Summer at Grace

My final project for the Digital Literacies class I am taking this summer is about one of my communities - Grace Church Brooklyn Heights. A community within my larger community of neighborhood, the Grace Church folk have sheltered me and my family through many a storm in the past 3o years.

In the proposal for this project I ask, What makes a church? Is it the building, the stained glass windows, the magnificent organ and choir? Perhaps it is the programs offered, the ministries to parishioners and members of the wider community? Or perhaps it is the people. But what happens in the wilting heat and damp of summer, the season of Pentecost in the liturgical calendar. Is the church still the church when the choir, the education programs, and most of the clergy and many of the parishioners flee the city for vacation.

It is of course all three but the greatest of these is the people. The building, the music, the liturgy, and the programs and ministries we offer -- all so important. But without the people to make it happen, to be the hands and mind of God, there would be no Grace Church.

Yet, perhaps it is because I live next door, often viewing the church through the leafy green of my own backyard, it is the magnificent sturdy structure of Grace Church that pleases my heart so.
My eyes take in the daily and seasonal changes of light that reveal the height and depth, the beauty in those massive blocks of red/gray New Jersey sandstone. Especially on a late winter afternoon walking home along Hicks Street my heart leaps in joy to see the winter sun warming those stones, bringing them to life as they build to steepled, pinnacled heights imprinting the

sky with gables and parapets flying. Foolishly for a moment I believe God eternal abides there, holding all evil at bay.

Wendell Berry, poet, writer, fellow Kentuckian, farmer

Wendell Berry is one of my favorite writers. I first discovered him through his novels set in the ficticious town of Port William, Kentucky. He is a poet, an essayist and a farmer for the past 40 years in central Kentucky. A native of Henry County, Kentucky he graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1956 and received his Master's degree in 1957. Through his essays, poems and novels, as well as lectures, he models values I share: sustainable agriculture, local communities, responsible technologies, good slow-cooked food, living in harmony with the land and your community, and a sense of place. Familiar with his fiction, I just recently discovered his poetry. Here is a YouTube clip of a reading of his poem, "What Do The Tall Trees Say":

This is the view from my kitchen door, up the steps my small plot of ground. At the back, barely visible from the picture is Grace Church Brooklyn Heights. When I enter through my garden gate, cross my small summer parched yard, down these steps and into my kitchen, I have just touched once again my grounding, my community, my place. I am home.