At my friend George’s memorial service last week, one of his two sons told an anecdote about his father that made everyone laugh.
George had grown up in New York City in a family of some wealth so he was used to privilege. But he chose to live modestly as a look inside his home quickly revealed. It was located in one of the poorest parts of my urban community, close to a city square that has been run-down for decades.
One day George, wearing his usual old clothes and looking disheveled, was walking through the square when a woman obviously poorer than he approached him and pressed a five dollar bill into his hand. Taken aback, George refused the money and returned it to the woman.
In response, the woman said to him, “Take it, for Jesus’ sake.” George, unable to resist this invocation, did then take it.
The anecdote about my late friend says something important about his character. Though he was widely known for his work for improvement of the local and world community, George also was deeply spiritual. As his other son said of him, “George combined secular humanism with intense spiritual fervor.”
The memorial service brought out the two sides of his outlook. It featured Latin and Greek chants from the classic Christian liturgy: the Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei from the Mass. These Gregorian chants George had first learned at Mount Saviour monastery in Elmira, New York where as a young man he spent a year doing religious studies.
George loved sacred music and himself played the flute. One of his heroes was Johann Sebastian Bach and an aria from this composer’s St. Matthew Passion was sung in the memorial service. The short aria concludes, “Welt, geh aus, lass Jesum ein.” (World, get out, let Jesus in.)
The service also included several remembrances from friends and colleagues who spoke of George’s work on behalf of the community. “He wanted to stop World War III,” said the person who managed George’s unlikely and doomed campaign for the United State’s Senate.
A distinguished physicist now retired from the M. I. T. faculty, after suggesting that some of the same challenges to world peace exist today, called George “a man of utmost integrity of mind and spirit.”
Another colleague recalled co-authoring a 1979 book with George that called for the Pentagon to cut its budget by fifty percent! That same colleague, when he thinks of George’s approach to society, recalls the bumper sticker that urges, “Think globally, act locally.”
Despite the social privileges of his upbringing, George knew suffering his whole life. As a child he had polio and needed to spend months in an iron lung. His mother used to read stories to him during this time of confinement, stories that George later told to his sons. In the aftermath of polio, his lungs were damaged and he also experienced severe back problems. By middle age, he walked with much difficulty.
“Conformism was just not part of George’s vocabulary,” said one of his sons. Like all people who work for the public good, George could be difficult. He espoused causes that many other people considered wildly unrealistic, if not wrongheaded.
He was a man of prominent contradictions. Another friend calls him “an aristocrat committed to democracy, a fierce warrior for peace.” Like other prophets, he was sometimes hard to take. But, those who knew him well respected his generosity of spirit.
His faith was deep. In his report to classmates preparing to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of graduation from college, George wrote: “My current interest is trying to stave off death until I finish the two and a half last (of twenty-nine) chapters of a guide of the Gospel of Matthew, chapter by chapter, verse by verse.”
His wife said at the service, “He really did consider St. Matthew’s Gospel a guide for life.” He did not succeed in staving off death as he hoped and the Gospel guide remains unfinished. But George has finished his own life in a way that those who knew him recognize as unique and precious.
The service concluded with everyone singing the round “Dona Nobis Pacem” (Grant Us Peace), honoring a man of peace and of spirit whose memory will live on.
Richard Griffin