Lead Me, Guide Me

Book excerpt: Father Dan Begin spent thirty-five years ministering among those who lived in the poorest neighborhood in one of the poorest cities in America—Cleveland, Ohio. He was one of thirteen children, full of stories of growing up in the fifties and sixties in a hardscrabble household of thirty-seven people on Cleveland’s West Side. He was a white priest who was welcomed into the homes (and church communities and funeral homes) of African-American families, as well as those of celebrities and athletes. Father Dan was irreverent, articulate, and wise. When he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2016, at the age of sixty-seven, the meaning of his life and ministry came into sharp focus. “Watch me through this,” he told his family, friends, and parishioners. Just as he had always showed us how to live, at the end he showed us how to suffer and die with grace. In Lead Me, Guide Me, author Kathy Ewing describes the friendship she had with Father Dan and the profound effects his life had on her and hundreds of others by simply being an ordinary man who possessed extraordinary goodness and love.