Posts tagged kentucky

I am deeply indebted to Steve Garber and Byron Borger for insisting that I get into Wendell Berry. At their urging, I have started with his novel Jayber Crow. The following is just one of many, many nuggets from this agrarian author with an astounding awareness of what makes human beings fully human.

re: agrarian, cultural worlds, kentucky, pilgrim, vocation, wendell berry

Christy:

If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line—starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King’s Highway past appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circling or doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have only seen them in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.

From a three-article series that the New York Times ran Christmas week. A lovely portrait of the sort of exchange that plays to the needs and strengths of both the sending and receiving cultures: priests come to the US to serve understaffed dioceses, whose members can then be brought into partnership to support development projects in their priests' home countries.

re: africa, asia, cultural worlds, gospel, horizons of the possible, kentucky, missions

Nate:

Majestic in a green chasuble, Father Ibemere delivered his homily strolling up and down the aisle. When it was time to distribute the eucharist, he bent down to give communion to a man he knew was too ill to stand.

After the Mass, however, one member of the congregation, Virginia Ballard, gestured toward the Nigerian priest and confided in Father Venters, “I can’t understand what he said, but he’s a sweet young man.”

Mrs. Ballard went on to praise Father Ibemere’s knowledge of the Bible, his capacity to remember the names of congregants, his willingness to teach the Americans about his home in Nigeria. “He is a holy man,” she concluded, “and we are honored to have him.”