August 2008 Archives

PLAN TO ATTEND!!!

THROOP CHURCH PICNIC
Saturday, September 6th from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM
At Tournament Park on the Caltech Campus

BBQ TIME! We will supply the veggies and fruit to make kabobs for barbecuing and drinks. Please bring a potluck dish to share and anything special for your kabob such as meat. If you can help with cutting our veggie and fruit Friday night prior to the picnic please contact Mary Jane at maryjaneholden@mac.com.

OLYMPIC GAMES! We will be playing games designed for all ages and abilities. Our plan is to form teams, have each team decide who will participate in which event, award points and medals to the most successful teams. Yeah! There will be Scrabble, Cards, Ultimate Frisbee, Water Balloon Toss, Potato Sack Relays, Watermelon Eating Contest, and more. If there are any particular games you would like to include please e-mail Kathleen at kathleenmcg@mac.com.

MUSICAL INTERLUDES! Dave Jones has agreed to lead our singing interludes. If there is a song that particularly appeals to you please let him know at mrblueguitar@sbcglobal.net.

ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES! Do you need a ride to the park or can you provide a ride to the park? Carol would like to assist anyone in need. Contact her at carol.rudisill@adelphia.net or 626-355-4285.

DIRECTIONS Click this pdf for directions to Tournament Park.
Throop Church Picnic Directions.pdf

You are cordially invited to attend an

Acting Showcase by the Throop Hall Players
Saturday August 23rd at 8:00 p.m. in Throop Hall

Admission is FREE and refreshments will be served. 

Talented professional actors along side those new to the courageous experience of performing in front of an audience are featured in the scenes below. 

Defying Gravity monologue performed by Tammy Partanen

Sail Me Away sung by Ramon Ramirez

The Frog monologue performed by Georgia Raines

Bitter Cane performed by Leslie Duong and Ramon Ramirez

Beyond Therapy scene performed by Ted Newman and Tammy Partanen

Henry V monologue performed by Matt Valenti

Scuba Duba performed by Matthew Doyle

Life During Wartime monologue performed by Johnny Paddio

Jack and Jill performed by Kim Asplund and Leslie Duong

Dutchman performed by Debra De Liso and Johnny Paddio

Lost in Yonkers monologue performed by Leslie Duong

Hal and Kathy scene performed by Tammy Partanen and Matt Valenti

(The scenes and monologues contain adult material. This presentation is not recommended for children.)

Directed by Debra De Liso
Theatre Artist www.debradeliso.com
debradeliso@sbcglobal.net

Over a hundred years ago W.E.B. Dubois struggled with the question, what causes race prejudice:

"Beyond my conception of ignorance or deliberate ill-will as causes of race prejudice there must be other and stronger and more threatening forces forming the founding stones of race antagonisms, which we had only begun to attack or, perhaps in reality, had not attacked at all." 

Throop Book Group Books for August and September

The Throop Book Group meets every Thursday, from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. in the courtyard of Mijares Restaurant, 145 Palmetto Dr., Pasadena.  Scheduled for August 14, 21, and 28 is Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke.  This visionary science fiction writer who wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey and won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on science and the future recently died at the age of 90.  Childhood's End was one of his earliest and best known works. It starts with supervisors from outer space parking their mammoth silver ships silently above every major city on earth. After six knuckle-biting days, one of them speaks. The discussion will be led by Ann Hunnewell, who recommended the book.

On September 4, 11, and 18, the Group will discuss Native Son by Richard Wright, an urgent call in 1940 to America to awaken from its self-induced slumber about the reality of race relations in the nation.  Set in Chicago in the 1930's, Native Son tells the story of a young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in the inner cities across the country and what it meant to be black in America. Native Son was the first novel by an African American to be featured as a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. The discussion will be led by John Hunnewell.

During our Coming of Age Celebration we heard the new song "All These Things" from our youth group "Fish Who Need Bicycles." For all of you who enjoyed the song but didn't catch all the words here they are.

All These Things

These are things that scare me
Life, if that's not too broad a generalization
Global warming
Mirrors, yeah mirrors, think about it.
My parents scare me
My report cards scare me
My parents seeing my report cards really scares me
Just thinking scares me
Thinking about the world's problems is even scarier
Thinking about politicians thinking about the world's problems scares me most of all
And Girls

All these things are a part of my life
All these things make me who I am

These are things that make me feel good
Hanging with my peeps
Money
Telling a joke and getting the punch line right and people actually laugh
Playing baseball and stealing a base
Helping someone out by doing a job
And getting paid for it
Feeling proud about getting good grades feels good
Music makes me feel good
Drumming makes me feel GOOD!
And Girls

All these things are a part of my life
All these things make me who I am

These are things I believe in
I believe life is what you make it
I believe you should pick up after your mistakes
I believe in acceptance
I believe in Thai food
I believe in trying new things
I believe spider webs don't taste good
I believe in Pac Man
And Girls

All these things are a part of my life
All these things make me who I am

Our species has evolved on this planet with the support of nutritive conditions given to us, and through the benefits of abundant resources. Over the centuries, homo sapiens, working together in communities, have been able to create cultures that can remember the lessons they have learned and apply those lessons to finding solutions.  Within those cultures we have erected institutions -- complex sets of human relations that continue over time, that facilitate needed social functions in the areas of governance, production, finance, medicine, education, security, and religion.  But, it is those very institutions, the ones that concentrate our collective power, that endanger us today.

It began in a few countries early in the so-called "industrial revolution." It expanded slowly, over more than three centuries, and today it embraces the whole world in a  global economy based on domination -- domination over both people and nature, by corporations.  We are depleting the resources of our planet; most critically its deep, rich agricultural soils, its biodiversity, and its groundwater, stored during the time of the Ice Ages.

The leaders of the key institutions in the major nations of this earth appear to be under the illusion that no fundamental change in direction is required, that we can find technological solutions that will allow the corporations to continue business as usual. But if we continue along this road, the world's economic and social structures will collapse.

In the past, grass roots movements have discovered ways to make changes in the direction of major institutions.  Consider the rise of organized labor, the consumer rights movement, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and the environmental movement of the past. While we have seen more and more grass roots movement toward more sustainable economics and agriculture, there is much more to do.

In the words of the Earth Charter (2000), "We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace."

Because of the urgency of this task, I am committing my ministry to the Great Turning, the effort to make the turn away from catastrophe and toward earth community.  I will open a discussion with you on how we together can accomplish this vital task.

Dozens of the oldest member congregations of our Unitarian Universalist Association were founded by the Pilgrim and Puritan settlers of colonial New England. Although we long ago rejected several doctrines dear to them, we, American Unitarian Universalists, steadfastly keep a precious part of our Puritan inheritance: their "congregational polity."

The Pilgrims in 1620 and the 20,000 or so Puritans who came here in the Great Migration of the 1630s were primarily concerned with a theology of organization: how churches ought to be organized, who in these churches should have authority, and why. They invented, or rather reinvented, what we call congregational polity, that doctrine of the church that insists that each congregation is to be governed by its own members.

Puritans had tried for decades to reform the Church of England. Persecuted and punished by bishops for holding what we would call study groups and conferences, they eventually concluded that something had gone terribly awry in church history. They studied carefully the "record books" of the church, the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. From these they learned that, from the days of Sarah and Abraham, the spirit of love has always been the "substance" of a church.

In 1646 reformers in England published the Westminster Confession. New Englanders disagreed with its prescription of a presbyterial model of governance. The New England churches convened a synod in Cambridge, Massachusetts, resulting in the Cambridge Platform of 1648, which explained and justified how congregational churches are constituted and work. The UUA's Skinner House Books has just published a new edition of this important work.

According to the Platform, the proper "form" of a church follows from "the second commandment," as Jesus expressed it: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" (Matt. 22:39). To join a church is to enter a covenant to walk with other members in the spirit of neighborly love. The goal of everything gathered members do is "edification," or mutual learning and teaching concerning the many and complex ways of love. Members of a congregation and their elected officers are a complete church; they need no higher authorities in church affairs. Reasoning together in the spirit of love, they can discern whither love leads.

For our founders, the autonomy of each congregation did not imply either self-sufficiency or isolation from other congregations. They were to be a community of independent churches, giving and taking counsel and helping each other in other ways.

Our founders surely didn't get everything right organizationally. Early congregationalists thought it perfectly reasonable that magistrates, as they had in England, should coerce all landowning citizens to pay the parish tax, a practice their Unitarian heirs fought to maintain into the 1830s. They also assumed that tiered levels of privilege and authority were natural and that acquired status should be respected in perpetuity. Ministers and elected lay leaders, unless they did something awful, tended to stay in office for decades. Sadly, this long-held pattern led to complacency and resistance to change among nineteenth-century Unitarians in matters affecting growth.

Thank goodness, even so, for our Puritan heritage. By their lights, the Bible is mainly about the free and covenanted social practice of love. Its ancient stories set them on the road to a revolutionary type of religious community and politics. Refusing to embrace any creed, their members entered simply and beautifully phrased covenants to "walk together" in the divine spirit of love, as best they could see to do. Their church practice in time led to today's Unitarian Universalist religious communities, in which individuals may differ in a variety of ways and yet continue to walk together freely in the spirit of love.

Adapted with permission from the introduction to The Cambridge Platform: Contemporary Reader's Edition, ed. by Peter Hughes (Skinner House, 2008). See sidebar for links to related resources.

At the opening of Unitarian Universalist worship services many congregations light a flame inside a chalice. This flaming chalice has become a well-known symbol of our denomination. It unites our members in worship and symbolizes the spirit of our work.

Hans Deutsch, an Austrian artist, first brought together the chalice and the flame as a Unitarian symbol during his work with the Unitarian Service Committee during World War II. To Deutsch, the image had connotations of sacrifice and love. Unitarian Universalists today have many different interpretations of the image. To many, the cup represents religious community, while the flame represents ideas including the sacrificial flame, the flame of the spirit, and more.

The flaming chalice image has changed many times over the past 65 years. There is no single interpretation of today's flaming chalice symbol.  Modern chalice designs often incorporate two overlapping circles which, for many people, represent our Unitarian and Universalist heritages. Other images include additional elements, some of which are merely decorative and others which are very meaningful.

Our current official UUA logo (at the top left of each UUA.org web page) was designed to offer a visual representation of a modern and dynamic faith. Unitarian Universalist congregations are free to use the UUA's logo in their congregational work, but they are not required to do so. Because of this, you may see many different styles of flaming chalices and other images used by UU congregations."

Thanks to the UUA and Dan Hotchkiss for this explanation of this symbol of our movement. 

The official opening service for the new church year is August 24, and the choir will be singing for that service.  If you have thought about joining the choir, this service is a great opportunity.

The rehearsal will be at 9:00 in the Sanctuary.  We will sing the hymns for the service and rehearse the choir's anthem. 

I look forward to seeing all of the choir members on the 24th, and I hope to welcome some new singers to our group.

- Gary Green, Music Director

Sunday, August 3, 2008
"What Price Paradise?"
Kathleen McGregor
In the early Christian church,Paradise was considered place on earth as well as a figurative place. Heaven as a place in the distant sky did not come into use until the next millennium. What can the imagery of paradise, based on much earlier descriptions from Genesis to ancient Sumerian myths, teach us today? What is the price we have paid for moving paradise to the heavens, and can we again capture heaven on earth?

Sunday, August 10, 2008
"Counting What?"
Beth Leehy
Exploring events in our lives and what we learn from them. Recently I've been adding this statement as a tag line to my emails: "The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings."  ~Eric Hoffer. And indeed, it has been easy to count some of the blessings in my life, but I have to dig deeper to count the blessings available to me in the "war" in Iraq, economic globalization, global warming, mass layoffs and other larger events that affect all of us. Come, let us enumerate together and create synergy (and music) together!

Sunday, August 17, 2008
"Teaching Unitarian Universalist to Clap"
Brad Munson

Sunday, August 24, 2008
"Why the Great Turning?"
Rev. Clyde Grubbs
More and more Unitarian Universalists are realizing that to create a sustainable, democratic, peaceful, egalitarian society will require a new awareness, and a new way of engaging each other.

Sunday, August 31, 2008
"They Take Our Jobs"
Rev. Clyde Grubbs
On this labor day we take notice of the campaign to scapegoat undocumented workers.

Sundays at 10:00 A.M. in the Fireside Room
During our Adult Discussion time we introduce a topic of interest and then discuss this topic. Our topics can be a series of Sundays or single Sunday. We determine topics based on the interests of those who attend. Please join us for this educational and thought provoking hour.
 
August 3           "The Old Testament-Samuel and Saul"
                        With John Hunnewell
 
August 10         "The Old Testament-King David"
                        With Jim Bys
 
August 17         "The Old Testament-From King Solomon to Preclassical Prophecy"
                        With John Hunnewell
 
August 24         SPECIAL ON WATER: "How to Save Money and This Vital Resource"
                        Panel and Group Discussion
                        (See description below)
 
August 31         "The Old Testament-The Prophets and the Fall of the North
                        With Jim Bys
 
 
Note:
*The Old Testament* is a 30-minute DVD presentation by Professor Amy-Jill Levine, Vanderbilt University Divinity School, followed by a 20-minute discussion by the Throop audience.

SPECIAL ON WATER

On Sunday, August 24 from 10:00 am to 10:50 sharp, two of our own water resources experts will present "How to Save Money and This Vital Resource."  Wayne Snively and Jim Emerson, professional engineers and experts on water resources, will lead a panel and group discussion on what you can do to promote wise use of water by individuals and local governments.  Please come early and show what you or your city has done in this area.  The previous program on water proved to be a winner!  Let's pack this one to the max!

--  John Hunnewell

We are trying a new type of newsletter here at Throop. Our newsletter will be recreated in the form of a blog. Some of us are not as familiar with blogs as others. In simple terms this is where we will be finding the information regarding Throop Church. The difference between this and the previous newsletter is at least two fold. First, all of the information of every newsletter will remain here in this blog. Instead of having 12 newsletters per year we will keep adding to this blog and send you e-mail reminders to come take a look at the most recent entries. Second, this newsletter/blog will be constantly updated. The latest information regarding the activities or events of Throop Church will be placed here on a regular basis. This is a new idea and we are testing it. Our goal is to have accessible information in a timely manner for our Throop community. We welcome you input to help promote our goal.