Some time last week Leah asked me how old my grandparents were when they died. I couldn’t remember, so I searched for their obituaries. What I found was not my maternal grandmother’s obituary, but a version of my mother’s that my brother Henry had posted on his blog. I didn’t often read his blog, so I started checking it out. That led me to actually look at the name of the blog, The Narrow Gate*. The subtitle was “A continuation of the blog ‘Down in Mississippi’.”

What? Henry had a blog called “Down in Mississippi”? Why didn’t I know that? The blog recounts his experiences when he took a week’s vacation to go down to Pearlington, MS. His blog starts on the first day of his vacation (dated November 2006 in his blog, but described as covering events in 2008 and 2009).

In this case, Henry’s idea of a vacation was to work all the livelong day with a group from the Presbyterian Disaster Agency (PDA) trying to help people rebuild homes that were destroyed or almost destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Many people whose lives and homes were damaged by Katrina were still trying to rebuild three years later, down in Mississippi.

I’m not going to try to retell Henry’s stories. They are still there for anyone to read, down at the bottom of his Narrow Gate blog.

Henry’s work in Pearlington changed his life. At that time he was working as a materials scientist for a company called Steward in Chattanooga. He was not particularly happy. The company ownership had treated him poorly considering all he had done for them. It was a materials business, and he was the only materials scientist there. So he decided to quit and go to work full time for PDA in Mississippi, continuing the work he had done on his vacation. He lived at the PDA facility in Pearlington for a couple of years, until the agency decided that they had to close that operation and move to Texas to try to help with another disaster. 

It wasn’t long after he left PDA that he decided to find a seminary school and become an ordained Presbyterian minister.

I wonder if he ever wrote anything about his experiences at seminary school.

Henry was always argumentative, with me, with my parents, with his classmates, and, I suspect, with his instructors. It might have been uncomfortable for some of them to deal with someone as intelligent and educated as him. He was certainly not the typical ministerial student.

After he completed seminary and was ordained, he worked with a Presbyterian church in Chattanooga. One of his projects was working with homeless people. Some of them attended his memorial service. He also started a huge garden to try to grow food for people who couldn’t afford groceries.

He eventually ended up as the minister at a little church in Spring City, Tn. It was an old church with a small congregation consisting mostly of the type of conservatives you might expect in a small Tennessee town. There had been a split in that church, as well as the Presbyterian Church as a whole, over gay marriage. The majority of the members were in the anti-gay faction, and they wanted the church for themselves. However, the Presbyterian Church (USA) owned the church, and the Presbyterian Church gave it to the smaller faction that supported the church’s new stand allowing same-sex marriage.

That was the type of church where Henry would have felt at home.

The last post on Henry’s blog is dated February 6, 2018. It was a sermon he had prepared for a Sunday service at the Spring City church. He died two months after that.

Henry and I were alike in many ways, but very different in some ways. As a scientist, I can’t find any reason to believe in any god. Henry apparently felt no conflict. All I can say about that is that he lived the underlying Christian message better than most people who call themselves Christians

*”Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it.”