[Faith-talk] Fwd: Re: Hi from Keith

[Penny Golden]

>Here is Keith Wiglesworth's message, an article he hoped you might 
>like to see.

I just realized that I haad got off the list.  why, what a dummy; I 
tried to send to a list I wasn't on.
but I'm here again, and here's keith Wiglesworth's note and the 
article he wanted you to see; for some reason he cannot mail to the 
list--but i did not get the reason.


>Hi Penny,
>     Okay, here's the article again.  Give it another go, or just send it to
>Linda and let her post it if it doesn't seem to work from your end.
>     Thanks.
>     Blessings,
>Keith and see below.
>     Seeing the light
>From: Richmond Times Dispatch - Richmond,VA,USA
>STORY BY BILL LOHMANN PHOTOS BY BOB BROWN
>TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF Sep 24, 2006
>LINK: AUDIO SLIDESHOW
>http://originmedia.gatewayva.com/rtd/multimedia/Preacher/preacher_conten
>t.html
>GLADESBORO - He ambled cautiously but confidently through the darkened
>but familiar hallway of his church.
>His hands reached for a light switch and then a door, which he pushed
>open to reveal the sanctuary divinely bathed in sunlight. The
>stained-glass win-dows
>filled with life. The bright-red carpet glowed as if on fire.
>"Isn't it gorgeous?" said the Rev. Duane L. Steele. "I think this is the
>most beautiful church in Carroll County."
>Pride is one thing, but how exactly might Steele know? Not once in his
>28 years as pastor of Gladesboro Evangelical Lutheran Church, tucked
>away in the
>Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia, has he seen the place.
>Steele is blind, but he's come to know beauty when it presents itself.
>"The ambience," Steele explained, not put off at all by the question.
>"You can feel it. Don't you just feel the reverence in here?"
>This is all part of Steele's job: helping others see the light he can
>only feel.
>Steele, 59, has been blind since shortly after birth. He was stricken in
>an epidemic in the 1940s and early 1950s that claimed the sight of
>thousands of
>premature infants given supplemental oxygen that was too rich.
>He's been friendly, enthusiastic and outgoing just about as long.
>His best friend, Craig Werner, also blind, remembers when he met Steele
>more than 50 years ago. Werner was 7, a scared and lonely child entering
>the New
>York Institute for the Education of the Blind in the Bronx, a
>residential school where Steele was already a student. Steele
>immediately welcomed Werner.
>"I'll be your friend," Werner recalled Steele telling him.
>"He was a very caring person, even as a small child," said Werner,
>associate professor of English at Buffalo State College. "He had the
>kind of personality
>. . . you just wanted to take to him."
>Steele grew up in the Catskill Mountains north of New York City, and
>didn't have family close by. Werner's parents lived a few blocks from
>the school and
>embraced Steele as their own. They invited him into their home on
>weekends, took him to church and to concerts, and introduced him to
>opera. He and Werner
>became like brothers.
>When Steele was about 10, Werner noticed his friend had taken a keen
>interest in religion - in class, in church and on the radio. For Steele,
>the radio
>was a sanctuary, a cherished source of news, music and ballgames, as
>well as a wave of on-the-air preachers who never failed to enlighten, or
>at least
>entertain.
>"My favorite heroes when I was growing up were pastors," said Steele. "I
>took an interest in the Bible very early on . . . and I always sat in
>the front
>pew as close to the pastor as I could get.
>"Then I started listening to all the people on the radio. Billy Graham,
>Norman Vincent Peale, Harry Emerson Fosdick. I would listen to these
>guys week after
>week, and I would say, 'I want to be one of them.'"
>In high school, though, Steele turned away from the church,
>disillusioned by the war in Vietnam and by religion in general. He went
>to college, thinking
>he'd become a teacher. But he discovered few opportunities for blind
>teachers. He quit college, married and started a family.
>A gifted singer and pianist, he poured his soul into music. He took jobs
>playing in restaurants and clubs. He moved to Northern Virginia and at
>one point
>was holding down three jobs: tuning pianos, playing gigs and serving as
>organist at a small Lutheran church.
>He wearied of that lifestyle and enrolled at what was then Shenandoah
>Conservatory of Music in Winchester, graduated in 1974, and, at age 27,
>decided he
>would indeed like to go into the ministry. He finished seminary and
>found a church in Lancaster, Pa., willing to hire a blind intern. He
>wanted to prove
>his independence. He got the chance.
>The pastor went on vacation and left Steele in charge. When a member of
>the congregation died, a panicked Steele tracked down his boss by phone.
>"What do I do?" Steele asked.
>Came the reply: "The funeral."
>Meantime, Gladesboro Evangelical Lutheran Church was a small
>congregation in search of a pastor. He came for a visit, preached the
>sermon on Palm Sunday
>in 1978 and, a few weeks later, was offered the job.
>His oldest child, Jennifer, then 9, helped him learn his way around the
>church.
>"She brought me over to the church and we walked and walked and walked,"
>said Steele. "She was very patient. My children learned over the years
>having a
>blind parent to be very patient."
>It took only a week for Steele to become comfortable in his new
>surroundings; he acknowledges it might have taken some members of the
>congregation a little
>longer to become comfortable with him. However, he eventually allayed
>their fears, largely through his disarming manner; it's hard not to like
>a man who
>can perform a great, thunderous hymn on the electronic keyboard, then
>push the piano button and launch into a bouncy version of "Ain't
>Misbehavin'." He
>also made members of the congregation active participants in the
>ministry, regularly enlisting them to drive him on pastoral visits.
>[wlo: Steele loves Gladesboro - it's not too terribly different from
>where he grew up, although he says with a smile that he doesn't recall
>eating pinto
>beans on cornbread - and he loves the people and the church, which
>celebrated its 150th anniversary last year. Over the years, he's
>traveled the country
>with his music ministry and as an advocate for the blind. At church,
>he's married a lot, buried a lot and begun to baptize the children of
>children he
>baptized years ago.
>But his deep-rooted ambition gnaws at him. Having grown up around
>big-city churches in New York, he always envisioned himself pastoring a
>larger church.
>The opportunity never came.
>"Frankly, I lost track of the number of turn-downs I received after
>about the first 10," Steele said. "Most of the time, the rejections were
>subtle. In
>a couple of instances before the passage of the Americans With
>Disabilities Act [of 1990], people said frankly that they were
>uncomfortable, or thought
>that their parishes might not be up to the challenge of working with a
>blind person.
>"I'm no longer marketable for those big churches, and I know that. So, I
>grow where I'm planted. I believe God had a vision, and maybe his vision
>was different
>from mine. But it still worked out. I've had a fantastic life. The
>people of Gladesboro Church have hung in there with me. I love these
>people, and they
>love me.
>"If I had to be in one place for my whole ministry, this was the place
>to be."
>He and Janet, his wife of 38 years and a middle-school teacher in nearby
>Grayson County, raised four children, all grown and gone.
>He tries not to ponder what if, focusing instead on what is.
>He said he has never been angry about being blind; he has known life no
>other way. He has been angered at having to work so much harder to be,
>as he put
>it, "normal," but he has never been angry at the blindness itself. In
>some ways, it has made him challenge himself, and he is not ungrateful
>for that.
>"When you operate with a disability, regardless of what job you go for,
>you have to give it everything," he said. "You have to be absolutely the
>best. I
>think being blind made me reach more for the stars."
>After all these years, Sunday mornings remain his favorite time. Church
>member Bob Willard stops at Steele's home evey week to pick up the
>preacher and
>drive him the quarter-mile to the church. While Steele gets ready to
>preach, the two talk sports.
>Technology has made teaching and preaching much easier than it used to
>be for Steele. He has computer software that can transform text on a
>screen into
>a digitized voice, and a Braille printer that spits out paper covered
>with raised dots. He loves e-mail. He also loves his MP3 player, being a
>fan of music
>of all kinds but particularly classical.
>On a recent Sunday at Gladesboro Church, the morning was still and
>quiet. Early-arriving worshippers gathered out front to chat. Cows
>grazed in the next
>pasture. Inside, Steele sat at a table in the middle of a Sunday school
>classroom in his dark suit the color of his sunglasses, his fingers
>crawling across
>his textured notes. Steele asked someone to read the story of the
>conversion of a woman named Lydia in the Book of Acts. The reader had
>barely finished
>when Steele blurted, "Isn't that cool?"
>His enthusiasm is something the members of Gladesboro have appreciated
>since the moment they met him.
>"That's what we needed," said Annette Marshall, a church member for 50
>years.
>And his blindness?
>"It didn't really bother anyone after we first saw him," said Marshall,
>who has been one of Steele's many drivers through the years.
>During the 11 o'clock service, Steele preached and sang with the choir -
>he said his voice has weakened in recent years because of asthma - and
>delivered
>the sort of announcements that ministers typically make. Before a
>congregation of about 75, he welcomed visitors and noted a birth,
>announced who was ailing
>and revealed who was celebrating his 60th birthday.
>During the last hymn, Steele recessed - alone and without a cane - down
>the center aisle. He stopped at a pew to sing and visit with two of his
>grandchildren,
>then continued to the welcoming red front doors of the church to greet
>his departing flock.
>"He has this unclouded view of who we are, untainted by the visual
>things that our eyes catch," said Bishop James F. Mauney of the Virginia
>Synod of the
>Evangelical Church in America. "Without getting too sappy, I think Duane
>sees in ways others of us don't see, and I think that's a unique gift
>for a pastor."
>After the service, Eldon Gardner stood near the last pew, talking about
>how he's attended the church for all of his 88 years and how he used to
>drive Steele
>to nursing homes for musical visits. Gardner played the harmonica.
>"The only reason he's stayed," a smiling Gardner said of Steele's long
>tenure in Gladesboro, "is he couldn't see to leave."
>At that very moment, Steele walked past, heard the comment and
>recognized the voice.
>"I love you, Eldon," said Steele, without the slightest hint of offense
>and without slowing.
>Replied Gardner, "I love you, too, Duane."
>Contact staff writer Bill Lohmann at
>wlohmann at timesdispatch.com
>or (804)
>649-6639. Contact senior photographer Bob Brown at
>bbrown at timesdispatch.com
>or
>(804) 649-6382.
>http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD%2FMGArticle%
>2FRTD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1149190729158&path=!flair&s=104585593
>6229
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Penny Golden" <goldpen at frontiernet.net>
>To: "Keith Wiglesworth" <kworks at etinternet.net>
>Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 9:15 AM
>Subject: Re: Hi from Keith
>
>
> > Keith, my attempt misfired. would you send me the article again, please?
> > my address that I used automatically for the faith-talk list had two
> > F's in it. what a chump I am. please send me the article again, if
> > you still have it. if not, I'll have to look it up in the outbox.
> > Blessings and thanks if you can do it, or even if you cannot, Penny
> > At 07:17 AM 9/28/2006, you wrote:
> > >Hi Penny,
> > >     Thanks so much for doing that, and letting me know of Linda's
>change,
> > >and I'll send her a brief note as well to get her in my address book.
> > >     Thanks again for everything.
> > >     Blessings,
> > >Keith
> > >----- Original Message -----
> > >From: "Penny Golden" <goldpen at frontiernet.net>
> > >To: "Keith Wiglesworth" <kworks at etinternet.net>
> > >Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2006 4:49 PM
> > >Subject: Re: Hi from Keith
> > >
> > >
> > > > Keith, She did get a new internet provider.
> > > > She is now:
> > > >
> > > > mentink at frontiernet.net
> > > >
> > > > I posted your note and the article.  thanks.
> > > >
> > > > we're doing well and I have to nap before our evening service.
> > > > Blessings, Pen
> > > >
> > > >
> >
> >
> >