'Being Alive and Having to Die'

BEING ALIVE AND HAVING TO DIE: The Spiritual Odyssey of Forrest Church, by Dan Cryer. St. Martin's Press, 352 pp., $27.99.

Born in 1948, the son of Idaho's liberal Democratic Sen. Frank Church, Forrest Church became the spokesman for another form of liberalism: the socially conscious, theologically inclusive religion practiced by members of the Unitarian Universalist Association. The minister of Manhattan's All Souls Church, Church countered right-wing Christian fundamentalism in a series of books whose vision is encapsulated in the title "God and Other Famous Liberals."

Former Newsday critic Dan Cryer traces the outward arc of Church's life, from a typically restless, questing baby boomer youth to his death at age 61. Himself a congregant at All Souls, Cryer makes good use of interviews granted by Church in the last two years of his life to explore the inner journey that is the book's central concern.

Gregarious and affably dominant, the center of attention in any group, Church was named minister of All Souls at 29. Yet Cryer gently suggests that his spirituality achieved its deepest levels only after a 1991 scandal nearly ended his career. Divorce from his wife, due to an affair with a married parishioner, confronted a man used to being "preternaturally beloved" with an angry recall vote. Church survived the recall, but only after enduring public humiliation.

Chastened and remarried to his lover, whom he considered "his soul mate," Church now found his earlier works "glib" and sought to convey his newly pressing sense of the inevitability of failure and suffering, the miracle of life that we must cherish every day.

A terminal cancer diagnosis in 2006 strengthened his desire "to 'remythologize' a Unitarian faith grown too cerebral." He died at home three years later. Cryer's quietly moving biography affirms the enduring power of Church's liberal religious creed, which urges us to find God all around us and in the hearts of our fellow human beings, whatever their religion.