Many Native Americans and their supporters like myself recognize the importance of celebrating the history and contributions of ALL AMERICANS, but there has to be a better way to honor Italian Americans, without associating them with Christopher Columbus.
I hope that we could find a reasonable compromise to satisfy all parties involved moving forward.
This past Tuesday, the Beatitudes Church and Campus communities, along with families and friends, gathered to celebrate the life of our founder, Rev. Dr. Culver H. “Bill’ Nelson. It was a deeply moving service where we heard of his four great passions- Music, Community, Preaching and Denomination Leadership. Each person shared stories and his role in their own leadership development. The Rev. Dr. Dosia Carlson remarked on his love of song and music; The Rev. Dave Hunting on his profound presence at the pulpit and the reflections and actions he left congregants; The Rev. Dr. William “Bill” Lyons on his leadership in the growth of both the United Church of Christ and Southwest Conference, and Peggy Mullan, my predecessor, on his involvement in not only the Campus Church communities, but the Phoenix community as a whole.
With her permission, below are excerpts from her piece.
Bill always believed that the secular community, our civic lives, should not be separate from the spiritual community. A man of action always, he lived that belief. He was a founding member of the Phoenix Forty, a group of forty businessmen brought together by Eugene Pulliam to envision the Phoenix of the future way back in 1975. Much of what we enjoy today in urban Phoenix came out of their dreaming and designing. Bill was active in the formative years of Valley Leadership; he served as chaplain frequently at our state legislature and worked diligently on too many boards and commissions throughout the state of Arizona to enumerate. Among his many joys were the interfaith relationships he fostered with clerics from every faith community imaginable. He enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the esteemed and beloved Rabbi Al Plotkin, another giant from the spiritual community of his generation.
It’s impossible to talk about Bill without speaking of his beloved wife and partner in everything important – Dee. He loved her passionately and unabashedly. When Dee suffered a massive stroke and then through the years several others, Bill rose to the occasion in a way that honestly surprised us all. She had been the wind beneath Bill’s wings…we feared he would not know what to do. How very wrong we were.
It will always be a point of pride for me and every other employee of the Campus that we were part of Bill and Dee’s lives as they grew older.
I’d like to close my comments today by presuming to speak for someone who is not able to be at this lectern today—Bill’s good friend and my predecessor that I mentioned earlier, Rev. Dr. Ken Buckwald. When Ken would give a eulogy for someone he particularly loved and admired, he always closed with these words from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 25, verse 23. I’ll speak them now in tribute to the friendship that the two men shared as they worked together over fifty plus years: “Well done, good and faithful servant…now enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”
Amen
I hope you can join us at Wednesday’s Town Hall meeting where we will begin with a special time of remembrance honoring our Founder, The Rev. Dr. Culver H. “Bill” Nelson.
By now, you have likely heard the very sad news that our Beatitudes Campus founder, Dr. Culver H. (Bill) Nelson, passed away on Friday April 14, 2019. Beatitudes Campus has lost a visionary leader and our community has lost an amazing soul.
Perhaps if you have travelled around the North of England, you may have seen the colossal sculpture pictured with this article. Not many sculptures become as famous as The Angel of the North, seen by an estimated 33 million people as they pass by each year. The Angel looms over the countryside for many miles around, with its 66ft tall body, and with its wingspan of 177ft. Its wings are angled 3.5 degrees forward to express what its sculptor Sir Anthony Gormley, called ‘a sense of embrace’ as he sought to create something ‘to serve as a focus for our evolving hopes and fears’.
Like so much of his work it is based on a cast of his own body. Gormley has said that he bases his work on casts of his own body because, as he put it, ‘it is the closest experience of matter that I will ever have and the only part of the material world that I live inside.’ He treats the body not as an object, but as a place, and in making works that enclose the space of a particular body tries to identify a condition common to all human beings.
We as individuals are embodied. Body, mind and spirit bound up together. The ancient creation narrative in the Book of Genesis pictures us as clay which has been breathed into life.
We now have a much fuller picture of that living clay. According to a generally accepted figure we are made of an astonishing 37.2 trillion cells, with each cell being formed of 100 trillion atoms. Each atom, each cell, busy being itself to combine in every more complex ways to form this being- which is you and me- which can feel and touch, see and hear, recognize right and wrong, and love and pray. No wonder the psalmist was impelled to cry out ‘I will give thanks unto thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well’ (Psalm 139, 13).
Maintaining a sense of awe and wonder in relation to our bodies helps to highlight those times when we fail to respect ourselves as created miracles made in the image of God. When we fail to have that same respect for the other 7.6 billion other walking-talking miracles of creation alive today, because of what they wear, or the color of their skin, or the politics that they ascribe to, then we are led to a very disturbing place indeed. The Apostle Paul put it very bluntly;
‘Do you not know that the body is a temple of the indwelling Holy Spirit?’
What a stark and much needed reminder to honor God in our lives and in the lives of others. May we all be open to the divine embrace as we evolve through our hopes and fears.*
