All Saints Episcopal Church Pasadena helped its rector, the Rev. Mike Kinman, mourn and celebrate his father, Thomas David Kinman, in a moving service this morning.
“I was trained as a physicist and worked as an astronomer,” Tom told his friend John Ahart, who offered a lyrical eulogy. “Then for ten years, I was a hospital chaplain, and that’s what I really did with my life.” Born in Rugby, England, birthplace of you-know-what, with a Ph.D in astrophysics from Oxford, Tom worked at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, has a galaxy named for him (PHL 293, or “Kinman’s Dwarf”), and designed a telescope that’s in the Smithsonian. Among other things, he studied pulsars, which, for our service today, All Saints added to the list of outer space phenomena mentioned in eucharistic prayer C in the “Book of Common Prayer.”
Born in 1928, Tom had powerful memories of World War II, including losing his brother, Jack, in action. He met C.S. Lewis and, as a cross country runner, once beat famed Olympian Roger Bannister. Later in life, he was ordained a deacon in The Episcopal Church, growing out of his hospital chaplaincy. “Never did a kinder, gentler man walk the face of the earth,” Tom’s daughter-in-law, Robin Blust Kinman, said in her graceful eulogy. After the death of Mike’s mother, Jackie, over two years ago, Tom moved from Tucson to Pasadena to live with Mike and Robin. Their accomplished sons, Hayden and Schroeder, read from Rupert Brooke (“The Soldier”) and St. Paul (Ephesians).
The Rev. Alfredo Feregrino preached a light-drenched homily. His and Mike’s clergy colleagues the Rev. Canon Susan Russell and the Rev. Mark Anthony Chase and the Rev. Sally Howard assisted. Weicheng Zhao and Fang Gao, spouses who met as students at a music high school in China, and Stephen McDonough offered glorious music. Few eyes were dry at the closing hymn, “Jerusalem,” which invokes the savior and the England Tom loved.
