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| Chapel of the Prodigal, Montreat College |
Hardly a summer passes without our finding serendipity in
North Carolina. This week it was umbrella weather when we left Sewanee,
Tennessee, and heavy rain followed us on the drive to Asheville, North Carolina
where we spent Monday night. Light rain fell the following morning when we set
out for Montreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a town that straddles the eastern
Continental Divide and is noted for being the home of Billy Graham, the
renowned U.S. evangelist.
We took refuge in the Chapel of the Prodigal at Montreat
College where we viewed the
Return of the Prodigal Fresco by Benjamin Long who has gained international fame as a
master of true Fresco.
The Return of the
Prodigal is one of eleven frescoes on "The Fresco Trail in North
Carolina" and depicts the biblical story told in Luke 15. This fresco is
the focal point of a chapel that was dedicated in 1998 with the words
"Strength and Beauty are in His sanctuary" (Psalm 96:6).
Montreat College was first established in 1916 as Montreat Normal School and is now a co-ed college with a four-year curriculum
dedicated to being "Christ centered, student focused, and service
driven," and is operated independent of the Montreat Conference Center.
The town, college, and conference center (which serves the Presbyterian Church
of the U.S.) are three separate entities, but all serve as centers for
spiritual and physical renewal. Montreat is another of those "thin"
places similar to St. Mary's on the bluff at Sewanee. In 1897, Montreat Assembly
was the first religious assembly established in the Swannanoa Valley by an
interdenominational group, and in 1906, Montreat was purchased by a group of
Presbyterians.
We climbed the steps to The Assembly Inn, a rock and marble building
overlooking Lake Susan that
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| Assembly Inn, Montreat |
accommodates guests from around the world who
attend conferences on leadership, spiritual formation, multi-faith, seasons of
the Christian year, recreation and radical hospitality, and is available for special
retreats. Eight hallways in the Inn are named for trees and shrubs found in the
Swannanoa Valley: Chestnut, Mountain Laurel, Rhododendron, Maple, Sourwood,
Poplar, and Oak. Handsome Mission style furniture occupies the spacious rooms
in this hospitable place where Billy Graham and Ruth Bell Graham held their
wedding reception in 1943.
The Assembly Inn gained national notice in 1942 when the
U.S. government housed 264 German and Japanese diplomats and their families while
they waited exchange for American families of diplomat and missionaries in Axis
countries who were caught behind enemy lines when WWII broke out. The German
and Japanese diplomats were restricted to the Assembly Inn and the property
fronting Lake Susan and were looked after by State Department officials and
guards. The Germans were eventually allowed to return to their families, and
Japanese men were sent to an internment camp in Texas, but during the stay
between October 29, 1942 and April 30, 1943, the Inn made a $75,000 profit!
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| Lake Susan, Montreat |
This week-end, leaders from the Presbyterian Church and
public life will gather at Montreat to conduct a "Teach-In for
Rededicating Ourselves to the Dream," celebrating the 50th anniversary of
Dr. Martin L. King's address to the Christian Action Conference in Montreat.
The major question posed to participants will be: "How can the church of
today answer the challenges King posed in Anderson Auditorium at Montreat in
1965?" The intention of this conference is to engage an intergenerational
community in embracing and lifting up Dr. King's unfulfilled dream... "standing
up against what he persistently labeled as the horrible scourges of our
national and world orders: racism, poverty, war, and materialism."
And there's more! As we walked out of the Assembly Inn, we spied
a shop overlooking Lake Susan, which we thought might be a bookstore. However,
inside we found a plethora of handcrafted treasures that represented cultures
of more than 30 countries including the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, the
Middle East, and Asia. The products of "Ten Thousand Villages" are
showcased in this shop as part of a fair trade organization that markets handicrafts
created by unemployed and underemployed artisans from throughout the world. "Ten
Thousand Villages" gives fair income to international artisans. The income
empowers them to improve their housing and provides education, healthcare, and nutritious
food for the artisans' families.
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| Ten Thousand Villages shop at Montreat |
"Ten Thousand Villages" has been operating since
1946 and is dedicated to solidarity and justice in the thirty countries with which
it trades. I bought a beautiful scarf made by an artisan in Bangladesh, a bar
of cucumber soap from India, and a children's book entitled
In the Trunk of Grandma's Car, the story
of a Mennonite woman named Edna Ruth Byler. Byler initiated the "Ten Thousand
Villages" project when she traveled from the U.S. to Puerto Rico in 1946,
brought back embroidery work done by women who struggled to feed their families,
and sold it to her sewing circle in Pennsylvania. From that small beginning,
the idea of a fair trade shop burgeoned and became 75 shops across the U.S. and
35 stores in Canada. Byler's first store was called Byler's Gift Shop, but in 1952,
it became a nonprofit program of the Mennonite Central Committee called the
Overseas Needlepoint and Crafts Project. In 1968, the name became SELFHELP
Crafts, and the name changed again in 1996 to that of "Ten Thousand
Villages."
The trip to Montreat, a place variously called "A Mecca
of Presbyterians," "the narthex of heaven," and "where God
vacations," was, for us, a visit to a center of hope and an encounter with serendipity
in one of the world's "thinnest places."
Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan
