Back in Kentucky

Back in Kentucky when he was a young, wet-behind-the-ears

minister who pastored Presbyterian churches he determined not

to send out ordinary, typical “messages from the pastor,” that basic-

ally were attempts by the pastor to make those who got the newsletter

and who actually bothered to open it and who hadn’t been in wor-

ship for a while feel guilty or the messages were stewardship updates

on how far behind the church was in the budget which also was

designed to make parishioners feel guilty or they were syrupy senti-

ments about Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild. After all, he had been

an English major and had gotten some poetry published in his college

literary publication and had been the editor of his seminary’s student

literary publication, so he wrote short stories and editorials on national

and local politics from his Christian perspective and poetry, mostly haikus

which didn’t take too long to write. He put two of his college English

professors on the mailing list – one from community college days and

his courses in Shakespeare and one from his junior and senior years and

his classes in creative writing.  Once, he wrote a tribute in a newsletter

to his Shakespeare prof. and when he was on a trip to Indiana stopped to

say hi. The prof. had framed the tribute and it hung in his home study.

After the minister, now-not-so-wet-behind-the-ears, moved back to Mich-

igan, he visited his creative writing teacher who told him how much the

newsletter articles had meant to him and then kidded the minister about

still having some hair on his head. The prof. had saved some copies from

all those years. The minister didn’t get any of the writing from those news-

letters published in periodicals or journals or anthologies, but he did get

them published in the heads and the hearts of two mentors.  Now the minister

has a photo of the one hanging on the wall of his home study. He was teach-

ing Shakespeare at London University on a professor exchange when he

just dropped dead while in his fifties while at his desk and the minister thinks about

the other every time he drives past the street where the prof. used to live

before he died at a pretty young age from smoking too much.  Then the min-

ister thought about impermanence and the aging paper of his newsletters and

while it had been a long time since he thought of heaven in a geographical

way, he wondered if his profs. remembered him and then he remembered that

eternity was in his head and heart and that he would simply leave the rest

to God.