First Church and Parish - Dedham
A UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CONGREGATION - Gathered In 1638
Worship on Sundays at 10 am
Bruce E. Kennedy
1989-1994
Biography
Bruce E. Kennedy was born on February 24, 1950 to James and Rae Kennedy in Washington, Pennsylvania. He was raised in the United Presbyterian Church and joined the Boy Scouts in his teens which later led to employment as a church camp counselor. Kennedy earned a BS in Business Administration from Susquehanna University in his early twenties and enrolled in 1973 in a Master’s in Divinity program at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. However, during his first two years of coursework, Kennedy began to have doubts about his belief in Presbyterian doctrines. Consequently, while working toward his Master’s, Kennedy served as a Youth Worker and an Assistant Pastor in two Presbyterian churches, but upon graduation in 1977 he chose not to seek ordination. Rather, he moved to Providence, Rhode Island where he was sought secular employment and was hired as Area Director of the American Cancer Association.
In Providence Kennedy made two decisions that would have lifelong consequences. First, he met, courted, and married local public school teacher Susan Drumm, with whom he would later father son J. Byron. Second, Kennedy began exploring more liberal philosophical and religious traditions, namely Ethical Humanism and Unitarian-Universalism. After briefly considering moving to New York City to work at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, Kennedy and his wife decided to remain in Providence where Bruce began to hold services at two U.U. churches, the Bell Street Chapel and a recently founded storefront congregation, the Mediator Fellowship. His deepening commitment to Unitarian-Universalism impelled Kennedy to seek U.U. ministerial fellowship which led finally to his ordination at the Bell Street Church in 1980. In 1982 Kennedy was called to Nova Scotia by the UU Church of Halifax where, as Minister-at-Large to the Canadian Maritime Provinces, he also conducted monthly services for three New Brunswick congregations. Shortly after taking up his ministerial duties in the Atlantic Maritime provinces, Kennedy was successfully treated with radiation for Hodkin’s Lymphoma, an experience that would have a profound impact on both his career and life in future years. Nevertheless, in 1989 after seven years in Canada, the Kennedys returned to the United States where Bruce assumed the ministry of Dedham’s First Church and Parish.
Here the trail of Bruce Kennedy’s life journey grows a bit cold because many of the First Church documents my research relies on, i.e. First Church annual meeting minutes, minister reports, Parish Records, etc., for this period, are missing and perhaps lost. For now, however, it can be said that extant records point to three important accomplishments by Kennedy during his time a First Church. To begin with, Kennedy was instrumental in leading First Church’s response to the world-historic fall of communism in Eastern Europe, more specifically, in Romania. Since conquest by the Red Army in 1945, Romania was ruled first by a pro-Soviet government and shortly afterwards by the Romanian Communist Party under the authoritarian dictatorship of, first, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and later Nicolae Ceausescu. In December 1989 Ceausescu was overthrown and executed in a revolution that established democracy and free-market capitalism in Romania. Among the religious communities that were now free from repressive state supervision was the Unitarian Church of Transylvania, a sect that had been established as a non-trinitarian denomination in the mid-16th century. Situated in the mountains of northwest Romania, several hundred Unitarian churches were still extant in 1989 with congregations composed mostly of Hungarian-speaking small farmers who had stubbornly resisted collectivization until the fall of Communism. These congregations lacked any source of funding for ministers, churches, and religious activities, other than that resulting from sale of their farm produce. In 1990 Dedham Women’s Alliance member Maureen Erickson reached out to the UUA Transylvanian Sister Church Committee with the offer to assist a Romanian sister church with, for example, needed institutional funds, RE curricula, aid in founding of a women’s group, and donation of food and clothing. Kennedy took the lead in organizing communication with Reverend Kiss Akos in Rares, Romania. Reverends Akos and Kennedy maintained correspondence throughout his tenure at First Church during which time Akos’s congregation sent several embroidered linens for the Meetinghouse pulpit and the table for the Child Dedication chalice. Reciprocally, First Church donors took up a collection of $400 to support both Reverend Akos and Rares church operations. And for the rest of the 1990’s the Women’s Alliance continued to support the Rares church by sponsoring coffee hour lecture about the sister church program, sending funds to the congregation through visiting ministers, and joining the Partner Church Council.
Another accomplishment of Kennedy’s years in Dedham was his crafting of erudite, artful, insightful, and, at times, inspiring sermons. Kennedy’s erudition was manifested in the number of scientists, philosophers, psychologists, and theologians, such as Scott Peck, Stephen Jay Gould, Loren Eisley, Rollo May, Albert Schweitzer, Alan Watts, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Parker Palmer, Baba Ram Dass, Theodore Parker, Chuang Tzu, and Howard Thurman, whose works he referenced in his sermons. (It should be mentioned here that Kennedy was a longtime member of the Henry David Thoreau Society, and actively engaged in research on Thoreau’s writings.) But Kennedy’s first love intellectually was the artfulness of poetry. In his initial year in Dedham, Kennedy led off with a sermon entitled " The Muse of Poesy” in which he mused on poetry a source of spiritual insight. In later sermons he discussed works by William Wordsworth, William Carlos Williams, Kahlil Gibran, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, and John Mansfield, along with extended discourses on Walt Whitman’s changing poetic attitude toward Civil War belligerence and Frost’s “Mending Wall” as metaphor for Unitarian faith in action. In addition, Kennedy applied his own artistic sensibilities in writing numerous moving prayers, meditations, and poems including the 29 stanzas “Shoreline Stanzas” along with the dramatic play “Fruitlands”, a dialogue critique of Bronson Alcott’s perfectionism as opposed to Louisa May Alcott’s Unitarian values of diversity, tolerance, and forgiveness. As for insightful sermons, Kennedy anticipated contemporary culture wars with “The Family’s Basic Value”, the U.S. creep toward authoritarianism with “Which Witch Is Which”, and Maga tribalism in “The Miracle of Community.”
But perhaps most significant were the Kennedy sermons that inspired congregants to take action on important social justice issues. Two sermons come to mind in this regard. First, the January 19, 1992 sermon “Promise the Children a Brighter Future” called upon congregants to become aware of children in crisis, school dropouts lacking medical insurance, beset by poverty and tempted by crime and to take action by starting a Boys and Girls Club, supporting Family Services, and instituting Preschool and Daycare programs in Dedham. He urged congregants to start small by activating “Your Congregation on Children’s Issues curriculum,” though this specific exhortation seemingly did not bear much fruit at First Church. However, another sermon had a more enduring impact, namely the 10/15/1989 sermon “Cast Your Bread Upon the Waters.” In this sermon Kennedy explored the causes and consequences of world hunger and advised that “A personal commitment to a world without hunger is a deliberate daily commitment.” First Church congregant Corrine Lewis was sufficiently inspired by this sermon to recruit fellow female congregants to set up a network of Dedham churches, Family Service, Visiting Nurse, Council on Aging, Dedham Youth Commission, and school counselors. Later that fall, representatives from 12 Dedham churches established the Dedham Food Pantry and First Church’s Corrine Lewis and Helen Bancroft took leadership positions in an organization that continues its bi-weekly mission today.
In 1994 Kennedy accepted a call from the UU Society of Martha’s Vinyard where he served an extension minister and later in 1999 Kennedy was hired by the UU Congregation of Santa Rosa, California. In 2003 Kennedy left UU ministry to work with bereaved families and lead non-denominational services at Daniels Chapel of the Roses, a funeral home and crematory in Santa Rosa. Subsequently, in 2007 Kennedy began serving as a chaplain at Santa Rosa’s Sutter Hospice where he would purchase sheet music so that he might sing his clients’ favorite songs to them as they passed away. As a consequence of the radiation treatment he had received in the 1980s, Kennedy was diagnosed with white matter disease in 2014 and spent the final 15 months of his life in a memory care unit where he died in his sleep on October 20, 2020. Despite his many job transitions, Unitarian Universalist values constituted a consistent thread running through Kennedy’s life, namely creativity, contemplativeness, caring, community, and a Thoreauvian reverence for nature. Indeed, as his son Byron observed at his funeral, Bruce’s transcendental Deism was so ingrained that he could walk into the woods and experience God.