(We are at the start of Sunday in Port Brokeferry. This is the last day of our week here and things will come to a head for some of the stories. Each day has opened with an 'official' document that adds to the authenticity of the place. Sunday is no different.... so here it is.)
THE FARAWAY PLACE IS CLOSER TO HOME THAN YOU THINK – an extract from a sermon delivered by Rev. Alexander Donaldson B.D., minister of the church at Port Brokeferry 1935-39.
On Wednesday, as you all know, I shall be departing these shores to take the word of God to our mission in the North East of China. I go to a city called Ningbo. It is a seaport and the name means ‘Tranquil Waves’. What my life will be like there I can only imagine, though the place is real enough and can be found on a map of the country. The journey will take the length of two full weeks, with God’s blessing. Missed connections may see it stretch to nearer a month. I am prepared.
But when I think of Ningbo, it is, I believe, not so very different from Port Brokeferry. The men there make a living from the sea, in boats with nets that they mend by hand just as our men do. And the women bear the burdens and blessings of children and the children go to school to be something more than their parents. And the people sit around their fires at night, gathered together as families, and they tell stories of their fathers and grandfathers and the lives that they spent and the great deeds that they performed, made greater and greater with each telling of the story. I am sure that I will find in Ningbo a home from home.
I take with me the virtues of Port Brokeferry, everything I have learned here at my mother’s knee and standing by my father’s side wanting to one day be as tall as a man may be and as good. A gentleness in my manner of speaking I take with me, and a warmth in my dealings with all of God’s creatures, that is what I have learned here. A generosity of spirit, too, and a belief in the inherent goodness of man, a goodness that is everywhere in evidence here in Brokeferry, and I believe all this will be found in the fishermen and their families in Ningbo.
The world is not so big a place as it once was. Ancient cartographers drew monsters at the edges of their maps and men with no heads or with the heads of dogs. Ningbo is not such a place. The world is shrunk to something more recognisable, and people are the same the world over, the same here as everywhere.
My favourite story from The Good Book, is the tale of The Prodigal Son. I hope to one day return to Port Brokeferry, to stand again before you, dear friends, standing as I do now, and that maybe there will be a fatted-calf-welcome waiting. On that day, the things I will tell you of the place I have been, will be no different than the things I take to tell the people there. The people from Ningbo will look at their own maps and their fingers point to a place called Port Brokeferry and they will say, ‘all of life is there in that small place’. For the faraway place is closer to home than you think and God is everywhere if he is looked for. I go to show the people of Ningbo where to look.
(The above is an extract from the last published sermon from the pen of Rev. Alexander Donaldson once of Port Brokeferry. He was three times winner of the Heather Balfour Trophy and was awarded a scholarship to the University in Aberdeen where he graduated as a Bachelor of Divinity in 1932. He returned to Port Brokeferry in 1935 remaining as minister at the church there until 1939 before leaving to take up missionary work in the far East. Alexander Donaldson accepted a post at mission buildings in Ningbo in the North East of Zhejiang province, China. He quickly established himself as a kind and warm-hearted man and a befriender of the poor. In 1940 Japan bombed the city of Ningbo. They dropped fleas carrying bubonic plague onto the streets of Ningbo. The Rev. Alexander Donaldson died in the same year.)
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