Youth Group News

Exciting and Busy Month for the Youth Group

Rounding out the month of October by helping set-up and serve at the Harvest Dinner followed by cleaning out the Youth Room in preparation for new decor and taking a turn at hosting coffee hour, you'd think a rest was in order for the Youth Group at St. John's. But as the saying goes, let there be no rest for the weary. 

Already November is proving to be an exciting month packed with activities suited for all ages of youth within St. John's Parish — and the Jr. High and High School group is no exception. Nancy Radloff continues to prepare exceptional music for parishioners and kicked-off the month with an All Saints' Day choir performance. In the week following, several youth helped to put the finishing touches on the newly renovated Youth Room by moving in furniture and hanging decorations. Our hope is that the space becomes a cozy hang-out pre- or post-service where youth will want to gather, bond, share stories, and support each other. 

Still to come this month is a Thanksgiving gathering - this year at the Oakes' house - for all members of the Youth Group. On Saturday, November 20th from 11am – 3pm, the group will gather, prepare tags for the annual Salvation Army holiday program (facilitated by the outreach committee), compete in a ping-pong and pool tournament, and of course... eat and give thanks! And to that point, THANKS is the theme for the month. 

The following day, on November 21st, the Youth Group at St. John's will host the first youth-lead THANKS Service combining ALL the Christian Churches and their youth groups throughout Ithaca. This service is open to all and will include musical performances by youth from St. Paul's Church and the First Congregational Church as well as a piano accompaniment by our own Carrie D'Aprix. It will also feature short sermons of Thanks, readings from the Old and New Testaments, and an offering of non-perishable food items to be given to Loaves & Fishes. Following the service, all Jr. High and High School aged children will be welcome to attend a pizza and ice cream social in the Parish House. 

Though Brett and I are expecting our first child—a girl who will be named Mattison Noelle—in the first weeks of December, our hope is to continue serving our Church, Community, and God through thoughts and deeds throughout the remainder of the year and develop more exciting youth programs for 2011 and beyond. We will of course join with the choir for the annual caroling excursion and hope to have at least one formal youth group meeting as well. More specific dates and details will follow shortly.

Mindy Oakes, Youth Director

Area Congregations Together and local faith communities will host the annual Multi-faith Thanksgiving Service on Sunday, November 21, 2010, at 3:00 PM. The event will be held at St. John’s Episcopal Church, 210 N. Cayuga Street, Ithaca. Refreshments and fellowship will follow the service. For over 40 years, Area Congregations Together has provided members of the Ithaca community with this opportunity to share their Thanksgiving traditions together.

The theme for this year’s service is “bringing the Ithaca community together in Thanksgiving,” and the service will focus on the richness of the diversity within the Ithaca and surrounding communities. Members of the Healing Ithaca planning team have been involved in the creation of the service, along with members of Area Congregations Together. The service will be hosted by the Rev. Philip Snyder, Rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church. Music will be provided by Dr. Nancy Radloff, Director of Music and Organist at St. John’s Episcopal Church and the St. John’s Episcopal Church Choir. The opening prayer will be provided by Ronald Benson, Pastor of the Baptized Church of Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith. Reflections on the theme of bringing the Ithaca community together in Thanksgiving will be provided by:

• Dr. Ahmed H. Ahmed, Cornell MECA
• Ted Bronsnick, Temple Beth-El
• Dan Phillips, Caroline Valley Community Church
• Ravindra Walsh, ParadigmShiftsCoaching
• Paula Younger, Calvary Baptist Church

Every year, Area Congregations Together designates a local non-profit to receive the offering. This year’s donations will go to the Ithaca Kitchen Cupboard to support the increased need to feed our community during the economic downturn.

St. "X's" Guild (formally for a brief time known as the 20's & 30's Group:)

An organizational meeting for a 20s/30s group at St. John's was held the past month in the Chapman Room.  The group will be called "St. X's Guild." (X to be determined)  Intentions are meet formally on the first Sunday of every month, after the 10:30 service in the Chapman Room.   All those in their 20s and 30s (or those in their 20s and 30s in spirit) are welcome!  Next meeting will be December 5th.  The purpose of the group, for now, is fellowship.  They would like to build on that foundation to engage with the church and Ithaca community, perhaps in small-scale service projects and participation in larger-scale service projects.  It has also been discussed; trying to expand adult Christian education offerings at St. John's every once in a while.  Nick Heavens has agreed to be the facilitator of the group meeting on the first Sunday of the month.  Contact him at:  nh264@cornell.edu.

Is life a race we are born to run?
And from whom can we learn how to run it?
Some thoughts on Christopher McDougal

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Ever Seen ( NY:  Knopf, 2009; $24.95)

      Lost tribes and buried cities: they pull our attention like bees to flowers and bears to honey.  And when we exhaust the fictional possibilities of our own planet, we even export them to outer space - from Star Trek to Star Wars.  From Homer's Odyssey to Hollywood's movies our interest never wanes.  Do we lead such humdrum lives on our overcrowded planet, where all lost places have long been found, where quest is impossible, where adventure no longer exists; that we long for the impossible?  Are we driven to re-create the limitless, frightening, enthralling world of our childhood?

      Whatever the cause, the thirst seems unquenchable and Christopher McDougal (a writer for Esquire and Men's Health magazines) has tapped into it to his profit (12 weeks and counting on the N.Y. Times best seller list).

      Starting with an injured foot (he runs) and a search among medical practitioners for its relief, he soon leads us into a search for "The Tarahumara, a near-mythical tribe of Stone Age Superathletes" who can outrun a cheetah, a racehorse, run down a deer and catch it with their hands.  They live in "the Baricas, a lost world in the most remote wilderness in North America", or as our atlas might indicate, the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico.  Theirs is  a place of "wild impenetrable (sic) copper canyons" , a place of "man-eating jaguars, deadly snakes, blistering heat, and canyon fever brought about by the Baranca's desperate eeriness."  There "the Tarahumara live in the side of cliffs higher than a hawk's nest in a land few have ever seen...known for swallowing the misfits and desperadoes who stay inside."

      Tarahumara also, it seems guard "the recipe for a special energy food that leaves them trim, powerful, and unstoppable:  a few mouthfuls packed enough nutritional punch to let them run all day without rest".  They even run consecutive days, for distances of 300 miles or more.

      By no means incidentally, the Tarahumara on occasion also hold drinking and whoop-de-do parties that hormone-driven sexually frustrated, college fraternity students might envy. (There is sadly no indication that the author was able to attend one of these.)

      Despite, or as the author would seem to say, because of all this, "the Tarahumara are industrious and inhumanly (?) honest...the kindest happiest people on the planet...also the toughest. Indeed, they are "the world's most enlightened people."

      McDougal is driven to ask himself "was it a coincidence that the world's most enlightened people were also the world's most amazing runners? " His answer, of course, is "no" and he takes about 280 pages to explain why this is the case. The book is in fact, an extended discussion of distance running, put together like an ancient mosaic floor of many small and often colorful piece.

      O.K. So what is a book (N.Y. Times successful or not) about distance running, as presented in a style politely describable as early-National Geographic-breathless, doing in a parish newsletter? Well, early in the book McDougal says "a photo of Jesus running down a rockslide caught my eye" (actually it turned out to be a Tarahumara in tribal costume). But I don't think that's the reason Philip Snyder asked me to do this. I didn't enquire: maybe he was just busy and desperate for newsletter filler.

      Whatever the case, the fact is that the author of Born to Run wants to make a larger argument-- several arguments in fact. These include:( I may well have missed some in 280 pages):

1. "Human distance running demands a brain-body connection that no other creature is capable of.  But it's a lost art."
2. "Running unites our two most primal impulses:  fear and pleasure.  We run when we're scared, we run when we're ecstatic; we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.  And when things look worst, we run the most."
3. "Running is rooted in our collective imagination and our imagination is rooted in running.  Language, art, science, space shuttles, Starry Night, intravascular surgery; they all had their roots in our ability to run."
4. "It (is)n't just how to run; it (is) how to live, the essence of who we are as a species and what we are meant to be...Perhaps all our troubles--all the violence, obesity, illness, depression and greed, we can't overcome--began when we stopped living as Running People."
5. "You don't stop running because you get old...you get old because you stop running."  People can run at the same speed at age 64 as they did at age 19; and this is true for both men and women.
6. "Nearly every top killer in the Western World - heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, hypertension, and a dozen forms of cancer, was unknown to our ancestors.  This is because the goal and habit of (physical) relaxation has largely replaces the goal and habit of physical exercise.  "You could halt epidemics in their tracks with this one remedy" (of running)

      Behind these assertions about the foundational importance of distance running for humans lies the explicitly given but quickly sidelined recognition that human distance running itself is an epiphenomenon.  It depends on- - is the result of-- our ability to breathe as we do: and a handful of other, only partially related physical features unlike other animals.  Our temperature control is effected, independently of our breathing, by smooth skin and efficient sweating/cooling.  Our upright posture reduces our exposure to the sun's heat.  Our pacing when we run is surprisingly efficient (human stride is greater not less than that of a horse for example).  So having reduced "thinking man" (homo sapiens) to "running man", we may have to reduce him still further to "breathing man."

      Do these various assertions (and others I may have missed)  accumulate into some larger final argument?  Or do they just go their separate ways and like old soldiers "only fade away"?  A bit of both I think (though the book itself ends diffusely, like a river vanishing into a delta as it nears the sea: no Niagara Falls here.)

      Separately considered, not all the arguments are sustainable and McDougal seems to confuse the disciplined imagination which is crucial to creative science with ungoverned speculation, which is not at all the same thing.  For instance we have far too little in the way of reliable historical medical records to assert what diseases our ancestors were susceptible to and what they were free of.  The worst epidemic in recorded history (The Black Death) was related more to the running habits of rats than of humans.  For some of us, running eventually depends on intravascular surgery.  The reverse is more difficult to show.  People have demonstrably run from Beethoven's Eroica symphony (especially the slow movement) or Wagner's endless Ring Cycle; how running might lead to them is more obscure.  One may love both distance running and Van Gogh's Starry Night yet fail to find a causal connection.  McDougal is easy to caricature.  Yet it is the case that sometimes it is more important that an idea be interesting than that it be true. 
(If it leads us to think, for example)

      As for accumulating assertions to a big argument, yes the book does that too.  Distance running, it declares, is of the greatest possible human evolutionary significance.  It is the natural thing for humans to do;  it is indeed the defining human activity; not "I think, therefore I am", as Descartes would claim, so much as "I run therefore I am".  In that sense, all of us - not just the Tarahumara of Mexico - have, and always have been, "born to run".  And if we fail to realize it, if we fail to run, then individually and collectively we shall die.

      The book has plenty of faults. All of it is magazine prose: some of it is magazine pose.  The very premise and framework of "lost tribe" is exploded soon after it is made by the note that in 1971 a physiologist visited the canyons (measured performance maybe? he doesn't say) and the University of Chicago has an anthropologist who specializes on the Tarahumara (his phrase).  Academic inquiry over a period of 40 years - and they are still a lost tribe in an unknown land?  Come on!  Indeed the whole breathless tone in which Tarahumara are introduced leads one to hear Spielberg/Lucas shout "Action!" as the script reads "Enter Harrison Ford with battered brown hat and attitude."

      In places it is unintentionally hilarious, as when McGregor in all seriousness reports: " I met a beautiful blonde forest ranger who slipped out of her clothes and found salvation by running naked in the Idaho forests."  Is it just my uncontrollable quirkiness that longs to add:  "Sadly, my feet hurt too much to join her and she left no phone number."  Or even: "It made this salvation business look a lot more interesting than just going to church".

      On the plus side, you will likely find it an effortless, painless read (except for those with finely tuned literary sensibilities).  And if you keep an open mind, it can jog your thinking into directions you might not come up with on your own.  Chapter 28, by the way, is a fine demonstration of how to focus and bring to a reader's attention the abstract ideas and methods of science by particularizing them into a plot with a few identified characters.

      But, you may still ask, why is this in a parish newsletter?  Outside of the short answer, (Father Phil asked me: what could I do?)  I would only say 'the metaphor'.  This comes from the book but isn't so much in the book (where distance running is a central reality rather than a metaphor)

      In a great movie about running, some years ago, called Chariots of Fire, a young athlete/evangelist preacher, standing in the rain just after winning a race, says to the small, dripping-wet crowd:  "Life is like a race."  The metaphor is often given to us as we grow up.  If living is - to any useful purpose - to be likened to running a race, then thinking about distance running (most of us have long lives to traverse) about what it is and may be, what it means in spiritual as well as physical terms, may be a good thing to do.  And a parish newsletter may after all be not such a bad place to find it.

Neville Dyson Hudson
(Neville is a retired professor of anthropology at SUNT Binghamton)

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Episcopal Peace Fellowship News

Our small but active chapter of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship is busy with two activities this fall.  We are continuing to pack books for Prisoner’s Express, a project of the Alternatives Library at Cornell University.  The library gives us letters from inmates requesting books as well as their addresses.  We try to fill their requests as best we can from our stash of books that we store in the basement Sunday School room below the kitchen.  The letters are often quite interesting to read and the requests vary from mysteries to educational and technical books.  Prisoners often request dictionaries.  We also will be sending Christmas cards to prisoners to whom we have sent books this past year.  Many of these inmates do not receive much mail and have expressed much gratitude to the library for this program.

We have a large stash of mystery books, but we are in need of books on topics such as history, classic literature, technology, computers (hardware and software), anthropology, psychology, and dictionaries.  If you can donate these types of books, please contact Nancy Siemon at 257-1600 or by email at siemonecs@aol.com.  I can pick up the books at your convenience.

We are also planning a pot luck/movie night but have not chosen a date or time as of this writing.

We also hope you will consider joining us in our mission of peacemaking and our project to pack books for inmates.  We meet once each month for 1-2 hours.  Please contact me at the above for more information. 

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A Healing Presence in an Anxious Community

One of the hats I wear is that of consultant to churches.  At times my consulting work takes place when I am the interim minister of a congregation, and sometimes when I am a hired consultant.  One of the most useful questions I can ask is this:  "Why is it important for this church to exist in this community?"  Many times the people in churches have difficulty answering the question in that form.  For many, churches simply exist - have for a long time - and "should" just continue to be.  In my opinion, churches that cannot answer this question are often in the process of dying.  "Will the last person to leave, please turn out the light and lock the door?"

A part of my job is to help congregations find healthy and functional answers regarding their purpose.  One very fertile area to explore for a potential answer is the present level of anxiety that may exist in the wider community.  In many, (if not most) parts of the United States, communities today carry prodigious levels of anxiety.  Upstate New York is no exception.  The anxiety springs out of the many challenges that economic and social changes can engender.  Let me give you an example:

A church I served a few years ago as interim minister was situated in a small community with a vibrant history.  That community had been supported for many years by a single major industry.  (The particular identity of this industry does not matter because stories like this have played out in many forms and with various details throughout the upstate region.)  When the industry moved out of town, it not only left a huge economic gap, but it also left a residue of distrust and anxiety.  These feelings were expressed in questions like: "Who are we without our industry?" "How will we survive?"  "We've given heart and soul to 'them'.  Don't they care about us?"  (And the most painful question of all...) "Weren't we good enough for them, or was there something wrong with us that caused them not to stay here?"  Over time the anxiety spread to the local government, law enforcement, and, of course, to the churches.

Now, we all know that life is fundamentally dangerous and is filled with peril.  We also know that we are clever and resourceful, so when we are confronted with clearly identifiable dangers our communities can often respond with creativity and purpose.  However, it happens too often that when communities, organizations, or families experience traumatic events, they don't

know how to handle those is a creative way.  They try to "put it behind" them and just go on, but the inner experience of violation, vulnerability, and unspecified blame results in free-floating anxiety.  It becomes difficult to trust anyone from the outside, but it is just as hard to trust anyone on the inside.

The loss of economic support from the departure of an industry is one kind of trauma, but there are many others, like racism and classism, to give a couple of examples.  In response to any trauma at any level (family, organization, or community), anxiety spawns emotional reactivity, that in turn spawns less safety, more anxiety, and even more reactivity.  In general terms, smaller units can deal with anxiety more easily than larger ones.  In turn, a relatively non-anxious individual can help lower the anxiety of any larger group.  (Or a relatively non anxious smaller group can do it for a larger community.)  Many useful books have been written on this topic. (See Ronald W. Richardson, or Peter Steinke).

I am suggesting that one way for a local church (or other community organization) to answer its "purpose question" is to see itself as a potential "non-anxious presence" in its wider community.  For Christian churches, we can draw from Jesus' invitation for us not to be afraid.  Our relative lack of fear (and anxiety is a form of fear) can then help us create safe opportunities for people in the wider communities to work through the effects of their collective trauma.  Being a non-anxious presence is not about fixing a community's problems.  Frankly some challenging conditions are not fixable.  This approach is more about creating an atmosphere of relative safety that encourages communication, helps build relationships, and promotes community health.

As I see it, we need a lot of that.  What do you think?

Wayne Gustafson (Wayne is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, a Certified Fellow in the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, and a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in New York.  Presently, he is a contract pastoral counselor and psychotherapist with Susquehanna Family Counseling Ministry, seeing clients in Ithaca and Watkins Glen.  St. John's is a supporting member of the counseling ministry and additional information about the ministry is in the tract rack.  His blog is found at http://entospress.blogspot.com/