July 2008 Soundings - Seekers Church

This issue of Soundings includes:

Calendar

Seekers travel stories, movies at Seekers, Wellspring invitation

CALENDAR

SCHOOL OF CHRISTIAN LIVING SUMMER SESSION

WELLSPRING EVENT IN AUGUST

HOST A HUMPHREY FELLOW

Kris Herbst sends an e-mail to all Seekers (June 18) with a request from the head of the Humphrey Fellows program:

FOR TOMORROW"—SEE IT [AGAIN?] IN JULY

LIGHTEN THE LANDFILL LOAD

A SEEKERS/COVENANT DIALOGUE ON RACE AND DIVERSITY

INTERPLAY

InterPlay DC will hold its regular First Sunday Gathering July 6, 1–3 pm in the "play room" (sanctuary) at Seekers. Free to first-timers; a donation of $10–$20 towards the rent is suggested for returnees. InterPlay is a practice and philosophy rooted in the transformational power of play. Its creative process uses easy-to-learn forms of movement, storytelling, and voice that anyone can do. Just ask Sue Johnson, Lewise Busch, Billy and Kate Amoss, Kevin Barwick, Kathy Tobias, and others! The July Gathering will be led by Sue Johnson and Lacey Gude. Next Gathering at Seekers will be August 3.

MORE ON PAT AND TRISH’S VACATION

Pate Conover and Trish Nemore write—What We Did on Our Summer Vacation That We Took in the Spring: Day one was a little rocky. We missed our first major turn, about 20 miles from our house, due to serious rain and bad signage. That corrected, we sped along for several hours, deeply engaged in conversation that is difficult to find time for in the normal course of daily life, until we realized that we were no longer on the route we needed to be on—we’d gone about 50 miles out of our way. We chuckled to ourselves, turned around and felt deep gratitude and relief that we did not have a carful of small children. (This feeling returned to us many times on the trip!)

Thus began our 27 day road trip across America. From May 9 to June 4, we engaged in what Trish has come to call our "tapas" taste of America—a little bit of here, a little bit of there. Trish had never done anything like this before—either the length of the drive (over 6,000 miles) or the amount of time (we usually taking vacation in increments of about four days). It was quite wonderful!

Our first "tourist" stop, after a fabulous visit with Sonya Dyer in Charlotte, NC, was Great Smoky Mountain National Park which we crossed, from Cherokee, NC to Gatlinburg, TN just before sundown, stopping at every look out point to ooh and aah over the gorgeous Smokys. The next day, bad weather and insufficient clothing to deal with it prevented us from climbing to the "top of old Smoky", but we enjoyed the vistas just below the peak. Gatlinburg, TN is so over-the-top tacky as to be amusing—walking down the street is like walking through the mid-way of a carnival. When we couldn’t find the street musicians whose CD we wanted to buy, having failed to buy it the previous night because we thought they’d be back, we adopted the motto of Carpe Diem for the trip. That served us very well.

A must-see in Memphis is the 1/2 mile topographical scale-model of Old Man River—the lower Mississippi from Cairo, IL to the Gulf of Mexico—carved into concrete at the Mud Island River Park. And, of course, listening to music on Beale Street, which turned out to be more than just a tourist experience.

At the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock we heard about the great accomplishments of President Clinton—in his own words. (No, he wasn’t there.) The truly fun and remarkable thing there was The White House in Miniature, which has been in the making for several decades and which has toured the country for some years.

Who knew that Amarillo, Texas, could be a fun place to visit? We planned to stop there for the night, just because it was at the end of the right amount of driving for a day, but Chip, Trish’s managing attorney, reminded us that his sister and brother-in-law live there, so we got the treat of seeing Jewel’s fabulous Beadz Shop and being the beneficiaries of her prodigious jewelry-making talents.

The best pancakes Trish ever ate she enjoyed at the outdoor café at Museum Hill in Santa Fe with Pat and Seekers Alum, Phoebe Girard. Yummy food and terrific conversation.

Ma’drid, NM (fabulous hippy town), Chaco Canyon, NM (home of Ancestral Puebloans or Anasazi), Canyon de Chelly on the Navajo Indian Reservation, Second Mesa on the Hopi Reservation and Grand Canyon, AZ, were all experiences to treasure.

The southwest is so vast in so many ways—history, geography, spectacular and otherwise remarkable vistas, among other things—that it’s nearly impossible to capture the feeling of being there. Trish felt she got a better understanding of the tragedies of US policies toward Native Americans over the centuries—especially the lasting effects of the Navajos’ Long Walk and the Cherokees’ Trail of Tears. (Pat had visited these places before and had a little more of the history and story under his belt.) On the Hopi Reservation in AZ, they refer to their schools as "Day Schools" to distinguish them from the hated boarding schools into which white America conscripted native children.

We really wanted to bring home a Native American woven rug—many of them are stunningly beautiful. And waaaaay out of our price range. We thought Samantha might not like having to give up the financial assistance we’d offered for her graduate school. . .

Trish had a lot of fun planning the trip and it was everything we both hoped for. Now, if we can just remember how to run our daily lives at home. . . What’s my ATM pin number?

MIKE AND ELARA STRAND’S TRIP—LINK TO PHOTOS

Elara Strand writes: So many of you were so kind as to ask about our trip to Jordan and ask to see pictures that I thought I would send you all a link. I wrote all about the trip, including pictures, on my blog. You can read about our trip at: http://elarie.typepad.com/weblog/jordan/index.html

and the Egyptian side trip at:

http://elarie.typepad.com/weblog/egypt/index.html

For anyone unfamiliar with blogs, please note that the most recent are at the top, so if you want to look at them in order you have to scroll to the bottom and read to the top. Take care, Elara

DAVE AND JACKIE MCMAKIN’S CURRENT TRIP

And for a finale to these Seekers’ trips, see all the e-mails to Seekers from Kate Cudlipp [kateycud@gmail.com] with the continuing story of Jackie and Dave McMakin’s bicycle trip through northern France. Dates are May 30 and June 4, 10, 17, and 29.

Go J & D, both on your bikes and in your letters!

SERMONS IN JUNE

On the Seekers website, you can see many of the community’s sermons. The most recent sermon is on the top of the page. You can view the page two ways: the default is the sermon title with a summary, but you may also look through a list of sermon titles with preacher names. Our sermon archive covers sermons 2006 and earlier, with some all the way back to 1994.

6/22—"Trans-formation Through Being," Kjerston Priddy of N Street Village. In a reflection on the work of N Street Village, one of my co-worker’s shared a quote. Famously attributed to Nelson Mandela, the quote by author Marianne Williamson went as follows: "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.

6/15—"Sent as Apostles," David Lloyd. Last week the Hebrew Scriptures passage was about God, out of grace, calling to Abram—but not to his wife Sarai. Abram was 75 years old when they moved into the land of Canaan, Sarai was presumed barren (the name Sarai means mockery) and as we just heard, this week’s passage is about how the now 99 year old Abraham, as he has since been renamed to mean "father of many nations", and Sarah, as she has been renamed to mean "princess", were, out of God’s grace, promised a son within the next year.

6/8—"The Illuminated Sea," Jacqie Wallen. I had planned to use my time in Mexico to work on the sermon I had volunteered to give today. I thought it would be something about Illuminated Sea, since that was my overall theme for the trip. That topic seemed initially to fit nicely with the lectionary verse from Psalms for today: "He gathers the waters of the sea into jars; he puts the deep into storehouses," even though that verse made absolutely no sense at all to me. Why would God put the waters of the sea into jars? And did they even have jars back then when only the basic elements had been created?