10/09/2026
"Dolly Parton and Wendell Berry: Lives that Inspire Us"
Sunday 13th September 2026
10am Queens Road Unitarian Free Church, Urmston
11.30am Dunham Road Unitarian Chapel, Altrincham
11.30am on Zoom ID 841 9082 8195 no password required
A service exploring the lives of two inspirational creators Wendell Berry and Dolly Parton. How they lived their lives and how they were inspired by a deep love at the core of their being, a love they recognised in everyone and everything.
Following the service there will be a “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” either in the chapel gardens or large schoolroom at Dunham Road. We are collecting new Teddy Bears for the “Send a Child to Hucklow” fund.
There will be a selection of cakes and scones – and coffee or tea of course. Please bring a new teddy bear to donate.
The teddies will be collected and taken to the Nightingale Centre at Great Hucklow to be given to children attending five-day breaks organised by the Send a Child to Hucklow Fund.
The Fund provides the opportunity for children from deprived areas to spend time in the countryside. It has recently become the custom for each child to find a teddy bear on their pillow when they go to bed on the first night of their stay. They are then able to take the teddy bear home with them at the end of their stay.
Send a Child to Hucklow began as a fund in the small school at Dunham Road over 60 years and has provided holidays to generations of children ever since.
All of course are welcome...Come as you are, exactly as you are...but do not expect to leave in exactly the same condition...
The following is an extract from the service...
Two truly inspirational people born of the south of the USA have died in recent weeks. They were well loved and lived out their personal spiritually in their unique and individual styles. They embodied beautifully what it means to live by the spirit of love and deep empathy, an attribute that has become under some attack in recent years, something I find astonishing. In my view if we lose empathy we are done for.
One was a daughter of Tennessee Dolly Parton and the other a son of Kentucky Wendell Berry. They couldn’t have been more different in personality and the way they lived their lives. That said at the heart of them was that same spirit, it inspired their lives and their love and care. As Dolly said “I always just thought if you see somebody without a smile, give ’em yours!” and as Wendelly Berry said “Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, ‘the least of these my brethren.’ Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded.”
Dolly and Wendell Berry shone like two bright stars from opposite ends of universe, the spectrum of love in many its manifestations. They followed very different paths, but they followed their own stars, they were uniquely and authentically themselves. The Gospel according to Dolly was that the work of life is to “find out who you are, and then do it on purpose.” Dolly on the surface was rhinestone and hairspray whilst Wendell Berry was all about the earth and the plough and yet there was a soulfulness in their melodic language, they embodied love through their human being. They were both holy in their own unique ways.
Dolly was a prolific singer/songwriter and entrepreneur who lived her life her own way. She dedicated herself to causes that were close to her heart, particularly childhood education and literacy. This began in her home Sevier County in Tennessee, spread throughout America and all over the world. I saw a clip of her speaking and reading with children in Rotherham south Yorkshire while I was researching for this service. She has gifted something like 330 million books to under 5’s. This was inspired wholly by empathy and the pain of her own father’s illiteracy. Dolly’s world was a big welcoming tent, she accepted people as they were. In a 1997 Out Magazine interview, she was asked about embracing LGBTQ fans while maintaining a country audience that included the religious right. “It’s two different worlds, and I live in both and I love them both, and I understand and accept both.” Dolly Parton was deeply rooted in her own identity, but open and embracing of others.
Wendell Berry’s vision was that local community, neighborliness, and belonging, including our interdependence with nature and our responsibility to one another. To Berry, the health of the soil, the health of the human body, and the health of a local community are a single, indivisible thread. In his “Think Little” essay, written in 1970, he wrote: "A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world... We become aware—perhaps for the very first time—of the enormous complexity of our world, and the realization of the folly of simplistic, reductionist, single-solution thinking." For Wendell Berry it was about the simple humble ordinary habits and how they bind us to nature and each other, and that the choices we make each and every day contribute to improving the world around us.
In a world where anxiety, pessimism and loneliness appear to be on the increase Wedell Berry and Dolly Parton always lived by faith, hope and love. They always looked and saw the best in others, in ordinary people. Neither lived easy lives, without pain and struggle. Their hope grew from struggle and helped create a vision of love of how we could yet be. They both in their own way visioned that kin-dom of love right here and now.
They were both people of faith, rooted in the Christianity of the southern states of America, that said they were not conventional and were true universalists in every sense of the word. Dolly grew up with a Pentecostal preacher grandfather, of the fire and brimstone type but said she found God personally as a girl in an abandoned church building near her family’s home. “I felt the presence there,” she said, remembering the moment she prayed for God to show, help and save her. “I just felt like that I had, for the first time in my life, had truly found God.” She lived her faith both in her philanthropy and in her love and acceptance of all people. She encouraged others to seek their own path, not to follow hers.
Wendell Berry Christianity was certainly non-conformist, he strongly criticised institutional religion and dogma of many kind and shaped by a love the world we live in now. That humans are a part of this and it is our task to take care of this as we take care of one another, a part of the creation.
