December 28th, 2012
Squeezebox is a place for our Song Leaders, as well as congregants, to learn the songs we sing at St. Lydia’s.
Here is “Songs of Thankfulness and Praise,” which will be our final hymn during Epiphany. We’ll sing the first verse in unison and then break out into harmonies on the second verse.
I recommend you start by downloading the sheet music and then singing the first verse along with this recording.
Once you’ve got the hang of the melody, then you can practice any of the harmony parts posted below. The featured harmony in each file is panned to the left, with the other three voices panned right. To assist you in hearing the change from the melody line to the various harmony lines, the recordings of the harmony parts start with the final phrase of the melody. Enjoy!
Songs of Thankfulness Soprano (2nd Verse)
Songs of Thankfulness Alto
Songs of Thankfulness Tenor
Songs of Thankfulness Bass
December 28th, 2012
We know all of you are brimming over with new, bold ideas for stuff we can do at St. Lydia’s. Here’s a project proposal to help you develop your thinking. Just copy it into a new document, spend some time with it, and then e-mail it off to Emily at emily@stlydias.org.
December 28th, 2012
Squeezebox is a place for our Song Leaders, as well as congregants, to learn the songs we sing at St. Lydia’s.
We’ll use this simple setting for our Eucharistic Prayer during the season of Lent. Click here to learn the Lent Table Acclamation.
December 28th, 2012
Squeezebox is a place for our Song Leaders, as well as congregants, to learn the songs we sing at St. Lydia’s.
We’ll sing this two part piece, “Arise, Shine” as a gathering song during the season of Epiphany. With many thanks to the composer, Ruth Cunningham, for allowing us to post this recording of her piece, which is found in the volume, “Music By Heart.”
Click here to listen to “Arise, Shine.”
December 27th, 2012
Squeezebox is a place for our Song Leaders, as well as congregants, to learn the songs we sing at St. Lydia’s.
We’ll sing this simple chant with a lovely little echo during the season of Christmas, and into Epiphany. Click here to learn to lead “The Light of Christ” by Donald Fishel.
December 24th, 2012
Read Emily’s Christmas sermon, “Bright Blooms Dark Night” on her blog, Sit and Eat. This one has all the key ingredients: shepherds, angels, and the sweet baby Jesus, plus rumination on why we keep telling this story, anyway. The text is Luke 2:1-7
December 21st, 2012
by Walt Whitman
On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.
Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.
From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps.
Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.
Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?
Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.
–Read at St. Lydia’s on December 16. 2012
December 21st, 2012
by Stephen Edgar
Impossible to wield
The acreage of the fabric that unfolded,
Slung from his shoulders like a crumpled field:
The distance from one Christmas to the next
When he was only seven
Was aching there; a foreign city flexed
Among the ripples; a face, the star-shocked heaven
About his flailing arms were shrugged and moulded.
Too heavy to outrun,
Too slow to measure what it underwent,
Though gradually the passage of the sun,
Unmanageable in its train of light,
Seemed almost to respond
As he yanked the yards of stuff in like a kite
And gathered the brocade that trailed beyond
His arms’ reach to the scale of measurement,
However strange the weave
That writhed about the working of his hands:
The footage too atrocious to believe,
Printed with corpses; Greece; the falls of salmon;
Her upturned silken wrist
He would have torn out history to examine;
His father’s final blessing, which he missed.
However far he comes or where he stands,
At last, and limb by limb,
Contour by contour, that unfolded cape
Settles ever more fittingly on him.
His forehead is the line of the sky’s vault,
His shoulders trace the ground,
His palms the ways he wandered by default,
And in his gestures those he knew are found.
What shape the day discovers is his shape.
–Read at St. Lydia’s on December 9, 2012
December 16th, 2012
St. Lydia’s will be holding regular Dinner Church services on Sundays through the holidays. We won’t be having a special Christmas Eve service but if a group of Lydians want to attend another church’s service together, we’d like to help facilitate that. If you want to go to church on Christmas with a group of Lydians, email rachel@stlydias.org to let me know. I’ll put everyone in touch and make suggestions for nice services around town you could attend.December 23…
is Christmas Eve Eve! We will have a fun, Christmasy service that night, diverging just a bit from our usual format. We won’t have a Lead Cook or Sous Chef–instead we will be having breads and spreads and snacky treats. Bring some breads, spreads or treats (cookies!) if you want to–we’ll also order some from Fresh Direct. We’ll also have lots of extra singing of Christmas carols that night, so if you play an instrument, like, ahem, the flute, the mandolin, the violin or the drums, please bring them and accompany all ye merry carrollers.
December 24, Christmas Eve
No Dinner Church (see above)
December 30
We’ll gather for Dinner Church at the regular time, 6:30 PM, to keep celebrating Christmas and get ready to ring in the New Year.
