NORWAY – A Unitarian Universalist minister who encouraged her congregants to look beyond their lives to the problems of the world, doing so not just by sermonizing but also with her own actions, died Sunday at a Nashville hospice.
Joy Dedman Gasta, who was 68, died of breast cancer close to her family in Tennessee, the state she grew up in.
Sallie Nealand, a member of one of the two First Universalist churches in West Paris and Norway that Gasta pastored for 10 years, said, “I learned more from the example she was setting. I think she influenced our whole congregation to put ourselves into the wider world and not be insular.”
Gasta in particular strove to guide people to greater harmony. Her sister, Jean Dedman, said on Wednesday from her home in Tennessee that Gasta’s Unitarian churches were “welcoming congregations,” which means they accepted all people, no matter their sexual orientation.
“That had to do with this idea of inclusiveness that she was very focused on,” Dedman said. “In her last days, she and I would talk, and she was so intent that people work toward acceptance and inclusion in all areas of life. It was something on her mind all the time.”
For the past year, Gasta served as vice president of the Maine Council of Churches, an interfaith organization of more than 600 churches that collaborates to address social problems. Tom Ewell, executive director of the council, said Gasta was an advocate for the environment and pressed for an anti-discrimination law in Maine, and also worked with the council to provide economic development other than casinos for Maine’s American Indian tribes.
Gasta also was active in the Oxford Hills Area Clergy Association, where she helped the member churches create a Thanksgiving service to appeal to many faiths, said the Rev. Anne Stanley of Christ Episcopal Church in Norway. She was a friend of Gasta’s.
“She was very careful in picking hymns that had words we wanted to hear and needed to hear for Thanksgiving but were also sensitive to people in her tradition and also people in other traditions,” Stanley said.
Gasta came to the ministry late, graduating from Harvard Divinity School in 1994. Previously, she earned a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and taught English and humanities at colleges in Michigan and Pennsylvania. After her husband, Carl Gasta, died in 1980, Dedman said Gasta started working as a stringer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, a job that reflected her abiding trust in the democratic process.
A sermon Gasta wrote in 1995, when she first joined the churches in Norway and West Paris, explored the Unitarian Universalist principle of open, communal dialogue. She ended her sermon with, “May we all find ways to bring the religious principle of right and conscience and the democratic process to our jobs, communities, and everyday lives. May we rejoice in the democratic process as religious experience.”
Dedman said her sister felt an affinity with the people in the Oxford Hills. “She said their sense of humor is very much like those in Tennessee. She had a very wry, dry sense of humor. I think she liked their way of life, their way of looking at things, and the fact that they were unpretentious, kind and close to their families.”
One of Gasta’s struggles at the end of her life, as she battled with her illness, was letting go of her ministries, Dedman said.
In the last letter Gasta sent her congregations from Tennessee, Dedman said her sister wrote that she accepted that ministers must let their ministries die when they leave a parish. “And that means she had to let her ministry die so that the ministry of the church could live, and she talked about her confidence that these two churches would do that,” Dedman said. “And she said at the end of the letter, I accept this instruction, but I want you to know that it is very hard, because I love these two churches and the congregants so much.'”
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