Whenever we drive through Kentucky, I can’t help but think of the six weeks I spent there back in the summer of 1979.

I went to Harlan – not a long distance in miles from Knoxville, but another world away in another sense – as a volunteer in a program run by a religious order. For the life of me, I can’t remember which one, nor can I find any hints online. They ran a number of programs in various parts of the country. This one was in association with the Catholic church in Harlan, Holy Trinity.

The program was about two things, of course: helping the poor and recruitment for religious life, although the latter was quite subtle and indirect, which is fine. There were two religious women running the show, as I recall, very kind women, but, I can see, or rather feel in retrospect, both with issues of their own. In fact, when I try to remember one of them, the memory is suffused with a sense of indecision and dissatisfaction, never directly communicated, but present nonetheless.

There were probably about 15 or 20 of us, college-aged women, there to lend a hand. Our main job was to teach in the church’s vacation Bible school…with our spare time being available for any other work that was needed.

Snapshots.

At that time, the parish was primarily composed of professionals, immigrants from the North, and some from overseas (which is farther from Harlan? New York or the Philippines? Who knows?). There were hardly any native Harlan-ites in the congregation, and it was decidedly middle-class in a community awash in poverty. An elderly farm couple showed up one Sunday morning and sat in the back. The conversation afterwards among the congregation concerned their appearance and their odor. What does the Body of Christ smell like, anyway?

One native Harlan-ite member was an African-American woman, a convert, who died while I was there. She was the only Catholic in her family, who all attended the funeral Mass, of course. We provided the music, and what I remember most vividly was her daughters and granddaughters, at the end of Mass, hanging onto the casket, weeping and wailing, intransigent, unwilling to let go. We were singing Be Not Afraid, and we sang…and we sang….I don’t know how many verses until they were finally pulled away.

The pastor was an elderly Irishman, a religious. I don’t remember what order. We gathered for our meals in the church basement every day. He would pray grace, and his parting shot every time was "Sail Away!" meaning…go eat. "Sail away…." he’d murmer. "Sail away!"  At our closing party, we gave gifts, and one of the gifts from our group was a cap that I, for some reason, volunteered to embroider with "Sail Away." There’s a photo somewhere in my stuff of him in it.

The parish sent a bus throughout the community to pick up children for Bible School. It went into every neighborhood and up into the mountains. Going up was bad, but coming down was worse. Oh, it was terrible. No side rails on the road – not that they would have done any good – with the bus hurling down those sharp curves, the driver taking them as if he’d been driving them his whole life – which he probably had, but that was no comfort to me. I’m not lying when I tell you that I’ve never been as frightened for my life as I was hanging on during those drives down the mountain.

One of our jobs, outside of Bible School, was to go into the homes of some of the elderly poor and clean and do whatever else needed to be done. One man I remember was blind. He lived in his home, alone, a home which was the filthiest place I’d ever seen in my life. We tried, and perhaps we made some dent in it by our efforts, but not much. He had family, I know, and I wondered why they didn’t take care of him.

I learned a lot about poverty in those six weeks. I learned, most of all, not to romanticize it. To serve the poor, but not to idealize their lives or characters. The squalor of Harlan startled me. I understood the terrible state those folks were in at every level, but I still didn’t understand why for so many of them, poverty had to mean squalor and filth and garbage in the front yard. It gave me much to think about.

A couple of other religious sisters crossed our paths a few times that summer. They lived in the area – one was a doctor, and one was a nurse. They traveled the hills, serving the poor, giving them medical care. Model religious, they seemed to me then, and now, as well.

The religious in charge of our program were kind, but rather ethereal, which those other medical sisters were not. They never really articulated any ideology, but we did participate in an agape meal, all the rage then in the 70’s, derived, I believe,from a passage in the Didache, which implied a non-Eucharistic ritual meal of some sort. Or that was what they explained. (Something similar is described in David Lodge’s Souls and Bodies… 1970’s Catholics doing an agape meal with their Jerusalem Bibles in hand..great image). I learned to play the guitar there, too. It was a very 70’s Catholic summer in that respect.

Not terribly dramatic. Not as severe as the "short -term mission" experiences of others. But it was something I needed to see and do – that there is a great deal of suffering out here in the world, some of it obvious in origin, some of it not so clear. But what is no mystery is what Jesus calls us to do about the suffering  – to see Him in the midst of it, and to love.

Sail Away…