The Oven-Bird

by Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

–Read by Kathleen at St. Lydia’s on June 26

Max’s Sermon on Psalm 8

This Summer, St. Lydia’s is welcoming guest preachers to share the Word with us.  Reverend Maxwell Grant from Community Church of the Pelhams, UCC in Pelham, NY joined us last Sunday, June 26, and shared this sermon on Psalm 8.

Part of what I find so wonderful about Psalm 8 is its profound celebration of Creation.  Many people make a connection between Psalm 8 and the opening of the Book of Genesis, and it has that same kind of cataloguing quality—that same evocation of divine balance and order in bringing forth Creation.  And I can see that.

Actually, for me, it’s a little bit like the opening shot of the movie “Casablanca.”  You may not remember the opening shot of “Casablanca.”  Trust me, it’s just like this.  “Casablanca” begins with the picture of a slowly turning globe, and then it zooms in to North Africa, and then onto the city of Casablanca, and then it goes closer and closer, further and further down, from the highest minaret until it finally comes to restonto the streets, where, if my memory serves, they are hard at work gathering up the usual suspects and watching for the take-off of the daily plane to Lisbon.  Does anyone else remember that?

If you look closely, Psalm 8 has a kind of analogous structure.  An older version reads:  “What is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou does care for him?  Yet thou hast made him a little less than God [some versions say “gods”; some say “ a little lower than the angels”] and dost crown him with glory and honor.”  You can kind of picture the spinning globe, there, can’t you?  “Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet…”  The camera is starting to zoom in, now, “all the sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea….”

And now the camera goes even further:  “whatever passes along the paths of the sea…..”  Warner Brothers couldn’t have done it any better.

What’s interesting about that particular shot in “Casablanca,” of course, is that it reminds us that the drama that will play out, mostly between three people, in a particular café in a a remote city, is somehow connected to the spinning of the globe itself.  At one point in the movie, Rick says to Ilsa that “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”  And yet the opening shot has already signalled to us that this isn’t true. Somehow, maybe in ways they cannot entirely fathom, all Creation is somehow implicated in their problems.  And so, by extension, all Creation is somehow implicated in their choices. Well, the Psalmist probably didn’t have the chance to check out “Casablanca.”  But I think he would have shared some of that sensibility. He evokes the majesty of Creation so powerfully—looking at God’s handiwork and wondering who we can possibly be, given the grandeur of everything around us. But then there is that crucial word right in the heart of the Psalm — right at the hinge, if you will – where he says: “Yet.”

“Yet thou hast made him little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor.”

Read the rest of Reverend Max’s sermon…

Quinoa with Mint Pesto

Quinoa:
1 cup dried quinoa
2 cups water
1 tsp salt
Place in pot, bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat. The water should be absorbed and the quinoa ‘fluffy’ in about 15-20 minutes.

Pesto:
1 cup mint leaves
3 cloves garlic
1/4 cup toasted slivered almonds
1/4 cup shredded parmesan cheese
1/4 cup olive oil
Process in cuisinart until you like the consistency (I kept it a little grainy). Salt and pepper to taste

Mix pesto into quinoa
Add vegetables (We used Tatsoi and Mizuna leaves)
1 can drained garbanzo beans
zest of 1/2 lemon
Top with a little parmesan

–Adapated from Tiramisusu and prepared at St. Lydia’s by Richard on June 26

Penne with Two Tomatoes and Mozzarella

Lightly adapted from Everyday Food

Ingredients
6 ounces fresh mozzarella, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
12 to 16 ounces penne rigate
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes, halved
1/2 cup sun-dried tomatoes, chopped small
4 to 6 garlic cloves, sliced
1/4 cup snipped chives (I slice up the entire bunch or package into
1/2-inch lengths)
Coarse salt and ground pepper

Directions
1. Place cheese cubes in freezer. In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook pasta until al dente. Reserve 1/2 cup pasta water; drain pasta and set aside.
2. In pasta pot, heat oil over medium-high. Add both kinds of tomatoes, garlic, and pasta water. Cook until tomatoes soften, 2 to 4 minutes.
3. Add cooked pasta, chilled cheese, and chives to pot, while stirring to prevent cheese from clumping. Season with salt and pepper. Toss to combine.

-Prepared by Heather at St. Lydia’s on June 19

See more photos from last Sunday here.

An Excerpt from Jeremy’s Thesis

Jeremy Sierra is a MFA student and lives in New York.  A congregant at St. Lydia’s, he blogs here under the category Jeremiah Speaking. On May 15, he shared this excerpt from his MFA thesis at dinner church.

I went to an Episcopal Camp in the Diocese of Texas, about an hour’s drive outside of San Antonio.  The cabins where we slept were spacious, with rough white stone walls, concrete floors and four sets of bunk beds attached to the wall in the corners of the large square room.  Overhead, a noisy fan whirred and failed to keep the cabins cool.

The concrete slab at the center of the campus was where we would all lie and look up at the stars and listen to whatever story the priest would decide tell us.  This was usually something with a traditional Christian message (God loves you, Jesus died for your sins, we are all forgiven) and forgettable. The stars were what I remembered. The sky was vast, seemed to pull me up into it, and as I lay back on the concrete I could almost feel the earth rotating silently in empty space. It could have been frightening, being so small, but then I remembered that God had created all of it, and God loved me.

On the last evening, before we were all to pile in our parents’ minivans and SUVs for the trip back through the hill country to our homes, they would hold a dance, a night that both excited and filled me with dread.  In the cabin bathroom the other boys would be putting on cologne, which they would sometimes lend me, and combing their hair, looking at themselves in their khakis and collared shirts.  I stood near the edge of the dance floor the entire time, picking out girls that I wanted to ask to dance but never asking anyone; I was too shy and self-conscious. Also, I didn’t know how to dance.  I did not even know how to two-step, which was what many of the couples did, that or a kind of rocking shuffle across the concrete.  I stood at the edge and made multiple trips to the water fountain just to feel as if I had something to do.
Continue reading here.

An Excerpt from Kathleen’s Thesis

Kathleen Reeves, a congregant at St. Lydia’s, recently graduated from the Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought at NYU. On May 15, Kathleen shared this excerpt from her MA thesis, “‘Perishable but Never Ending’: Materiality and Mystery in Early DeLillo,” which traces the vivid presence of the human body in DeLillo’s early novels, End Zone and Great Jones Street. Both novels present originary moments of representation in which the body reinvests language with meaning and points toward the possibility of transcendence. Even when flawed and diseased, the human body’s real presence in the novels counters the disorienting forces of capitalism, technology, and war and guides DeLillo’s silent characters back to the possibility of art.

In the last chapter of Great Jones Street, Bucky roams lower Manhattan, mute after an urban cult has injected him with a much sought-after superdrug, “the product,” which destroys language. Again, terror and awe coalesce in Bucky’s experience, as he walks slowly through his apartment, “as though in fear of objects, all things with names unknown to me.” At the same time, he is “unreasonably happy . . . thinking of myself as a kind of living chant. I made interesting and original sounds” (264). The silence that Bucky has been seeking allows him to be, for the first time, original. But Bucky’s mute observation yields eventually to naming, in a process in which the physical forms of the city are essential. First, Bucky is drawn to the specific ruin of downtown New York, as he “never ventured north of Cooper Square but stood above the rivers east and west, wod-or, this double sound all I could fashion from sight of sluggish currents in transit to the sea” (258). New York’s natural setting, often obscured or forgotten, inspires Bucky’s rediscovery of language. Furthermore, the song of a ragged merchant provides a model of naming that runs throughout this final, “mute” chapter. Like all of DeLillo’s derelicts, he is gloriously decrepit, a “toothless man” surrounded by “glowing produce,” “one of nature’s raw warriors.” His sales pitch is described as “a religious cry,” and, as in the windshield men and the material industries of Great Jones Street, this kind of selling is material-based and markedly different than the more complicated and sinister forms of commerce in the novel:

RED YAPPLES GREEN YAPPLES GOLDEN YAPPLES MAKE A YAPPLE PIE MAKE ALSO A YAPPLE STRUDEL YAPPLES YAPPLES YAPPLES BIG JUICY YAPPLES FROM THE HEART OF THE YAPPLE COUNTRY  (259)

Bucky passes another radiant, ordinary namer, this one a woman, “resplendent,” “loudly cataloguing various items along the sidewalk”: “NEWSPAPER VOMIT SHIT GLASS CARDBOARD . . . GARBAGE SHIT GARBAGE GARBAGE SHIT” (260). The refuse on the sidewalk is elevated when named, each fragment of urban decay illuminated by language. Finally, DeLillo recasts a derelict’s physical infirmity as a lofty form of expression:

A rag man at the edge of the park retched into his scarf, working himself up to a moment of vast rhetoric. His seemed the type of accusation aimed at those too constricted in spirit to see the earth as a place for gods to grow, a theater of furious encounters between prophets of calamity and simple pedestrians trying to make the light. (261-62)

DeLillo situates the divine in the earth, pointing again to the embeddedness of the extraordinary in the ordinary, and the next act of naming in the chapter reinforces this idea.
…Continue reading here.

Sermon: Acts 2:1-13

Read Emily’s latest sermon, “Notice Your Breath,” on her blog, Sit and Eat.

With That Moon Language

by Hafez

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them,
“Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud;
Otherwise,
Someone would call the cops.
Still though, think about this,
This great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one
Who lives with a full moon in each eye
That is always saying
With that sweet moon
Language
What every other eye in this world
Is dying to
Hear.

–Read at St. Lydia’s on June 12

Pentectost: Spinach and Chickpeas

1/2 pound (230 grams) dried chickpeas, cooked until soft and tender or two 15-ounce cans of chickpeas, drained and rinsed
6 tablespoon olive oil
1 pound (450 grams) spinach, washed
A hefty 1-inch slice from a country loaf or about 2 slices from sandwich loaf bread (2.5 ounces or 75 grams), crusts removed and cut inset small cubes
1/2 cup (4 ounces) tomato sauce
3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
Pinch of red pepper flakes
1 1/2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Lemon juice, to taste

Place a large saucepan over medium heat and add half the olive oil. When it is hot, add the spinach with a pinch of salt (in batches, if necessary) and stir well. Remove when the leaves are just tender, drain in a colander and set aside.

Heat 2 more tablespoons olive oil in a frying pan over medium heat. Fry the bread for about 5 minutes or until golden brown all over, then the remaining tablespoon of oil and the garlic, cumin and pepper. Cook for 1 minute more or until the garlic is nutty brown.

Transfer to a food processor, blender or mortar and pestle along with the vinegar, and mash to a paste. Return the mixture to the pan and add the drained chickpeas and tomato sauce. Stir until the chickpeas have absorbed the flavors and are hot. Season with salt and pepper.

If the consistency is a little thick, add some water. Add the spinach and cook until it is hot. Check for seasoning and serve with paprika on top, or on fried bread toasts (as the Spanish do).

–Prepared by Mabel at St. Lydia’s on June 12, the recipe is from Smitten Kitchen.

See more photos of our Pentecost celebration on our Picasa page.

Hymn