Victoria Requiem Saturday Night

Six parts. Two choirs. One beautiful liturgy.

More here.

The Ten Commandments of Luuuuuuuuuv

In honor of the Sunday School’s upcoming discussion of Moses this Sunday, here’s Aaron Neville:

Daylight Savings Saturday Night!

Don’t forget to “fall back”!

Not that there’s anything wrong with coming to church an hour early…

What’s the Deal with Halloween?

Does anyone else wonder why we dress up as monsters and try to frighten each other with images of death and violence, all while smiling and laughing and chomping on sweets?

Halloween is, as always, a night just before the coming of winter, the season of death. And indeed, tomorrow, many will celebrate El Dia de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead). And in the Episcopal Church, Halloween is All Hallow’s Eve, the evening before All Saints (Hallows) Day–the day on which our church honors all those Christians who have died (all of them, not just a select few). At Saint Bede’s we will be marking that occasion with a Requiem service featuring Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Officium Defunctorum, or “Office for the Dead” (more on that here). And on Sunday, we will commemorate All Saints Day with a baptism, a service welcoming a child into the life of Christ–which, according to Christian tradition, involves a spiritual passage through the death of one’s old life and into a new life of peace and faith and joy.

So clearly Halloween has to do with death… Is Halloween a celebration of death? Do we prepare ourselves for the coming season by physically embodying our worst fears about the ugliness of death? And do we then generate the courage and hope we need in the face of all that horror by partying while wearing death masks? By encouraging kids to jovially threaten their neighbors? Trick or treat!

Maybe Halloween helps serve as a reminder of how terrible and violent our earthly lives can be. But also, paradoxically, maybe Halloween allows us to revel in the joy and hope that can be found even in the midst of the horrors of death. Despite how hideous life can be, the love of God, the goodness of God, the peace of God is with us. Always.

Sunday School Questions: Moses & Commandments

This Sunday, the kids will be talking about Moses (before cracking glow-sticks and singing “This Little Light of Mine” as part of our All Saints baptismal service).

Here are the questions:

Can you imagine being chosen by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt? How would you feel if you were called to such an enormous task? What do you think it was like for Moses? What is Torah? What are the Ten Commandments? Why do you think God handed down the Ten Commandments to Moses? Why do we need laws? Why do we need rules? Are they helpful or just annoying?

By the way, we spent 10 weeks this past summer discussing the Ten Commandments during our Sunday Soulwork sessions, 9 – 10 am. And we kicked off our conversations by listening bit by bit to an episode of the NPR show, This American Life, that focused on personal stories related to each of the Commandments. You can listen to it here.

Sacred Spaces

Happy Diwali!

“You Shall Be Holy”

I think we are confused about the word holy for good reason. Linguistically there are two threads: the first is the idea of holy things being sanctified, set apart in some way from the ordinary world. It is hard to bring that kind of holiness back into our day to day lives without a sense of desecration. There is, however, another way to understand the word holy: the Old English word ‘hal’ means ‘entire, whole and healthy’. Holy is that which is whole and healed. And to be whole is to be as God intends us to be.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that one understanding of the word holy is all about separation, setting apart, whether as a thing away from ordinary things or as a person, removed somehow from ordinary life. It would seem from our readings today that the sort of holiness God is calling us to is not about separation at all, but rather about how to be with other people.

[Click below for the complete sermon.]

Check Out the Blogroll

To the right, there is a list of links to websites connected to St. Bede’s and St. Bede’s folks, including Jeanne Cooper’s Hawaii Travel Blog, Mike Graebner’s Green Tech Blog, the site for Ben Werner’s Electric Car, and Los Ayudantes Tutoring & Mentoring, the English literacy tutoring operation busy in the Redwood City Public Schools that was founded and is still largely run by St. Bede’s parishioners, including Sue Sartor, Ann Latta, John Hickson, Jim Stocker, and Becky Zaren.

Check ‘em out!

Social Entrepreneurship at India’s Barefoot College

As some may know, our Rector, Kitty Lehman, spent much of her sabbatical this past summer reading and thinking about social entrepreneurship as an exciting new form of missionary work and evangelism. Social entrepreneurs harness their business acumen together with new and emerging technologies to establish self-sustaining enterprises that help to build and strengthen community–amassing what is known as “social capital,” rather than wealth, and, dare we say it, offering a glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Recently, Kitty saw a PBS report about the Barefoot College system that has been developed throughout rural India as a way to bring solar powered electricity to the Indian countryside, and, in so doing, so much more as well. Click here for the complete report. And here’s an excerpt:

Today [at Barefoot College], solar energy drives not just the equipment, but a larger social experiment to improve the lives of some of the world’s poorest people. It begins in the classroom, run by instructors who themselves have little or no formal education.

Young People Unite?

I just stumbled upon this video touting a new “movement” called, Generation We.

I find it fairly compelling–particularly the message about our environment, which calls to my mind our Youth Group’s Watershed Service Project. But I also think that it’s at times a bit creepy–in the way that it seems to encourage a kind of group-think.

What do you think? Post a comment!

The “New Atheism,” cont’d. (comments??)

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, has recently announced a plan to write a book about how Harry Potter and other fantastical stories popular among young people–including those that can be found in the Bible–may be “pernicious” and have a “negative effect on children,” since they are “anti-scientific.”

Some warn that attacking Harry Potter, fairy tales and other fantasy stories sounds an awful lot like religious fundamentalism. But Dawkins insists that children should be trained to “always look at the evidence,” and so his book will examine various mythical accounts of life and compare them to scientific accounts. And as Dawkins puts it, only the scientific ones are “substantiated.” (Check out Bede’s Blog’s earlier post on Dawkins and others here.)

All this brings to mind something that came up during our Seekers Dinner discussion of science and religion last week. Just like Harry Potter and Bible stories, as well as all myths and fairy tales, the plays of Shakespeare, and the novels of Mark Twain or Virginia Woolf are not “substantiated” either. Indeed, much of the writing of Shakespeare, Twain and Woolf is quite fantastical. That’s why we stock Shakespeare, Twain and Woolf in the “Fiction” sections of libraries and book stores. Yet I think that most people, whether they believe in a Judeo-Christian conception of God or not, whether they are hard-core scientific thinkers or not, find a lot of Truth (with a capital “T”) in such un-substantiated fiction. Might the same thing hold for the fantastical stories found in the Bible and elsewhere?

(This is only kind of a rhetorical question- Please post a comment! Don’t be shy! Or if you must be shy, post a comment using an alias…)

Victoria Requiem at Bede’s this Saturday

As part of the Arts at St. Bede’s series, the St. Bede’s choir will team up with the choir from Christ Church, Portola Valley, at 7 pm, this Saturday, November 1st, to perform the 1605 masterpiece, Officium Defunctorum, by Tomás Luis de Victoria–otherwise known as the Victoria Requiem. Written to commemorate the death of the Dowager Empress Maria of Spain, this intensely passionate six-part work is one of the finest of the Renaissance era and not to be missed, particularly as part of a Eucharistic liturgy. Take a minute and listen to this clip right now:

Our own Jane McDougle will be conducting together with Matthew Burt of Christ Church.

Simple Supper and Soulwork of Saints

Every Wednesday evening, from 6 pm to 7:30 pm, a group of Bede’s folk gather to eat a simple meal together and to discuss the scripture readings for the upcoming Sunday. We will do so as usual this coming Wednesday, October 29. And as always, we welcome any who’d like to join us.

Then, next Wednesday, November 5, 6 – 7:30 pm, we will have a special Soulwork session in honor of All Saints’ Day, in which we will discuss just what is meant by the word, “saint.” Who are saints according to our Episcopal Church? How are those listed in the church’s Lesser Feasts & Fasts chosen for veneration? As the word is used in the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of Paul, can’t we all be considered, in some sense, saints?

Still Seeking

Last night, during our Seekers Dinner, we had spirited discussion kicked off by our consideration of the Albert Einstein quote: “Science without religion is blind; and religion without science is lame.”

Our conversation ultimately alighted upon the power and importance of spiritual experiences. We spoke of awe in the face of natural beauty, of our halting attempts to still our restless minds, of the way our desires for detailed scientific explanations for what we call “spiritual” may sometimes get in the way; we spoke of crying at the opera, of the yoga “corpse pose,” and of Nietzsche’s idea that, “That which we have spoken is already dead in our hearts,” which included a hilarious child-hood story about “Attila the Nun.”

So in honor of all that, and in thanksgiving to the great thinker who got our juices flowing last night, here is Einstein on the importance of spiritual experience:

The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.

Our next Seekers Dinner is Thursday, November 20, 7:30 – 9:30 pm.

Sunday School Questions

This Sunday, October 26, during the 10:15 am service, our Sunday School tour through the major figures of the Hebrew Scriptures continues with Jacob’s son, Joseph.

Joseph was known as the “King of Dreams” for his ability to interpret dreams, and that combined with Joseph’s other spiritual gifts made his brothers so jealous that they sold him into slavery in Egypt. So, amidst our weekly Sunday School prayers and hymn-singing, we will talk about Joseph and ask the kids about the spirituality of dreams and the experience of jealousy.

When have we felt jealous and why? What does jealousy make us do? How might we guard against jealousy?

What dreams do we remember? Have our dreams ever revealed something important to us? Why might Joseph and others throughout human history have believed that dreams contain important spiritual insight?

More Bicycle Blessing Pics

Many thanks to Fred Langhorst for passing along these pictures from last Sunday’s Bike Blessing:

Reimagining Pocahantas

As part of our educational series exploring what happens when different cultures and religious traditions collide, St. Bede’s will screen, The New World, Terrence Malick’s beautiful 2005 re-telling of the story of Pocahantas and John Smith, on Friday, November 14. So mark your calendars.

The movie portrays the very beginnings of the complicated, messy history that has been the culture clash between Europeans and Native Americans on this continent. And it beautifully captures the feeling of cross-cultural transcendence one can find when barriers between disparate peoples somehow fall away, a feeling the Youth Group experienced in fits and spurts during our Mission Trip to the Rosebud Lakota Reservation this past June.

The “New Atheism”

Funds are now being raised in England to pay for public service advertisements such as the one above.

Damon Linker laments what he calls the “new atheism” that such advertisements–as well as  recent books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, together with Bill Maher’s new movie, Religulous–represent:

Religulous is a perfect complement to the recent books by Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens. Like these authors, Maher harbors so much contempt for religion that he would rather score easy points than explore the messy reality of humanity’s complicated–often sordid, but sometimes noble–religious impulses and experiences.

Moral Imaginings

The Rev. Canon Charles Gibbs visited St. Bede’s this past Sunday, October 19, celebrated the Eucharist with us and led our Soulwork discussion on the topic of the work he does as Executive Director of United Religions Initiative (“…to promote enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, to end religiously motivated violence and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing for the Earth and all living beings”).

In particular, he recommended a book by John Paul Lederach, called The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace, that offers the following four-step prescription for building peace between disparate people:

Imagine a web of relationships that includes your enemies.
Attend to complexity without resorting to duality.
Cultivate creativity in apparently hopeless situations.
Risk moving into the unknown.

From the opening chapter:

Akmal Mizshakarol painted the image found on the cover of this book following the tragic events unleashed in New York and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001. Its title is that date… In the spring of 2002 I found Akmal completing the first of his pieces on the tragedy that hit the United States in the fall of 2001. A year later, he completed the one you find here… We talked about the painting. From first sight, I was mesmerized by the combination of the painting itself, the context in which it was made, the color choices, the faces, and the implications of such an effort. A Tajik Muslim painter sitting just north of Afghanistan had reflected through his hands a response to the events that had taken place half a world away, yet that were close to home.

Faces of the Day

Jane blesses the bicycles of Athena, Zachary and Alex Burrs-President, last Sunday, October 19.