--- /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/funeral.txt	Thu Sep 11 12:43:46 2025 -0400
@@ -0,0 +1,93 @@
+Brain 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 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 remmebered 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.
+
+...
+
+
+
+------------------
+
+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 center 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.
+