Remembering our friend and mentor, Jim Forest, with a song from the Sixties Peace Movement. Jim reposed in the Lord one year ago today. He touched many lives, including mine starting in 1969 during the height of the Vietnam War. He resurfaced in my life when I came into the Orthodox Church in 1999. May Jim’s memory be eternal.
GET TOGETHER
Love is but a song we sing,
Fear’s the way we die,
You can make the mountains ring,
Or make the Angels cry,
Though the bird is on the wing,
You may not know why.
Come on people now, smile on each other,
Everybody get together,
Try to love one another right now.
Some may come, and some may go,
You will surely pass
When the one that left us here
Returns for us at last,
We are but a moment’s sunlight
Fading in the grass.
Come on people now, smile on each other,
Everybody get together,
Try to love one another right now.
Come on people now, smile on each other,
Everybody get together,
Try to love one another right now.
If you hear the song we sing
You will understand
You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand,
Just one key unlocks them both
It’s there at your command.
Come on people now, smile on each other,
Everybody get together,
Try to love one another right now.
Come on people now, smile on each other,
Everybody get together,
Try to love one another right now.
Try to love one another right now,
Try to love one another right now,
Try to love one another right now.
Volkert Volkersz is a singer/songwriter and retired music teacher and school librarian formerly from Washington State. While preparing to apply for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War in 1969, he picked up a pamphlet by Jim Forest about the roots of peace and nonviolence in the Christian faith. Thirty years later, after a sojourn through several expressions of the Christian faith, Volkersz embraced the Orthodox Christian faith in 1999. In his parish bookstore he found several titles by the same Jim Forest who helped him gain CO status 30 years earlier. Learning that Jim had come home to Orthodoxy in 1988 helped Volkersz to feel welcome in his new spiritual home. He met up with Jim Forest in Amsterdam in 2011, and again when Jim was giving talks about the Beatitudes in Toronto in 2018. Volkersz resides in Peterborough NH and attends Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church in Claremont, where he is lay reader, choir member, and assistant choir director.
Jim Forest
November 2, 1941 ~ January 13, 2022
Memory Eternal
ORTHODOXY IN DIALOGUE 