The minister didn’t even make it two months into his retirement.
“Well, you know how it goes,” D.D. Meighen said with a chuckle, Friday.
Meighen, 78, started a new job last week as minister of WVU’s Presbyterian Student Fellowship on Willey Street.
In December, he announced he was retiring from active ministry while scaling back his work on numerous other projects and community causes. He’s also an activist and videographer.
His interim appointment is expected to last for several months, while the search for a permanent leader ensues.
Call it a homecoming of heart for Meighen.
From 1976-81, he served as campus minister of the state’s flagship university.
Students in Morgantown then were still feeling the sting of Vietnam and Watergate, before uncertainty concerning the Middle East settled in.
Delivery systems and pop-culture references may have changed since, Meighen said.
One thing hasn’t, though, the minister asserted, and that’s the students.
They’re still inherently the same, Meighen said.
They’re still seeking, wandering and hoping to set down moorings for their place in the cosmos – be it anchored by faith, or not.
As for him, he’ll still preach the Gospel of seeing the good in common citizens, he said.
He’ll still train brains on ways to cut the static attached to societal and political messages that may be untruthful at their very worst – or manipulative, at their very least.
After graduating from divinity school in Ohio in the early 1970s, Meighen came back to his native Mountain State.
For almost two years after, he stayed with two economically needy families in Marshall and Fayette counties.
Conventional wisdom at the time decreed that such Appalachians “chose” to live in poverty, but what the young clergyman found, was quite the opposite.
Awareness begat empathy – and an appreciation for the narrative, as the residents of those barely inhabitable homes told him their stories.
That led to the liturgy of the lens, as it were, for Meighen, who would eventually start TV19, his own public affairs network on cable access.
He covered meetings across Marion County and north-central West Virginia – the marquee gatherings and small affairs that may not have registered otherwise.
There were committees, boards and community organizing work.
Much like those post-divinity school excursions, he got people, as said, to recount personal history and the archeology of circumstance.
This is why my dad dropped out of school.
This is why I voted the way I did.
This is why I’m volunteering at this food pantry.
For the minister, a good story is both a celebration – and an act of amazing grace.
That’s why he’s preaching one already.
One of the first students he met through the Presbyterian Student Fellowship is Rachel McNeel, a junior chemistry major from Beckley who aims to find a cure for Alzheimer’s.
Her research is centered in the human eye and how its tiny blood vessels could be a huge pathway of prevention for the dreaded disease that first robs people of their memories – then their lives.
“And she’s just a junior,” Meighen said.
“Can you imagine how far along her research is going to be 20 years from now when she has her own lab?”
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