The Valley of the Shadow

Forrest Church: Notes & Quotes

Yes, yes, the above graphic is taken (shamelessly) from the cover of the late Forrest Church's Love & Death: My Journey through the Valley of the Shadow. I'll have more to say soon. 


In the meantime, here is Pastor Church:.

Death is central to my definition of religion. Religion is our human response to the deal reality of being a live and having to die ... the religious animal, knowing that we must die, we question what life means. The answers we arrive at may not be religious answers, but the question death forces us to ask are, at heart, religious questions .....

Death is not life's goal, only life's terminus. The goal is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for. This is where love comes into the picture. The one thing that cannot be taken away from us, even by death, is the love we have given away before we go.

..... We do not and cannot possess the ones we love, for we hold them on loan. This hard truth makes the courage to love also the courage to lose. It speaks most eloquently when anything we cherish is in jeopardy, when our expectations for the for the way life ought to be are interrupted and challenged by death.

.....all of our stories end in the middle .....

.....Love and death are allies. When a loved one dies, the greater the pain, the greater love's proof. Such grief is a sacrament. Sacraments bring us together. The measure of our grief testifies to our love.

.....We cannot protect love from death. But by giving away our hearts, we can protect our lives from the death of love.

..... Few of us are unafraid of death. Death is the ultimate mystery. But there is a way to counter this fear. It lies in our courage to love. Our courage to risk. Our courage to lose. Many people have said it many different ways. The opposite of love is not hate. It is fear.

Forrest Church's father was Senator Frank Church from Idaho, a famous critic of the Vietnam war, and thus I was a great fan. At his memorial, the words of Thornton Wilder were on the program:

All that we can know about those we have loved and lost is that they would wish us to remember them with a more intensified realization of their reality. What is essential does not die but clarifies. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

Church resumes, citing his mantra in sickness and in health:

Want what you have.

Do what you can.

Be who you are.

.....A proportional relationship exists between the fear of death andthe fear of life. The fear of death diminishes our trust in life by increasing our awareness of the risk of living. Diminished trust and an increased awareness of risk are two primary sources of fear's debilitating power .... Until we can embrace death as (along with birth) one of the two essentialhinges on which life turns, we remain, at least to a degree, in hiding .....

Life is difficult, fragile, painful, unpredictable, unfathomable, and limited. Put simply, everyone suffers. That is a given. Suffering is a birthright far more inalienable than happiness. And the shares are not allotted evenly ..... Yet all is not hopeless. Despite our ignorance and suffering, hope emerges in the lifelines thast connect us ..... We cannot avoid adversity, loss, or failure, but we do have a choice of how we will respond .... Everyone suffers, but not everyone despairs. Despair is a consequence of suffering only when affliction cuts us off from other. It need not. The sane suffering that leads one person to lose all hope can as easily promote empathy, a felt appreciation for other people's pain. Grief, failure, even death can thus be sacraments. Not that suffering is valuable in and of itself. If one suffers alone, suffering is no elixir. A sacrament symbolizes communion, the act of bringing us together. Suffering brings us together when we discover the lifelines that connect our hearts.