Brian was my best friend, for nearly 50 years.  He had a profound
influence on my life.  From very early on, back in California in the
late 1970s, we found in each other someone who did not find engagement
with spiritual and scientific questions incompatible.  We both were OK
with acknowledging that there were deep questions, that really
mattered, that we did not know the answers to.

I had grown up in a non-practicing atheist household, but went to
Quaker school in Philadelphia, and became a Quaker myself.

Brian had grown up in a practicing Christian household, but by the
time I met him was firmly _not_ a member of any denomination.  Yet he
has always insisted that we cannot do without what the churches and
mosques, the temples and synagogues, hold in trust for us.

Despite those differences, I think our talk in those early days about
our search for answers shaped our respective lifelong journeys of
faith.

When Brian's father Wilfred was appointed by Harvard to lead a
newly-established Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard,
he was interviewed by a reporter from the Boston Globe, who asked him
"Are you a Christian?"  After a pause, Wilfred replied "You'll have to
ask my neighbour".  It is possible to live a life in faith without
joining an institution to help you do so, and I think we all know that
Brian did exactly that.

I was going to tell the story of Long Ridge, but once I started to
write it I realised that it would take too long to do it justice.
Suffice it to say that there can be no greater proof needed of
Julian's love for his brother than that he agreed to design and
oversee the construction of a house with Brian, a world-class fanatic
for detail, as his client!

I have time for only one more story, that follows on from that one, in
a way.  

Early this year I got a phone call from Brian, rather late in the
evening in Scotland.  He was unusually agitated, very stressed by the
first week or two of the actions of the newly inaugurated dictator in
Washington, and he wanted to know if, given my long membership in the
Quaker Meeting in Edinburgh, he could become a Quaker.  I had to say
that our normal application process took rather a long time, and
usually was only initiated after someone had been attending Meeting
for Worship with us for quite a while.  But then I remembered that
Brian had actually been married in a Quaker Meeting back in the early
1970s, and he thought that it might even have been in Toronto.  If so,
the preparation for that would have involved a similar kind of
process, and perhaps it would be possible for the Toronto Meeting to
take him on.  Well, it wasn't Toronto, it turns out, but Brian did
start actually joining in via Zoom with the Sunday Meeting for worship
here in Toronto.  I think he felt the need to publicly associate
himself with an institution that stood clearly and forthrightly for
everything that was now, as he saw it, so much at risk.

Something else that we shared was a love of language.  Words _matter_,
and attention must be paid to that.  We both understood that the old
familiar words still speak to us. Words that have been spoken over and
over again down through the centuries have great power, power that can
still send shivers down our spines.

It makes sense then that we naturally turn to the old forms, the old
festivals, the old words, particular at the specially good times and
the specially bad times.  They still have the power to move us and
support us, to help us recognise we are bound together in a fellowship
of love and care for one another, as we are here today.

In that spirit I'll use some old Quaker phrases as I come to a close.

Take heed, dear friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your
hearts.  We are witnesses to the Truth.  Be patterns, be examples, let
your lives speak, as Brian's most emphatically did.

I want to give thanks for the grace of God as shown forth in the life
of Brian Cantwell Smith.  Brian was a giant: physically tall and
substantial, towering intellectually, a warm and tender friend, lover
and husband.  In the two 1/2 years since his terminal cancer
diagnosis, although his body slowly degraded, he remained himself in
all the ways that mattered.  His life spoke, to me and to many, and it
still does.

Brian's physical living has come to an end, but his life is still as
real and true as the pyramids or the ignition of the Sun, and that
life, in its entirety, is still with us.  Perhaps my excuse for not
being as devasted by his death as I expected to be is precisely that
I've been used to physical distance from him for so long.  He was with
me then, and he still is.

...



------------------

In the early 1980s Brian and his then partner Susan bought 40 acres of
forest and scrub, including two giant redwoods and a _lot_ of poison
oak, on the western slope of the hills south of San Francisco.  It was
two miles of dirt road off the nearest public road, off the grid, with
only a dodgy drilled well for water, a diesel generator for power and
a rusty old house trailer to live in.

At this time Brian was running a major research lab at Xerox Palo Alto,
co-founding Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and helping
to create an interdisciplinary research centre at Stanford.  But being
Brian, with Susan's help, he put together a plan for a compound, got
Julian to design it, scraped together the money to build it, and moved
in.