Fr. Harrison's Letter for October 1, 2017

9/30/2017

Dear Hearts,

Looks like we will have perfect weather for the annual Blessing of the Animals in Honor of St. Francis, Saturday, September 30! Please bring the creatures who bless your lives to the Green with you on leash, in crate, or in photo-form. We will again gather with our neighbors from First Congregational Church and St. George Church and all their friendly creatures at 10 a.m. Please note the time change: we'll gather at 10 a.m.! I think St. Francis would be pleased that we gather as fellow creatures to give thanks for the wonder of Creation.

The CROP Walk is this Sunday! We'll meet on The Green at 1:30 p.m. There are several ways to participate -- by walking, by contributing, or both! However you choose to participate, you'll be helping to end hunger "one step at a time." Funds go to relieve the food insecurity of local neighbors, and to support projects to enable basic agriculture throughout the world:

Sign-up to do the walk on Guilford sidewalks by going to the Shoreline CT page and click on "Register" on the right side of the page;

You can support our marchers by making an on-line donation; go to our Christ Church Team page, and click on "Donate."

Or, you can sign-up and/or make a donation, Sunday, on The Green. Lower tech, but just as effective!

It was strangely quiet on Park Street today. None of the hubub of preparations for The Tag Sale, or of the opening day of the Friends of the Library Book Sale. Hats off to all who labored at one or both ends of Park Street last week! Y'all definitely "bore the burden of the day and the scorching heat!" Even so, every shopper was greeted with a smile and warm welcome. So, a profound Sarum Bow to all Tag Sale helpers! Well done, good and faithful servants!

The daytime ECW will sponsor a "Bottles of Hope" Workshop, on Saturday, October 7, from 2 to 4 p.m. Think you're too old to play with clay? Think again! Workshop participants will have the opportunity to make two polymer clay bottles -- one to keep and one to send to a cancer patient with a message of hope. There is no charge, but signing up is necessary. Please sign-up in the Parish Hall, and direct your questions to Diane Link.

While Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands may be territories of the United States, they are full-fledged dioceses of The Episcopal Church! So, the catastrophic devastation from Hurricanes Irma and Maria impacts The Church just as much as what they did in Florida and what Harvey did in Texas and Louisiana. Indeed, the badly hit British Virgin Islands are also included in the Episcopal Diocese of the Virgin Islands. The latest news from Episcopal Relief and Development can be found here. Please consider contributing to relief efforts here.

May God's love and mystery continue to enfold us all,
Harrison+
YFNR

p.s. The work of Episcopal Migration Ministries -- and local agencies like I.R.I.S --. is/are directly affected by the administration's proposed further reduction in the number of refugees who will be permitted to enter the country in the 2018 fiscal year which begins on October 1. Here's EMM's statement.

1 Comment

Jane Ferrall

9/30/2017 07:29:05 am

The blog image is entitled "Quilt from Gee's Bend community." According to the notes on this picture from the Vanderbilt lectionary, "Quilting has long been a communal exercise, in which folks bring their cloth scraps and together make one quilt at a time, sharing their resources and enjoying fellowship. The Quilts of Gee's Bend were created by a group of women who live in the isolated African-American hamlet of Gee's Bend, Alabama."

"The compositions of these quilts contrast dramatically with the ordered regularity associated with many styles of Euro-American quiltmaking. There's a brilliant, improvisational range of approaches to composition that is more often associated with the inventiveness and power of the leading 20th-century abstract painters than it is with textile-making," writes Alvia Wardlaw, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts. The quilting tradition in Gee's Bend goes back to the 19th century, when the community was the site of a cotton plantation owned by a Joseph Gee. Perhaps influenced in part by patterned African textiles, female slaves pieced together strips of cloth to make bedcovers. Throughout the post-bellum years and into the 20th century, Gee's Bend women made quilts to keep themselves and their children warm in unheated shacks that lacked running water, telephones and electricity. Along the way they developed a distinctive style, noted for its lively improvisations and geometric simplicity. The quilts have been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others."

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