Florida Catholic | ‘Try God’: A Life Changing Message

‘Try God’: a life changing message

Forty–years ago Bill Parrott spotted a “Try God” lapel pin and it changed his life. Now he seeks to do the same for others.

BENNET BOLTON | FLORIDA CATHOLIC CORRESPONDENT

Published: 04.04.08

JASON COLLINS | FC
Bill Parrott sports his ever-present “Try God” lapel pin on his jacket.

PALM BEACH GARDENS | “Try God.” Those two simple words on a lapel pin worn 40 years ago by a priest in Bayside, Queens, N.Y., changed Bill Parrott’s life.

Parrott, now 80, had gone from cradle Catholic to lapsed Catholic before something about that pin sparked his return to the faith. “I had fallen away a few years before I saw that ‘Try God’ lapel pin that my pastor wore,” he said. “I was burned out. I did not know how God worked with me or even whether he did. Yet I came back.”

Today, Parrott, a lector at St. Patrick Parish in Palm Beach Gardens, wears his own Try God pin. He also is a founder of an interfaith Web site, www.trygodturnbacktome.com, along with two other laymen: Perry Weisberg, a Jewish businessman; and Gholam Rahman, a Muslim who writes a food section column called “Kitchen Counselor” twice a month in the local Palm Beach Post. Click on to the site and it states clearly that there is no attempt at conversion from one faith to another. The concept is “an idea that has never been tried before: religions working together. To show what we have in common. To invite all religiously inactive people to turn back to God and rejoin their own religions, Judaism, Christianity, (Islam) and others.”

Since its inception in 2000, Try God has grown to include an interfaith board of seven, adding Episcopalian Sharon Ferguson, Methodist Debbie Klop, Unitarian Universalist Richard Lake and Patricia Haynie, who is Baha’i. Parrott and the board meet a few times a year. The group’s team of advisers includes a rabbi, a priest, an imam, a Disciples of Christ minister, a Buddhist ngakma (nonmonastic practitioner) and a Christian Science spiritual healer.

The group has produced a video workshop series aimed at fostering interfaith discussion groups in Catholic parishes, other faith congregations, businesses’ employee lounges, prisons and other places to encourage people to return God to their daily lives.

The concept has been in the making for all these years, but the Try God Web site is new.

Board member Lake, a retired health care executive and native of Taunton, England, said the basic idea behind Try God is “to get people back to faith — their own faith.”

Parrott said that in 1963, once again a practicing Catholic, he was working in the insurance business in New York City. The Vatican Council of 1962-1965 was in full stride. Parrott was impressed by its document on the laity and what part it could and should play in the universal church.

He heard of the Institute of Lay Theology, begun at the University of San Francisco by Jesuit Father Eugene Zimmers, and he was hooked. The Parrotts at that time belonged to St. Francis de Sales Parish in Patchogue, Long Island.

“I left my job in New York to become a lay theologian,” he told the Florida Catholic. “I had this idea of becoming a lay evangelist — so I took my six children and my wife, Aileen, out there with no income. I just packed us all up in the car and off we went. My poor wife had to put up with this, but she was agreeable. I had what I felt was a calling.”

He spent one full scholastic year at USF, and at the end helped out at St. Cecilia Parish in San Francisco, where he worked with fallen-away Catholics and others coming into the faith.

“They were baptized, confirmed or whatever it took for them to return to the Catholic Church,” he said.

In 1968, the Parrotts returned east, spending a few years at Our Lady of the Snows Parish in Floral Park, Queens. Parrott formed his own company in nearby Lake Success, dealing with financial planning and investments.

He became active in 1970 in the Catholic-Jewish Relations Council of Northeast Queens, thus “the idea of having an interfaith program began germinating in me,” he said.

“I ran my idea by Father Avery Dulles, the Jesuit theologian at Fordham University, who is now a cardinal. I asked him, ‘Am I going to do something that will hurt the church?’ He said my idea was valid. To me it was something broadening, not limiting. It was inclusive of people who believe in God, not exclusive to only Catholics,” Parrot said.

He retired after 10 years and moved his family, by then expanded to seven children, to Juno Beach where they live today.

“We are not perfect,” he said about Try God. “But we make people think — try to make them see how God works with us as individuals, one by one.”

Rahman, treasurer of Try God, was a Time magazine correspondent in Pakistan before he spent 35 years with the Palm Beach Post as a copy editor. Before that, he spent some time with the U.S. State Department in its information service.

“We believe in accepting God’s will and accepting every other religion that accepts God in following God’s commands,” said Rahman, a native of India when it was a British colony and later a resident of Pakistan. “Islam means submission to the will of God, and thus to be a lover of peace.”

He said terrorism raging every day in Iraq between Sunnis and Shiites is not about religion, but about politics.

As part of his Try God ministry, Parrott developed God cards and passes them out to help people think about God. He also gives them to religiously inactive people hoping they may help nudge someone to come back to the faith.

“He is very passionate about his work,” said Father Brian Flanagan, pastor of St. Patrick. “He has been working on this for years. He has done a lot of work on it.”

Return to Diocese of Palm Beach Front Page

‘Try God’: a life changing message

Other Stories