By Victor H. Carpenter, Consulting Minister, First Parish Church, Dorchester

Last month, on a bitterly cold morning, I stood in a New Hampshire cemetery beside the ashes of a good man. The honorable Hugh Bownes, Judge of the First Federal Court of Appeals, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to that position from which he issued hundreds of rulings, upholding freedom of expression and basic human rights. A separate Memorial Celebration occurred that same afternoon at which a series of speakers including United States Supreme Court Justices Breyer and Souter would honor him.

Some years ago his daughter had introduced us, knowing that Judge Bownes and I shared the bond of both having served in the US Marine Corps. While we were both Marines our experiences in the Corps could not have been more different. I had spent a year in Korea during that conflict, driving tanks and amphibian tractors. Although I served in a war zone I was never obliged to fire a shot "in anger". In contrast, Hugh Bownes participated in some of the fiercest combat of the South Pacific war against the Japanese. He was seriously wounded and almost given up for dead.

Bownes was awarded not only a purple heart, but also a Silver Star medal (the third highest honor this country can bestow, after the Navy Cross and the Congressional Medal of Honor). They don't hand out Silver Stars with Cracker Jacks! To receive such an award you have to do something pretty special. He did; he went on a one-man reconnaissance mission, was landed from a submarine behind Japanese lines, living and collecting intelligence for five days. Later a war wound almost cost him his leg and his life.

Hugh Bownes' war experience marked him as a man of both great courage and one who knew great physical pain. His courage was demonstrated in his willingness to make tough and unpopular legal decisions for the sake of justice; the pain of his war wounds gave him an empathy for the pain that ordinary people suffer in their life struggles to obtain justice from the powerful and the mighty.

You can often tell the quality of a person by the enemies that person makes. Shortly after being appointed an Associate Justice of the District Court of New Hampshire Bownes made an enemy of newspaper publisher William Loeb of the Manchester Union Leader. The cause was his ruling that New Hampshire residents have a right to take duct tape and tape over the state motto "Live free or die" on their license plates.

Loeb wrote vicious editorials attacking Bowne's patriotism. Thinking back on them the judge said, "The only good thing about the editorials was that they always ran a picture. And the picture was about ten years younger than I actually was, so I looked pretty good!!!"

Over and over again he supported the rights of individuals. As a lawyer, practicing during the era of Joe McCarthy, Bownes defended the radical Willard Uphaus who was accused of being a communist and of harboring other communists at his New Hampshire retreat center. In those days, such a charge was equivalent to branding someone a "terrorist" and maintaining a terrorist cell. Those of you who remember those days will recall that people were attaching bumper stickers that read "Better Dead Than Red" - and they meant it.

In the early '90s Bownes endorsed the preferential hiring of minority members for Boston's overwhelmingly white police and fire departments; later he ruled as unconstitutional the efforts of the First George Bush to bar family planning clinics from giving abortion counseling.

But the ruling dearest to my own heart was his judgment that federal law made it mandatory that communities provide education for all disabled children, regardless of how little the child may appear to benefit from education. The thread that ran through Hugh Bownes' career was his consistent defense of the rights of minorities and those with little political power; his use of the law to provide consistent and continuous protection of the "have-nots" from the "haves" and the "want-mores".

He was not a religious man, at least not in the conventional sense, but his son told me that he had a great fondness for the Sermon on the Mount and that, as much as the humanity demonstrated in his legal decisions, provides a key to his character. The Sermon on the Mount begins with a series of aphorisms called "the blesseds" because each begins with the word "Blessed": Blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, the merciful, blessed are the righteous, blessed are the peacemakers. The "Blessed" stand alone as a hymn of compassion.

Perhaps the judge was drawn to the "blesseds" because of the terrible wounds he had suffered in war; those wounds certainly deepened his awareness of how fragile and precious life is and how it needs protection and support; how it demands respect and compassion, the twin components of justice.

It was said of him that, in writing a decision (which would invariably turn out to be controversial) he would say to his law clerk, "Let's strike a blow for justice!" What he was actually doing was striking a blow for compassion and against compassion's eternal adversary: contempt! His decisions followed a pattern of sticking up for the weak and the humble; a poor woman needing an abortion; a disabled child needing an education; the right of a black man to a place on a municipal police force. Decisions that served to curb the arrogance, the distain, the scorn of the high and the mighty.

I've spent time profiling Judge Bownes this morning because I think his life is an example of the "religious life". I don't know whether he believed in God, or prayed or spoke of Jesus or of any other specifically "religious" figure; but his life demonstrated a commitment to justice and his judgments reflected compassion rather than contempt for the poor and the oppressed and that expresses "religion" in my book.

And I think the example of such a "religious" life is instructive as we move into an election year when "religion" is going to play a large role in the future direction of our nation. It appears that the United States is undergoing a sort of Great Religious Awakening. Americans are increasingly telling pollsters that they believe in prayer, in God, in miracles. I don't think this is particularly good news - especially when you learn that only 28 percent of Americans say they believe in evolution but that seems to be where we are.

We are also at the beginning of a highly political year, which will culminate in November in the election of a president. It will be a year when politics and religion will have much to say to each other. I confess I am not very moved when I hear that Evangelist Pat Robertson announces that God has assured him that George Bush will win presidency; but then I am not reassured when Howard Dean announces that his favorite New Testament Scripture is the book of Job! But neither Robertson's God nor Dean's scriptural illiteracy is of much concern to me. For me "religion" is elsewhere.

How the candidates of both major parties deal with poverty is a religious issue; how they deal with the environment is a religious issue; how they deal with sending our young men and women to fight and die in preemptive wars based on false claims is a religious issue. And any presidential candidate who fails to address the ultimate concern implicit in these issues is a false prophet and a religious fake...

I know that there are those who say that religion should be kept out of politics; I know that there are politicians who proclaim that their religious views will not affect their political decisions; I know that there are those who say that their faith is a private and personal matter. In the face of such statements one can only wonder (as did Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourner's magazine and writing in the New York Times two weeks ago) "What would America be if the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had kept his faith to himself?"

The separation of church and state does not now and never has meant keeping religioous values out of politics and public life. Nor does it mean limiting a religious perspective to only those issues that are overtly "religious" topics like having the 10 commandments in a public courtroom or prayer in schools. Separation of church and state means respecting the pluralism of American democracy while expressing one's faith convictions about public policy in public.

Howard Dean has suggested that we not talk about "God" during the upcoming presidential race. That would be just fine with me. If Democrats - and Republicans - talked about economic security, health care, and the other crucial public issues and that true faith is not how often you say "God" but how often you show compassionate concern for those on society's margins whose lives are most deeply affected by the issues of economic security, health care, and war.

At the beginning of this election year this nation needs to increase its moral clarity and decrease its reliance on politicians' claims of moral sanctimony. In this effort we could hardly do better than to follow the example set by Judge Hugh Bownes who was clear about his duty to the occupants of the great American "House We Live In"; a house resting on a foundation of social justice and compassionate concern for all its tenants.