Since September 2020, on the last Saturday of each month, Burrito Love has been on a mission to provide a nutritional sack lunch to our community neighbors. As you walk in the neighborhood, you may notice Burrito Love flyers posted for the event on telephone poles. Included with each sack are cookies and a chilled bottle of water. The Super Torta restaurant on Woodstock provides the burritos at a significantly reduced cost.
I feel like we are frayed around the edges because of COVID. We are still knit together but have lost some cohesion over the past 18 months. Even our strongest pieces have thinned and struggled to hold everything and everyone together. It’s the nature of collective trauma, surely, to feel forever exhausted and on edge in unstable times.
Still, a golden thread has emerged in our beloved music program in the form of a return to in-person choir rehearsals. Even while we cannot sing to full capacity on Sunday mornings until restrictions are lifted, the St. Michael’s Singers has started gathering again in the open sanctuary on Wednesday nights to learn psalms and anthems together for both personal enrichment and communal worship.
St. Francis Day is on October 4, and we’re celebrating it on Sunday, October 3. All are invited to attend our annual Blessing of the Animals at 12:00 noon in the courtyard. The clergy will offer blessings and treats for each pet, and you can have your photo snapped with St. Francis (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) or in front of the red doors. It’s a chance to chat and catch up with your friends and fellow parishioners and introduce them to your beloved pet.
The first youth group meeting of the new school year is happening at Normandale Park on Sunday, September 12, from 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm. Masks will be required, and dinner will be provided 🙂 We hope you had a wonderful summer. We missed all of you!
If you missed the offertory solo from last Sunday, take a listen to the marvelous duet from St. Michael’s Singers soprano Beth Ilem and Choir Director Brian Fairbanks on flute as they present Craig Courtney’s “Be not afraid,” set to Isaiah 43:1-4.
The month of August is the perfect time to pick up a backpack and school supplies to help support local children in the foster-care system. Donations can be dropped off at the church on Sunday mornings inside the courtyard doors, or you can bring them during the week (call first). Monetary gifts are also very welcome to help “fill in the blanks” when more supplies are needed to complete the backpacks. Please bring your donations the next three Sundays—August 8, 15 & 22.
One melodic composer you’ll hear on Sunday during the offertory is Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-1847). Fanny was the older sister of fellow composer Felix Mendelssohn. She is finally starting to get the recognition she deserves as a monumental composer of over 400 pieces, particularly for voice and piano, matching the genius of her more famous brother.
You no longer need to sign up to attend either of our Sunday services in English. Our numbers have stayed comfortably on the low side and well within the OHA guidelines, and we anticipate that will continue throughout the summer. If you are already signed up for one or more Sundays in July and August – no worries, you don’t need to delete yourself from SignUpGenius. The 11:00 am service will continue as it has – in the courtyard most of the time and inside the church during periods of rain, extreme heat and possibly smoke.
In celebration of the 4th of July weekend, enjoy again this clip of St. Michael’s Music Director/Organist Hannah Brewer playing an arrangement of the classic patriotic tunes “O beautiful for spacious skies” and “America,” recorded last year. This coming Sunday, July 4, at the 9:00 am service, we’ll sing the moving Finlandia hymn This is my song for our national holiday, which calls for unity, peace and an appreciation for all nations: “My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean, and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine./ But other lands have sunlight too, and clover, and skies are ev’rywhere as blue as mine.”
One of the primary sources we have for understanding how monastics engaged the practice of contemplative reading of scripture in the first centuries of the Church’s life is called The Ladder of Monks, by a Carthusian named Guigo II. “The ladder” was the practice by which monks considered the text before them and examined it with study and questions and commentary, but then also began to leave their intellectual work behind for the spiritual work of contemplating what was beyond the power of their rational mind to understand.
