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by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton (Author)
In these insightful essays, Barbara Cawthorne Crafton reflects on a broad range of experiences ministering among merchant seafarers, the homeless, the bereaved, AIDS patients, and others in need of personal and spiritual help. She shares honestly her own emotions as she grapples with the harsh realities of the world, while delighting in the humor and joy found in everyday living.
Crafton compassionately recounts the unique stories of the men, women, and children she worked with during her service as a port chaplain in New York and New Jersey and as a minister at Trinity Church on Wall Street. In doing so, she weaves together threads of the mundane and the traumatic, the lovely and the ugly, and the down to earth and the holy, creating an original tapestry of the richness of life.
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Barbara Cawthorne Crafton is among the first women ordained to the Episcopal priesthood, in which capacity she has ministered in both the richest and poorest sections of New York City. She is also a sensitive writer who addresses the human condition with plainspoken eloquence and bracing moral common sense. Cynthia Ozick writes, "The Reverend Crafton's purity of insight and pellucid voice suggest transparencies - one sees straight through them into the unshielded light of the plainest human truths. A shelf is dusted, a grandmother's sewing machine is recalled, mothers and fathers are praised and appraised, a lost child is mourned - and the weave of our lives is movingly unwound, ribbon by ribbon, until our hands are filled with rosiness and rue. Upon small moments large mercies are shed. Barbara Crafton's essays are everyone's heirlooms". These rich, moving essays will be read again and again.
