A holy man died last March, born in the 1920s and leaving this earth early in the 2020s.
I am richer for knowing this saint. Sanctus, kadosh, holy--every language has a word for the kind of person Albert Gleaves Cohen was.
Al Cohen was reverend too, ordained a minister/servant in the United Church of Christ. Early in his life, he attended the Naval Academy in Anapolis, Maryland, graduating just after the world's second great war.
I loved visiting him at his home in Pasadena. He read widely and followed the political follies of the last several years in Washington, D.C., where he was born. Our political views were very similar though his observations were made with humor and patience, mine with frustration.
His study of theology at Oberlin College made him a radical Christian, the kind that changed the world in the first centuries of the Common Era. From the 1960s through the mid-1990s, he worked on two California State University campuses as a chaplain, showing students how to be a follower of Jesus:
attending peace marches, organizing protests, registering voters in Mississippi and in Selma, Alabama, organizing trips to U.N. environmental conferences and generally "speaking truth to power." (from the legacy.com website below)
Then in 1996 he became executive director of the Southern California Ecumenical Council, working for racial justice and against US military adventures, among other causes.
My path intersected with his in 1994 when Faith Annette Sand of Hope Publishing House decided to publish my prochoice book on Christians choosing abortion (Abortion--My Choice, God's Grace: Christian Women Tell Their Stories). I had met Faith, his second wife, at conferences of evangelical feminists. She died of cancer in 2015 at age 76.
To the end, he remained a keen observer of humans, their ups and downs, and their foibles.
Albert Cohen was the kind of man who causes others to say, "Yes, there is a God. The deity he sees and serves, I want to believe in."
Praise be to the Holy One who gives us life.
Or as the Kaddish says, "Magnified and exalted be God's great Name throughout the world created by divine will."
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/albert-cohen-obituary?pid=198313275
A public memorial service will be held on October 2, 2021, in Pasadena.
No comments:
Post a Comment