I was one of the lucky Masters of Divinity students in 1988 who made it through the lottery for Peter Gomes’ preaching course at Harvard Divinity School. He ushered us into the semester with flourish, answering all of our questions. “Of course I am a Republican. Didn’t Lincoln free the slaves?” and “Yes, I did pray for the Bush Administration at the inauguration. Somebody had to pray for them.” Then he got us down to business. “Welcome to Homiletics. Speaking from the pulpit is a formidable task. You must read, read, read, before you try to preach. Read sermons by masters. Read sermons by scholars. Read all that you can, and then set aside the devotion to reading, for when you preach you must never read.”

He taught us to preach without notes, looking directly at the congregation. “Far better it is,” he said, “to stumble or repeat yourself than to read drivel from a manuscript.” We limped our way toward Peter’s goal, over the months of the course, and he cheered us along the way. “Keep trying,” he would say, listening and finally taking out a small phrase from an impossibly inarticulate speech. “That little bit was fine.”

At the end of the semester, he invited us all to supper. We dined, enjoying Peter’s lively stories. After dessert, he offered us each a short speech. He praised us for our strengths. He challenged us to overcome our weaknesses. Then he handed us each a book, selected from the shelves in his study. These were his gifts to us. Some of the books were galley proofs, sent to him by colleagues for his comments. Some were antiques. Some were brand new. Some were worn and creased. He had thought about where we could proceed with our intellectual thought, and chosen something appropriate. He inscribed the books for us and handed them over.

Over the years, I have sent many field education students to Peter’s homiletics courses, and he has invited me back to his preaching class dinners. Each time I have been there, he has done the same thing: a meal, a speech, and a book. As I have seen his students leave that dinner, clutching their gift books, I have learned something from Peter’s generosity. Diverse as his students are, from various theological schools and spiritual perspectives, Peter knew that they must read, read, read to be able to speak eloquently. He also knew that they had to be able, after a point, to set aside their books and speak face to face.

As Peter heads to his next great adventure, I know he is well prepared. After all, he has set aside the rest of his books. He is unencumbered with notes and manuscripts. And when that sweet chariot swings low, he is ready to speak, face to face.

My dearest memory of Peter Gomes was of him presiding at an old-fashioned hymn sing at a little chapel in the woods of Plymouth, which he did every summer. His delight in leading old favorites like How Great Thou Art with a full house was infectious and unforgettable.

He was a Plymouthean as well as a Harvard man, in his words "sturdy people with ruddy faces, brought up on cranberries, chowder and pond water, where simple living and high thinking is the order of the day . . .".

Like most of us, not a churchgoer during my time at Harvard and definitely not a Baptist (needless to say), my familiarity with Reverend Gomes for much of my undergraduate life came through glimpses of him walking magisterially through the Yard or in hearing him deliver wise words at campus gatherings. You felt better knowing he was around, our very own sage. But joining the Signet my senior year brought me the great pleasure of actually getting to be an acquaintance--turning the corner into the dining room and finding that you had luckily chosen to dine on a day that Reverend Gomes would join you and, on the best of days, walking back to campus with him after five courses of Rachel's best. As many others have remembered these last couple weeks, those moments were filled with unusual knowledge and warmth, and the rare experience of realizing that you are with someone who is truly singular.

But my favorite memory of Reverend Gomes has none of this gravity, nor is it set in the historic confines of Harvard College. In May of my senior year, on the cusp of graduating with no certain idea where I was going next, and just off a day of interviewing for a job I wouldn't get, I sat in the terminal at Baltimore-Washington Airport in the late afternoon, ready to go back to Harvard, stressed out, and unfortunately caught in a conversation with a fellow passenger whose attentions I did not want. God himself surely planned that Reverend Gomes would walk around the corner at that moment, Roy Rogers bag in hand. Of course my jaw dropped, and of course I waved him over, and of course he soothed all my anxieties as we talked over french fries. Reverend Gomes retained all the same special powers even in that prosaic context, and indeed he had conducted a wedding that very day, bringing his sacred presence to suburban Baltimore.

We boarded together, I said my goodbyes as I moved to the back of the plane, and though I don't remember the next hour well, I am certain that I felt finally at ease. Like most experiences with Reverend Gomes, this fortuitous encounter had been (and remains) both humorous and substantial, two qualities that he managed to always hold at once. But I should have remembered that he was also always a gentleman. Disembarking from the plane, I expected to see only the familiar terrain of Logan but was greeted instead by my friend Reverend Gomes, who had waited for me so that he and his driver could deliver me safely to Currier House. I was of course thankful for the ride, but even more so for the chance to spend thirty more minutes with him.

Another frequent teatime exchange::

"It's nice to see you, Professor."
"Well, it's nice to be seen."

A teatime conversation:

"Hello, my dear, how are you?"
"I'm doing well, Professor Gomes, how about you?"
"I FLOURISH."

Until my daughter attended Harvard I didn't know that Reverend Peter Gomes would attempt to keep incoming freshmen humble, by regaling them that a former Governor of Massachusetts who happened to attend MIT used to keep a little card on his desk that said, "Dont ask me I didn't go to Harvard." I'm sure my father, the MIT graduate who became Governor of Massachusetts, smiled from the other side every time he heard Peter say it. Now the two can share a few Heavenly laughs because we know God has a sense of humor as well.

The Bishop goes to Washington: A Fond Memory of the Reverend Professor Peter Gomes

I first met Peter Gomes in the late 1960s, when he was fairly new to Memorial Church, though not to Harvard, having studied at the Divinity School. We didn’t get to know each other well until the 1980s, when I was a member of a small group planning a campaign to raise $1 million for the Signet Society.

Our brave little band met regularly for breakfast at Sparks House, Peter’s gloriously and lovingly furnished home. John Marquand—not the author, but one of Harvard’s “presences” for many decades as Senior Tutor of Dudley House, a great friend of Peter, and, if I’m not mistaken, Secretary to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—always arrived carrying an array of edibles from Au Bon Pain in the two large canvas tote bags that accompanied him everywhere. Other usual attendees were Jim Storey ‘53, a partner then at Gaston Snow Ely Bartlett in Boston, Don Bacon ’62 and me. We spent what was often an uproarious time at Peter’s table, plotting the direction and targets for the drive, until the moment when Peter had to get over to Appleton Chapel for Morning Prayers.

After the campaign was in full swing, kicked off at a splendid banquet in the Armorial Galleries of the Metropolitan Museum thanks to Douglas Dillon ‘36, Peter and I undertook some pretty serious soliciting. One of our first assignments was to see a couple of Signet alumni in Washington. The most important was Casper Weinberger ‘38.

Cap Weinberger was Secretary of Defense at the time, and it was arranged that we should call on him at the Pentagon early one morning. We arrived and were ushered in by armed military personnel—Marines, I believe. After a brief wait in his antechamber, the door opened and the Secretary himself waved us in. He was gracious, but not miraculously generous in response to Peter’s artful solicitation. I think he said, “Put me down for $5000,” after he had been asked for twice that. The transaction concluded, he apologized for brevity, explaining that his General Staff were waiting outside for their daily meeting with him.

We emerged into a bank of gleaming medals and uniforms bedecked with scrambled military eggs, who seemed to fall away in absolute precision into a kind of gauntlet. As Peter and I strode forward, one of the brass on my side of the room turned to another and whispered loudly, “It’s Bishop Tutu!” We didn’t correct him.

Peter relished that visit, and the check from the Secretary came in.

I first met Rev. Gomes as a parishioner and Sunday School teacher at Memorial Church, but I came to know him through the Signet. I will miss his joyful, gentle presence greatly. He was truly his namesake: a Rock, for Memorial Church, for the University, and for the Society.

Rev. Gomes was in the habit of ending memorial services and funerals over which he presided with a prayer of Cardinal Newman's. I hope that it has meaning for us all as we mourn his death: “O Lord, support us all the day long of this troublous life, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then, in thy great mercy, grant us a safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at the last.”

Reverend Gomes always told us to "do nothing." That was the Signet Society's job. We didn't understand. We wanted to start a magazine. We wanted to launch a performance series. We wanted screenings. We wanted cooking lessons.

It was from Rev. Gomes that I had to ask for my budget for undergraduate activities. Once I got it I was free to do as I and the other officers saw fit. I spent almost every penny of it on parties and tea.

The deep magic of the Signet seemed to be that for all of this, I had a wise man's blessing.

On the subject of portraits...I'll always remember Peter one day coming down the hallway at Mem Church to where I was sitting in the sexton's office. "Wesley," he said in his inimitable tones, "you must sit for a pohr-trait some day. Before you lose your looks!"

The Last Victorian

To say that Peter Gomes was one of a kind hardly conveys his uniqueness. His mother came from Boston's African-American aristocracy, a type once known to blacks, not unpejoratively, as "dicty." That she ran off and married an immigrant from the Cape Verdean Island of Brava, a foreman in the cranberry bogs of Plymouth and a Catholic to boot, was the most daring of moves.

Peter dared to leave Massachusetts for Bates College, then a modest Baptist place, and only after graduating made his way to Harvard. He became a great student of the Puritans, and knew the little biographies of early Harvard men backwards and forwards. That he did his turn at Tuskegee testified at once to his curiosity about the African-American world and his consciousness of what was required of him. Though his accent seemed to the untutored ear Anglophiliac, it aimed to be the purest Boston Brahmin. He was a New Englander, and proud of it.

He was also a shrewd judge of character, a great gossip, and, so far as I could tell, a tough inside player. When there was pressure to expand the Harvard chaplaincy into something more ecumenical, he did what it took to maintain his position as primus. The Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church would never be inter pares.

I recall a dinner at Sparks House, the turn-of-the-19th-century clapboard domicile he occupied along with his antiques and his leather-bound volumes. The guests were all young men. Only later did Peter come out to the world, and his strong moral and intellectual witness for gay equality became his redeeming feature for those who found him insufferable.

I last spoke with Peter back in 2000, when he came to Trinity College to give the Baccalaureate speech and do the invocating and benedicting at Commencement. I don't know how much of this stuff he'd done over the years en route to yet another honorary degree, but he had it down to an art form. I've never seen a graduation crowd more thoroughly charmed, amused, and edified.

It had been a couple of decades since I'd seen him and he did look like a send-up of himself: stout and gouty, toting a velvet bag stuffed with his Harvard robe, and not one of those latter-day polyester ones either. He'd written a letter for a candidate to be Trinity's new chaplain that included the commendation, "He says his prayers." No wonder people didn't know what to make of him.

I saw him last two years ago on stage at the Bushnell, appearing at a Connecticut Forum evening to chat about religion with Rabbi Harold Kushner and Christopher Hitchens. I'm afraid Kushner was way out of his league as a repartee artist, but Peter more than held his own against Hitchens' well-wrought atheist pieties.

A YouTube clip from the occasion ends with him delivering a bon mot that perfectly conveys his talent for making his own pieties go down easy. "I can't conceive of a world without God," said he, "and I'd like to think that God can't conceive of a world without me." It's sad indeed to have to conceive what he hoped was unthinkable for God.

Returning to my junior fall at Harvard after a year engaging with the "real world," including a decidedly non-religious 500-mile pilgrimage walk across Spain, I was inspired to change focus. I switched undergraduate majors, eased back on political extracurricular activities, invested in artsy silk scarves, and discovered the Signet Society. Miraculously, I was elected as a member. It was through the Signet that I identified the idea and gained the courage to ask Reverend Gomes-- an ever-polished, stalwart Associate, grand raconteur, and super busy man-- if he'd be willing to sponsor a 1-on-1 independent study with me. Of course I'd heard him preach at Memorial Church and even attended events at his Sparks House home, but it was the Signet that provided the comfortable venue for me to approach.

I wanted to better understand the sermon as a form of persuasion. How, rhetorically, do effective preachers use words to compel their congregations to change behavior based on visions and beliefs that-- at least to a student who was baptised Catholic, confirmed Congregationalist, and slid off the slippery slope as a Unitarian drifter/flunkie years before-- are essentially unknowable and unseen on this earth? He accepted the request, and gallantly, patiently, quietly endured my heathen waywardness. We studied sermons from Jonathan Edwards to Paul Tillich, but my favorite moments were arriving to the office of Reverend Gomes with a creased copy of his own sermon, eager to hear a master storyteller, devout believer, and tireless teacher push back his glasses, lean back in his chair, and share tidbits of how and why he wove such beautifully constructed webs of images, stories, and morality.

I was so grateful to Reverend Gomes for lifting the curtain to reveal both a workshop of rhetorical tools and methods, as well as interconnecting pathways to a deeper, greater, grander spiritual world. What an improbable combination of gifts, interests, and generosity. What an ability to arch an eyebrow when making a joke! An untimely mortal passing for a timeless soul.