June 4th, 2012
Last week at the garden, Sarah, Matthew, Jason, and a few other friends were HUGE heroes, finishing up our retaining wall! We also built our final raised bed, and harvested one, singular, and singularly delicious radish.
Our next volunteer day will take place on Saturday, June 9 from 11:00 am -3:00 pm. We’ll be digging out the soil in front of the retaining wall, filling our raised bed, and building a bench!
As always, don’t forget you hat, water, and sunscreen!
The wall of retainment
Jason shows off our radish.
Looks like a radish...
The raised bed, ready to go in behind the retaining wall.
June 4th, 2012
This Summer at St. Lydia’s, we’re reading the stories of our ancestors found in the book of Genesis. These “family stories” tell use something about who we are and where we came from. If you’re interested in learning more about Genesis, the first five books of the bible (called the Pentateuch) or the Hebrew Bible in General, you might be interested in these books:
Women in the Hebrew Bible: a Reader, Alice Bach, editor
The Pentateuch: an Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible, Joseph Blekinsopp
An Introduction to the Old Testament: the Canon and Christian Imagination, Walter Brueggemann
Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, John J. Collins.
Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives, Phyllis Trible and Letty M. Russell, editors
Sisters in the Wilderness: the Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, Delores Williams
May 31st, 2012
Hello friends! We got some good work done on Monday spreading woodchips and digging the ditches for the retaining walls. Kathleen and Richard also did some important worm-relocation work (see below). Our scheduled radish harvest turned out to be premature, but we at the greens from one of them and they were peppery and delicious!
Our next volunteer hours will be this coming Saturday from 9 AM to 3 PM. We’ll be finishing the retaining walls and building more beds. The sprouts are growing up strong, come down and see our progress! Email Emily at emily@stlydias.org if you are interested in volunteering, and don’t forget your sunhat, sunscreen, water, and a pair of gardening gloves if you have them.
Please note that the Opening Party originally scheduled for June 2 has been changed to June 16.
May 31st, 2012
by Czeslaw Milosz (pronounced CHEH-swahv MEE-wohsh)
Faithful mother tongue,
I have been serving you.
Every night, I used to set before you little bowls of colors
so you could have your birch, your cricket, your finch
as preserved in my memory.
This lasted many years.
You were my native land; I lacked any other.
I believed that you would also be a messenger
between me and some good people
even if they were few, twenty, ten
or not born, as yet.
Now, I confess my doubt.
There are moments when it seems to me I have squandered my life.
For you are a tongue of the debased,
of the unreasonable, hating themselves
even more than they hate other nations,
a tongue of informers,
a tongue of the confused,
ill with their own innocence.
But without you, who am I?
Only a scholar in a distant country,
a success, without fears and humiliations.
Yes, who am I without you?
Just a philosopher, like everyone else.
I understand, this is meant as my education:
the glory of individuality is taken away,
Fortune spreads a red carpet
before the sinner in a morality play
while on the linen backdrop a magic lantern throws
images of human and divine torture.
Faithful mother tongue,
perhaps after all it’s I who must try to save you.
So I will continue to set before you little bowls of colors
bright and pure if possible,
for what is needed in misfortune is a little order and beauty.
–Read at St. Lydia’s on Pentecost, May 27, 2012
May 24th, 2012
by Kathleen Reeves
It was something other than fear of death
or love of the world, my friends, our plans—
having waited so long to enter it
I wanted to keep my body.
Even when so many wore it down
and even when it tormented me
during my long death, I thought of it
as a gift because I had come
to love it unconditionally.
Love: the word isn’t right.
Words fail me, they all fail me,
I’m disappointed in them now.
I was all words in the beginning
but my heart broke when I came into skin.
This is how it happened:
I had a heart, it broke
in the moment of having it,
I lived out life that way, heartbroken,
on earth, human.
–Read at St. Lydia’s on May 20, 2012
May 24th, 2012
Last week Emily and Phil attended the annual New York Metropolitan Lutheran Synod Assembly meeting in Long Island. The following is a reflection that Phil wrote about the experience for our edification and education.
Emily and I attended the annual New York metro area Lutheran synod assembly last Friday. It was very inspiring, very aspirational. Hardly any petty fighting over power and holding on to old ways. All of the parliamentary stuff was respectful and productive, despite the fact that some hard decisions were being made. The result was a strategic plan for how to decide which churches to close and what to do with resources in the future.
I was really inspired by the plan and the conversation. The Synod is very committed to change. They talked a lot about moving away from traditional models. There was a strong theme of recognizing new types of ministry, new types of leaders, and of deemphasizing church buildings and the distinction between member and non-member. St. Lydia’s was mentioned from the podium as an example of the kind of exciting “new ministries” that are happening!
It was also an unexpected treat to see so many familiar faces — several Lutheran pastors I know in the New York and Hudson County and several who have crossed paths with St. Lydia’s, and many more friendly faces, several of whom said they’d visit St. Lydia’s in the future. There was a real sense of community, of communion.
At the worship service in the evening, Bishop Provenzano, the Episcopal bishop of Long Island, which includes Brooklyn, gave the sermon, and the spirit of full communion was so strong. It was really inspiring to hear him talk about mutual support and lack of competition between the denominations. It made St. Lydia’s ties to both denominations make more sense to me. Emily led all the synod’s pastors in singing, which was awesome and fun. Everyone loved it.
It was great to see how St. Lydia’s was recognized as the future, not because that makes us special, but because it really shows the synod is open to radical change in how they think about church.
May 22nd, 2012
I’ve written a proposal outlining the vision for our garden, as well as some of the practical details for how things will work this summer. I’ll post some excerpts here, and you can read the full text here.
The St. Lydia’s Enough for Everyone Garden is a freehold of radical generosity, where growing and eating fresh, healthy food becomes a possibility for everyone.
What We Need is Here
The St. Lydia’s Enough for Everyone Garden grows out of the belief that we and the earth are already equipped with everything we need to provide abundant healthy food for all people, everywhere. This theological premise that what we need is here resonates with statistical data on the ratio of productive farmland to populations worldwide. And yet, nearly one in seven people in the world is hungry (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization). In Brooklyn, 18.4% of people are hungry or “food insecure”–a term that is applied when people have to choose between basic needs like health care and utilities and buying enough food (City Harvest).
Not All Food is Good to Eat
The persistent problem of hunger is compounded in America by the broken way in which our current system of industrially farming and processing food produces an overabundance of nutritionally devoid food-like products that do not contribute to the health or well-being of people who consume them, while fresh, nutritionally rich fruits and vegetables are scarce and prohibitively expensive in many areas. Meanwhile, the pollution of the environment by overuse of pesticides and fossil fuels and the destruction of topsoil by development threaten our future ability to create a sustainable and equitable food system.
A Small Green Patch
Grounded in our faith, and rooted in these realities, St. Lydia’s proposes to assume stewardship of a 20’ x 40’ plot of land in the newly formed community garden at 346 Bergen Street in Brooklyn called A Small Green Patch. After more than 40 years of neglect and abandonment, this land has been given freely unto our care. As temporary overseers of the land, we intend to:
– give freely of our labor to grow food and give the food freely to everyone who wants or needs it
– extend our practice of welcome and hospitality by creating public green space that is open to the community
– be in relationship with our neighbors in Brooklyn, and identify and develop partnership opportunities to make growing and eating fresh food a possibility for everyone.
Take What You Need, Pay What You Can
When the produce is ready to be harvested, the fruits of our labor will be shared freely among volunteers, congregants and the public. This will be done on a take-what-you-need, pay-what-you-can basis, with the understanding that some will pay with time and labor, and others will contribute financially according to their means, and with the further understanding that we give in response to all that we have been given. St. Lydia’s will pay the annual group membership fee for A Small Green Patch of $200. Community members will be encouraged to give freely of the resources available to them according to their means, be it time, muscle, seedlings or tools, but any substantial financial investments in soil, lumber etc. made by individual Lydians will be reimbursed out of the funds raised in collections (receipts for expenses and reimbursements will be recorded and signed by two witnesses). Any funds left over will be invested back into the Garden.
What if there isn’t really enough for everyone? An experiment in living by the radical logic of abundance…
We may be religious, but we are not insane, and we don’t actually expect to grow enough zucchini this summer to feed all of the 2,504,700 people living in Brooklyn. But we believe that if we work to create a culture of generosity, and ground our action in the idea that the more we give away, the more we have, profound change can begin to take place. The healing of our environment, of our economic systems and of our bodies all begins with a healing in our hearts. We believe that we are all, everyone of us, beloved, and are worthy of health, of the holy tiredness that follows work done together and the fullness that settles after sharing a meal. We are telling a story that begins with God’s breath over the deep, and continues in an ongoing, outpouring process of creation in which we, and every creature, plant and drop of water on the earth, are continually taking part.
May 21st, 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 lovely hymn, All Praise to Thee My God This Night, which can be done as a round, as a closing hymn during the month of July. We’ll take it a bit faster than the youtube clip (which has a slightly different text). Sheet music may be found here.
Listen to the links below to learn the harmony lines, with piano illustrating the given part and the choir panned to the side. (You’ll notice that this choir has been looped to sing the first verse over and over, so if you’re singing through the hymn, your words won’t match these recordings, but you’ll at least get the hang of the various harmony lines. We generally sing the first verse in unison before breaking into parts on the second verse, so each mp3 begins with a piano lead in from the final phrase of the first verse: “beneath the shelter of your wings.” This will help you make the transition into the harmony parts.)
Here’s what it sounds like when sung as a 4-part round.
All Praise to Thee, soprano
All Praise to Thee, alto
All Praise to Thee, tenor
All Praise to Thee, bass
May 21st, 2012
Squeezebox is a place for our Song Leaders, as well as congregants, to learn the songs we sing at St. Lydia’s.
Click here to listen to our closing hymn, Come Down O Love Divine. We’ll sing this hymn on Pentecost and the following Sundays, until the end of June at a nice brisk tempo moving right from one verse to the next. Check out the music and text
here.
Update: harmonies!
If you would like to learn the alto, tenor, or bass lines, to help in the harmonizing (in the second and third verses), here are some mp3s that illustrate those parts. Each mp3 starts with the last phrase of the soprano melody (”And kindle it your holy flame bestowing”) and then illustrates a different harmony line (alto, tenor, or bass) on piano, with a full choir panned to the right. You can adjust the left-right balance of your playback device (or slide off the right ear of your headphones) to increase or decrease the isolation of the piano illustration of your chosen part.
May 21st, 2012
Squeezebox is a place for our Song Leaders, as well as congregants, to learn the songs we sing at St. Lydia’s.
Come Light of Lights is a piece by our friend, Ana Hernandez, that can be found in the volume, Music By Heart. We sing it during the summer months as a Lamp Lighting Song. It can be sung as a four part or two part round, and has a fun little descant line that can be sung over the top of all of it. The piece works well with shruti box and drum.
Click here to listen to a recording of Ana performing the piece on her album, HARC: Blessed by Light.
