By Stephen Miller - Staff Reporter of the Sun April 13, 2006
William Sloan Coffin, who died yesterday at 81, was among the foremost pacifists of his generation, and set the mold for the liberal activist preacher, both on campus at Yale and as pastor of New York's Riverside Church.
After a few years in the CIA, and inspired by anti-communist convictions, Coffin went to divinity school and became the campus chaplain at Yale, where his habit of making pastoral rounds on a motorcycle added an exclamation point to his challenge to students to live out their faith. While at Yale, he was among the most visible of the Northern clergy among the Freedom Riders who supported civil rights demonstrators in the south.
Applying civil disobedience to international affairs to protest the Vietnam War, Coffin led students to turn in their draft cards, and urged those with deferments to give them up and declare themselves conscientious objectors. In 1972, he visited Hanoi in order to accompany three released prisoners of war home to America.
When 52 Americans were held captive by student terrorists in Iran in 1979, Coffin was one of four American clergymen selected by Iran's ruling Revolutionary Council to travel to Tehran to celebrate Christmas with the hostages. He returned with hopeful remarks about the captives' chances - "This is one point when we have got to rejoice in a Muslim country [alcohol was banned]. There were no drunk guards and, needless to say, no drunk hostages." But when Coffin urged Americans to acknowledge "past sins" in Iran, the criticism was deafening.
But for Coffin, a hue and cry was confirmation that he was doing his job. When a minister once lamented to him that the press was disinterested in mainline churches, Coffin replied, "Do something interesting." Following his own advice, Coffin resigned the pastorate at Riverside in 1987 to focus on peace and nuclear disarmament, as president of SANE/Freeze, now called Peace Action. After retiring in the early 1990s, he continued to speak out and write. His most recent book was "Letters to a Young Doubter" (2005), in which he quoted Rilke's words, "be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves," for gradually, "you will live into the answers." Turbulence and doubt were to be expected, and indeed were the genesis of Coffin's ministry.
Coffin was born June 1, 1924, in New York, where his father, William Sr., was proprietor of W.&J. Sloane, a Fifth Avenue furniture store. It was an old-line Puritan family of note, and Coffin's uncle served as president of Union Theological Seminary and was a fellow of the Yale Corporation. Family fortunes reversed during the Depression and Coffin's father died. The family relocated to California, and then, in 1938, moved to France, where Coffin briefly studied piano with Nadia Boulanger. Any thought of a career as a concert pianist was dashed, but Coffin retained a love of music, and throughout his life used his skills at the keyboard to encourage friends and strangers alike to sing with him. Returning to America, Coffin, just 14, enrolled at Phillips Academy and then Yale, where he initially studied music. In 1942, he entered the Army and went to Europe as an infantry officer. He served as a liaison officer to the French, and after a crash course, to the Russians.
It was while serving with the Russians immediately after the war that Coffin became involved in Operation Keelhaul, in which he helped return to Russia some 3,000 troops suspected of disloyalty. The men, he knew at the time, were destined to an almost-certain death - he watched at least three of commit suicide, two by shoving their heads through windowpanes to slit their jugulars. His inaction left him with a "burden of guilt," he wrote, "sure to carry the rest of my life."
He returned to Yale intending a career in the foreign service, but spent several years vacillating between direct action via government work and spiritual action in the ministry. He attended Union Theological Seminary for a year, then, in 1950, joined the CIA, where he participated in running Russian agents into the Soviet Union, with mixed to dubious results. In 1953, he enrolled in Yale Divinity School, and became chaplain at Phillips Academy, and then Williams College. He returned to Yale as chaplain in 1958.
Leading student Freedom Riders, he was arrested several times for disturbing the peace in Montgomery, Ala., and elsewhere in the South. Later, to help protest the Vietnam War, he teamed with John Bennett of Union Theological Seminary and Abraham Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary, he founded Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam (later known simply as Clergy and Laity Concerned). He wrote that "the church in our country has been remiss in its prophetic role," and he was a charismatic enough figure around campus to become the model for "Rev. Sloan" in the comic strip "Doonesbury," when it was first penned by then-Yale undergraduate Garry Trudeau.
In 1967, Coffin and Dr. Benjamin Spock presented authorities at the Department of Justice with the draft cards of hundreds of young men in protest of the war. The two were arrested and charged with conspiring to disobey the Selective Service Act. Their convictions were overturned on appeal.
Coffin was known for his optimism and humor while protesting the iniquities of the world. Once, while speaking to the congregation at Riverside about international arms control, he said, "We have to be meek or there will be no one to inherit the earth."
http://www.nysun.com/article/30900
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