Dear Friends,

Last Saturday Travis and I met up with our friends John and Naomi Gibson (brother and sister from Salem Primitive Baptist Church in Madisonville, Kentucky) and proceded to look for the Old Salem PBC cemetery (about 20 miles from our house) in southern Henderson County. The Gibsons had been to it before (some of their ancestors are buried there), but the last time they had tried to find it they got lost. I didn't even know it existed until Naomi told me about it in a phone conversation last week. Hearing about it sparked in me a desire to go see it. Many years ago I had gotten interested in the history of Salem Church and knew that it was constituted in Henderson County in the early nineteenth century. When we came to Kentucky in 1969, our first church membership in a church in Kentucky was at Salem church. In August of this year, 2004, the Highland Association (which was constituted century before last, and of which Salem PBC, as well as Dawson Springs PBC where our membership is now, belongs) will observe its 185th Annual Session.

We found the cemetery on a recently paved country road (the Gibsons said it was still a gravel road the last time they came here.) The Gibsons told us that the first church building for Salem PBC was built in front of this cemetery. Standing there on the grounds of the church building of the church that was constituted in 1812 in Henderson County, and among the gravestones of some of its former members, I thought of Thomas Gray's poem Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Some of my favorite stanzas of this poem follow:

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her ev'ning care:
No children run to list their sire's return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

* * *

Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

The boast of Heraldry, the pomp of Pow'r,
And all that Beauty, all that Wealth e'er gave,
Await alike th' inevitable hour,
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

* * *

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
Or wak'd to ecstacy the living lyre.

But knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of their soul

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

* * *

No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode:
(There they alike in trembling hope repose)
The bosom of his Father and his God.

Who were these people buried in the Old Salem Cemetery? As I read the names and dates, I thought of Gray's poem and wondered about these individuals whose pre-resurrected bodies lay a few feet below the grassy surface of the ground. I wondered about their experiences as a part of this place, and what the church here was like then, as I tried to imagine a service here in, say, 1823. What songs did they sing? What text was preached? One thing I knew about them is that they were a part of Christ's church, and maybe I will see them someday in that "City of Light". Maybe I can ask them then, I thought, and the lines from another poem (this one by Emily Dickinson) came to mind:

This world is not conclusion;
A sequel stands beyond --
Invisible as music,
But positive as sound.

Thinking about the Resurrection,
Elaine