We had a wonderful visit to Unity Farm Sanctuary
AppleFest! 2022
After the 10 am service on Sunday, October 23, we’ll hold our newly-annual AppleFest! celebration outside. All are welcome, and we invite you to bring an apple-y treat to share with the crowd. Chili and ciders will be offered, and games, crafts, and other fun things will round out the good time.
Blessing of the Animals! October 2
Did you hear the Good News?
Our jam-packed issue of the Fall Good News was mailed out last week. Click here to download a digital copy.
Welcome Joe!
Welcome Joe and Shoko!
Our new curate, Joe Kimmell will officially join St. Anne's staff this week, his first Sunday being July 24. We hope you will join us in the Sanctuary for 9 am worship, followed by a welcome coffee hour in Flint Hall.
Joe is originally from Chicago where he grew up in an evangelical church. After college, Joe moved to Lhasa, Tibet as an evangelical missionary. While studying at Tibet University, he met his wife Shoko who was in Tibet for her doctoral research on Tibetan Buddhism from her native Japan, where they were married in 2009. They moved together to the Chicago area in 2010, as Joe completed an M.A. in Clinical Psychology. Then, after moving to Cambridge in 2013, Joe earned an M.Div. at Harvard Divinity School, before discerning a call to ordained ministry as an Episcopal priest.
Now, while Shoko teaches colloquial Tibetan in Harvard's South Asian Studies department, Joe is completing the final year of his Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard in New Testament and Comparative Religion. In addition, he serves as an adjunct professor at Boston College, teaching introductory courses to the Bible. In their spare time, Shoko and Joe love to travel, cook (Shoko), and watch reruns of really old Law and Order episodes (Joe).
Requiem by Maurice Duruflé
Summer Worship: one service at 9 am starting 6/18
Our worship schedule shifts to a single service beginning Sunday, June 18, 2022. At 9 am each Sunday, we will hold a service of spoken Holy Eucharist in the Sanctuary and via livestream.
Our office hours will also change during the summer: we will be closed on Mondays and Fridays, and open on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at the reduced hours of 9 am to 1 pm.
As always, if you have questions, please email Jennie Cook, Parish Manager, at Jennie@stanneslincoln.org or leave her a message on the office phone line: 781.2259.8834, x 201.
In-Person Worship Resumes!
We are excited to announce that we have resumed in-person worship now that the building is in the final stages of repair and reconstruction. Due to the end of Daylight Savings Time this Sunday, March 13, we will hold just one service of Holy Eucharist at 10 am; the service will also be livestreamed (to access the link, visit our Home Page).
Next week, on Sunday, March 20, we will hold an in-person spoken Holy Eucharist at 8 am, followed by a hybrid (in-person and livestream) service of Holy Eucharist at 10 am.
Contemplate Lent with our 2022 Lenten Booklet
Once again the St. Anne’s community joined in creating a compilation of poems, readings, and reflections to guide us through the Lenten season. This year’s theme was about finding the “holiness in the ordinary,” which each submission considered in a unique way. We also included each Sunday’s particular collect. Every St. Anne’s family was mailed a hard copy of the Booklet; if you would like one, download it here or email Jennie to send you a copy.
A Message from the Wardens
As you know by now, a ceiling sprinkler head in the hall outside the upstairs kitchen failed the night of Sunday, January 16, resulting in substantial water damage to the core of the building on all three floors. The primary damaged areas are the interior hallways, the copier room, Jennie’s office, and the multipurpose room downstairs. Gratefully, the Sanctuary side of the building was not affected in any way; likewise, clergy offices, the library, the elevator, and other major equipment (except the copier) were unaffected.
The fire alarm system triggered the Lincoln Fire Department, which responded quickly and turned off the water; they also notified church staff. Although the water did not run for long, it was at a high volume. Our multi-talented maestro, Jay, and his wife, Jean, being the only ones able to respond immediately, went over late Sunday night and moved or covered items being dripped on (HUGE thanks to Jay and Jean!).
Insurance claims were filed right away with Church Insurance Group and ServPro’s drying equipment was up and running by Tuesday evening. The cause of the sprinkler failure is still under investigation; it was probably not due to freezing. The affected areas are now completely dried out, and all of the wet materials – carpets, insulation, ceiling tiles, wallboard – have been removed, as has the drying equipment. We expect to be able to start reconstruction very soon.
For now, the building remains closed while we relocate some staff offices and set up construction perimeters. Please assume no in-person activities for at least another week. Some previously scheduled activities may need to be relocated elsewhere in the building or re-scheduled. If you have questions or need anything, please email Jennie at parishoffice@stanneslincoln.org. This coming Sunday, January 30, we will again have one 10 am Zoom service of Morning Prayer, preceded by a 9 am zoom forum on the 2022 budget and a revision of our bylaws. We will let you know as soon as possible about the resumption of in-person services and limited in-person activities. Thank you for your patience and your good wishes!
Tom Shively & Carol Carmody, Wardens
Lenten Booklet 2022 Call for Submissions
This year’s Lenten Booklet Theme is “Holiness in the ordinary.” We typically associate holiness with our Sanctuary, the Bible, prayer and liturgy and perhaps saints. In observance of Lent and Holy Week 2022, let’s contribute our thoughts and meditations, memories, favorite poems, song lyrics about holiness outside of the church as well. Where have you encountered God? Please submit a page (250 words or less) by February 11 to jennie@stanneslincoln.org. Need help? Contact Joan Perera, Kay Peterson, or Al Rossiter.
Christmas Memorial Flowers
We regret that the listing of Memorial Flowers in the Christmas Eve bulletins was incomplete. Please click here for the complete list.
Prayer for a New Day
Blessing of the Animals October 3
Pentecost 2 (6/6/21) – Garrett Yates
“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.”
Trinity Sunday (5/30/21) – Garrett Yates
“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?”
Day of Pentecost (5/23/21) – Garrett Yates
“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?”
Easter 7 (5/16/21) – Kyra Cook
“I am not a priest—I just poorly play one on Facebook live. My study of the Bible is relatively recent and shallow—I didn’t find my way into regular worship until I met Gene. Sure, my childhood featured Easter Sunday services in fluffy Talbots dresses and two-weeks each summer of Vacation Bible School… but those were less an expression of my belief in God than they were my being easily bribed by flowery dresses and weeks of time at Grandma’s house.
I’m not a rector, but Iama writer. I’ve consumed a lot of stories in all sorts of different media. I love the craft of storytelling, and the tropes and tools we writers use to tell a story right. That’s why I think I love John’s gospel.”
Easter 6 (5/9/21) – Garrett Yates
“Our tradition provides us two holy books, two sacred texts, to shape our spiritual imaginations. The first text is Holy Scripture – the Old and the New Testaments containing the great story of salvation, providing us the teachings of Jesus, and the examples of the earliest followers. The second Sacred Text is the Book of Creation. We don’t normally think of creation as a text, but all the elements are there. There are characters (both heroes and villains), and landscapes, and family conflicts, and resolutions and more bloody conflicts. And like any text, or book, it’s there for the reader to interpret it. To try and make sense out of it. What’s it about? Can we discern a plot?”
Easter 5 (5/2/21) – Garrett Yates
“Bertrand Russell, the famous British philosopher, once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said, “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You're very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it's turtles all the way down!
Two millennia ago, while the Stoics, and the Platonists, and the Aristotelians were holding forth about the motions of the planets and the stars and the observable universe, in the back of the room, a little old man stands up, and clears his throat, and says something so preposterous you’d hardly believe it: it’s love all the way down.”