A Deeper Look at a Family Reunion

If you follow this blog, you know that I have a 9 month appointment as a Synod Appointed Minister (a part-time appointment) at Faith Lutheran Church in Bristol, Tennessee.  Long ago, my grandfather served 5 parishes in Bristol, Tennessee, and they have merged through the years; one of the merged churches is Faith Lutheran.  Here's a picture of one of the older churches that my grandfather served:

The members of my grandfather's generation have died.  Here's a picture of my grandfather (on the left) and my grandmother's youngest brother, Jim Crumley; both men served the Lutheran church in a variety of ways.

Here's a picture of my grandmother Mary 

And here's one of her only sister, Martha (there were 2 other brothers, but I don't have pictures):

Yesterday, the children of that generation came to the front of the church for communion.  As I handed each one the bread, I felt this spookiness.  Their faces looked like the faces of the people in the pictures above, the faces as I knew them when they were older, not in the pictures.  And of course, I am not the young woman that I was when I first met many of them, at a long ago family reunion in 1977 I'm in the lower right corner, to the left of my mom who is wearing a striped shirt, with my little sister sitting between my mom and dad):

Here's a picture of Saturday's family reunion, held just down the road, at the Faith Lutheran's picnic pavilion:

And here's a picture that I snapped of the church at sunset, a sunset made more spectacular by tropical storm Ophelia to our east.

I thought it captured a sense of liminal space, that sense of something passing away even as other things remain.  The family remains, as does the church, as do the mountains that surround the church and the farms, some of which have remained in family hands, some of which have not.  The news delivers a steady drumbeat of reports of challenges ahead--so many challenges.  But that would have been true for the people in those old pictures above, the pictures in this old album of pictures of people who are gone now.  

My grandfather went off to seminary in the early 1930's, even after the seminary sent him a letter encouraging him to stay on the farm where at least he would have food to eat, but if he was determined to come to seminary, he was welcome, even though the church wasn't sure of job prospects at the end.  My mother was born in 1939, a year filled with bad news and worse news to come.  

And yet, the sun rose and set, the lights stayed on, forces of good prevailed, and so did forces of evil.  I try to take a longer view of history, although it doesn't come naturally to me.  Every generation has had struggles, and we are no different.  I hope we continue to gather as humans, in groups large and small, to tell the stories, to be nourished in so many ways.