A Palpable Kinship

September 1, 2026

Beloved:

          Wendell Berry died.  I’ve been tearful since I read the news this morning.  No more stories from Port William.  No more essays or interviews.  I’m a better preacher and a better person for having read him.  I’d like to think I am a better writer, but I know for sure I am more at home in my own writing voice because of him.  Good writers write about the places, people and work they know, he said.  It’s why he wrote from rural Kentucky, his home and people.  About agriculture, the work his people had done for generations – a way of life being plowed under by technology and corporate greed.
          Southern Indiana and east central Kentucky are of one topography and as far as I know we weren’t related.  But the kinship I feel to the people in Berry’s stories is palpable.  They could be the aunts and uncles at my own childhood family gatherings – throwing horseshoes and shelling peas, drinking store brand pop from a galvanized tub of ice.  The men drank whiskey on the sly.  My elders were not farmers, but all of them had grown up farming in and around Lawrence County.  An older cousin married into a dairy farming family up in Brazil, and she’d take us little kids to see the newborn calves and get ice cream from the freezer barn.  Most went to trade school or joined the military and got jobs at which they could make a living.  I had uncles who were truck drivers and an aunt who tended lots of greenhouses.  Only in my generation did cousins begin going off to college – to become teachers, engineers and nurses, along with a fancy environmental scientist who lives in Europe and one very ordinary preacher.
          From this spot on the earth I understand everything I know about this life, this world, and my faith.  Among these people I first experienced family, community and church.  And from Wendell Berry I learned to embrace it all for the gift it is, and to glean the stories from which to make meaning of my own life, honoring them as the only truthful stories I can tell as well as the stories only I can tell.  His memory will forever be a blessing to me.

~ peace & prayers, 
pastor annette