Holler in the City

On my end of Clark County, there was a holler. Well, there were a few, but this one was easy to miss. I did not pay much attention to it until one evening the fire trucks rolled in there. They came back out pretty quick, so I figured there was no huge emergency. But I resolved to head back up in there.

I found the usual: a canyon, we’d call it out west, a draw that ended with a hill surrounding three sides of it. Some trailers and a lot of scrap metal around. Not much grows in such places because the trees on top of the hill shade the floor below.

I was met at the trailer at the head of the holler by the patriarch, and old man with a beard down to his waist. My kind of guy! He listened with interest to who I was and then commented, “I knew you had to be someone special. You’re the only stranger that dog has never tried to eat,” and he pointed to a mean-looking dog I had not even noticed, curled up in a corner outside the house.

I have long said that the best preparation for urban ministry is rural ministry. They share the same problems, but rural ministry is usually a little friendlier, so you get broken in a bit more gently. Rural and urban areas suffer from isolation, despondency, lack of opportunity, being forgotten by the rest of the society. When they are remembered, it’s to be made fun of, if not completely degraded. “Trailer trash” are the new “niggers.”

This is all to say that I ended up in a holler on the Northside of Lexington on Thursday. Jessie and I were out doing pastoral visits, and we came to a very small dead-end street that is less a street and more the pattern of a holler—houses strewn about. It’s an enclave. Even tho no real geographic barrier prevents you from going down the street, why would you?

But these are some of my newest people, so I go.

I think that the isolation of this street, right in the middle of thousands of people, is a refuge. The folks who are on the street are on it out of social ties; that is where, a holler in Eastern Kentucky might be built on families, this is built on people who have a kinship forced on them. They are the poor who are most on display. White, uneducated, disabled, some facing mental handicaps, sweet, devoted to each other.

I wish you could have been there with me, to be invited in, to have a chance to read 1 Peter 1:1-9 to them (words that 2000 years are re-filled up with meaning for this flock), to get to pray, to hear the devotion of a husband to his sick wife.

Have you ever seen ‘em pack the kids in the car after work on a Friday night,

Pull up in the holler ‘round three a.m. lights still burning bright?

Those mountain folk stayed up all night

Just to hold those little grandkids in their arms.

I’m proud to say I’ve been blessed by their sweet hillbilly charm.

--Dwight Yoakam, “Readin’, Writin’, Route 23”