There is a moment I have carried with me for years. We had just pulled off something improbable: an interfaith service at Grace Cathedral to mark the United Nations' 50th anniversary.
At the end of the celebration at Grace Cathedral, Rita and I stood on the steps watching people leave the cathedral when she turned to me and urgently said,
"We can't stop now."
That was Rita, and that sentence, more than any award, any title, any resolution passed in her honor, is her legacy.
When I arrived in San Francisco in 1979, interfaith work was a polite curiosity, a handful of religious leaders meeting occasionally, carefully, cautiously.
Rita, on the other hand, had already spent two decades building bridges and laying the groundwork for the interfaith movement by co-organizing the city's first interfaith commission in 1963. Interfaith was in her DNA, as I once said, long before any of us knew what to call it.
When URI was little more than a question that I asked, if the nations of the world work together through the United Nations, what are the world's religions doing? ,Rita was in the room.
She served as our Board Chair through the chartering years, then became the first Chair of URI's Global Council of Trustees, a role she held with fierce love from 2000 to 2005. She did not merely help found URI, she helped found it right.
With her characteristic insistence that we earn the world's trust one relationship at a time, one community at a time.
Today, URI is a network of over 1,200 Cooperation Circles and thousands of members in over 120 countries with people of every different faith, beliefs, traditions, and spiritual expressions, working side by side promoting enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, ending religiously motivated violence, and creating cultures of peace, justice, and healing for the earth and all living beings.
None of that is separable from Rita Semel, and she is woven into our foundation.
She was a Jewish woman who stood up in a Muslim community meeting two days after a horrific act of violence and read aloud a statement of solidarity, signed by the Northern California Board of Rabbis.
"My religion is not a threat to you," she said.
She did it because someone had to show up and because she wanted them to know it, in person, without hesitation.
She will be remembered for her tremendous work with the San Francisco Interfaith Council that she co-founded in 1990. To date, it is a URI member organization.
That is the interfaith life, not a conference or a curriculum, but a life.
The world URI was built to serve, that is, a world at peace, sustained by communities that respect diversity and resolve conflict without violence, is still unfinished.
Rita knew it would be and spent decades of her life investing in the people who would carry the work forward through her work at the inception of URI.
And today, we are working together with grassroots Cooperation Circles, friends, and allies across the world to promote URI’s mission far and wide.
In URI, we speak of a Celestial Cooperation Circle, a community of those who have passed on, and a reminder of those who have built URI with their hands, expertise, resources, love, and hearts. We believe that they don’t leave us, but simply move into a different kind of membership. We remember them, and we celebrate them.
Rita, we will not stop here, and we honor your legacy today and always.
In Memoriam
Bishop William Bill Swing
