Read Emily’s latest sermon, “Continental Drift,” on her blog, Sit and Eat. It’s about being alone, about Jacob wrestling with the angel, and about, well, continents. That drift. It’s also a part of our “Generations” series, in which we’ve been exploring the stories of our ancestors in the book of Genesis.
Join us this Saturday as we gather to bless the Enough for Everyone Garden and A Small Green Patch and celebrate all the ways in which the land is blessing us. The garden is located at 346 Bergen Street, between 3rd and 4th Avenues in Brooklyn. We’ll have a short liturgy with music and prayer starting at 4 PM (and the answer is yes, there really will be a trombone!). At 4:30, we’ll have some light refreshments and continue the celebration with some mingling and merriment. Feel free to come for just the party, or just the blessing, or for both! We’ll be hosting volunteer hours from 12-3 to water the plants, spiff up the space and finish installing the ladder-sculpture-gourd-trellis that will sit in our newly formed bed along the wall. Hope to see you there! You can also check out more recent photos of the Garden on our picasa page.
by Scott Cairns
–Read at St. Lydia’s on July 8, 2012
by Jane Miller
March 10th and the snow flees like eloping brides
–Read at St. Lydia’s on June 24, 2012
Who is that creature
-Read at St. Lydia’s on July 1, 2012
lord
-Read at St. Lydia’s on June 17
Nature knits up her kinds in a network, not
This morning, between two branches of a tree
–Read at St. Lydia’s on June 3, 2012
by Mary Oliver
Sunrise
You can
die for it —
an idea,
or the world. People
have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound
to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. But
this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought
of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun
blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises
under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?
What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it
whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.
–Read at St. Lydia’s on June 10, 2012
We’re seeing a lot of growth in the garden, both in the size of the plants and the progress of our various projects. Some small but robust radish harvests have been made, and the peas are really starting to look like peas! Everything is getting very leafy and bushy and it is a verdant sight to behold. We also made some more good progress construction-wise, leveling out the sitting area, laying down mulch and completing the second bench. It is very cozy now, perfect for cooling your heels and watching the plants grow.
If you are interested in hosting volunteer hours this weekend or next, please email rachel@stlydias.org. Our Garden Manager and Garden Director will be out of town for the next couple of weeks, and we could use some help with watering, especially on June 6th, 7th and 8th.
Eric and Richard relax after leveling the sitting area and covering it with mulch.
Katrina hard at work finishing our second bench, donated by Katrina and her husband Luke!
Proof of concept: four radishes produced in our garden and eaten for breakfast!
Richard Ruane, a congregant at St. Lydia’s, is a preacher’s kid from Dallas. A recovering Baptist, he’s been drifting between Episcopalian and Lutheran congregations since 1992. He works as an administrator in higher education and has grad degrees in communication and education. He preached this sermon at Dinner Church on June 24, 2012.
When I was 28 years old, I was living in Dallas, and I was working with a therapist. She was not the best therapist you could find, but she gave me one good piece of advice: she told me it would be a good idea to put some distance between me and my home city, my history there, and go out into the larger world.
I thought she was trying to be funny: so I laughed.
It was over a year after that when, almost unexpectedly to me, I packed my Toyota Tacoma (yes – I drove a pickup truck), said goodbye to two beautiful faith communities I had been part of. There was a round of goodbyes and I drove 780 miles away to Atlanta.
I was taken in by my friend Kraig. At the time, we had met only once before, but I needed a place to live and he welcomed me.
For me, leaving Dallas was an act of hope. I was diving headlong into a chaotic journey that I needed and had every trust that it would take me where I needed to go. But the actions that I took on hope caught a lot of people in its wake: it changed the way I related to my family. Before they were born (or their parents had even met), I had decided that my nieces and nephews would have an uncle that they only saw twice a year. It changed the way I would see and relate to many of my friends who were themselves quickly dispersing throughout the country, most of them migrating west to California.
Eight years and three cities later, I was living in Chicago, and, surprising myself, climbing a corporate ladder in a company I had come to intensely dislike and distrust, working closely with an executive team that could give the writers of Mad Men or Dallas some pointers on moral bankruptcy. I had no faith community, only a very small group of friends, and near desperate longing for the people who had been my family of choice on the East Coast. I desperately needed a chaotic journey, but lacked the hope that I needed to launch one. But eventually, launch one I did, and despite its beginnings in resignation, it became the reason I returned not just to the East Coast, but why I ended up returning to Christianity when the St. Sebastian church community and its pastor welcomed me to their altar without questions or hesitations.
Of course — many people would tell you that I got that story at least a little bit wrong.
Read the rest of Richard’s wonderful sermon: “Sarah’s Laughter“.