During the service you might well have voiced your own memories of him. And you’d surely have joined in singing hymns he loved, especially the old gospel standard that opens, "When peace, like a river, attendeth my way." In days past, the man’s superb, almost operatic baritone made that church’s wooden walls vibrate as he sang the refrain, "It is well. It is well with my soul!"

Even his name was majestic: Stanford Aston Mighty. He was born near Kingston, Jamaica, 67 years ago, the son of a successful farmer. He once told a group of us that as a little boy of five he was awed to discover the river that ran through the fields near his home. "I’d only known a trickle of water as it flowed from the faucet," he said, "but here was a vastness of water! It was sweeping down from somewhere, heading somewhere else."

Mesmerized by the river, the little boy set off at once to find its source. He walked barefoot for hours and for miles. Late in the day, worn out, he sat down between the river and a road running next to it. He hadn’t given up his quest, but he had to rest.

Soon a farmer came along the road in a wagon and saw the little boy asleep. "Son," he said, "I know you! You’re Robert Mighty’s boy. But what are you doing here, so far from home?" The answer was, of course, in the river, in finding its source. But Stanford was just too weary to explain. And so the kind farmer picked him up, set him in the wagon, and hauled him home to his relieved parents.

In telling us that story, Stanford, already dying, told us the story of his life. All his days he kept searching for the Source, never giving up on his quest. For Stanford was a mystic, a man who fervently believed that the ultimate Source can be found and embraced, immediately, in this life.

He was a committed Christian, finding the anchor of his faith in the Quaker school he attended in Kingston. With the Quakers he memorized the scriptures, and with them he learned the grand old gospel hymns.

"When peace, like a river ..." No wonder he loved that one best.

In his last days, Stanford told us another story, too. As a young man he earned a degree at England’s Bristol University, but he also spent much time walking throughout England, especially along riversides. I’ve seen a photo of him from that time. In it, Stanford looks like a young Sidney Poitier: mahogany skin, piercing black eyes, high forehead and cheekbones. And like Poitier, Stanford has a look of majestic command.

Once, he said, he was hiking in the Lake District and topped a hill to face a breath-taking panorama of woodlands, fields, flocks of grazing sheep, even a distant manor house with castle ruins next to it. The magnificent scene made the young man’s heart sing.

"It came to me suddenly," said Stanford. "I didn’t have to own any of that! I was free of its burden, and yet it was all mine to enjoy!" And that epiphany became the touchstone of his life. He and his wife Cora, a perfect match for him, lived their life with minimal concern for possessions, maximum concern for loving service of others.

I knew Stanford through Butternuts Quarterly Meeting, the unit that links our local Friends with Quakers from Binghamton, Hamilton, Mohawk Valley, and Unadilla. Stanford loved sessions that brought us all together. He was a gifted cook, and when we’d finished our business meeting, Stanford and Cora would enlist the help of a half-dozen others to carry in the coolers of food they’d brought along, much of it made with a grand Jamaican flair. That big, warm-hearted man saw food as a sacrament. For him, a pot-luck meal was a thanksgiving, a eucharist.

If you had known him, I know that what you’d remember most today would be that astounding singing voice. It had a church organ’s depth and fullness, and Stanford joyfully used it for music from show tunes to hymns to oratorios.

When, toward the end, he was bedridden and wasting slowly away, a group of us would visit to sit with him in Quaker silence, to read Bible passages, to sing. It was only at the very end that he could not raise that wonderful voice to sing with us.

Once, when I was there alone at his bedside, I was reading him some of the psalms. Stanford was drifting in and out of morphine-induced sleep, but that didn’t matter. I began to read that sad lament of the exiled Hebrews, "By the rivers of Babylon." Suddenly, eyes still closed, he sang from Handel’s setting of that very psalm. In a rich, modulated voice that could have filled a theater, Stanford sang, "How can I sing the songs of the Lord on an alien soil?"

It was the song of one waiting for his painful exile to end.

And end it did, in late May, with all the beauty of spring outside his room’s windows. At the funeral home in Unadilla, people wept when they saw him. In death, the years had dropped away. He was Poitier again, perhaps aged 40.

During the funeral, people reminisced, laughed, told their own Stanford stories. His fellow Rotarians were there, and his family doctor of many years, and wonderful relatives from Canada and downstate and, of course, from Jamaica. At the service’s close, a niece, her voice as big as Stanford’s, burst into song. She plastered us back against the pews with a gorgeous, bluesy hymn. Then we buried him under a cloudless spring sky.

Live free of possessions, love and serve people, follow the river to its Source. He’d done the first two all his days. And finally, I’m sure, he found where that river rose. And there he surely sings, "It is well. It is well with my soul."

Read about Jim Atwell’s book, "From Fly Creek _ Celebrating Life in Leatherstocking Country" at JimAtwell.com.