Posts from July 2013 (Page 2)
Crossfit and Church
This short video featuring folks from our community of faith reflecting on Crossfit will give you a preview of worship this Sunday. Watch here: [wpvideo dQ8eaTB1]
Toward Sunday
We continue our summer worship series, Notice Grace All Summer, with reflection on Crossfit & church this Sunday. How was fitness a part of your childhood? How do you relate to fitness today? Crossfit is a rapidly growing fitness program started by Greg & Lauren Glassman in 2000. Over 3,400 Crossfit gyms have opened in the last twelve years across the county. In an article titled “Understanding CrossFit” (April 2007) Coach Greg Glassman writes, We sought to build a program that would best prepare trainees…
Grace all season
“You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out it was the other way around all the time” ~ Jim Bouton, pitcher “What you have to remember is that baseball isn’t a week or a month but a season – and a season is a long time.” ~ Chuck Tanner Learning how to recognize God’s Grace in our daily life takes time and practice. “Looking back” is one way…
Baseball as a road to God.
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/424489/march-07-2013/john-sexton When does wondering about “what has been” give us freedom to live into “what might be”? What is a time that you made a choice to wonder about things that you know…and things that you don’t know?
Seeing through Baseball
Today, as for thousands of years, it is possible to find meaning beyond words everywhere – and in this domain beyond words, the religious or spiritual resides. In an age of gigabytes and picoseconds, we tend to lie too quickly and to miss much that we might see. Baseball, as it turns out , can help us develop the capacity to see through to another, sacred space. Indeed, the more we come to appreciate the sport’s intricacies and evocative power,…
Communion and Baseball
“So, while the gospels of Matthew and Mark were giving nourishment to my soul, the feats of Mays and McCovey were taking hold of my heart. It was not easy to know what held more meaning for me as a youth: my first Communion or my first major league baseball game. Both were spiritual experiences. Communion made me eligible to receive the major league sacrament of the Catholic Church, ingesting the bread transformed into the body of Christ just as…
Staying Power
It is often impossible to understand the staying power of baseball. “There is something transformational about connecting with the game at the right time in your life — almost always in youth — when you learn to fully embrace its character and every potential: the patience and endurance required, the long season, the triumph, the forgiveness. When you fall in love with this game, there is no doubt. Even as childhood fades, we still believe in what the game can impart.…
Toward Sunday
We continue our summer journey that will take us from Yoga to Crossfit, Baseball to Knitting, Picnics to Movies! There will be space for play and time for prayer. We hope to rest in the assurance of God’s dynamic presence while we seek to identify the way in which God’s Grace comes to us. By focusing on Grace all Summer Long we intend to practice “noticing and naming” the ways Grace appears so that we will improve our skills in…
Knitting Church
Worship this morning will focus on what we can we learn about practicing our faith from Knitting. We begin at 10:30 a.m. With the cooler temperatures last evening the sanctuary won’t be too warm. All are welcome.
Praying and Knitting.
“The web of our life is of mingled yarn, good and ill together.” ~from William Shakespeare, “All’s Well That Ends Well” This…. becomes this…. and finally this: “Praying and knitting Covers those you love with love Disguised as a shawl” ~Haiku by Maria Fire
Grace of our Failures
“The folklore among knitters is that everything handmade should have at least one mistake so an evil spirit will not become trapped in the maze of perfect stitches. A missed increase or decrease, a crooked seam, a place where the tension is uneven-the mistake is a crack left open to let in the light.” ~from the essay “Yarn” by Kyoko Mori Grace of our failures Life consolable again The hands still dreaming (Haiku by Maria Fire)
“Patriotism”
“All ‘isms’ run out in the end, and good riddance to most of them. Patriotism for example. If patriots are people who stand by their country right or wrong, Germans who stood by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich should be adequate proof that we’ve had enough of them. If patriots are people who believe not only that anything they consider unpatriotic is wrong but that anything they consider wrong is unpatriotic, the late Senator Joseph McCarthy and his backers…