His Soul Cried Out, Emmanuel!

A Son's Eulogy For His Father

Remarks Delivered May 10th at Church Of The Redeemer, Baltimore, Maryland

Note: Emmanuel is a Hebrew name meaning "God is with us". It's used in the Old Testament, particularly in the book of Isaiah, to refer to a future Messiah. In the New Testament, Jesus is identified as the fulfillment of this prophecy.

It is my distinct honor and privilege as his son to lift up the life of my father, Robert Murray Ross, a life devoted to his family, a life dedicated to a living God, a life spent longing for the promise of a world in which the hurting, grieving, impoverished outcast or stranger was welcomed into the loving arms of Beloved Community.

My father was a man of sacred contradictions. He held the form of an Episcopal priest on the pulpit, but his soul cried out like a prophet in the desert of the real. He loved Episcopal hymns and liturgy, but detested a dead or hollow ritual. He carried a fierce loyalty to the potential of the Church—a loyalty born out of a radical hope that it could truly be the living body of Christ, stretched and broken in love for the world.

After his death, I felt a profound intuitive call to immerse myself completely in his sermons and letters, the digital artifacts and echoes left behind on our childhood computer and the thumb drives collecting dust in his keepsake box. I wanted not just to be close to my father but to see the world through his eyes, to know what mattered most to him. And in between the lines of nearly everything he wrote, I saw evidence of a man grappling deeply with profound existential questions, intensely seeking a living God who gave his only begotten son to be here, to be with us. My father sought connection, connection to God, to family, to humanity. He sought to know God’s love, not as an abstract idea but as the felt presence of love in action, an unconditional and redeeming love that can hold us even in our deepest suffering.

Again and again he returned to the same persistent questions: What is the Church for? Who is it failing? What does it mean to truly love as Christ loved? How can so many who claim to be Christian pursue war, stoke hatred, and seed division? How can the privileged sit silently as our brothers and sisters in the body of Christ are suffering? And, how might we live in a world in which God’s Kingdom is not just a place we go when we die, but a living practice, a politics, a present-day enactment of God’s love as a disciple of the heart?

Rob’s life was not a straight line. It was a circle.

As Rilke wrote, “I circle around God, around the primordial tower.”

His love of music was the first place where my father circled around God. Rob played, worked in, and appreciated rock and roll music and culture for simultaneously aesthetic, spiritual, and political reasons. He told us proudly his stories of attempting to receive conscientious objector status as a Quaker in opposition to the Vietnam War. His love of music was as much an expression of his rebellious spirit as it was an expression of his resonance with the themes of love, justice, and freedom that his favorite artists shared. Rebelling against his family’s Catholic upbringing, a teenage Rob sought God in a local Episcopal Youth group where they studied the theology of Bob Dylan lyrics, his first foray into a theology of liberation and revolutionary love.

The second place my father found God was in my mother, his beloved wife Sarah. Even under the strain of decades of marriage and many challenges and hardships, she remained the center of his world. My mother gave Rob the greatest gifts of his life, he would say. He cherished my brother and I beyond words, often late to drop my brother off at preschool after getting lost in play. My father vowed when I was born that he would never lay a hand on his children, a promise that he kept, in so doing breaking a generational pattern of physical abuse that he himself received and could have easily passed on to us. This, I think, is one of the greatest gifts he gave my brother and I after giving us the gift of Life with and through our beloved mother. I sometimes imagine my father throwing his body and soul in front of the rushing train of generational trauma, softening its blow upon his children to whatever extent he could through sheer power of will. His life was a testament to placing himself on the line to protect those he loved from the pain he inherited, even if it at times made him distant, stubborn, or emotionally absent.

Rob found his calling to the Episcopal Church in his late thirties, having already pursued careers in music, television, and technology by the time he had met my mother. A gall stone had migrated into his pancreas, requiring a procedure that is probably routine today but with the medical technology of the 1980s posed a significant risk of death. As my father first grappled with his own mortality, it was an Episcopal priest who visited him, providing him with pastoral counsel and spiritual guidance. My father made a promise to God that if he helped him through that surgery, he would make an offering of his life to pay forward the grace he had received –  by serving as a minister of God’s Church. He survived – and he kept his promise.

But Rob’s commitment was never to the institution itself, it was to Christ. His Christianity was the Christianity of Cornell West who famously said that “justice is what love looks like in public.”

In one of my father’s very first sermons as an ordained minister, recorded on VHS in the early 90s, his thesis revolved around what I would call a kind of “Christian egalitarianism,” a political philosophy as much as a theology, based on the authority and responsibility of an individual to be an agent of Christ’s Love, an authority that comes from our personal, unmediated relationship with God. He preached about Moses’ followers who were upset by the notion that other prophets would usurp Moses’ authority, to which Moses replied, “I wish that all the LORD’s people were prophets and that the LORD would put his Spirit on them!”

My father’s life’s work was profoundly ecumenical. He believed there were many paths to God, paths that all reconciled and converged through the enactment of a world rooted in love, compassion, and care. His ministry became even more inclusive as the chaplain of Wooster School where he taught World Religions and wove prayers from many faiths into his school chapel services. He knew the universal languages of love: music, laughter, fellowship.

From his time in Youth Group to his brush with death, all the way through each chapter of his ministry at St. Peter’s in Cape Cod and Holy Trinity in Northern California, my father knew Christ as a radical agent of love and redemption who preached the Good News that we too were the children of God and our inheritance is an abiding love and grace that we receive unconditionally.

His love of children and his love of the forgotten defined his ministry within and outside of the church. My father held a deep passion for people who didn’t have a place in society—those who were lost, marginalized, or neglected.  I believe it was his own childhood pain that made him so deeply sensitive to suffering in others and fueled his need to create spaces—like youth and family worship services, homeless shelters, and fellowship dinners —where that unconditionally loving presence of God with us could be felt through direct experience.

This love wasn’t an abstract “high church” doctrinal ideal. The “low church” my father fought for was one close to the ground, rooted in enacting Christ’s love in people’s lives. The pain he felt when the institution prioritized its own self-preservation, drifting away from this immanent divine purpose, was his deepest heartbreak, a spiritual wound that stayed with him long after his departure from parish ministry, the profound pain of seeing the vessel he believed in not fulfilling its calling. 

Rob was willing to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” in a way that I profoundly respect. He chose to stand in the widening chasm between an ever-more secular and nihilistic culture and a Church that he believed held the promise of eternal life through acts of service and love. He took on the impossible task of keeping a 19th and 20th century institution alive in the 21st. My father offered his life to that institution. Not for its own sake but because he longed for each person to know that they, too, were beloved of God. He longed for love in public.

My father carried many sacred wounds and burdens that often caused him to push others away when he desired connection and safety most, but his struggle was not in vain. Redemption is the promise of resurrection, a promise that is now fulfilled.

Rob was a man of integrity. He kept his promises to God and his promises to his family. In honoring him and lifting up the sacred worth of his life, I carry forward the same promise. I receive the vision he carried. I say yes to carrying the sacred mantle of his life forward with his same fierce and tender love.

And as his sacred labor is passed on – he can now return to the arms of the love for which he longed. His burden is lifted. His sins forgiven. His words and his tenderness and his vision of a world rooted in love remain.

So today, I am not mourning the loss of my father. I was blessed with years to unravel my grief as he slipped away into Parkinson’s Disease.

Now, I simply want to say thank you. Thank you, Dad. You lived and longed for love. And now, at last, you abide in it.

Amen.