Each of us who attended the funeral service of Canon Billy Wynne, who died a year ago yesterday, had our own story of the man. Around the aisles of St Patrick's Cathedral people had tears on their faces, barely-held lumps in their throats, and laughed as they listened to Canon Cecil Hyland describing "the big man". The man who watched in righteous frustration as the lonely sought sleep and their only comfort in too many "half-ones". The man who cleared an empty space in the parish hall and created the "Friendly Room", where friendship and fellowship replaced loneliness.
Billy was an active Christian. Not for him the stereotype of the Church of Ireland rector of the time, ministering to a quiet minority unsure of where it stood in the new Ireland of Lemass and Whitaker.
He ministered to anyone in trouble, be they homeless, alcoholic, or those of his "brothers in Christ" whose clerical collar was no immunity from sins of the flesh. All of them were assured of anonymity in his bookladen study.
He proposed a counselling service for clergy, which would be outside the hierarchical system. As was so often the case with Billy's ideas, this was several decades before its time.
Had it been set up not just for his own denomination but also for other "brothers in Christ", they too might not have had to suffer their private miseries in silence while preserving the public facade of rector of priest.
Back in the 1960s suicide wasn't on the agenda and no one had anyone to talk to about their fears. In London Rev Chad Varah, at St Martin's in the Fields, was so concerned about the number of people in so great distress and loneliness that he set up a confidential phone service.
The Samaritans, now a worldwide name for offering a non-judgmental telephone listening service, had begun. Billy wrote to a colleague who was working with Chad and who, seeing the letter, said this was "the type of man we want to start a branch of the Samaritans in Dublin."
They became close friends, with Billy becoming the first Samaritan contact in Dublin. Chad would mind the phone while the Wynnes had their August break; the cultures may have been very different but the distress of callers was the same. Billy often spoke of Chad's concern with sex problems which were not discussed then, but which he said were the same in Dublin as London.
Billy knew Dublin needed a Samaritan branch, just as there was one in Belfast. One challenge was the principle that branch directors must be from all denominations. He found Vincent Grogan and Father Jack Brennan, who resolved that problem, and the Dublin branch was set up. It is now one of the busiest Samaritan branch in these islands.
His motto was a favourite line from the musical No, No Nanette: "I want to be happy, but I won't be happy/ Till I make you happy too." It was a line he often used.
Probably everyone of the thousand or so people at his funeral service in St Patrick's had their own story of Billy - such as the occasion in Monkstown Church when he cycled up the aisle in full robes to illustrate the theme of his sermon that "all things work together for those who love God."
How can we sum up the influence of Canon Billy Wynne? Perhaps by borrowing John Healy's description of Sean Lemass: One understands that Wynne was a big man. Wynne is a big man. Wynne will be a bigger man.