At
the celebration in 1866 of the 250th anniversary
of the organization of the First Church (Unitarian)
in Cambridge, Mass., Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Jr., at that time a justice of the Supreme Judicial
Court of Massachusetts, said: “The founders
of this parish. . . and their fellows planted
a congregational church, from which grew a democratic
state. They planted something mightier than
institutions.... Whether they knew it or not,
they planted the democratic spirit in the heart
of man. It is to them we owe the deepest cause
we have to love our country—that instinct,
that spark, that makes the American unable to
meet his fellowman otherwise than simply as
a man, eye to eye, hand to hand, and foot to
foot, wrestling on naked sand.”
.
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| Leslie
Pennington as a high school student in Spiceland,
Indiana |
Leslie Talbot
Pennington, born in 1899 in Spiceland, Indiana,
was of this heritage, though he sprang also
from Quaker loins, bearing the name of a venerable
Quaker family. Accordingly, he attended and
graduated from Earlham College. He was a worthy
scion of the democratic tradition so forcefully
described by Mr. Justice Holmes. Both the Puritan
spirit and the dissenting spirit of the Friends
are to be discerned in the many-faceted life
and in many a sermon of Leslie Pennington.
In the archives
at Andover-Harvard Library many of his letters
are preserved. In a letter he wrote in the first
year of his pastorate at the First Parish in
Cambridge from 1935 to 1944, he said, "I
am trying to relate some of the affairs in current
public life to what seem to me very fundamental
principles." He held with his predecessor
there, Dr. Samuel McChord Crothers, that "every
personal problem is a social problem, and every
social problem is a personal problem."
A familiar characterization
of the Christian minister, reaching back to
the Bible, is that of the servant of God. But
this word servant scarcely comprehends the intention
incarnate in Leslie Pennington. His was the
creative spirit that aimed to engender or maintain
a religious and democratic community or fellowship
in which individuality is protected and fulfilled.
Also in the immediate person-to-person relations
of pastoral counseling, Leslie tried to protect
the individuality and integrity of the other
person. One of his favorite mentors was William
Wallace Fenn, the late Bussey Professor of Theology
and Dean of the Divinity School. Leslie liked
to quote Dean Fenn as saying, "I do not
presume to make a decision for you. I shall
try as best I can to clarify the alternative
possibilities and their likely consequences,
but the decision remains yours." In my
hearing Leslie frequently appealed to this principle
from Dean Fenn (who, like Von Ogden Vogt, was
his predecessor in Chicago).
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| The
Penningtons' wedding, September 17,1928,
at Edwards Church in Saxonville, MA |
This attitude
informed also his aim as a parent. Temperament
and habit made it in him a property of easiness.
I can recall his speaking of his intention and
Danny's (Elizabeth Entwistle Daniels) with regard
to their relation to the two daughters, Mary
and Antoinette, "Love 'em, and leave 'em
be." That is, leave ‘em be themselves.
Indeed, his attitude toward Danny, his wife,
and her attitude toward him, bore this respect
for the other in the I-Thou relationship. If
Danny spoke in conversation, he did not assume
he knew in advance what she was likely to say.
Rather, he appeared to listen with the expectation
of, and the respect and love for, her uniqueness.
He expected something fresh to come from her
lips, and he was not disappointed. In his relations
also to friends, to parishioners; to colleagues
in the ministry, this sense of fellowship, of
unity in diversity, of freedom in fellowship,
was characteristic.
Leslie served
Massachusetts parishes in Lincoln and Braintree,
and from New England he went to Ithaca, New
York, then back to Cambridge and on to Chicago,
and finally back to West Newton. His participation
in the life of the community and of the denomination
is remembered wherever he has lived and worked.
From the earliest days of his ministry he was
a member of civic associations as well as of
ecumenical enterprises. He was a non-sectarian
Unitarian. He served as an officer in a multitude
of community, denominational, and national organizations,
from the Unitarian Sunday School Society to
the Religious Arts Guild to the Board of Directors
of the American Unitarian Association to the
Brothers of the Way to the American Church Peace
Union. He was one of the founders in 1927 of
the Greenfield Group, which still today aims
to maintain a literate clergy amongst us.
He could be relied
upon to state his views with gentle ("Friendly")
persuasion but also with honest, open-minded
firmness. In a letter regarding a denominational
communication on "the Eternal in our common
life," he said, "The Statement is
so tangled that I do not wish to be put on record
either as wholly opposing or wholly supporting
the program. I am afraid we are to have more
heat than light at the May Meetings." He
definitely preferred light to heat, the light
(he would say "the inner light") that
comes from religious commitment and rational
consensus. He liked especially the admonition
of the prophet Isaiah, "Come now, and let
us reason together." But for him rationality
must be informed by a renewing spirit and by
moderation and humor. In a letter to Dana McLean
Greeley who was then a young minister in Concord,
N. H., he said in speaking warmly of a former
parishioner in Lincoln who was now in the Concord
parish, "I had the fortune to have this
man as a member of the church in Lincoln. Dr.
Samuel A. Eliot," he continues, "asked
me the other day why I did not make a Christian
of this man, and I returned the question to
him. No, Dana, it is your job—more power
to you. "
The democratic
combination of protection of the individual
with concern for the commonweal appears strikingly
in his response to a letter from a layman who
had written to him in criticism of a Ware Lecture
by Adolf Berle, Jr., who at the time was a member
of "the brain trust" in Washington.
In his letter Leslie grants that "it is
the fidelity of the average businessman which
must sustain the fabric of our national life.
“However," he goes on to say, "beyond
that we must have vision and foresight. The
church should endeavor to work through both
ways. It should sustain the fidelity of the
average businessman but it should endeavor also
to present the common vision without which.
. . there is no liberty and no justice."
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|
Pennington
during his West Newton, MA ministership
|
These sentiments
were not confined to private communications
or to sermons. For Leslie Pennington the common
vision beckoning one to a society of liberty
and justice required common disciplines. This
concern for discipline was bound up with his
sense of the importance of institutions and
of institutional participation. At the First
Unitarian Church in Chicago (1944-1962) he established
subgroups within the church, one group to promote
civil liberties, another to develop better race
relations, another concerned with housing policy,
and so on. Each subgroup had the assignment
to achieve consensus with a minority report.
Something like this disciplined activity he
had previously inaugurated in the First Church
in Cambridge.
We should recall
here that his three longest pastorates were
in a university milieu. In Chicago he enjoyed
the able and devoted assistance of Herbert Vetter
among the students and the faculty as well as
in the parish and the pulpit. The congregation
did not at that time have the ample and elegant
space of the Pennington Center which was erected
(alongside Fenn House) and named in his honor
shortly before he transferred to the First Unitarian
Society in West Newton, Massachusetts (1962-1968).
Leslie Pennington’s
concern for a living democracy became most conspicuous
in the city of Chicago through his leadership
in an enterprise that gained national repute,
the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference.
This conference, like the First Church itself,
undertook well over twenty years ago the slow
and painful task of bringing about desegregation
and of developing a peaceful pluralistic community.
Leslie as the outstanding leader gave to this
ecumenical enterprise the best energies of his
life, and with marked success. The Conference
continues to be the creative, integrating power
in that community. Indeed, today the section
of Chicago called Oak Park (on the West Side),
like certain other communities in the nation,
has taken this Community Conference as a model.
For these and similar manifestations of Christian
leadership Leslie received numerous awards,
including three honorary doctorates.
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| Leslie
and Danny Pennington with granddaughters
Molly and Sarah Fisk, circa 1959 |
As Leslie was ever
aware, the ideal of a democratic congregation promoting
the priesthood and prophethood of all believers
cannot be pursued without raising a dust. I recall
that in the midst of the desegregation effort in
the Chicago parish Leslie at one juncture felt obliged
to bring about the resignation from the church of
two prominent laymen who in principle rejected the
goal of integration. When the issues and the differences
became crystal clear he said privately to these
two laymen, "Either you two leave this church,
or I do. Your leaving will indicate goodwill that
you are professing for this church. I think that
each of you had best depart." ... They did.
Leslie and the parish were attempting to break through
a "restrictive covenant" of pigment to
a church covenant at least as broad as that of the
U. S. Constitution. "Have we not all one Father?
Hath not one God created us?" Leslie asked.
"Why do we deal treacherously every man against
his brother, by profaning the covenant of our fathers?"
Dr. Waitstill
H. Sharp who in 1949 was executive director
of a Chicago race-relations agency has reminded
me of a dramatic episode in which Leslie Pennington
played a central role. In a series of Chicago
race riots seven nights in duration the police
had adopted a permissive stance, in effect encouraging
the rioters. Inflamed one evening by a Nazi
type xenophobia, the rioters seized strangers
unsympathetic to the purpose of the rioters,
demanded their indentifications, beat them,
and dragged them out with threats to kill them
should they return to the neighborhood. In the
midst of this turmoil the representatives of
civil rights agencies and religious bodies unanimously
selected Leslie Pennington to serve as their
spokesman in approaching the Mayor of the City.
In a confrontation at the Mayor's Office in
face of the Mayor, the Police Commissioner and
his Deputy, Leslie (accompanied by thirty-five
indignant representatives of civic and religious
organizations) said "Your honor, you and
your Police Department are responsible for these
seven nights of outrages against the rights
of individuals and in gross violation of our
public peace." After recounting the perilous
stages of the rioting and of the inaction of
the police Leslie presented four major demands
for change of policy, squarely placing on the
shoulders of the Mayor and his subordinates
the responsibility of effecting this policy.
He concluded his plea by saying firmly, “We
are telling you what your election and your
tenure in office mean: To give orders to your
Police Department implementing the laws of our
City protecting the rights of individuals and
the public peace."
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| Leslie
and Danny Pennington with grandchildren
Liz, David, Michael Updike, in Vermont,
1959 |
According to Dr. Sharp, an observer later said of
Leslie's demeanor: "Leslie Pennington led us
in a timeless and universal experience. We who gathered
that afternoon in the Mayor's office were priviliged
in our time and place to see and hear again, one
of our own prophets speaking of the evil of a great
city before the reluctant gate keepers remiss in
carrying out the duties of their constituted authority."
One
other aspect of Leslie's character remains to
be mentioned, his artistry combined with his
piety, graciously evident in his prayers, evident
also in the liturgical services he developed
particularly in Chicago. When I first knew Leslie
as a theological student in Cambridge, he was
known among his fellow students as a poet. He
always recognized under Dean Willard Sperry's
tutelage that a sermon should "sing."
He and his listeners were most gratified when
this singing quality informed a sermon. Indeed,
we must say that Leslie's genius for friendship
possessed a singing quality.
His
love for beauty as well as his genius for friendship
have been aptly set forth in a paragraph I have
solicited for this eulogy from one of his oldest
friends and colleagues, the Rev. Miles Hanson,
Jr., of Weston, Massachusetts:
