A Purple People Eater and celebrated jurist speaks at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis

LOUISVILLE — Former Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page, a member of both the College and Pro Football Hall of Fame who anchored the famed “Purple People Eaters” defense of the Minnesota Vikings, spoke Thursday at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis as part of Westminster Town Hall Forum’s 45 anniversary. Listen to Page’s talk here. He’s introduced at the 58:12 mark.

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Now 80, Page, a distinguished jurist and longtime supporter of opportunities for young people, also addressed the Forum in 1982 after retiring from the NFL’s Chicago Bears but before embarking on his 22-year career as an Associate Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. For Thursday’s event, Page was interviewed by the Rev. Dr. Jessica Patchett, WPC’s senior pastor.

Patchett asked Page: What foundation have you stood on? What well have you drawn from?

Page cited his parents and family and his late wife, Diane Sims Page, a longtime Twin Cities philanthropist, as well as “operating from a belief that life is not as complicated as we sometimes try to make it.”

Page’s parents “worked very hard to make me and my siblings understand that you have to be honest and trustworthy,” he said. “When you make a mistake, you try to correct it. When you do something wrong, you take responsibility for it.”

He said he’s “baffled that we live in a time in which honesty is thrown aside” and “the truth is ignored.”

“Who would have ever thought we would come to the point where our leaders … would feel comfortable making statements that are demonstrably false — about anything and everything,” Page said. “What that does is erode our trust and confidence in our government and our leaders, and when it filters down to us, it erodes our trust and confidence in each other.”

It’s “a little scary, quite frankly, to be in a world where the effort seems to be to do everything we can to ensure that we don’t trust each other.”

With the agency we have, how do we change that, Patchett wondered.

“Each of us has it within ourselves,” Page said. “My sense is [it’s] in the same way we can impact issues of justice and race and unfairness.”

“This isn’t somebody else’s problem; this is my problem,” Page said. “When we focus on what we can do to bring about change, change will happen.”

Asked about cultivating an environment where young people can thrive, Page reminded the large crowd in the sanctuary that “young people are watching us.”

“Even when we think we’re pulling the wool over their eyes, they can see through us,” he said. “They’re trying to figure this all out. That’s where the hope is for me. … We can support them in their efforts to make sure they understand the difference between right and wrong — doing what is right as opposed to what’s convenient. We all benefit from that.”

“As my kids used to argue: ‘You’re not the boss of me,’” Page said with a grin. “We want to be free, and that freedom means we have to figure out how to be free and live together. That’s the underpinning of it all.”

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Those gathered then sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” before a panel joined Page and Patchett for more discussion. The panel included Wenda Weekes Moore, who directed the Forum in the 1990s; former Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak; and the Rev. Dr. Tim Hart-Andersen, WPC’s former senior pastor. Patchett asked them to share how they seek to live an ethical life.

“I have simple words I have lived by all my life: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” Moore said. “My children heard them over and over again, and I’m teaching it to my grandsons now. We have a commitment to touch that next generation. We need to start pouring into them.”

When things are tough, many of us retreat into what’s familiar to us, Rybak said. He advised those in attendance to “start as local as possible, and we saw that in this community” in the protests and the caring for one another following the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

Hart-Andersen remembers preaching once with a memorable prop: a big rock on a string, a plumb line. Hart-Andersen asked those in worship: What is your plumb line? What keeps you living straight and true?

“I am especially appreciative, speaking as a Protestant minister, of Pope Leo,” Hart-Andersen said, and the crowd applauded. “I don’t know if he carries one around with him, but he’s got a plumb line, and that line is straight and true. He knows what it is and he knows where he stands.”

“It’s us. It’s not somebody else,” Page said. “We have the power to bring about change, individually and collectively.”

“We have to start connecting with each other and not looking at people who are different from us as though they are less than,” Page said. “I managed to play pro football. There are people who can’t do that. That doesn’t mean they are any less than I am. It just means they are different than I am.”

And we must listen better, Page said, especially to voices we may not agree with. “If we don’t listen to each other, how can I understand what I’m thinking, much less what you’re thinking?”

Hart-Andersen joked that “I was hoping we would get to the point where Justice Page explains how one plays ethical football.”

“Absolutely! You don’t cheat. It’s real simple,” Page said. “You understand the rules and you play by those rules. You try to play at your highest level, but you don’t bend rules — you use the rules to your advantage.”

“I don’t know when our political conversation has been as heated and mean as it is now,” Moore said. “I think it makes all of us talk to our circle of friends who agree with us because we don’t want to run the risk of having one of those uncomfortable conversations.”

“If we hear the same conversation all the time, it confirms who we are,” Moore said. “Maybe it’s our responsibility to reach out and share a different perspective and hopefully build some bridges.”

Page quoted the late U.S. Senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone: “We all do better when we all do better.”

He recalled a display of Jim Crow art and artifacts that he and his wife arranged for at the Minneapolis Central Library.

“Each of those artifacts was a fact,” Page said. “We may have a dispute about the reasonable inferences to be drawn from those facts, but we can’t have a discussion about what the facts are. This notion that there is such a thing as alternative facts — an alternative fact is a lie, and we have to call them what they are.”

“You can’t be operating on facts that don’t exist and expect to have something productive come out of it,” Page said. “It just can’t happen.” He said that “common set of facts” is one of the things he most appreciated about his service on the Minnesota Supreme Court.

Sara Wilhelm Garbers, executive director of the Westminster Town Hall Forum, drew the discussion to a close with words that Page offered during his Forum appearance 44 years ago: “You know, in football there are winners and losers. Fortunately, life isn’t like football. If we are willing to work and make changes, make the system better for young people entering it, then I think everybody can win.”

“I believe you can never have too many winners.”

Learn more about the Westminster Town Hall Forum here.