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Yesterday I travelled by way of the Number 3 train to 72nd and Amsterdam by subway, then walked from the subway stop over to Fourth Universalist Church (76th St and Central Park West) to pick up some items that I had lent Rosemary Bray McNatt,. I walked back to the subway and took the train to 42nd Street and then transferred over to S train and took it to Grand Central. I then walked to the Community Church at 35th and Park. I met with Janice Marie Johnson about some details for the Memorial Service for my late wife, Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley. Then I walked over to Sixth Street and got on the N to bring me back to Court Street in Brooklyn. The subways are wonderful ways of getting around the city, but the haven't been updated for ease of use, upstairs and downstairs and long corridors for transfers.

I think I might have walked four miles during the course of the afternoon plus at least 12 flights of stairs. I am not in terrible shape, but not ready to hike up a mountain either - but New Yorkers do this kind of thing everyday.

One can be car free in New York, get a good workout, and spend the money one would on a car on taxis when time is pressing. And save enough to retire to the Sun Belt, I can' t imagine doing those stairs for many more years.

Of course I might have walked a few less steps if I had my sense of direction up and running. Marjorie always told me I could find my way anywhere, but I have found myself turned around more than once in this city. I got to corner of the 35th and Park Ave. yesterday and lo there was no church! I called Janice, and she told me to cross the street. Community Church is one the West Side of Park, not the East as I had remembered.

I am looking out over the Manhattan skyline from a Brooklyn Heights parsonage. I can see where the Staten Island Ferry docks, and where the Brooklyn Bridge enters Manhattan and I can see the Empire State Building further up Manhattan. Beneath the Empire State Building is the location of community church.

I am in New York until the Memorial Service for Marjorie on Saturday. My New York City visits go back to the early 1960s. I was here when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and I was part of the huge demonstration the next day, I was here for anti Vietnam war rallies, and large meetings in solidarity with the overthrown democratically elected government of
Chile. Most of my New York adventures were on the upper West Side in those days.

Later I lived a few months in Chelsea, and visited friends here frequently driving from Boston and parking in the space of a friend who lived in a co-op who had a parking space but no car.
When I meet Marjorie I got to know the East Side a little better, I would come down from Quebec and we would see the city. I remember the trip to Union Theological School for a lecture, it was cold and it involved a lot of transfers. The lecture I have forgotten, but that trip was an adventure. Marjorie travelled all over the city.

I know Boston so much better, but this city has been very much a part of my life. I will consider the next few days as if it were a pilgrimage, reconnecting with so many events over so many years.

Boston's Arlington Street was not my first church experience. I didn't begin to attend Arlington Street until I was nineteen. I had been part of at least four Unitarian churches before that, not counting the one I was christened in. But in those churches I was always Clyde and May's son Clyde Elliot.

Arlington Street was a place where no one knew my parents, and I was one of the young people. Jack Mendelson was minister then. I was not a loyalist. I went to King's Chapel, First Church and Charles Street Meeting House. When I went to San Francisco to finish to college, I went to the Bay area UU churches. When I came back to Massachusetts in 1965 to go Crane Theological School I did my student ministry at Second Church of Boston up in the Fenway.

But I always came back to Arlington Street when I had to think about my life. I first made the decision to go into the ministry there sitting in a pew. It was sitting in that same pew that i decided to leave theological school in 1966 and throw myself into trying to stop the Vietnam war. When I became disillusioned with the leadership of the Unitarian Universalist Association during the Black Empowerment Struggle in 1969 and 1970, I found folks at Arlington Street who agreed with me, and was able to "keep the faith" despite my anger with those who we had designated to lead us. For years I travelled as an organizer, kept myself busy as a justice advocate, and experienced that Arlington Street was there when I had a free Sunday, when I needed to touch base with that childhood faith that kept calling me home.

Finally it was at Arlington Street all most twenty years ago now that I again felt the call to become a Unitarian Universalist minister. At the time, I had so many commitments and it seemed totally out of the question, so many people depended on me. But I was yearning for a way to combine my commitment to social justice and peace with a spiritual understanding. I read for a few years, trying to reconnect with the theological and religious studies that I had given up as irrelevant in the late 60s when the realities of war and racism confronted my liberal faith and found it wanting. Over the next years I began to reconstruct a theology, Unitarian in ancient simplicity - bring God's beloved community to realization, it is present and among us, but we do not see it.

It was at Arlington Street where I was ordained. And I have returned at least once a year.

During this last week I have been there three times, twice for public worship and once for a conversation with my home church's minister. Kim Crawford Hardie and I shared stories of Marjorie. I experience myself as a congregant with her, a colleague and peer to be sure, but she is still my minister. It was good to go home.

I have been in Boston for a week tomorrow. I have been visiting friends. I have been checking in at the UUA. I came up to Boston just after the funeral last Saturday.

When I came I was disoriented. Grieving. Tired. Very tired. I was coming down with a cold. The cold lingers. I am less disoriented. I have embraced the grieving, it doesn't possess me like last week. I experience myself owning the grief, and being deliberate about the process. I know I will still find myself overwhelmed and taken by aching sorrow. But right now it is more a sweet sorrow, a contemplative sigh.

Talking to people who knew Marjorie is good for the soul, good for the grieving. Thanks to all who gave of their time. One good friend observed that those I meet with, knew Marjorie as well, and that the sharing of stories with me was part of their grieving as well. She asked if that was difficult for me. I answered no. I find being alone more difficult, talking with others about Marjorie is healing.

I lived in Boston and its vicinity for most of my adult life. Being here, trying to navigate by rapid transit and bus, walking from the bus to this church, and that headquarters building has been a revelation. My body has become accustomed to a warmer, dryer winter than Boston presents. This is a warm day for Boston, but it is too cold and damp for me.

My soul loves Boston, but my body wants to be in LA. I think I will schedule my Boston visits for the warmer times in the future.

"I continue to be nurtured by my ministerial colleagues, but when I go into many of our congregations, at a cultural level, it often feels like all the healthy juices in my body are being drained out of me.

What continues to challenge my personal faith is wondering whether I will ever see the day when our religious movement moves beyond its Eurocentric norms. We would probably all agree that a life of faith cannot be nurtured in the face of endemic evil. But it's more difficult to see that it is also impossible for many people from non-European heritage to be nurtured by an upper middle class Euro-centric norm blessed by self-satisfaction.

Someday, I'm going to update W.E.B. DuBois' book, "The Ways of White Folks," that will focus on the cost of Euro-centrism and of cultural indifference in a multicultural society."

From the Reverend Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley
address to the Birmingham Minister's Convocation 2002

A DRUUM meeting in San Diego, California

We are planning the memorial service for December 30th at Community Church of New York at 2 pm. It took a little bit of coordinating to find a common date.



"Ministry is what we do together - clergy and the laity. It flows from a religious
conviction that invites people to become more of themselves, more whole, as we give
witness to a vision of a world transformed by our care."

Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley - January 2005
from an eulogy delivered at her father's funeral

This is a photo of the Rev. Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley and Janice Marie Johnson sharing in the ministry of JUUST change. (An UUA effort to help congregations in the transformative work of overcoming racism and embracing multiculturalism.) It was taken by JUUST change consultant Annette Marquis

Marjorie and I chose to celebrate her life at The Community Church in New York. To gather all that we hoped could participate means that the service will be in January. Some have assumed that the service would take place right away, but Marjorie thought big and her service will reflect her spirit.

Marjorie passed to glory yesterday morning.

Her sister, her daughter, her nephew, a good friend and I were with her. We prayed and wished her peace and breadth from the dawn to about ten in the morning and then she left us peacefully. It was a gentle crossing.

I sat with her till the late afternoon when the men came to take her, and the family gathered on the street as she was driven away.

Our good friend Hope Johnson was installed as minister of the congreation in Garden City (Long Island) New York and many of her friends and colleagues were there and they tell me that Marjorie's name was lifted up as part of the celebration.

The family gathered here and we shared my photographs of her and memories into the late evening

Marjorie said "my life is a prayer. She witnessed Jesus with her life, praying always.