A man of faith

Héctor E. López

If most people on the planet are connected by six degrees of separation, if often seems there are only one or two degrees in Portland.

So it happened that a mutual friend's cyber-introduction resulted in my meeting the Rev. Héctor E. López for coffee last week. What a delightful, intelligent man. And who knew we'd have so many things in common?

He's a 72-year-old retired minister from the United Church of Christ who's married to Lynne Smouse López, the current minister at Ainsworth United Church of Christ in the Concordia neighborhood of Northeast Portland. It's a congregation that bills itself as "a multicultural, multiracial, open & affirming community" that explicitly welcomes members of the LGBQT community, and part of a centuries-old progressive church that in 1700 (76 years before the United States came into being) to oppose slavery.

Coincidentally, the Ainsworth church is the same one where a group of young parents, including us, established a Montessori preschool in the upstairs of the building in the early '90s.

Hector struck me immediately as a friendly, generous man (he insisted on buying my coffee and scone) with a keen sense of self and his family's and church's history.

-- He's a third-generation Congregationalist, owing to his maternal grandparents' conversion from Catholicism in the 1880s in Mexico. 
-- His parents immigrated to the U.S. in the 1910s and settled in southern California. Héctor was the youngest of three children and wound up following his older brother to UC Berkeley, graduating in 1960. As a tribute to his deceased sibling, Héctor wears Humberto's class ring from UC.
-- He was part of three-member team that did off-site supervising of a woman minister in her last year of seminary in Los Angeles. (That would be Lynne.) They married in 1996 and moved to Portland the same year.
-- He and his wife are raising two adopted children, a 20-year-old son and 17-year-old daughter. I shared the story of our adoption and it turns out their kids attended some of the same schools as ours.
-- He and a Muslim imam are co-leaders of an interfaith group that meets every Tuesday in downtown Portland for informal conversation. They started the group after the 9/11 attacks nearly 10 years ago and are still going strong.
-- He's a member of the city's Human Rights Commission and its Community and Police Relations Committee, panels that allow him to take a stand against discrimination, racism and overly aggressive police.

Clearly, this is a man who lives his values. I admire that in a person.

On the day we spoke, Héctor told me that we was flying to Boston the next day to present a scholarship to a student at Andover Newton Theological Seminary in Andover, Mass. Not just any scholarship, either. The Héctor E. López Scholarship, established in 2005, is awarded to Latina and Latino seminarians preparing to become United Church of Christ ministers.

Two students received scholarship funding this school year. The other: Andrea Cano, another transplanted Californian who's made Portland her home. Andrea graduates this month from the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley (my birthplace, btw) and already has a job waiting for her next fall as a chaplain at Portland's Providence Hospital.

Is it any surprise that it was Andrea, a former journalist and community activist, who brought Hector and me together with an email suggesting we might enjoy meeting each other?