“He made us think” would be a very nice epitaph.

Gomes: Well that is not an easy question, which is why you doubtless put it to me.  I hope that I will always be thought of as a thoughtful preacher, that I took the life and the mind seriously, that I didn’t toy with people’s emotions, that I worked very hard in trying to find the right words to convey the right ideas.  I’d like people to think that that’s what I did and that I did it well – that I did it over a long period of time in a wide variety of places.  It would please me to be thought of as effective both in an exalted place like the Memorial Church of Harvard University, and in a very modest pulpit like South Pond Chapel in the dark woods of Plymouth, Massachusetts – that I was, in those remarkably different settings, to make people think, and to cause them to react and to respond.  That’s what I’m interested in.  And I would hope that that would be the legacy that I would leave behind.  “He made us think” would be a very nice epitaph.