The following transcript was dictated from audio recording made of the memorial service for James Rose Watson and Charles Gray Watson on January 16, 2000. An audio recording of this memorial is available.
When I heard about Chuck Watson's death and that this service would be a memorial for both Chuck and for his father, I was on my way to a week long religious retreat at a monastery in Boston, on the Charles River just a stones throw from Harvard Yard. The retreat was meant for priests in the middle of their careers, meant as a time to take stock of our ministry and to renew our calling. Well after that phone call, for most of my time there I was thinking about Chuck and his father. For me that was a gift, you see, because in thinking about what my own ministry should be about, I was able to think of theirs as models. The shape of their careers, the influence they had on so many people, the tremendous power of healing invested in their minds, their hearts, and their hands. The sheer bowtie force of personality that made them what they were.
As I meditated on what I knew of Jim, and what I had experienced with Chuck, I realized that the role they had played in hundreds of people's lives, in the lives of their patients, of their colleagues, their students, of their family, their friends, my own life too, the role they had played in fact was a priestly role. Both of them were channels of God's healing grace. Now I don't mean this in any kind of sentimental way. Clergy usually don't like to admit this, but the fact is that for most people in our culture when push comes to shove, it's physicians whom we regard as the real priests, our real ministers, whether physicians like that idea or not. No wonder the writer of Ecclesiasticus used such strong terms to praise the physician. Because for people in extremis it is the physician who explains the mysteries, who offers healing and hope.
I learned this many years ago in New York City when I was a Chaplain in a major hospital on Morning Sides Heights. It was an old fashioned kind of place, an Episcopal hospital in fact, in the days before the wave of mergers began to dilute the identities of the city's great medical institutions. At St. Luke's Hospital chaplains in my day were still required to wear a black shirt and a clerical dog collar, even though they weren't ordained. But they were also required by long standing hospital policy to wear a short white medical jacket over their black shirt and dog collar. Well my experience time and again, dressed in such a confusing outfit, was that when I encountered a patient, it was not the collar they saw. I usually had to draw their attention to it, rather sheepishly. The collar was invisible. It was the white jacket that they saw. It was the white jacket that mattered.
So with the writer of Ecclesiasticus I stand here to praise the physician as priest, the physician as minister. I mean you would think just the opposite. Physicians are meant to be dispassionate and unsentimental. Not usually qualities you associate with priests. They are meant to be detached, observant, measured in speech, empirically minded. When I hear those words I can easily picture Chuck. One of the most even tempered, precise, and self contained men I've ever known. And I'm told he was very like his father in this. But it is precisely those dispassionate qualities that freed Jim and Chuck truly to minister to their patients, to be channels of healing grace.
These were passionate men, passionately committed to medicine, as a sacred trust, a calling passed on from generation to generation, to generation in the Watson family. And in every generation these Watsons are fired by what is in fact a deeply religious conviction. That a passion for medicine entails a passion for all God's creatures, for all created things, for the sun and the stars and the planets in their courses, for the sea and all that is in it, for the multitude of living creatures and for men and women both in sickness and in health. I'm told you could see the fruits of this passion if you ever visited Rosslyn Farm with the forest of trees that Jim planted on one small acre. And you knew this about Chuck, if you visited what Nancy always called the funny little farm outside of Kittanning and saw Chuck's bird book and binoculars always at the ready near the great picture window, or took the star charts with you to the upper pasture on a clear night to marvel at the planets. Or if your friendship with Chuck and Nancy meant, as it did for me, a first real taste of living by the sea.
These men were passionate about creation and so they were also passionate about people. So in fact the two kinds of passions were inseparable for them. They knew that living a passionate life meant living a life of boundless compassion. Compassion. The ability to minister not just to the patient but to the person. To teach by forming students, not just informing them. To minister to the whole person, not just to that person's disease. To know in your own life what it means to love and be loved, what it means to take risks for others. Lives of passion and compassion. It is that rare combination in these two men, father and son, that draws us here in great numbers to this sacred space today. It's what draws us to celebrate them as husbands, fathers, grandfathers, mentors, colleagues, healers, friends. Honor these physicians for their ministries, for the Lord created them, we heard. Men of passion and compassion, ministers of God's healing love.
But that word Passion has a double edge. The sorrow, the sorrow of this day is that both Jim and Chuck tasted passion in its other sense. In the sense of passion as suffering. In what we might think of today, this morning, as a final act of compassion from them. They felt what they knew their patients felt, what in the end we all must feel, as energies diminish in old age or as old diseases no longer in remission rear once again their ugly heads. The irony of this sad day is that we remember these two extraordinary healers now also as patients, not only as men who healed, but as men who suffered. To live close to such suffering is the physician's calling, and in a different kind of way it is a priest's calling too. To experience such suffering in our own bodies is a calling that none of us, priests or physicians or anyone else, can in the end evade. Which brings me in closing to this morning's second reading.
"Then he said to me, these are the men who have passed through the great ordeal. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb." Now the ordeal, the great ordeal that the New Testament writer speaks of, was the ordeal of persecution at the hands of the Romans. But now, two millennia later, these words speak of different ordeals, of our own ordeals. The diminishments and indignities of old age, the resurgence of a disease once thought vanquished, the grief that Nancy and Gray and Andrew feel at the loss of husband, father, grandfather, and now for Timmy Great Grandfather. The loss that colleagues and students feel at the loss of a mentor, a friend, an exemplar. Losses like this, passion like this, place us face to face with mystery.
Now I know that mystery is a word that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. It smacks of mystification and it's the work of scientists and physicians after all to dispel mystery, not to embrace it. But what the scripture presents to us this morning, what these two lives and these two deaths present to us, is mystery of another sort. They shall never again feel hunger or thirst, the sun shall not be on them, or any scorching heat, and God will wipe away all tears from their eyes. In mourning Jim and Chuck, and in celebrating their lives, we commend these two extraordinary healers, these two passionate and compassionate men, we commend them to the mystery of a love that never ceases, to the mystery of a divine compassion in which their own acts of compassion and healing were deeply grounded, to the mystery of the passionate God who created them and the world they treasured, the God who redeemed them and sustains them still.
May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.