Join us October 3 at 5pm for an outdoor Blessing of the Animals. Animals on leashes or in carriers are warmly welcome, as are stuffed animals and photos.
“It feels like this is something of our last Sunday of the school year, before we shift into summer mode next week with one 9am service. It’s also like we are at this societal moment of pivoting out of COVID-19 restrictions and more or less going back to normal – if there ever was such a thing. What’s been a bit disorienting for me was the radical abruptness of reopening. It was like the CDC and our civic leaders just got tired of the gray zone of semi-regulated communal life, and rather than slowly undimming the lights, they just decided to flick the switch on, and many of us, accustomed to the dark and coziness of quarantine, are squinting a little bit, trying to acclimate to the bright lights of normal.”
“Imagine a Portrait Gallery approached you and wanted to capture your image for posterity. How would you like to be portrayed? What picture of yourself would you like others to see? And do you think that picture ties up at all with the pictures others have of you? How would you be in this portrait? Where would you be? What emotion, position, look would just capture you?”
“Human beings take around 650,000,000 breaths in their lifetime;
About 25,000 a day. How many of those are we aware?
My Apple watch rings once an hour with a reminder to Breathe.
It’s kind of annoying:
What does it think I’ve been doing for the last hour?
It doesn’t give me a reminder to tell my heart to pump blood
Or to my intestines to digest food.
Why does it suppose I’ve neglected my breath?”
We have all experienced the frustration of not being able to hear someone who is speaking. Our reliance these days on technology for moments of connection raises the stakes, making any sound quality or volume issues not only a frustration but a loss. St. Anne’s has a team working to ensure consistent, clear sound on Sunday mornings, but it will never be perfect. There are simply too many factors involved.
So here are some things we can try at home if we are experiencing sound issues.
A familiar prayer can be a great comfort, but it can also become rote, so familiar that we do it without bringing our heart or mind to the task. I have been guilty of this lately, so I borrowed Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s An African Prayer Bookfrom our library. The book is separated into the traditional types of prayer, but I preferred to open it randomly and read whatever I found there.
St. Anne’s Reopening Task Force has continued to meet several times a month to consider all aspects of outdoor and indoor gatherings. Much of our attention has been focused on embellishing the outdoor services begun last summer by offering communion at 8am and adding an occasional Sunday afternoon service, complete with fire pit. The first of these was held October 18 and the next is planned for November 22. It may become a regular offering.
I’ve been very busy recently, and I’m delighted to report that we now have a working audio system that allows the choir to sing, and make recordings, from their cars! We celebrated the feast of All Saints on November 1st with perhaps the first Drive-In Evensong in the entire Anglican Communion, and we were featured in the Boston Globe: see the article here: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/11/01/metro/choir-learns-sing-one-once-more/ We owe a tremendous debt of thanks to Tom Vollaro, who not only supervised the purchasing of the equipment, but also put it all together. He has even attended every one of our our events to run the new sound system. Thank you, Tom!
Students came to visit St. Anne’s in five different outdoor fellowship events this fall, as well as two Pageant filming afternoons. Atrium groups of grades K-8 meditated in a labyrinth and painted their own for everyone to walk, shared in more chalk art, painted fall trees and votives, hunted for mini pumpkins, learned about the history of voting and wrote postcards to voters, prayed with Garrett, played Bible Pictionary in teen teams, gathered for s’mores, and wrote greeting cards to parishioners. At home, they were offered Sunday School Zooms with presentations, prayer table, and breakout room discussions. All of our kids are working hard in their complicated school lives, so please hold them in your prayers. St. Anne’s will gather them in, at home or in the snowy yard, this winter.
Come one, come all, bring the family….for a “BYOC” fall clean-up day at St Anne’s on Saturday, November 21 at 9am. Nothing is quite the same this year, but know this: There will be an ample supply of Fall grounds clean-up tasks to go with your coffee! And what a nice way to get outdoors and make a difference…..
Of course, our fall focus is leaf clean up at both the Church and the Rectory. But there is a role for ANYONE who wants to participate, regardless of age, skills, physical ability, or energy level. While we hope to have some leaf blowers and chain saw aficionados, cleaning up gardens with rakes and tarps will also be needed.
I was talking to a wise spiritual friend recently and we were sharing the ups and downs of the present moment, particularly how this second wave of loneliness and stress and all the rest is somehow different than the first wave of sickness. You can follow the first wave (read first wave as physical illness) in the newspaper; the second is more subtle, more particular to each person, and, while less physically harmful, so much more soul-depleting. This wise friend said something, well, wise.
The year 2020 has us all registered in the same course, one we might call Impermanence. None of us thought we’d be in this class, but here we are, face to face with change, fragility, and life’s impermanence.
We are living in the midst of what has been called the Twindemic — Covid-19 and also the racial injustices that have been brought to light following the death of George Floyd. In some ways as we are moving closer to the presidential election, you may say we are shifting towards a Tridemic.
How can we survive this moment? What are the lessons this season has for us? How might our traditions of faith and spirituality help ground us in this shaken time? Our Forum series is meant to help us survive this course.
“Love God with all your heart soul and mind. And love your neighbor as yourself. On these hang all the law and the prophets.
The Pharisees come at Jesus with a question about which commandment is the greatest. They are trying to trap Jesus. It’s actually a lawyer that asks the nitpicky question. It’s interesting to note that at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry he had 3 temptations put to him by the devil. Now a few days before his execution, at the end of Matthew’s gospel, in the last 3 weeks of readings, he has 3 tests offered by the religious authorities.”
“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s. Or in the more familiar language: render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s.
From its beginnings as a minority religious community in the midst of Roman military rule to its status today as a majority faith in a secular American democracy, the church and state are like the odd old crotchety couple who have been in the neighborhood forever. It’s not at all clear that they should have gotten together in the first place, and it’s very difficult to tell what is really going on in the relationship, but given they’ve been seen together for so long, it’s awfully hard to imagine them not occupying the same space.
Full disclosure that when I looked at the lesson for this Sunday, I immediately made plans to preach the Exodus reading. It is one of my absolute favorite readings, and I’ll say a brief word about it later on, but after being in our Bible studies this week, and hearing the different perspectives on the church and politics I can’t resist the minefield.”
“The Gospel today is one of the harder, or perhaps harsher, ones in our lectionary, and many preachers choose to address it by preaching from the Epistle instead, with its familiar and comforting turns of phrase that seem to be part of the very air we breathe. Peace that passes all understanding. Truth, honor, justice, purity, and excellence as human attributes. We can settle into those words like a comfortable old sweater, or a down comforter on one of these cold mornings.”
“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” (Matt. 11)
“Those words of Jesus in this morning’s Gospel reading are surely among the most comforting in the entire Bible. Lord knows, they hit me somewhere deep—because my burden this morning is a heavy one.
As your preacher this morning, I’m afraid I’m not here to offer comforting words. Rather, I’m here to tell the truth, as hard as it may be to hear. Because that’s what I owe each and every one of you. Because there is no such thing as any real comfort without facing the truth. I think the Gospel teaches us that.”
I remember a talk offered by a therapist in my first-year orientation to seminary, and I think the talk was something like, “How do I know if therapy is for me?” I really don’t remember what the therapist said – I was too busy sizing up the room, thinking about these, my future classmates, and also doing my own diagnostics. Scanning the room, everyone was so fit and sharp looking, everyone’s Nalgene had the coolest stickers. I thought to myself, “No way any of you need therapy.” Again, I don’t remember anything the therapist said but I do remember her response a question I asked her. Trying to appear like I was really engaged, and also psychologically subtle, I said, “I struggle distinguishing between what I need and what I want. I often feel like I need recognition, but when I get it, it’s not as satisfying as I want it to be.”
“In his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College “This is Water,” David Foster Wallace highlights the difficulty of giving attention and care to the most obvious, matter-of-fact, unmistakable aspects of our lives. He begins this address with a comical little parable about two fish. There were these two fish who are swimming along in the ocean, when a wise old fish swims by and shouts, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the heck is water?” Wallace’s speech, which I commend to you, is about the singular challenge raised by these two young fish: how do we as people gain the awareness, the attention to see and notice that most obvious and essential of things – the water in which we are immersed. For Wallace, it takes practice, prayer, and attention to gain the miracle of sight, to be able to see what is right in front you, and say, “This is water. This is water.”
Jesus’ parable for us this morning is like an icy splash of water onto his disciples faces – and he’s trying to shake them awake to recognize the water that is the Kingdom of God.”
“I have to say, after six months of a global pandemic, I'm in better physical shape than I've been in the last decade.
Like many people, I’ve been working from home on a fairly strange schedule. For most of the spring, I'd usually get up around 6:30 in the morning, drink a cup of coffee and answer emails or work on my laptop until around 8:30, then spend a couple of hours with Murray while Alice was in class. We spent the rainy month of April trading off between wandering around outside and logging on to Zoom. With libraries, coffee shops, and playgrounds closed, going for a run together was one of the few leisure activities we had left, other than playing with the grass clippings outside the Harvard observatory. And so Alice, Murray, and I spent most of the spring running from place to place with our stroller, discovering that a two-year-old makes an inspiring, albeit rude, track coach: “I want you to run faster!” “
“In my second sermon here—way back in September of 2018—I preached about my two pet turtles, the Song of Songs, and love. It was a pretty good sermon. I re-read that sermon a few weeks ago, because I wanted to know if anything had changed. I wanted to know much these two years of ministry alongside you had changed what I thought, had changed who I was.
Not very much, it turns out. And unimaginably.”
How comforting to write these words from my office chair! Looking over these last six months, so much of my work has been done away from my big, broad desk here in the Parish Office, and it’s nice to be back among my scrawl-labeled file folders, jumbled bulletin board (whose Kalendar is still on April!), and hidden stash of smokehouse almonds.
I have been “on-campus” quite a bit, though – when we closed St. Anne’s in March, the painting of the exterior of the building had just begun.
In mid-June, 30+ parishioners gathered to form the Racial Justice Allies (RJA) group with the intention of exploring ways to take action at St. Anne’s to address racial injustice. The group has developed a vision statement to articulate our goals:
Racial Justice Allies Vision Statement
· We acknowledge the white supremacism on which our society and economy are built, rooted in 400 years of violence, indifference, and inaction.
· We believe in love, respect, repentance, and opening our hearts and minds to our fellow human beings.
· We commit to:
Listen, look, and reflect more deeply in order to take responsibility for liberating ourselves from our own biases.
Create opportunities to connect to, learn from and celebrate with communities of color.
Identify, support, and take actions to promote racial justice through social, economic, and environmental policy.
I’ve been busy adapting to our strange new world—and I’ve learned how to make and edit videos! Each week I record a prelude and postlude; Jean and I record a hymn; and I also provide something for the anthem, which can be a newly-recorded solo, a recording from past years, or a “virtual choir” piece. This last option, where each singer appears in a box, is very labor-intensive: first I make a video that the singers sing along to as they record themselves, then I combine all the individual videos into one big movie. This complicated process really does give listeners the feeling that we are singing together, and so we gladly do the extra work—we want to keep our community happy and healthy while we tune in from home, looking forward to the day when we can be together again safely.
