town of Strafford, Vermont, where he lived on the village green with his wife, Randy, and their terrier, Rosie. Coffin was 80 years old then.

Two strokes had slurred his speech. He couldn’t walk much, and had had to give up playing the piano, of which he had been a master. But his commitments and beliefs were as strong as ever.

The Reverend WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN: I thank God for all the young men and women here who are going to refuse registration.

ABERNETHY: Today, Coffin has retired to the little town of Strafford, Vermont, where he lives on the village green with his wife, Randy, and their terrier, Rosie.

Coffin is 80 years old now. Two strokes have slurred his speech. He cannot walk much and has had to give up playing the piano, of which he was a master. But his commitments and beliefs are as strong as ever.

The Rev. COFFIN: What this country needs, what I think God wants us to do, is not practice piecemeal charity but engage in wholesale justice. Justice is at the heart of religious faith. When we see Christ empowering the poor, scorning the powerful, healing the world’s hurts, we are seeing transparently the power of God at work.

God is not too hard to believe in. God is too good to believe in, we being such strangers to such goodness. The love of God is to me absolutely overwhelming. It’s clear to me, two things: that almost every square inch of the Earth’s surface is soaked with the tears and blood of the innocent, and it’s not God’s doing. It’s our doing. That’s human malpractice. Don’t chalk it up to God. Every time people say, when they see the innocent suffering, every time they lift their eyes to heaven and say, “God, how could you let this happen?” it’s well to remember that exactly at that moment God is asking exactly the same question of us: “How could you let this happen?” So you have to take responsibility. If you back off from every little controversy in your life you’re not alive, and what’s more, you’re boring.

“Only God has the right to destroy all life on the planet.”

ABERNETHY: I asked Coffin to think back on the civil rights and other protest movements he helped lead.

The Rev. COFFIN: I think the greatest pleasure was being with black civil rights leaders and followers, because they were so alive. You can be more alive in pain than in complacency.

The antiwar movement split the nation in a more acute, painful way. I think, in retrospect, just about everybody agrees it was a terrible, terribly misconceived war.

ABERNETHY: Coffin became the leader of the U.S. campaign against nuclear weapons.

The Rev. COFFIN: Only God has the right to destroy all life on the planet. All we have is the power. We haven’t the authority. Therefore to make, to threaten to use nuclear weapons must be an abomination in the sight of God.

ABERNETHY: Are you a pacifist?

The Rev. COFFIN: Fifty-one/forty-nine. I’m a nuclear pacifist, that’s for sure. But there is an irremediable stubbornness about evil. We have to recognize it, including our own complicity in it. We have to constrain it, but I doubt we will ever eradicate it. To say, “Grant us peace in our time, O Lord” — God must say, “Oh, come off it! What are you going to do for peace, for heaven’s sake?” It’s not enough to pray for it. You have to think for it, you have to suffer for it, and you have to endure a lot for it. So don’t just pray about it.

ABERNETHY: Coffin rails at neglect of the poor and U.S. policies in Iraq. Above all, he condemns what he sees as the country’s self-righteousness.

ABERNETHY: As he conducts what he calls his lover’s quarrel with his country, Coffin acknowledges that he has to be careful not to become self-righteous himself — perhaps especially when he is honored, as he is often. Last year Union Theological Seminary in New York gave him its highest medal.

Union Theological Seminary in New York gave Coffin its highest medal.

Meanwhile, a collection of Coffin’s writing, CREDO, is selling well and, encouraged by that, he is at work on a new book he calls LETTERS TO A YOUNG DOUBTER — a college freshman.

The Rev. COFFIN: And the rule is, he won’t treat me as if I were too old if I won’t treat him as if he were too young.

ABERNETHY: I spoke with Coffin about growing old.

The Rev. COFFIN: I’d just as soon live a little bit longer. But when you are 80, you can’t complain. Joy in this world comes from self-fulfillment. Joy is a more profound experience than mere happiness. When you feel a sense of undeserved integrity because you think you’re in the right fight — against segregation, against the war in Vietnam, against the stupid and cruel discrimination against gays and lesbians — these are the right fights, I feel very deeply. And the sense of self-fulfillment which comes from being in the right fight is a wonderful thing.

I remain hopeful. The opposite of hope is despair — not pessimism, despair. And as a very convinced Christian, I say to myself, “Come on, Coffin. If Christ never allowed his soul to be cornered with despair, and his was the greatest miscarriage of justice maybe in the world, who the hell am I to say I’m going to despair a bit?

When you get older, friendship obviously runs deeper and deeper. And, I would add, nature gets more interesting the nearer you get to joining it, and also more beautiful. I can sit on the front porch here and watch the sun coming in through the maple leaves. You know, God is good.

ABERNETHY: In our conversation, Coffin quoted words he liked, words he attributed to Irenaeus, an early church father: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” Bill Coffin was such a man.

Q: You have, in the course of your life, participated in a good many great causes and have done so with a lot of passion. As you look around the country today, I wonder whether you see an absence of commitment to great causes with great passion.

A: I think we lack passion. We’re showing moral lassitude. In universities tolerance is very apparent, but often it feels like abdication. There’s not the kind of prophetic fire which also produces insight. Universities are very leery about passion. They think it’s poured on top of judgment. But passion produces also insight. Read the Bible. All the great prophets in the Bible were very passionate.

Q: Why do you think that is, in the country as a whole? Why aren’t people in the streets today the way they were in the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement?

A: We’re prosperous. … And now, of course, fear has taken hold, and in life you can either follow your fears or be led by your values, by your passions. Now we have an administration which sponsors fear — of immigrants, homosexuals, crime, terrorists particularly. And this fear-mongering, I’m afraid, is quite deliberate because the more you can make people fear, the more a government can control you. I’ve seen that in many countries, and now I see it in the United States, where the administration is engaging in fear-mongering. Everybody is fearful. The Congress is made up of practicing cowards, and people don’t feel a sense of accountability for what the nation should stand for — and money doesn’t help.

Q: What’s the role of churches in this?

A: Unfortunately the churches now are pretty much down to therapy and management. There’s very little prophetic fire in the churches. When I was growing up we had church leaders — Catholic Church leaders, Protestants, and wonderful rabbis like Abraham Joshua Heschel — who were full of passion, highly intelligent. They knew that love demands the utmost in clear-sightedness. And they were not lazy about doing homework. They were really present, you know? Now, we haven’t got quite as many. But that being said, we have wonderful individual ministers, I would say primarily women, and individual Catholic priests, but not quite the way it used to be.

Plato said once, “What’s honored in the country will be cultivated there.” When we started as a nation we had only, what, three million people? Less than Los Angeles County today? And yet we turned out statesmen (there were no women, unfortunately) named Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams. You can name a list as long as your arm. How many people on the public political stage can you name of the caliber of that first generation? “What’s honored in the country will be cultivated there.” We have fantastic athletes, and we deserve them, and we have rather mediocre politicians and clergy.

Q: Where does the rise of conservatism, especially on the religious Right among Protestant evangelicals, fit into this whole thing?

A: I think most people prefer certainty to truth, and when they feel insecure and want to secure themselves against a sense of insecurity, they engage in what psychiatrists call “premature closure.” They close off too early. I’m often asked what I think of the Christianity of President Bush. I think his God is too small. After all, it’s a profound Christian conviction that we all belong one to another, every one of us on the face of the Earth — from the pope to the loneliest wino, and that’s the way God made us. Christ died to keep us that way. Our sin is always that we’re putting asunder what God has joined together. For every serious believer the question arises: Who is big enough to love the whole world? How, for instance, can the president call Iran, Iraq, and North Korea the axis of evil when all of humanity suffers immeasurably more from environmental degradation, pandemic poverty, and a world awash with weapons? Our God is too small, and then our God is much too nationalistic. A good patriot is not a nationalist. What really puzzles me about the Christian Right is how they can applaud the messianic militarism of the president, a kind of divinely ordained cleansing fire of violence, all in the name of Jesus Christ, the mirror opposite of the Jesus we find in the four Gospels.

I would like to say that for the president to offer a constitutional amendment is very painful. He believes that all people are not created equal, not if they’re gays and lesbians. And he wants a constitutional amendment to reinforce the inequality. That’s a cruel, cruel thing to do. If he had any more feel for what the suffering of the gay and lesbian crowd is all about, if he’d just be available to the suffering, he’d understand that it’s not their outward expression, it’s the inner connection that really counts. And he ought to know that straights have not cornered the market on life-sustaining, deep-caring love. Gays can do that just as well as straights. It’s like Christians and Jews. They are different — not different up, not different down, just different. Gays and straights, they’re different. Not different up, not different down, just different. And what the world needs is a pluralistic vision of love, if we’re going to survive.

Q: Many, many religious conservatives read the same Scripture that you do and come out very differently on social issues. Why?

A: I think they read the Book of Revelation more than they do the gospel. This apocalyptic view which allows them to substitute fate for faith doesn’t make them feel accountable in the same way. Now, if you read the Gospels, you know Jesus was servant of the poor. So how can you say compassionate conservatism should be directed primarily at CEOs and unborn babies? Why doesn’t the Christian Right pay attention to hunger, homelessness, poor education, absent health benefits of babies already born? I’m not saying social justice is the same thing as the gospel; it isn’t, but social justice is at the heart of the gospel, not ancillary to it. And that seems to be an understanding that is, unfortunately, not very deeply appreciated here — not in Latin America, though.

Q: Many of us say, “Well, you know, I’ve got to work hard to support my family, I don’t have a lot of time,” or “I don’t want to seem radical,” or “I don’t want to cause my neighbors to suspect I’m not fully patriotic.” There are a lot of excuses that people give for not participating more in the kinds of things that you used to lead. What do you say to those people?

A: I understand that people want to be safe, polite, obedient, comfortable, but that’s not being alive. Irenaeus, the great early church father, said the glory of God is a human being fully alive. Now, if you back off from every little controversy in your life you’re not alive, and what’s more, you’re boring. It’s a terrible thing that we settle for so much less. Religion is the revelation of the love of God and of human possibility. Christ is a mirror to our humanity and tells us what it means to be alive and well. So it’s hard for me to think they are very good examples for the kind of Christianity I believe in.

Q: After September 11 there was a surge of patriotism. Sometimes it has seemed that patriotism blocked any kind of criticism, that we were afraid if we spoke out against going to war or the policies after the Iraq war, that it would be considered disloyal to the troops and our country. How do you separate patriotism from criticism?

A: In a democracy, dissent is not disloyal. But that’s hard for people to accept when they don’t like criticism. During the war against Vietnam, there was that bumper sticker: “America: Love it or leave it.” That bumper sticker really said, “America: Obey it or leave it.” Or maybe it said “America: Obey it or it will leave you in the cold.” You will be called unpatriotic. You will be told, “Go back to a communist country,” or something like that. It takes work to stay alive. It takes work to engage in dissent. But I would say the great trouble now is self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is the bane of all human relations — interpersonal, international, interfaith. Self-righteousness destroys our capacity for self-criticism. It makes it very hard to be humble, and it destroys the sense of oneness all human beings should have, one with another. I think the fact that we are, as a nation, rather self-righteous now is a terrible danger for us and very bad for other countries.

Q: It must make you terribly frustrated to see all the things you think are wrong and not being righted, and not be able to play the part in leading those movements that you once did.

A: Oh, no. With age, you should step aside. Let other people take over, you know, and maybe the next generation or the one after that will do something much better than we did. Besides, you know, the great Frenchman Albert Camus once said, “There is in the world beauty, and there are the humiliated. And we must strive, hard as it is, not to be unfaithful either to the one or to the other.” Well, blessed as I am living in Vermont, it’s easy to be loyal to beauty. If I get too down on our failure to deal with the humiliated, I can always say, “God was good; the creation hasn’t totally been corrupted yet.” Hope needs to be understood as a reflection of the state of your soul, not a reflection of the circumstances that surround your days. So I remain hopeful. The opposite of hope is despair — not pessimism. As a very convinced Christian, I say to myself, “Come on, Coffin, if Christ never allowed his soul to be cornered into despair, and his was the greatest miscarriage of justice, maybe, in the world, who the hell am I to say I’m going to despair a bit?” And besides, when I addressed people as I used to frequently in the peace movement, there would be, in the last ten years, always somebody saying, “I am so disillusioned.” Well, being old now, I can be forthright and say, “Who the hell gave you the right to have illusions in the first place?” We have no right to have illusions. So we have only ourselves to chastise when we feel disillusioned.

Q: What’s the essential connection for you between religious faith and justice?

A: Justice is at the heart of religious faith. It’s not something that is tacked on. And justice is not charity. Charity tries to alleviate the effects of injustice. Justice tries to eliminate the causes of injustice. Charity is a personal disposition. Justice is public policy. What this country needs, what I think God wants us to do, is not practice piecemeal charity but engage in wholesale justice. And that’s not only to erase or greatly reduce the wage gap and the living standards in America, but really to be committed to doing something about the horrible, really horrible poverty of at least one third of the people on the planet. If you want to do something good for national security, and every American should, take billions of dollars and wage war against world poverty. That would have a very sobering effect on terrorism. Terrorism now has a wonderful recruitment policy supplied by the United States foreign policy. If we were serious, with other nations, to engage the war on poverty around the world, that would stem the flow of recruits to the ranks of terrorists.

Q: Let me ask you to look back a little bit at some of the great movements you were part of. The civil rights movement: What do you remember with the greatest pleasure or what was the greatest lesson of it?

A: The greatest pleasure was being with black civil rights leaders and followers, because they were so alive. You can be more alive in pain than in complacency. These often very poor blacks in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia with whom I had the great pleasure of working, they were so wonderfully alive, so cheerful, so courageous. It was inspiring, really inspiring. I felt from the get-go that the so-called “black problem,” as it was called in those days, was the white man’s problem, and we were the ones discriminating against black folk. We were the ones being pressed not to give them their rights, but to restore rights that should never have been taken away. While it was right to have the civil rights movement led by leaders like Martin Luther King, Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, all the wonderful black leaders, whites were necessary — to bail them out of jail. The NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund did that very well, and whites were very much necessary to raise money, and the Jewish community in New York City was generous to a fault. It was very moving to see that. The rest of us who weren’t lawyers and who didn’t have money — we could go to jail with our black brothers and sisters.

Q: How about the antiwar movement?

A: That was in many ways more painful than the civil rights movement. I think everybody knew discrimination was evil; no question about it. Integration was painful but necessary. I had great sympathy for Southern whites who, if they were against segregation, were like anti-Soviet Russians in communist Russia. Very difficult. The antiwar movement split the nation in a more acute, painful way. It wasn’t quite as clear that we had the Constitution behind us. I think, in retrospect, everybody agrees it was a terrible, terribly misconceived war. After all, the separation between North and South Vietnam was a temporary military line, not a permanent political one. The Geneva Accords in 1953 made that clear, and then Eisenhower admitted, in his autobiography, that we ignored the elections called for because Ho Chi Minh would have won hands down. So it was, in effect, a unilateral, massive intervention in a small Third World country’s civil war. And, of course, the slaughter was just heartbreaking — on both sides. Let’s not forget the other side. There was such a fuss made about missing-in-action Americans. There were about 39 to 45. We went over there; they helped us find them. Meantime, Americans forgot there were about 300,000 missing in action among the Vietnamese.

Q: The nuclear disarmament movement?

A: It’s a new world when you have weapons of mass destruction, and particularly nuclear weapons, which is why Kofi Annan at the UN said the abolition of all nuclear weapons is at the top of the UN agenda. Only God has the right to destroy all life on the planet. All we have is the power. We haven’t the authority; we only have the power. Therefore, to threaten to use nuclear weapons must be an abomination in the sight of God. As far as what we can do about it, it’s not hard. We have to recognize a single standard for all nuclear weapons: either universal permission or universal abolition. Now, there are retired admirals, retired generals, including the U.S. Strategic Air Commander George Leroy Butler, who have been calling for years for the abolition of all nuclear weapons. We don’t need them for our national defense. We are only lacking the political will to do it — obviously under stringent international inspection.

I think the danger of nuclear destruction grows every day. The terrorists will get a hold of it if we don’t police the storage points now. More nations will get a hold of it, because we can’t stop them. We’ve been practicing nuclear apartheid. The nuclear powers have arrogated to themselves the right to build, deploy, threaten to use nuclear weapons, while policing the rest of the world against their production. Now, we all know racial apartheid couldn’t succeed in South Africa. That was apparent from the beginning. Nuclear apartheid will fail, too. That’s why strenuous efforts must be made to abolish nuclear weapons. My personal sadness is, if Kofi Annan says the abolition of nuclear weapons is at the top of the agenda of the UN, why isn’t it at the top of the agenda of every church in this country, every synagogue and mosque?

Q: Are you a pacifist?

A: Fifty-one/forty-nine. I’m a nuclear pacifist, that’s for sure. But there is an irremediable stubbornness about evil. We have to recognize it, including our own complicity in it. St. Augustine said, “Never fight evil as if it were something that arose totally outside of yourself.” We have to constrain it, but I doubt we’ll ever eradicate it. It’s incredibly naïve of President Bush to say that we’ll rid the world of evil. Come on. The pacifists I greatly admire are those who know that the mystery of evil is beyond their solutions. Nonviolence cannot eradicate violence, which means we have a dilemma, because violence is not working very well either. I keep coming back to the wonderful verse in the 33rd Psalm: “The war horse is the vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save.” In short, I’m looking forward to a day when universal police action will take the place of national armies. That would be a blessed day, if we got to that point. In the meantime, we have pacifists and nonpacifists and a terrible dilemma.

Q: As you look back on everything you’ve done in your wonderful life, what are you most proud of?

A: I never thought that was a question I should answer. It’s not so much a question of pride; it’s deep satisfaction. Joy in this world comes from self-fulfillment. Joy is a more profound experience than mere happiness. Happiness connotes pleasure. Joy can include, and not exclude, pain. The moments of great satisfaction in my life are many, for which I’m deeply grateful. Most of all because I’m a pastor and my pastoral relations have been some of the most satisfying experiences of my life. After all, when I was at Yale for 18 years, I spent almost every afternoon when I was in town — and that was most of the time — just counseling students, one on one. People who invite you into the garden of their soul are really wonderful people. They’re never boring. I don’t bear fools’ company gladly, but people who are deeply personal and willing to air their conflicts — that’s very satisfying. That was a part of my life that was very satisfying. And, I must say, when you feel a sense of undeserved integrity because you think you’re in the right fight — against segregation, against the war in Vietnam, against the stupid and cruel discrimination against gays and lesbians — these are the right fights, I feel very deeply. The sense of self-fulfillment which comes with being in the right fight is a very wonderful thing. And lastly, only because I’m mentioning it last, is my family. I was too busy when I was younger to really appreciate the incredible ties I have with the family, with my children and two stepchildren also, and with a wife without whom, I think, I would not be sitting here now. When you get older, friendship obviously runs deeper and deeper. And, I would add, nature gets more interesting the nearer you get to joining it, and also more beautiful. I can sit on the front porch here with a little bit of “mother’s milk,” which I learned to appreciate when I was a liaison officer with the Russian Army (they had lots of it), and just sit there and watch the sun coming in through the maple leaves. You know, God is good.

Q: How about regrets?

A: Regrets? Well, I mentioned one, the fact that — I don’t say this to excuse myself, but I think it’s basically a myth that people who are so devoted on public fronts have a wonderful relationship with their families. They’re kidding themselves. My regret is that when my children were growing up, I was there for them but not in the way that a father ought to be there for them.

Q: You preached that wonderful sermon after your son’s death, and there were some ideas in there about what is “God’s will.”

A: The part that most people most appreciated was that I said I have no comfort in thinking that it was the will of God that Alex die. My comfort lies in feeling that of all hearts to break, God’s was the first as the wave closed over the sinking car. God is not too hard to believe in; God is too good to believe in, we being such strangers to such goodness. The love of God is, to me, absolutely overwhelming. It was an awful tragedy, and you have to go into the depths of pain, and grief is experienced often as the absence of God: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” said Jesus from the cross. But that’s the first words of the 22nd Psalm, and the end of the psalm is in praise of God. It’s always in the depths of hell that heaven is found and affirmed and praised.

Q: How about your own death? Do you think about that?

A: Not very much. I’d just as soon live a little bit longer. But when you’re 80 you can’t complain. To quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his inaugural address, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Fear of death is what is insidious, and once the fear is behind you, then it is only the physical death which is ahead of you. If we didn’t die we’d be immortal, like the Greek gods, and perhaps up to their same dumb tricks. It’s a very good thing we die. In fact, it’s death which brings us to life. But we need to be scared to life, not scared to death. I await death with no protest. “Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light”: I’m sorry, Dylan Thomas, but that’s not always the case. You can go gentle into that good night. Stop complaining. Remember that, as old Hamlet said, “The readiness is all.” Basically, when I said I don’t think much about death, I was really thinking, I don’t think much about what comes next because I believe our lives run from God, in God, to God again. And that’s enough. We might want to know more, but we don’t need to know more, and demanding that I know more about the afterlife somehow demeans my faith. I think, one world at a time. The second world will be in God’s hands, whereas we were lucky enough to live in this world.

Q: We’ve been talking about a lot of big problems. But you seem to be able to deal with these problems in a way that recalls some deep confidence. There’s something deep in there that involves joy and hope. How are you able to look at the world as it is and still have the capacity for feeling joyful?

A: First of all, it’s clear to me that almost every square inch of the Earth’s surface is soaked with the tears and blood of the innocent, and it’s not God’s doing, it’s our doing. That’s human malpractice. Don’t chalk it up to God. Every time people lift their eyes to heaven and say, when they see the innocent suffering, “God, how could you let this happen?” it is well to remember at that exact moment God is asking exactly that same question of us: “How could you let it happen?” You have to take responsibility, and then you have to say with the poet, “We’re always undefeated because we keep on trying.” You have to keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing has the evidence any chance of changing. You hang in there, and not to hang in there is to abdicate and to get bored and be boring, and it’s important to be engaged in the right way. For instance, I mentioned self-righteousness. It’s very hard for me to war against the self-righteousness of my beloved nation without engaging a little bit in self-righteousness. I have to watch that all the time, because the quality of the engagement is very important. Abraham Joshua Heschel always had a wonderful sense of humor about him. King wasn’t exactly a barrel of fun, but still he had a kind of ability to step back and not run himself into the ground. Humor is very important. Faith is important for the ultimate dilemmas of life; humor can take care of the immediate ones rather nicely. I have a wonderful son, David, who keeps me in good jokes, and a joke a day keeps the doctor away. I’m a great believer in that. And then you have to have moments when you let it go. Often I work with one crowd and drink with another, because the drinking crowd is a little bit more fun, but I wouldn’t want to work with them.

Q: Your faith and the nature of God and God’s love — what is the bedrock there for you?

A: The bedrock of my faith — mind you, I didn’t get to it easily. I think I have World War II to thank for it, because there are few things as irrelevant as an answer to an unasked question, and World War II asked all the important questions for me. When I went to college, I had the right questions. And as Rilke says, “Love the question, and live into the answer.” Very nicely put. My rock-solid belief is that we are loved by God. He loves us as we are, but too much to leave us that way. We are loved by God, and that’s what gives us value. We don’t achieve value. It’s not because we have value that we’re loved by God, but because we’re loved by God that we have value. Our value as human beings is not an achievement; it’s a gift. We don’t have to prove ourselves. All that is taken care of. What we have to do is express ourselves, return God’s love with our own. And what a world of difference there is between proving yourself and expressing yourself. That’s the core basis of my faith. And, of course, Jesus is primary. God is not confined to Christ, but to Christians God is most essentially defined by Christ. In other words, when we see Christ empowering the poor, scorning the powerful, healing the world’s hurt, we are seeing transparently the power of God at work. How do we know what to pray? “Through Jesus Christ our Lord” — that’s why all Christian prayers end that way. We are confident about the things we pray for through Jesus Christ our Lord. That’s not to say that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was a great mentor in my life, didn’t see the same things about God from the perspective of the Talmud and the Torah and incredible Jewish literature throughout the ages.

I’m convinced that gratitude is the most important religious emotion. Duty calls only when gratitude fails to prompt. When you’re grateful for the undeserved beauty of a cloudless sky, you’re praying. You’re saying, “Thank you, Lord,” praying all the time about the beauty of nature, of a relationship with other people, the beauty of the deeds some people do. In World War II, occasionally a soldier fell on a grenade there was no time to throw back. Well, you could be absolutely appalled by their deaths, but you could be struck by the beauty of selfless courage. I feel grateful all the time, so my prayers of thanksgiving are very full. My prayers of petition — I don’t tell God what to do, but thinking about other people and trying to think what God would think about them is a way of directing my thoughts to other people. Praying for world peace — instead of saying, “Grant us peace in our time, O Lord,” God must say, “Oh, come off it. What are you going to do for peace, for heaven’s sake?” It’s not enough to pray for it; you have to think for it, you have to suffer for it, and you have to endure a lot for it. Don’t just pray about it. A lot of people think their prayers aren’t answered. They are answered; the answer is “No,” and they haven’t heard it. I don’t think you have to be self-conscious about your prayer life. If you can live in wonder and gratitude and with a sense of wanting to respond — responsible means “respond-able,” able to respond. … If you’re able to respond to the beauty of nature, you’ll be an environmentalist. If you’re able to respond to human beings’ basic right to peace, you’ll be a peacenik. It’s a matter of being full of wonder, thanksgiving, and praying for strength to respond to all the wonder and beauty there is in human life.

Q: I’m interested in the distinction between a speech and a sermon. What do you think it is?

A: A good sermon is like reading a whodunit: “That’s right. I get it.” It’s a discovery of inevitability. A good sermon should raise to a conscious level the knowledge inherent in people’s experience, so they recognize themselves as you do at the end of a whodunit: “Ah! Why didn’t I think of that?” That’s my idea of a good sermon. And you don’t preach at people; you preach for all of us. You show your own humanity as well as the divinity of Christ. Very few preachers do this, including myself. It’s not bad to end up with a question: “What do you think of that?” Let people go think about it, because a good sermon they will remember on Wednesday. If you leave them a question, they’ll wrestle with it.

Speech? It depends on what you mean. Really good conversation is about pretty deep things, and that’s not what Americans engage in very often. I remember asking a distinguished lawyer, “What did you do at the law firm when Martin Luther King was killed?” And he said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Didn’t you senior partners call a meeting to discuss what this means in your lives and what this means to the nation?” And he looked quite surprised. So I asked the next lawyer, “What did you do when King died?” “What do you mean?” he asked. And I realized I couldn’t find a lawyer whose law firm had the simple decency to call together a meeting and say, “Let’s talk about it.” Now that would be speech that would be very close to sermonic speech. It would come from the heart.

Q: What should we be mindful of when we make defense policy?

A: The art of defense is not to lose from within what you’re defending against from without. In defending against terrorism, it’s a great danger that we become like terrorists. We’ve become self-righteous. They certainly are self-righteous. We’ve become vengeful. “Vengeance is mine. I will repay,” saith the Lord. We forget that. With the present attorney general, I fear all the time that he’s going to lose from within the rights we’re trying to protect against terrorists. The idea that in the Patriot Act the government can go into our own library here, any library in the whole country to find out what books people are taking out — come off it. We have more things to do, better things to do than that. I fear desperately that if the terrorists attack again this summer, this fall before the election — if there’s a dirty bomb in the Holland Tunnel, the devastation will be heart-wrenching, and John Kerry will say, “I’m 100 percent behind the president.” And bye-bye to a lot of human values that have made this country really great. That’s following your fears, not being led by your values. That’s an awfully, awfully important thing and, of course, religiously it’s very important. The Scripture says, “Perfect love casts out fear.”

I started campus ministry at Yale in 1970 … and was received by a lot of people there with great graciousness — Hillel people, Thomas More people, but chief in that was Bill Coffin. He wanted some of the denominational campus ministers to be associate pastors at Battell Chapel, which meant that I was always there Sunday mornings. I would do an early Lutheran Eucharist and dash across the Old Campus, go down the aisle for the great procession with the great choir and great organ (Charles Krigbaum was the university organist then). Occasionally we would do some part of the service, the prayers, maybe a reading, but it was more about presence and contact and that sort of thing. Battell was also a parish of the United Church of Christ. There would be services when school was not in session, and that’s when some of the rest of us would also get the chance to preach occasionally. What I appreciated was Bill’s hospitality and his particular model of how to do chapel work and chaplaincy at a school like that. People came there both to do denominational work and then to be “on loan” to the university in an ecclesial way.

Battell in those days, along with the divinity school, had a place at the center of the table of the university in a way I think is not as true anymore. It was a grand place for the exchange of ideas, certainly in the religious mode, and chief in that was Bill’s preaching. I hadn’t the foggiest notion of how to preach out of the Old Testament with the kind of verve that we certainly were trained to have for preaching out of the New Testament. Bill could make the characters in the Hebrew Bible be as alive as I think Lutheran seminaries can help us make either Paul or characters in a parable seem alive. Part of it had to do with his Niebuhrian training and that idea of “Christ transforming culture” — therefore his ability to look at the characters in the Old Testament, many of whom, especially the prophets, were dealing with Hebrew nationhood and Hebrew governance and the machinations of kings and peoples and foreign countries. The war was raging in Vietnam at the time, so his ability to use these ancient texts to say a contemporary word to where we all were then was just extraordinary. It’s not only that he could apply something that David said to the contemporary scene paradigmatically or intellectually or ideologically. He could make David come alive at the same time so that it was flesh-and-blood people speaking. That was delightful for me.

We would meet as pastors of Battell every week, and we’d even pick out the hymns together. Bill’s attention to detail was delightful. He wasn’t simply the prophet on the road; he also had a strong pastoral and, in his own way, liturgical sensibility. When the assignments would go around, and we’d lead what we called the prayer of the faithful or community prayer, he’d often want [associate pastor] Sam Slie to do it, because unlike the rest of us, Sam was not interested in pretty words. It was just meat and potatoes. Not that we didn’t pray, all of us, for those issues, but Sam didn’t dress it up, and Bill loved that.

Bill’s care for the older people in the congregation was something you could sense. He was not only chaplain to the nation and chaplain to a university and certainly a magnet preacher for a lot of folks at the time, he could also pay attention to the details of most people for whom Battell was their parish. I am aware, also, of his doing some small but consistent amount of pastoral counseling to students.

One of the things that Bill modeled for me was his capacity to talk about Jesus, and to talk about Jesus in something more nearly like the public square. Bill was preaching in a church, but he knew full well that he wasn’t just addressing Christians when he spoke from Battell’s pulpit. … Clearly he was a Christian minister, and he was putting Jesus out as a model, but he was doing it in such a way that a Jew or an agnostic or a Buddhist could listen in on the power of what was being said and not be distracted by the claims of people who want somehow to own Jesus, denominationally or religiously. He saw Jesus in bigger terms and could put it out there and therefore keep the discussion going, rather than shut it off or close it down. That is a legacy for ecumenism, because too often we are going for the lowest common denominator, and Bill didn’t do that. He wouldn’t satisfy the “orthodoxists” in his presentation of Jesus, but aside from that it was pretty powerful stuff.

Bill got into any number of public discussions and debates, but preaching was his forum, at least at Yale, and he had humor. Just at the point that he would very nearly bedazzle you with his capacity at winding two strands together, the ancient story and the contemporary story, and you would nearly be blinded by the light of it all, he’d flick in some humor or maybe even some of his own anger. It brought it back home a little bit. There were people who would take notes. I knew divinity school students who could tell me, not only the next week but much later, even later into their careers, “Bill once said … ,” and they had it written down. He had that ability to turn a phrase. If you were to study classical oratory, like those who can tell you how several of Lincoln’s speeches conform to the ancient pattern of Greek rhetoric, Bill had a rhetorical style that often would flame out at you at the end of an idea that he was trying to put forward. It revolved on usually two lines, with the second line being the inversion of the first. But it was done with a certain poetic flair so it would be memorable. It had a certain piercing quality to it. It would bring your soul to its feet saying, “Oh!” He preached with passion, and he used all this emotion. … Words mean a lot, and sometimes their meaning rests in their brevity, or their meaning comes through brevity and through how you work them, how you make them work, how you attend to them. Bill attended to them.

If you look at H. Richard Niebuhr’s book CHRIST AND CULTURE, he talks about five or six definitions of different relationships of Christ to culture. Lutherans are usually interested in the Christ of culture, whereas Calvinists are about Christ the transformer of culture — the insights of Scripture and of Jesus trying to break through how the civic realm worked to the more pure, more noble, more just. Lutherans, with their attention to the sinfulness of all things, are more inclined at their best to engage in the sinfulness in some fashion, to get their hands absolutely dirty and at some level take it as it is, whereas Calvinists want actually to change the order, to transform it in some fashion. Bill was a Calvinist, so his preaching often would have to do with not simply inviting us to get involved in the messiness of things, but labeling the messiness and saying there are paradigms from the Scripture that we can rely on to suggest alterations of the system.

I think about Bill’s joy of living. What I’m grateful for is that I have known him a little bit up close, and the fiery orator known closer to be a person of such exuberance and joy is different from the fiery orator who is just mad. It’s interesting I would put it that way, because he often would say, “Never trust a happy revolutionary.” Why? Because the things that you want to change and the anger that you bring to a situation cause pain. You hurt people. He knew that some of what he did, the changes that he wanted to be a part of — if the changes themselves weren’t hurting people, people were hurting in any event. It’s not a happy thing, so don’t be happy in the sense of, “I’m glad I’m a part of the revolution. Isn’t this fun?” But conversely and paradoxically, at the same time he was a person of immense fun. He could sit down at the piano and just rattle those ivories something fierce.

I think he respected the university in a deep, deep way and took it seriously as one of the “orders of creation,” to use Lutheran words. He knew that his role there as chaplain was to be the person to speak truth to power. But he didn’t do it as an outsider to the power circles. He was clearly an insider, but he understood at the same time he was an insider only as a prophet is an insider. So it was a strange balance there that he was able to keep. Some people get on the inside and lap it up. He was on the inside because he could speak truth to power, because they knew him and he knew his stuff. He did his homework. He could speak within the academic world with considerable authority. He was on the inside, but he wasn’t on the inside in terms of what his calling was. He brought that other voice. But whether inside or out, he had enormous respect for the academic institution. He knew it was flawed, but he took where he was planted so seriously. I’m thinking of the great convert to Catholicism, John Henry Newman, and his essay on the idea of a university, and Jaroslav Pelikan’s reexamination of that. There are not a lot of people around who think that sort of thing. For crying out loud, it’s a business anymore, and students are clients and consumers, and if not the students then their parents. It was a privilege to go to school, whether you went to Yale or the University of Maine, and you went there with that sense. I think the people who served best also felt that.

Read recollections of William Sloane Coffin by the Rev. Philip Zaeder, associate university chaplain at Yale in the 1970s and former chaplain and dean of the faculty at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

My acquaintance with Bill Coffin began almost 50 years ago in a room at Yale College. He did not so much occupy as fill a room, his speech touching even the most skeptical of listeners. In the fall of 1955, in the old Dwight Hall library, dimly lit and unpretentious, our group of naïve, hesitant Presbyterians awaited their new divinity school advisor. Bill entered and spoke to us with passion, his words wise and compassionate, filled with cadence and humor. He talked of love as a witness in ways I had not imagined or conceived. With the bracing candor of a Socratic sojourner, he asked whether we are loved because we are worthy, or worthy because we are loved. We are loved because God first loved us, Bill reminded us.

Twelve years later, I shared rooms with Bill in Durfee Hall at Yale as his associate in the chaplaincy. During those years in the 1970s, I watched him fill his office, Battell Chapel, press conferences, walkways, even once the New Haven Green, as the Vietnam War, the trial of Black Panther Bobby Seale, May Day events, and the Hunger Action project demanded his time and received his strength and wisdom. I learned firsthand his capacity for turns of phrase, an almost psalmlike gift to find urgency and truth in language. “Dogma is a signpost, not a hitching post,” he would tell his chapel audience, and more recently, “Truth is above harmony. Those who fear disorder more than injustice invariably produce more of both. … If faith puts us on the road, hope keeps us there.” A Yale professor once said of Bill, “We expect him eventually to mellow.” An unfulfilled prophecy. (Warren Goldstein’s recent biography, WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN, JR.: A HOLY IMPATIENCE, published by Yale University Press, is a testimony to Bill’s far-reaching ministry and soul-filled character, an etching framed by the lines of turmoil and pain, joy and accomplishment.)

Bill had an inspired touch. Chopin came from the keys of his piano. A child, cradled in his arms, was touched by his pastor’s baptismal hand. He gently held candles in vigils, clasped his fingers, like Millet’s farmers, in prayer. I learned how deftly his hand could direct a squash shot to the corner (”Your day for character-building, Phil,” he would say) and felt the breathtaking power of his Russian bear hug in the passing of the peace.

Bill’s voice could rise and fall with the rhythms of a singer and move with the authority of a biblical prophet. And what a voice: it would boom and rasp with an accent all its own and give tongue to Russian, French, Spanish, and German, to Yiddish jokes, Vermont tales, and pithy street humor. “We love our enemies,” he would say, “not by countenancing their sins but by remembering our own. It is the only way to avoid self-righteousness that is the bane of both interpersonal and international problems.” When a minor stroke forced Bill to find his voice again, he would tell his listeners, “I will say only one thing about my voice, akin to what Mark Twain said of Wagner’s music: it must be better than it sounds.” It does sound good and right. It kindles lives and hearts and afflicts the comfortable while bringing, time and again, comfort to the grieving and to those longing for truth.

Bill has the ability to bring light into dark corners of our lives and historical times and to lift our spirits in prayer. His own spirit seems stretched by God’s majesty, yet grounded in the Holy Spirit. The holy becomes for him not a theological abstraction, but the impetus for life and love. In a prayer once for Dr. Howard Koh, he began: “Almighty God, who has created a world beautiful beyond any singing of it, yet one which is filled with rebuffs and heartaches and the mysteries of sickness and death, pour out thy blessing on this healer, thy servant Howard.” In an invocation at a Battell Chapel service in the early ’70s, he prayed: “O God, who hast scattered in the sky stars greater in number than the inhabitants of this earth, and yet art one to whom we turn as to a father, thou who hast given us minds and bodies and spirits, and with whom we can walk and talk, sing and laugh, and learn that giving is taking and love is all in all, how can we speak and not of Thee? Who but Thee deserves our love?”

At the heart of Bill’s world, I imagine, lies the astonishing, life-giving power of the Holy Spirit: a world beautiful in the making, a creation groaning to be full. He could say, like Gerard Manley Hopkins, that the world “is charged with the grandeur of God.” The poet wonders why men do not reckon with God but instead blur the world with trade and turmoil; Hopkins concludes with thought akin to Bill’s vision:

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

In a sermon years ago, Bill preached on Jesus’ phrase, “Do not be anxious about your life” from the Sermon on the Mount: “If the world does not give us what we want, God gives us what we need (and probably really want anyway). We shall have what our faith expects … namely freedom, a thumb-nosing independence from all the powers of death militant that want to do us in.” Bill then went on to quote Isaiah 40:

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary. … He gives strength to the weary,
and to them who have no might he increases strength.
Even youths shall faint and grow weary …
But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength,
They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary,
They shall walk and not faint.

As Bill once wrote, “I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.”