Dear Members and Friends,

I am so glad Gary asked us to take one Sunday to celebrate art, especially the art of our own fellowship. It will be a day to remember because as we see each other’s art works, we shall see each other in a new light. Art is revelatory and makes plain what has been hidden.

W. H. Auden said, “Art makes us better people.” I have been thinking about that process. What happens in the aesthetic experience? Do we feel a sense of enlargement that we and our world expands?

Does our soul move into another dimension? Our whole self is involved as our defenses are touched in new ways, and our eyes are opened to new truth never glimpsed before. Think of the transformative power of art. I am thinking about Ken Klos and his teaching young “at risk” people to draw and paint. I venture that Ken changed more lives in his all too short life than I in sixty years of preaching. As we know by Monday morning, most sermons of whatever kind have evanesced. One reason for this is the lack of physical contact, the body takes a story beyond words. Sermons will continue, but most of them fail as high art. Perhaps the only sermon our nation remembers is the one by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “I have a dream…”

Educators tell me that children are natural artists. According to research, this gift is gone by the fourth grade. This is what the study of West Roxbury Schools revealed a decade ago. The study is published in a book called Death at an Early Age by Jonathon Kozol. The aesthetic experience is closely related to the spiritual in that both deal with the truth about life in its deepest dimensions. Artists do not lie and preachers should not!

Have you ever noticed how quiet people are in an art gallery? I think it is because people sense that they are in the realm of the sacred, all new creations of the imagination, some so wonderful that we can only say, “honey from the rock,” to quote Hebrew scripture. We raise our allelujahs in thanksgiving for riches shared by artists who never know how touched and moved we are by their work.

As we move toward our one shared holiday, Thanksgiving, we remember the words of Johann Sebastian Bach’s prayer: “Let my life be all thanksgiving!” May our music and feasting remind us of the gifts we bring each other everyday in laughter and music.

Love,

On October 30, Louis and Sharon Orlando hosted an all-ages Halloween party at BUUF that included music, movies, games, contests, costumes, candy, and scary decorations! A great time was had by all!

Greetings!

While I try to be cognizant of the wonders of being alive and living on this beautiful planet throughout the year, it is during the holiday of Thanksgiving when those feelings are most easily expressed. In fact, I celebrate Thanksgiving twice each year. Once in October when Canadians express their thanks for a bountiful harvest, during which time I visit with friends, many of whom I don’t often see throughout the year and who usually spend American Thanksgiving with their families. And then again in November, usually travelling and feasting with relatives and friends in other parts of the country.

For me it’s a personal holiday during which I focus on my family and friends. I don’t subscribe to the Pilgrims’ Christian view that their God played a role in the 1608 kidnapping and enslaving of the Patuxet boy of about twelve years of age, named Squanto, who became tri-lingual during more than a decade living in Spain and England before returning to his homeland in order to make possible the survival of the Pilgrims and the first American Thanksgiving in 1621. This event has since contributed to the Euro-Christian belief of Manifest Destiny, which, in turn by the horrendous damage done, has led many Native Americans to consider Thanksgiving a day of mourning.

On November 15, I’ll lead our 4^th-6^th grade class in deciding which ideas/causes for fundraising or COSA for Kids projects the students want to pursue. The following Sunday is Gary’s Intergenerational “Show and Tell,” when I hope our kids will have much to show us! Then on the fifth and final Sunday of November I’ll lead the class again in a discussion and preparation for the Sunday Service our RE program will present on December 20.

Those of us attending the most recent Speaking of Faith get-together decided to postpone the November 17 program on “Pagans: Ancient and Modern” to allow many of us to attend the Root Beer Summit on race relations and ethnic diversity in Benton Harbor (see calendar).

On November 24, Julie Williams will host “Preserving Words and Worlds” which is described as follows: “The Hill Museum & Monastic Library rescues manuscripts from across the centuries and across the world. We explore this with a Benedictine monk and an Ethiopian scholar who have led some of its most intriguing work. In their lives as in this work, the relevance of ancient manuscripts to people of the present, and the cultural cargo of the past itself, are revealed in a new light.”

On December 1, Joanne Krettek will host “TV and Parables of Our Time” which is described as follows: “Diane Winston appreciates good television, studies it, and brings many of its creators into her religion and media classes at the University of Southern California. In what some have called a renaissance in television drama, we examine how TV is helping us tell our story and work through great confusions in contemporary life.”

On December 8, Linda Lobik will host “The Ethics of Eating” which is described as follows: “Barbara Kingsolver describes an adventure her family undertook to spend one year eating primarily what they could grow or raise themselves. As a citizen and mother more than an expert, she turned her life towards questions many of us are asking. Food, she says, is a “rare moral arena” in which the ethical choice is often the pleasurable choice.”

May all your food choices this Thanksgiving be both ethical and pleasurable!

Your DRE,

Dave Sarra

Of all you've heard, trust not a word
nor half of what you see.
For words deceive, he did believe,
and quoted this to me.

He told me this, so I dismiss
it all as silly lies.
But if it's true, I'm glad that you
possess TWO twinkling eyes.

BUUF CALENDAR