I very much appreciated your last column on your beliefs [My non-rational beliefs, Ken Trainor, Viewpoints, July 29]. You are a Universalist in your soul, in my opinion.
Your words are so close to those I want to share with you, that I suspect you may have read them at some time or another. They were given by Augusta Chapin, Unity Temple’s first — and up until a week ago, only — woman minister, delivered sometime during her ministry (1885-1891), the occasion lost to history:
The greatest names will perish from human history,
the finest monuments crumble into dust,
and the time will come
when our places know us no more.
Yet we shall survive in the memories of our friends
as long as the remembrance will serve any good purpose;
and then our work and thought and influence
will mingle with the great ocean of human achievement,
and the sum total of that
will be something more,
something different,
from what it would have been without us.
Ron Moline
Oak Park