CCGP Crossings: Advent 2024

rossings C Advent 2024

Christ Church Film Series

January 10 | 6:30 pm

Bringing God and people together to know and live the good news of Jesus Christ.

Contents

Bonhoeffer Movie Review........... 12

Legacy Society.............................20

Rector’s Message...........................4

Welcome Tim Wood.................... 15

A Sermon by Mtr. Maureen.........22

Dame Ethel Smyth........................6

Community is Curriculum.......... 16

Common Thread..........................24

Hope is Revolutionar Patience.... 10

Birthdays & Anniversaries.......... 18

Journey of Generosity.................26

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He `ōlelo i ku’u mau hoaloha (a word to my friends) Fr. Drew

On Waiting’ We’ve stoked the fire and turned the porch light on; now all that remains is to wait.

It seems like the most inconsequential of tasks – to wait by the fire for an old friend to arrive.

And yet, the quiet wait in the night is a profound testament of hope.

The wait proclaims that something good is ahead. It is the confidence which proclaims that what we await is worthy of our patience and preparation. The wait proclaims that the real joy is coming.

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Our greedy world is always wanting more. More lights for the tree; more presents for the kids; more food for the guests.

Stores are never satisfied, plying us with one more sale to be the last. Instagram and Facebook are never satiated, greedy for one more picture or post.

But none of that is of God. For Christ, a manger was adequate.

For it was there that Mary and Joseph stopped all the fretting and worry, and waited for joy’s arrival.

Friends, the fourth candle of Advent has been lit, and now we are invited to wait as well.

Like Mary and Joseph, we wait with what we have.

We wait with confidence that all that has been done is sufficient.

We wait with confidence that something good is ahead.

We wait with confidence that the real joy we await needs nothing more than our presence and heart.

Friends, enjoy the wait of these next days, for joy shall arrive!

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– Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Palm Sunday, April 13, 2025 | 4 pm Christ Church Schola with Orchestra Pre-concert lecture at 3 pm

Free-will offering

Dame Ethel Smyth

By Meredith Hanoian

Dame Ethel Smyth was an insistent person. From her struggles to study and compose her music, to her social advocacy as an unmarried, queer and very active suffragette, Smyth was demanding that her work and opinions be noticed and included. And we are the better for it – a woman fully of her time, yet ahead of her time.

Usually dressed in tweed suits and accompanied by a large dog, voicing her loud viewpoints while combating deafness in the last years of her life, Smyth was impatiently waiting for her day in the limelight, as she wrote later in her 1936 memoir, As Time Went On, the “exact worth of my music will probably not be known till naught remains of the writer but sexless dots and lines on ruled paper.” Since her death in 1944, her works were mostly forgotten or overlooked, but now in 2024, there is a new surge of interest, and performances of her oeuvre are increasing internationally. And today, here in Southeast Michigan, we are thrilled to showcase this incredible woman, and finally perform – perhaps the Michigan premiere of - her great 1891 work: the Mass in D.

the Leipzig Conservatory under Alexander Ewing and Carl Reinecke, and later privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg, a close friend of Brahms. Smyth soaked up this musical immersion, meeting and befriending many composers, whose (male) names are clearly known to all: Wagner, Grieg, Faure, Dvorak, Berlioz, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and more.

Smyth also met Clara Schumann, whose similar fortitude as a female pianist and composer inspired Smyth.

Smyth was born to an upper middleclass military family in southern England on April 22, 1858, though she would often say her birthday was April 23 to better align with another British creative genius, Shakespeare.

Her large family first encouraged her study of music at a young age, and Smyth quickly took to both piano and composition, writing her first pieces at 10. Once she reached 17, she fought with her father for more intensive study, as composition was not seen as a suitable future for a lady, but he begrudgingly allowed her to continue her studies on the Continent.

Many of these friendships were fruitful with encouragement and support for Smyth’s compositions – Brahms, who Smyth called a “kindly,jocular fellow,” would discuss instrumentation with her. Once at a rehearsal of Smyth performing his Piano Quintet, her giant half-breed St. Bernard, named Marco, bounded into the room knocking Brahms over!

Though, as a dog lover himself, he didn’t seem to mind. Tchaikovsky also enjoyed Smyth musical depth and compositional style, writing many compliments after hearing her Violin Sonata. He befriended and mentored her – perhaps subconsciously

In Germany, Smyth began at

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supporting a fellow composer of the ambiguous 19th Century LGBTQ community – and wrote in his 1888 autobiographical journal, “Miss Smyth is one of the few women composers whom one can seriously consider to be achieving something valuable in the field of musical creation.” In 1889 in a letter directly to Smyth, he wrote, “Goodbye, dear Mademoiselle; I hope that you have composed many fine things, and I wish you every possible happiness. P.S. I hope that your dear dog is faring well!!”

Not all of Europe loved her audacity as a working female composer, and there’s a story that one German impresario saw her across the street in the city he was visiting, and then he immediately went to the railroad station to leave town – knowing that once she saw him, she would repeatedly demand he program her works. After several years abroad continuing composing and studying (even a brief stint in Italy for opera) and though some of her works were being performed and supported by conductors like Bruno Walter and Hermann Levi, Smyth returned home to England in the 1890s.

In England, her career gained a little more momentum with performances of her works in larger spaces, like her Serenade in D in London’s Crystal Palace in 1891 and the premiere of the Mass in D at Albert Hall in 1893, and with the composition and premiers of her lush and almost Wagnerian operas, Das Wald and The Wreckers.

Her career continued to be supported by her many friends from society – many with whom Smyth had both platonic and romantic inclinations, including: the Princess de Polignac; the ex-Empress Eugenie of France; Lady Mary Ponsonby, who was Queen

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Victoria’s Maid of Honor; author Virginia Wolf; leader of the Women’s Social and Political Union, Emily Pankhurst; philosopher and librettist Henry Bennet Brewster, composer Arthur Sullivan, and more. She even played her music in a salon for Queen Victoria. And though these efforts aided Smyth’s career, her works were still often seen as just not good enough. When she wrote with lush sweeping lines, it was “too German,” if she added English dances or a folk tune, it was “too simple.” A piece was either “too masculine” for a female, or “too light” for a serious composer. She was stymied by convention and her own reality.

a toothbrush! This difficult period eventually became the subject of her 1930 dramatic oratorio, The Prison.

A New York Times article from 1912, called Smyth a “Militant Victorian” – ready to scandalize and scintillate with her romantic life and suffragette notoriety, rather than her musical prowess. For the rest of Smyth’s life, she continued to persist in her musical career, composing in more diverse styles and instrumentation, and insisting that her works be considered, and she had a vast list:

“It’s a queer business! Because I have conducted my own operas and love sheepdogs; because I generally dress in tweeds, and sometimes, at winter afternoon concerts, have even conducted in them; because I was a militant suffragette and seized a chance of beating time to The March of the Women from the window of my cell in Holloway Prison with a tooth-brush; because I have written books, spoken speeches, broadcast, and don’t always make sure that my hat is on straight; for these and other equally pertinent reasons, in a certain sense I am well known…This is celebrity indeed or shall we say notoriety, but it does not alter the fact that after having been on the job, so to speak, for over forty years, I have never yet succeeded in becoming even a tiny wheel in the English music machine.”

“ Miss Smyth is one of the few Possibly her most women composers whom one famous composition of the time was not a can seriously consider to be larger orchestral piece, but instead her 1910 achieving something valuable In the 1920s, Smyth began March of the Women – a rousing anthem to lose her hearing – perhaps written for the women’s in the field of musical creation.” from her time working as a rights movement. As an nurse in WWI – and she turned unabashedly unmarried, writing words instead of -Tchaikovsky tomusic, bisexual person, Smyth with over eight mostly fought against societal standards and was a fierce advocate for women. She even donated her own musical revenue to the cause during this time. Smyth is credited as teaching Pankhurst, the leader of the movement, how to “properly” throw stones to break the windows of the male politicians who opposed their rights. It’s no surprise that Smyth was imprisoned in 1912 for two months after one such stone throwing incident – and also that when her friend and conductor Thomas Beecham was visiting her in prison, she was conducting her fellow suffragettes from her cell window in her powerful March of the Women anthem with

six operas, a concert mass, a double concerto, a choral symphony, organ pieces, chamber music, and songs with piano and orchestral accompaniment.

In 1922, she was awarded a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (the first female composer to be awarded a damehood) for her contribution to the Arts, but interestingly, also for her efforts for the Women’s Suffrage movement.

And though friends would program her pieces, she still never became a household name like her English male peers, Elgar and Britten. Smyth wrote in her last memoir As Time Went On, about being “famous” in England:

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autobiographical publications from 1927 to 1940. Deafness in a composer is often seen as the death knell, as Beethoven himself states in his Heiligenstadt Testament, but it afflicted more composers than just him – Faure, Smythe’s friend from her travels, also suffered deafness, as did Ralph Vaughn Williams, similarly from deafening WWI canon fire. At her elaborate celebratory concert conducted by Thomas Beecham of The Prison and Mass in D, for her 75th birthday in 1934, she could barely hear a thing. Her dear friend, Virginia Wolf, was in attendance and sadly noted that Smyth, seated next to the Queen for the concert, leapt to

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Ethel Smyth Cont’d her feet at the wrong time – unable to hear her works beautifully performed.

As Smyth wrote toward the end of her life, “If you are still in possession of your senses, gradually getting accustomed, as some people do, to a running accompaniment of noises in your head; if instead of shrinking from the very thought of music you suddenly become conscious of desire towards it… why, then anything may happen… and once more you begin to dream dreams.”

Smyth’s Romantic style of composition and her melodic richness, and varied, well-balanced musical structures, and dance-like humor, pervades the Mass in D. Within the piece, one hears the influences of Wagner in rich operatic moments, and the sweeping orchestration reminiscent of Brahms, Faure, and others in this period – though arguments may follow of whose works influenced whose. When conductor Hermann Levi first heard her Mass, he said to Smyth, “You must at once sit down and write an opera,” as he could hear how her dramatic style easily lent to that genre, and soon afterward she did compose Fantasio, her first opera, with her friend and sometimes paramour, Henry Brewster, as librettist.

Throughout the rehearsal for the 1893 premier of the Mass, Smyth was anxious, rewriting sections after hearing them live for the first time. She writes, “No sooner was the rehearsal over than armed with musicpaper, scissors, stickpaste, and all the accursed paraphernalia of composers, I ensconced myself in the bowels of the edifice and re-scored the Sanctus.”

Later in her memoir, she writes of this time, hoping for and almost expecting accolades once audiences heard her

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music, but sadly receiving little. “I believed I had something to say, but as far as my countrymen went was seemingly alone in that opinion, for, like its forerunners, the Mass had gone to the bottom, leaving not even a ripple on the surface.”

The piece follows the older English pattern of the mass service, with the declamatory Gloria performed as the last movement, juxtaposing with the dark beginning of the Kyrie. Each movement flows beautifully with moments of trepidation, triumph, anguish, peacefulness, and finally, celebration. The solo quartet shines throughout with operatic fervor – pulling emotion from every note – and showcasing her abilities to write for the voice. The original orchestration of this piece is huge – requiring full winds and strings, and a shocking amount of percussion to 19th Century ears. Her use of cymbals, gong and snare drum in this Mass predates their increasing addition by the next century’s composers. Today’s performance is reorchestrated with fewer winds but still holds true to its original vibrant energy.

After fighting for notice her entire life, Smyth acknowledged this was a battle any composer undertakes, but more specifically due to her gender, saying “now it may be said that hundreds of artists are called on to endure the like, but in my case was a disheartening element no man has to cope with…given my sex, my foreign musical education, and the conditions of English music life as I was coming to know them, if I were ever to win through at all it would not be till I had one leg in the grave.”

last, the international musical world is fulfilling Smyth’s hopes that her music would rise again. In 2022, her opera, The Wreckers, and a few smaller orchestral pieces were performed at the BBC Proms. A 2019 recording of her work, The Prison, was released with James Blachly and the Experiential Orchestra to much acclaim, finally winning Smyth her first posthumous Grammy. Blachly, like many of us when first confronted with something new, was at first hesitant, as he admitted before he took the recording project, saying, “I have to confess that I had this sense that if I hadn’t heard of her, then she must not be very good.” He then readily admits this mistake, for as Blachly dove into her history and work, he writes, “she has a unique musical voice, and that to try to describe her in terms of other composers often does her a disservice.”

If Ethel Smyth had lived in this century, her strength and ambition would be praised, her loud opinions applauded as a champion of gender equality and for women in music.

Though later than hoped, the musical world is finally bringing her life and works into the limelight. How thrilling to witness! And how grateful we are that despite all the challenges she faced for her choice of career and its roadblocks, for her gender, sexuality, and marital status, for her writings, advocacy and imprisonment, and even with her deafness, she persisted.

After her death in 1944, her music seemingly died with her, but at long

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Hope is Revolutionary Patience

By Lisa A. Brown

Discernment is the practice of distinguishing the voice of God from among the many different voices that vie for our attention, such as the expectations of others, cultural pressures, or even our own inner critic. The root word for “discern” means to “cut away.” So, discernment is the art of sorting through all these voices and our own tangled motivations and cutting away all but those that are of God.

bright. Not being far from the village, he had frequent guests. One night a woman needed oil to keep her family warm. Another night a father needed oil for his lamp. Then another needed oil to lubricate a wheel. All the requests seemed legitimate, so the lighthouse keeper tried to meet them all. Toward the end of the month, however, he ran out of oil and his lighthouse went dark, causing several ships to crash on the coastline.

Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber wrote a heartfelt essay about our urgent need for prayerful discernment in this moment of our collective lives.

With all that confronts us today— political division, familial strife, climate change, war, hunger, systemic inequalities, and global suffering—we might be tempted to throw our hands up in despair and abandon our efforts to make a difference.

This story, like Jesus’s parable in Matthew 25: 1-13 about the ten young women waiting for the bridegroom, presents an intriguing metaphor. What does the oil represent? Perhaps it symbolizes the good “fuel” that comes from exercise, artistic expression, or quiet time spent in prayer and gratitude – things we simply cannot give or do for another. It invites us to consider how are we called to let our light shine and how can we help others to light their own lamps so that they may shine too?

Instead, she suggests we spend time with three guiding questions: •

What’s mine to do, and what’s not mine to do?

•

What’s mine to say, and what’s not mine to say?

•

And perhaps the hardest question: What’s mine to care about, and what’s not mine to care about?

To be clear – this isn’t to suggest these important issues don’t deserve care from someone. Rather, we as individuals aren’t designed with the capacity to meet every need that comes to our awareness.

Consider this curious little story from spiritual writer Max Lucado:

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A lighthouse keeper who worked on a rocky stretch of coastline received oil once a month to keep his light burning

Maybe the thoughtful distribution of the oil represents good discernment, about understanding our calling – what we need to do and not do, say and not say, care for and let go. It might echo the humility of John the Baptist, who knew precisely who he was and wasn’t. While reminding us we’re not God, it affirms that our truest identity lies in our belovedness and belonging to God, allowing our false notions of self – both inflated and deflated – to fall away.

Perhaps these stories help us realize that alone, we are not the Messiah, but that our oil represents our specific, perhaps humble, yet essential contribution to the Body of Christ. We are a small, brief part of a very big, long story, providing a modest but mighty service to a greater mission of

love and transformation. As the prayer reminds us: “We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.”

Many of us struggle to envision and function as a collective right now.

We feel alone in the wilderness, deeply concerned for our children’s and grandchildren’s future. Yet hope emerges in Jesus’s parables of seeds and in the image of the mature dandelion. The strong winds of change and uncertainty scatter our dandelion seeds far and wide. We exist in this liminal, sometimes uncomfortable space, not where we’re going and not where we’ve been.

Advent is traditionally understood as a season of hopeful waiting, but such enduring patience is only possible when we recognize that what we await has already begun—growing from the ground beneath our feet. Joyful waiting means staying fully present to the moment, believing something beautiful and beyond our imagining has already started, trusting that God works even when appearances suggest otherwise. As Anne Lamott says, “Hope is revolutionary patience.”

May we take hope in the idea that sometimes the darkness doesn’t mean we are buried but that we have been planted.

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Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste.

Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be.

Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

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The new Bonhoeffer movie isn’t just bad. It’s dangerous.

By egregiously misreading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s moral crisis, it primes viewers for violence.

By Mac Loftin, The Christian Century Buried in the foreword to Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” the not-quite-disavowed blueprint for the incoming Trump administration, is a strange reference to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. “Open-borders activism,” the document declares, is “a classic example of what the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called ‘cheap grace.’” Bonhoeffer is then invoked to denounce other excesses of the left, such as environmental extremism and insufficient hostility to China.

It is obscene that an antifascist martyr’s memory is being used to legitimize a movement promising mass deportations, but the American right has long admired Bonhoeffer.

Much of this admiration stems less from his theology than from his decision to join a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler—a decision that ultimately led to his execution in the Flossenbürg concentration camp.

This has given rise to the dubious concept of the “Bonhoeffer moment,” a term some use to describe a historical situation in which nonviolence is no longer tenable for a Christian and something like his act of attempted tyrannicide becomes necessary.

Bonhoeffer moments are imagined as moments of extraordinary moral clarity, when good and evil are laid bare and previously unjustifiable acts become justified.

It is this image of Bonhoeffer wielding righteous violence against a tyrannical state that has ignited the right’s imagination. In 2011, former VeggieTales writer and current far-right radio host Eric Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy became a runaway hit and positioned him as a popular interpreter of Bonhoeffer’s legacy (see

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“Hijacking Bonhoeffer,” October 19, 2010). In 2020, he proclaimed that the allegedly stolen election marked a Bonhoeffer moment and that lethal force was now permissible to keep Donald Trump in power: “What’s right is right,” he said. “We need to fight to the death, to the last blood.”

But Bonhoeffer himself refused to see the plot to assassinate Hitler as morally justified. He insisted that what he was doing, while necessary, was at the same time a grave moral wrong for which he must repent and beg God’s forgiveness. In the hundreds of pages he wrote during his years in the conspiracy, Bonhoeffer adamantly warned that any sense of moral clarity we might feel is always an illusion. If we trick ourselves into thinking that we have full knowledge of good and evil, that we clearly see right and wrong, then we never have to question the moral purity of our actions. Because we are on the side of good against evil, we think that our actions—and our violence—must

therefore be good.

This was the heart of Bonhoeffer’s theological critique of fascism: fascism seduces by promising knowledge of good and evil, shrouding its own violence in a fantasy of moral clarity. His greatest act of antifascist resistance is thus not some act of righteous violence but his own steadfast refusal to see even the most necessary and seemingly justifiable violence as a positive moral good.

The new movie Bonhoeffer emphasizes similar themes to those of Metaxas’s biography. It situates Bonhoeffer’s story in the familiar genre of the World War II thriller but erases the moral powerlessness and inescapable guilt that haunted him.

The real Bonhoeffer wrote that he felt lost in a “huge masquerade of evil” in which “evil appears in the form of light.” He lamented the uselessness of Christian ethics, which relies on “the abstract notion of an

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isolated individual who, wielding an absolute criterion of what is good in and of itself, chooses continually and exclusively between this clearly recognized good and an evil recognized with equal clarity.”

Bonhoeffer the movie, on the other hand, presents him as just this kind of moral agent who clearly recognizes good and evil, with the only real question being whether he has the stomach to do what he knows is right.

By reducing moral deliberation to a question of will, the movie not only badly misreads Bonhoeffer. It also traffics in the dangerous idea of the Bonhoeffer moment, inviting its viewers to imagine that they, too, can clearly recognize evil tyrants in need of some justified violence.

Nearly every scene mangles and stretches both Bonhoeffer’s life and German history into a

pat fable of good versus evil. The real Bonhoeffer’s bit part in the conspiracy to kill Hitler (using his church contacts in England to pass documents negotiating a possible peace treaty in the event the coup was successful, all of which were ignored) is transformed into a starring role, with Movie Bonhoeffer hunched over a table in the back of a bar, whispering about plans to construct a bomb. The real Bonhoeffer’s failure to radicalize German churches against Nazi antisemitism (a failure that informed his understanding of Christian ethics as a dead end) is in the movie a rousing success— the Confessing Church forms as an underground cell of Christian resistance under Bonhoeffer’s command, with one character gushing that “Bonhoeffer and his merry men” have “declared war on Hitler.”

The most egregious misreading of the real Bonhoeffer comes in a scene where he makes the fateful decision to join the conspiracy. His brotherin-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, has just told Bonhoeffer and his student Eberhard Bethge of the secret plan to kill Hitler. Bethge is shocked at the idea of committing murder and tries to talk Bonhoeffer out of it. He reminds Bonhoeffer that he once said Christians must defeat their enemies with the power of love. “That was before Hitler,” Bonhoeffer glowers.

Bethge, despondent, asks, “Will God forgive us if we do this?” Bonhoeffer shouts him down: “Will he forgive us if we don’t?!”

The line gets Bonhoeffer’s thinking about the conspiracy exactly backwards. He was tortured by his decision to violate God’s clear and inviolable commandment not to kill. Everyone, without exception,

Thursdays at Christ Church Return January 16!

Join Mtr. Maureen for an in-depth look at Jim Wallis’ book, The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith and Refounding Democracy.

Evening Prayer | 5 pm Holy Eucharist | 5:30 pm Community Dinner | 6 pm Formation | 6:45 pm Teen Gathering | 6:45 pm

Books available for $20 from Mtr. Maureen.

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Bonhoeffer, cont’d is beloved of God, and killing is, in every situation, wrong. At the same time, it would be wrong to sit idly by as millions were murdered. No matter what he chose, whether he joined the conspiracy or not, he would be guilty.

He had to act, he wrote, “in the sphere of relativity, completely shrouded in the twilight that the historical situation casts upon good and evil.”

He joined the plot, but he refused to see his decision as morally justifiable.

“Here the law is being broken, violated,” he deplored. It might be true that “the commandment is broken out of dire necessity,” but to say he broke the commandment of necessity is still to say he broke the commandment.

Rather than pretend this was some positive moral good, Bonhoeffer instead threw himself at God’s feet and begged forgiveness for the sin he could not but commit. The movie has none of this squishy moral agony.

Bonhoeffer is clearly aware of the real Bonhoeffer’s writings on the impossibility of right moral action, but in the film any language of moral ambiguity is simply window dressing on a clear-cut case of good versus evil. Whenever Bonhoeffer does acknowledge the moral messiness of his actions, it’s always in tough-guy quips delivered like Clint Eastwood.

When Dohnanyi tells him that the conspiracy will involve getting his hands dirty, Bonhoeffer snaps, “All I have are dirty hands.” And when he’s told he’ll have to swear an oath to Hitler so he can join the Abwehr and travel freely to England, he growls, “Sometimes you have to lie better than the Father of Lies.” Gone is the twilight of good and evil, gone is the diabolical masquerade in which evil appears as light.

This Bonhoeffer is exactly the

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kind of person the real Bonhoeffer skewered as an “ethical fanatic” who easily falls prey to fascism’s seductions. Ethical fanatics “believe they can face the power of evil with the purity of their will and their principles” but only end up “fall[ing] into the net of their more clever opponent” as their self-conception of being morally pure makes them blind to their own complicity.

I can’t help mentioning that Bonhoeffer not only is based on a far-right propagandist’s spurious biography but is distributed by Angel Studios, which also distributed the QAnon-adjacent thriller Sound of Freedom in 2023. That film dramatizes the life of Tim Ballard, a self-styled crusader against child sex trafficking, whose bizarre claims that he led secret raids into African “baby factories” where children are harvested for Satanic rituals landed him on the first Trump administration’s anti-trafficking advisory board. (Ballard was removed from his organization after being accused by several women of sexual misconduct.) Ballard is played by Jim Caviezel, best known as Jesus in The Passion of the Christ and last seen at a Michael Flynn event at which the general endorsed the idea of a military dictatorship and Caviezel accused Hillary Clinton of consuming adrenochrome harvested from the blood of children.

Sound of Freedom and Bonhoeffer inhabit the same political and moral universe, in which the only moral dilemma is whether the good guys can set aside their squeamishness and start killing the bad guys. For the real Bonhoeffer, this was exactly the fantasy of moral purity that led so many into complicity with fascism’s

escalating spiral of violence.

The final scene in Bonhoeffer, based on historically discredited accounts of the man’s death, explicitly invokes the idea of moral purity and extends it vicariously to the viewer. Bonhoeffer stoically marches to the gallows past his fellow prisoners (and the SS man whose heart, Grinch-like, grew three sizes after meeting the saintly pastor).

He stands with the noose around his neck and recites the Beatitudes.

When he gets to “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God,” the camera cuts to the dappled sunlight shining through the clouds. As in every other scene, this is all text and no subtext: Bonhoeffer is pure of heart, and he has seen God. But the real Bonhoeffer did not feel himself pure at heart. He felt himself an attempted murderer, wracked by shame and guilt, a moral failure whose only hope was in God’s boundless forgiveness. That his fellow conspirators saw themselves as heroes profoundly disturbed him. “We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds,” he wrote in a document circulated among the conspiracy. “Experience has rendered us suspicious of human beings, and often we have failed to speak to them a true and open word.

Unbearable conflicts have worn us down or even made us cynical. Are we still of any use?” The film whitewashes the real Bonhoeffer’s crushing sense of uselessness, offering instead a Bonhoeffer who promises that violence can make us pure.

Project 2025’s invocation of Bonhoeffer to justify a regime of deportation and concentration camps is obviously absurd, but it illustrates the danger of remembering Bonhoeffer more for his decision to

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Welcome, Tim Wood! title

By The Rev’d Andrew Van Culin blue title As most of you are aware, Diane Ward, Associate for Finance and Administration, announced her intention to retire in 2023. Since then, we’ve been working diligently to find a suitable replacement to join our ministry team and assume the myriad of responsibilities Diane has so ably overseen these past 10 years.

Prior to moving to the US, where he met his wife, Beth, Tim studied music and theology at Sydney College of Divinity, receiving a Bachelor of Theology. Tim’s unique melding of professional skills and knowledge with a deep and abiding faith promises to be a unique gift to our common life and ministry.

I’m thrilled to announce that our own Tim Wood has accepted the position and joined our staff on December 1.

Together with Beth, Tim lived in New

Known to many as Brynn and Lachlan’s father, Tim has spent the past 13 years as Business Manager and COO for Singing Serpent, a company specializing in sound design for advertising. Praised by his supervisor as the glue to the team, Tim regularly took on new challenges, helping him develop a wide range of skills from accounting systems to facility management, CRM development, HR support, and more.

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As my Associate for Finance and Administration, Tim will provide strategic leadership and management for all business and administrative affairs necessary to support the ministry of Christ Church Grosse Pointe. More specifically, Tim will oversee our financial activity and record-keeping, ensure sound stewardship of all buildings and grounds, provide leadership for our financial stewardship and development, and support our IT, HR, and general office administration.

York City before moving to Detroit in 2018. Married now for 13 years, Tim and Beth have two children, Lachlan (10) and Brynn (8).

When the Wood family moved to Grosse Pointe Woods, they visited more than a dozen churches before settling on CCGP. “It wasn’t until Brynn and I showed up on an ordinary Sunday in the summer of 2022 that we instantly felt connected. A kind usher

(Eric Ash) met us at the parking lot door and showed us up to the nave. A little girl (Eliza), thinking that Brynn was another little girl (Paige), rushed over and gave her a big hug. We felt so welcome! The next Sunday our whole family came and we have been part of the community ever since. We have found this to be a gospel-focused community with a social conscience.

We love the people and the ministry.”

Since that ordinary summer Sunday, Tim, Beth, Lachlan, and Brynn have become steadfast and faithful members of our community.

Lachlan is an avid reader and is active in Cub Scouts, while Brynn loves swimming with her Synchro team, is a novice in the CCGP choir, and serves as an acolyte. As parents, Tim and Beth have been regular volunteers with our Children and Youth.

Just this spring, Beth was brought on by Lisa Brown as a Catechist with our Children’s ministry, while Tim lent his musical talent to our youth at their first High School Youth retreat.

Needless to say, I am excited that Tim will be joining our staff and ministry leadership. His professional background, his commitment to our ministry, his abiding faith, and the natural friendship he brings to our community will help us to further our work to bring God and people together to know and live the Good News of Jesus Christ!

CROSSINGS CROSSINGS| |Christ ChristChurch ChurchGrosse GrossePointe/Advent CROSSINGS Pointe/Homecoming |2024 Christ 2024 Church Grosse Pointe/Pentecost 2022

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Community is Curriculum

By Lisa A. Brown

One of the things that I have discovered in accompanying children in their faith development is that much of what I end up doing is un-teaching.

Children often ask me to address ideas they’ve grown up hearing about God that contradict the loving and merciful divine presence that Jesus presents, teaches, and embodies.

This experience of having to “undo” misconceptions has deeply shaped how I speak about God to my own children, leading me to ask: “What do I want to communicate to my kids that they will never have to unlearn?

What do I want to say about God that I would never have to unsay?”

One of the most enduring, irrevocable divine truths for me is that we are made for togetherness. By God’s design, all of creation is connected in ways that we couldn’t even begin to understand. Just as a bee is drawn to pollen and a flower turns toward the sun and soaks up rain, we are created for relationship.

A fundamental part of living into the kingdom that Jesus dreamed for us has to do with our unity, what my favorite author Fr. Greg Boyle would call becoming “a community of cherished belonging.” He says, “There are two unwavering principles, rooted in the teachings of Jesus, that I believe would solve all our most vexing and complex social dilemmas if we embraced them: 1) Everyone is unshakably good. No exceptions.

2) We belong to each other. No exceptions. Compassion is the answer

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to every question. The only enemy is the enemy that would make us enemies to one another.”

When fragmented or alienated from one another, we suffer and wither, like flowers kept from the sun or embers that cool when removed from the fire.

We humans, as part of God’s cherished creation, are designed for a holy oneness that seems almost impossible

other, breaking into small, exclusive groups, and turning away anyone who seemed suspicious. When all the groups had been formed, the teacher asked all witches to raise their hands… but no one did. The confused students said she’d messed up the game. “Did I?” she responded. “Was anyone in Salem an actual witch, or did everyone just believe what they’d been told?”

What a poignant demonstration of how easy it is to divide a community.

to imagine, let alone achieve in our current cultural climate. Yet, our being “The Body of Christ” – the ongoing incarnation of the spirit of Christ alive in the world today – (at least to me) remains unquestionably of God.

In the atrium, we begin the presentation on the Parable of the Good Shepherd by saying, “One time when Jesus wanted to tell people about himself, he said ‘I am the Good Shepherd.’” Then we ask the children, “What does a good shepherd do?” and they respond, “A good shepherd takes care of all the sheep, keeps them safe, leads them to good food and water,” and so on. All great answers, of course, but if we look at this scripture passage in its historical context, the significance of the shepherd imagery becomes even more illuminating and informative.

My eldest daughter once told me about a powerful lesson she learned in her high school history class. While learning about the Salem Witch Trials, her teacher announced a rather highstakes game: “I’m going to whisper to each of you whether you’re a witch or a normal person. Your goal is to build the largest group possible that does NOT have a witch in it. Any group found to include a witch gets a failing grade.” The teens began grilling each

When Jesus shared this parable in the first century, he was speaking to Pharisees, religious leaders who were steeped in the Hebrew scriptures and were presumably serving as shepherds for God’s people. They, like Jesus, were very aware that the book of Ezekiel was written during a distressing time when the Jewish people were separated from one another and suffering in exile. In this holy book, the prophet Ezekiel passionately

CROSSINGS | Christ Church Grosse Pointe/Pentecost CROSSINGS 2022 | Christ Church Grosse Pointe/Advent 2024

communicates how God’s people are scattered, vulnerable, and lost, lacking good shepherds and how this state of anguish and separation is defiling God’s name.

“You have not strengthened the weak; you have not healed the sick; you have not bound up the injured; you have not brought back the strays; you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and scattered they became food for all the wild animals. My sheep were scattered; all over the face of the earth, with no one to search or seek for them… in this my name has been profaned” (Ezekiel 34-36)

Jesus prayed, “that they may be one,” because he knew that our journey to God, our path to the kingdom, is a group effort, with not a single expendable person. Sin is not a lack of perfection related to our personal performance. On the contrary, our individual failings – places where we need others to fill gaps and forgive us – are not some

were struggling to keep apart. His aim was to hallow God’s name by being our Good Shepherd and guiding us together towards the fullness of creation for which we were made – a time when “God will be all and all” and we will be united.

It is God’s joy to bring us home and restore wholeness to us and our community – this is the true fulfillment of God’s dream for us. Healthy and life-giving community truly is the heart of the curriculum of Jesus. John Shea writes, “God desires unity and rejoices more when a wholeness is approached by the inclusion of what was formerly excluded than when an incompleteness, even when it is a righteous incompleteness, remains even one short.”

“Just as a bee is drawn to pollen and a flower turns toward the sun and soaks up rain, we are created for relationship.”

The prophet Ezekiel is basically saying that God’s reputation has been damaged because the so-called shepherds are failing dreadfully at their job. So God declares that He will be stepping in to unite His people, bringing them together again so that His name will again be hallowed, or made holy again. (Pardon the pronouns!)

Similarly, each week when we pray as Jesus taught us and say “hallowed be thy name,” it’s not simply an expression of reverence, but rather a petition like the rest of the Lord’s prayer, a plea for God to show His stuff! To bring about such a dramatic change in restoring our wholeness that all of humankind will take notice.

We are imploring God to remove our divisions and restore our oneness.

kind of design error on God’s part, but rather are a gift; a reminder of our essential interconnectedness. God doesn’t love us despite our faults and failings but in and through them is bringing about the Kingdom. As Brene Brown reflects, “Our imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together.”

The real enemy of the kingdom is any lack of inclusiveness and acceptance that distances us from God and one another. Jesus was a man of reconciliation in a world that had accepted, and even gloried in division, in proclaiming who was an insider and who was an outsider, the clean and the unclean. He was struggling to bring together people that others

CROSSINGS | Christ Church Grosse Pointe/Advent 2024

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Birthdays & Anniversaries!

December 2 Billy Mansfield Meredith Loomis Quinlan 3 Eliza Hix Richard Platt Graham Ryan Charlotte Walsh 4 Betsy McCormick Lorna Utley 5 James Gray Sue Mara Kathy Oranchak 6 Judy Kling Emma Reich Jessica Van Culin 7 Marica Ostrowski 8 Marisa Bennett Terri Lyn Huston Clara Pietsch 9 Claire Platt Ron & Linda Solterisch 11 Karl Baumgarten Sidonie Brown Tracy Magee Jody Burton-Thompson 12 Ali Carr Elizabeth Felix Gerhard Heinen Jocelyn Padden 13 Lori Moulton Boeckler Karl Koto 14 Charles Exley Edward Turner 15 Erik Traynham George & Lynn Detwiler 16 Marian Baal Mason Bollozos Kathie Gotfredson 17 Katie Wilson 19 Ryan Waller 20 Jamie Blaine Susan Higbie Barbara Nickles Jonathan Rudolph Ned & Liz Johnson, Jr. Dan & Cathryn Skedel 21 Heather Albrecht Jane Edwin

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22 23 24

25 26 27

Martha Lakis Gustav Svensson Gerard Vallee-Smith Patrick Chesterton Rick Worrell Jud Utley Shirley Fortune Carol Gove Morgan Walker Sara Sweeny John & Caroline Watkins, Jr. Ursula & Maris Persidskis Carol Exley Ryan Peabody Chris Dirkse Moira Hix Jacqui Wilkinson Len Azzaro Richard Baumgarten Andy Gavagan Tom MacMillan Sarah Ollison Garrett Redding David Tobbe Jan & Susan Starr

January 1 Don Wray Jr. & Arlene Rozzelle 2 Molly Albertson 3 Sarah Eatherly-Marchi Cidney Graff Brad Reck Arlene Rozzelle Melissa Larpenteur 4 Doreen Kohr Tegan Jones Kate Zinn 5 Amy Chesterton Dave Chaklos Ross Kogel Madelyn Martin Julie Oliver Susan Payne 7 Libby Anderson Ashlyn Johnson Jacob Stevenson 8 Lynne Cameron Julie Schuetze

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Karl Boeckler Kirby Traynahm 10 Nick Bachand Ray Graves William Minetola Maggie Sweeney 11 Emma Hanoian 12 Anne Wilkinson-Burke Molly Hanoian 13 Bob Kingscott 14 Laura Huebner Paulette Lewis 15 Mike Prieur 16 Karlyn McCoy 17 Ed Dyer 18 Paul Vogt 20 Kelly Darlington 21 Mark High William Minetola Rick Walker 22 Ross Kogel Eleanor Walsh 23 Mackenzie Krygowski Miranda Ostrowski 24 John Paul Albrecht Lowry Scotten Jane Oliver 26 Bonnie Romer Mark Lorenger Charles Shreve Cathy Walker 27 Ebony Gillolly Michael Reich 28 May Jean Chen Bennett Walsh 29 Eric Ash Charles & Karen Shreve, IV 30 Don Wray 30 Heather Bossler-Byron Jan Squitieri Sharon Stellingwerf 31 Joselyn Mills Al Torp

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February 2 Abbey Schuetze 3 Claire Graff 4 Jim Quinlan Jason Richards Megan Prieur Mike Fournier Tracy Clarke 5 Kiera Phlipot Lynda Webster Susan Starr 5 Clark & Kim Standish Evan & Sarah Pile 6 Pamela Blair Jaclyn Grosfield Scottie Knight Bob Payne Lynn Schneider Carol Smith Kathy Williams 7 William Lefevre Sophie Schuetze Brendan Walsh 8 Kerri Gustafson 9 Lauren Dirkse 10 Ian Davis Blair Murawski Michelle Ormsby 11 Jerry MacMillan 12 Darlene Grabowski Valerie Koto 13 Peter Nickles Sally Paddock Burt Rudolph John Waller 14 Sandi Heald Jean Redfield 15 Dana Deimel Severin Vogt 16 Bob Alltop Peter Ferrara Kim Standish 17 Ryan Lally 18 Ellen Durand Steve Fehniger Ursula Torp 19 Eric Pietsch Bev Walsh

20 Emma Bowe Allison Keelean 21 Mark Higbie 23 Mike Bowe 24 Jim & Susan Kalre Carol Newton 25 Hank Darlington 25 Kate Everham 26 Jeff & Tracy Clarke 27 Josie Fedirko Mary Trost 28 Richard Rittenhouse 29 Mike Bamford Sarah Dirkse

CROSSINGS | Christ Church Grosse Pointe/Advent 2024

61 Grosse Pointe Boulevard Grosse Pointe Farms, MI 48236 Church Office (Hours: 9 am–5 pm) Phone: 313-885-4841 | Fax: 313-885-7019 www.christchurchgp.org

Pastoral Emergencies: 313-885-4841, ext. 4 The Rev’d Andrew Van Culin, Rector dvanculin@christchurchgp.org 313-885-4842 Lisa Brown, Associate for Children, Youth and Family Ministries lbrown@christchurchgp.org 313-885-4841 ext. 104 Scott Hanoian, Associate for Worship and Liturgy, Director of Music and Organist shanoian@christchurchgp.org 313-885-4841 ext. 102 The Rev’d Maureen L. Martin, Associate for Parish Life & Community Engagement mmartin@christchurchgp.org 313-885-4841 ext. 116 Diane Ward, Associate for Finance and Administration dward@christchurchgp.org 313-885-4841 ext. 111 Tim Wood, Associate for Finance and Administration twood@christchurchgp.org 313-885-4841 ext. 111

In Memorium Kit Greening Dorothy Nelson George Nicholson

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gacy Society

The Legacy Society

Legacy Society

The Legacy Society

The

Le

The The

In gratitude

Legacy Society

Thank You • Mr. & Mrs. Mark Lorenger

• The Rev’d & Mrs. Andrew Van Culin

• Mr. Jeffrey Smith

• Mr. & Mrs. John Van Osdol

& Mrs. Lisa Vallee Smith

• Mr. John Snyder • Ms. Amie Sweeney • Ms. Karyn Weir • Mr. & Mrs. Michael Labadie • Mr. & Mrs. George Sutton • Mr. & Mrs. Richard Trost

• Ms. Martha Bangs • Ms. Libby Candler & Mr. Daniel Hughes • Mr. Michael DeFillip & Mr. David Gerdis • Mr. & Mrs. Peter Ferrara • Mr. & Mrs. Allan Torp • Mr. John Woodhouse

& Ms. Susan Vercruysse

At Christ Church, we are more than just a place of worship, we are a faith community that has stood the test of time, intertwining our lives and stories with the rich history fo Grosse Pointe. For generations, Christ Church has been a sanctuary of solace, a source of strength and a home for our souls. Planned giving provides a unique opportunity for each one of us to leave a lasting impact, to sow the seeds of faith that will blossom and bear fruit for generations to come.

By including Christ Church in your planned giving, you are ensuring that our spiritual home remains resilient and ready to guide those who seek solace, support, and a deeper connection to their faith.

Your gift, whether it be through a bequest, charitable trust or other planned giving option, will become a lasting part of your legacy of dedication and devotion to Christ Church.

To learn more about planned giving, please contact Diane Ward at dward@christchurchgp.org.

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CROSSINGS | Christ Church Grosse Pointe/Pentecost CROSSINGS 2022 | Christ Church Grosse Pointe/Advent 2024

A Special Thanks to our Campaign Leadership!

Our campaign would not have been possible without ...

The vision of our Vestry who helped solidify the vision and approved the investment not only in our campaign but in our vision and mission!

The generosity of George and Nancy Nicholson, “Our First Family,” who encouraged us to build the plan and have led the way with generosity and faith!

The commitment of our Campaign Ambassadors, Richard Best, Betsy Creedon, Amie Sweeney, and Brendan Walsh, who have advocated for our ministry and invited so many to join the campaign!

And, of course, the steadfast leadership of our Campaign Chair, Lisa Vallee-Smith, whose friendship and attentiveness has kept us on task with humor, generosity, and efficiency!

To Excel In Campaign Status Campaign Goal.............................................................................. $6 million Household Commitments.............................................................. 101 Total Commitments Pledged ......................................................... $6.52 million Cash Pledges.................................................................................. $3.65 million Legacy Commitments.................................................................... $2.87 million Dollars Received to date:............................................................... $1.83 million

CROSSINGS | Christ Church Grosse Pointe/Advent 2024

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Let Us Love One Another As God Loves Us By: The Rev’d Maureen L. Martin “I give you these commands so that you may love one another,” begins today’s reading from John. You may be wondering which commands Jesus is talking about. If we step back a few sentences, we find ourselves in Jesus’ Farewell discourse. He is leaving the disciples with his last message of love and friendship. “No one,” Jesus tells them, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” And then, Jesus goes on to talk about how the world will treat his disciples and that it will often be with hate.

One of the tools I enjoy using when teaching is the feelings wheel. My favorite coffee shop up north has a feelings wheel poster in the bathroom.

Every time I go in there, I spend a little time looking at the wheel. I love it because it has helped me understand my own feelings and the feeling of others. The wheel looks like a pie cut into 6 pieces: scared, joyful, powerful, peaceful, sad, and mad.

These feelings are the center tip of each pie piece.

As the piece radiates out it is divided into 6 more pieces in the mid zone, and then the outer ring has 6 more pieces. Essentially, each core feeling has 12 additional feelings that at their core are the central feeling.

You can read the feelings wheel in either direction. Either you can use it to help you identify what is at the center of your feelings. As an example, if you are feeling sleepy, bored, lonely,

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depressed, ashamed, guilty, apathetic, inferior, inadequate, miserable, stupid or bashful the core of that feeling might be sadness, and identifying that is helpful because it helps you to face what you might be afraid to know about your situation: you are sad, and

joy. Maybe your old joy word is happy, a fine word, but why not expand on it? Or you see joy in others, and you just want to more fully understand joy. Radiating out from joy we find awareness, creativity, playfulness, energetic, vibrant and excited.

Regardless of what our feelings are it is healthy to expand our vocabulary for them.

On the feelings wheel I say this: feelings words offer us a vocabulary of Grace.

Feelings words are like colored pencils: sometimes more is better! The ability to name our feelings with shade and nuance is a gift not only to ourselves but those around us. A we grow in understanding and forgiveness of ourselves we gain the capacity to understand and forgive the people who matter most in our lives, both living and deceased.

you need someone you love to sit down with you and let you have a good cry.

Figuring out sadness is important because sometimes we confuse sad with mad and lash out, or, just as bad, we numb out.

You can also go the other direction with the wheel. Say you feel really joyful, and you want to enlarge your vocabulary in order to increase your

In today’s reading, though, Jesus talks only about two feelings. Love and hate. He isn’t talking about nuance or shade, only stark contrast. He is also using stark language around the idea of us and the world. If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me first.” We find ourselves living in a world now that seems divided into these stark contrasts too. Not a lot of nuance out there, is there? As Sandy said during the Rector’s forum, we drive down the street hatefully judging our neighbors because of the political signage we see on their front yards. In fact, you could say that the only thing uniting us as a country right now is

CROSSINGS |CROSSINGS Christ Church | Christ GrosseChurch Pointe/Pentecost CROSSINGS Grosse Pointe/Advent 2022 | Christ Church 2024 Grosse Pointe/Homecoming 2024

the shared experience of hatefulness and on both sides of the equation, we have pulled away from one another.

We have quit speaking to those around us who are on the other side.

But we know that, like a muscle help in a state of tight contraction, we cannot stay this way forever. At some point something is going to have to give. We are going to have to let go, exhale, unclench.

And, if we were to get our feelings wheel, we would see words fanning out from fear and anger that go well with how we are feeling in this moment: hostile, hot, angry, helpless, confused, and rejected.

And, do you know what is really great about feelings? They are the product of our thoughts about our emotional responses to the events and context of our lives. Emotions well up in the body, the brain gets to think about them and make a decision about how we are going to feel. We, whether we realize it or not, need not be enslaved by our feelings. One writer put it this way: emotions are nouns,

stay scared. The assignment, should you choose to take it is to make a list of people who you haven’t seen in a while, people you feel stuck about and begin to pray for them. Write their names down, put it in your pocket and when you remember it is there, pray for them, even if it is just to say their name. Ask for God’s forgiveness to enter into the relationship. Remember the good things about that person, remember when you were close. And, when you are ready, call them. Tell them you miss them, invite them back into your life.

“Figuring out sadness is important because sometimes we confuse sad with mad and lash out, or, just as bad, we numb out.”

So, I wonder about how to reconcile the feelings wheel and the gospel from today. How do we reconcile Jesus’ Message to the disciples of love love love, that’s what it’s all about, and oh yeah, the world is gonna hate you. I am relieved to say I have some feelings about that.

To begin, Jesus’ message is not one of retaliation or resignation. It is one of truth telling. Jesus is describing to his friends how the world will sometimes act when they take up their cross and follow him. He is not advising them that the followers of Jesus are to act likewise. Though the world may be filled with hatefulness, hostility and rage, there is nothing to be gained from joining ourselves to it. You know what is worse than being hated? Being filled with hatefulness ourselves.

feelings are verbs.

We need to remind ourselves to verb, not get stuck. Stay loving, choose not to hate. Stay curious, keep asking ourselves wonder questions. Don’t get sucked into the world’s hatefulness.

I have a bit of an assignment for us to consider. So many things have happened to us as a nation that have caused us to allow relationships to erode. All of us, I believe, have people in our lives that we miss. It can be hard to allow ourselves to feel our feelings around brokenness, but when we do not we are making the decision to stay in brokenness, to stay in despair, anxiety and insecurity; to

CROSSINGS | Christ Church Grosse Pointe/Advent 2024

It is time that we re-widen our circles again. Jesus did not say that the world is full of hate, therefore build walls and hide behind them. He sent his followers into the world, despite the state of affairs because he loved the world.

Today we remember Saints Simon and Jude. May we be like them and go forth gladly to spread the good news

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Common Thread By: Cheryl Johns

I graduated from high school in the 1960’s and can tell you that education has changed greatly in the years since then. In those times, there were school activities that boys did while girls had their own studies. When I was confirmed as a teenager at Christ Church, there was a boys choir, which I could not join since I was a girl.

Luckily my high school had a mixed choir to sing in. Band and orchestra classes were coed but some other classes were not. Shop class was an elective class for boys only and Home Economics classes were for girls. Some gym classes were for boys only or girls only.

Of all the elective classes I ever had, Home Economics was the most impressive. Our classroom was huge with four kitchens, ten large sewing tables and fifteen sewing machines. We did a lot of cooking and that was fun, especially eating what we had made, but a requirement of this class was that we each had to make a dress. Luckily I had learned to sew by hand in Girl Scouts, darning socks and sewing on buttons. That was a start. But sewing a dress was an entirely different thing. We had to buy a dress pattern, a zipper, and the material and learn to pin the pattern to the material, cut the material and then sew. To sew, we had to learn how to thread and use a sewing machine. It was a lot to learn. I made a green dress that was good enough to wear, and other dresses after that.

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At home my mother had taught me to embroider tea towels and pillowcases, which was enjoy-able, and then how to knit. Knitting can be easy if you choose easy pieces to knit, but

it can also be quite complicated as the stitch patterns become increasingly difficult. My mother saw my frustration and offered to teach me to crochet instead, saying it was a lot easier. But I was so deep into knitting that I could not handle adding crochet into the mix. After my dress making experience, I was pretty much done with hand crafts. At least that is what I thought at the time. But one day my mother started working on

a needlepoint tapestry. It was really big, over three feet long and two feet high. I had never seen something like this before. She had chosen a deep turquoise back-ground color yarn and then light bright colored yarns for the flower motif. Unlike most mothers of that time, my mother, May Granville worked outside of the home. She was an Emergency Room nurse at Cottage Hospital, working part-time. She worked the three to eleven p.m. shift so when I was coming home from school she had already left for work, having cooked dinner and left it on the stove for us to eat. She did not have a lot of spare time, so her needlepoint project sat for quite a while. But one

day I sat down to practice my piano lessons, and there it was, the most beautiful, colorful turquoise piano bench seat cushion you could ever want to see. I didn’t know it then, but this would inspire me to create beautiful, colorful needlepoint items myself.

I left Christ Church when I married my husband in his church. My husband and I had a wonder-ful 50 year marriage, when he passed away in October, 2023. It didn’t take me long to return to my roots at Christ Church. I attended the Living With Grief program last Spring and met the most wonderful women there, who encouraged me to join Common Thread craft group. These women are a tourde-force! One woman is making a large handmade rug, while another has brought a spinning wheel to spin her own yarn for knitting! We have really expert knitters who help nurture and grow new knitters. We have expert embroiderers and needlepointers. I am guessing by now that you have guessed what my favorite hand craft is.

This year the Gifts and Greens Christmas party was held on December 13. Many of our Common Thread members donated hand crafted items for the auction benefitting Carstens Literacy Initiative. Happy Holidays everyone.

CROSSINGS | Christ Church Grosse Pointe/Pentecost CROSSINGS 2022 | Christ Church Grosse Pointe/Advent 2024

Journey of Generosity Pledging is an act of worship – thanking God for all God has done for us.

Pledging is an act of love – sharing our abundance to help others experience the joy and love of Christ.

Pledging is an act of faith – reminding ourselves that our greatest joy is found not in our wealth, but in God’s love for us and for all.

Thank you to all who have made a pledge to support God’s ministry at Christ Church.

Thank you for joining us in our worship, love, and faith!

Dr. & Mrs. Anthony Alcantara Mr. & Mrs. Dave Anderson Ms. Lynn Anslow Mr. Joel Anyim Mrs. Barbara Arrigo Mr. & Mrs. Rodney Arroyo Dr. & Dr. Eric Ash Mr. & Mrs. Len Azzaro Mr. & Mrs. Michael Bamford Ms. Martha Bangs Mr. & Mrs. Sandy Baruah Dr. Richard Baumgarten & Dr. Cheryl Wesen Mr. & Mrs. Dominic Bennett Mr. & Mrs. John Benson Mr. & Mrs. Richard Best Mr. & Mrs. Brad Blaine Mrs. Stephanie Blatt Ms. Antoinette Book Miss Terry Book Mr. & Mrs. Michael Bowe Dr. Jerry Brackett & Ms. Karen Kienbaum Ms. Libby Candler Mr. & Mrs. David Chaklos Mr. & Ms. William Champion, III Mr. & Mrs. Patrick Chesterton Ms. Sarah Clark Ms. Lauren Clune Mr. & Mrs. William Collison Mrs. Betsy Creedon Mr. William Cudlip Mr. Henry Darlington Mr. Michael DeFillipi & Mr. David Gerdis Mr. & Mrs. Peter Durand Mr. & Mrs. Edward Evans, III Mr. Steven Fehniger Mr. & Mrs. Peter Ferrara Mr. & Mrs. Ed Fitzgerald Mrs. Martha Ford Mrs. Shirley Fortune Mrs. Hadley French Mr. David Gaskin Mr. John Gillooly & Mrs. Ebony Duff

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Mrs. Carol Gove Mrs. Christine Gretchko Mr. Anton & Dr. Betsy Hall Mr. & Mrs. Scott Hanoian Mrs. Elizabeth Hardwick Mr. Mark Higbie & Mrs. Gretchen Knoell Mr. & Mrs. Henry Hubbard Mr. & Mrs. Peter Huebner Mr. & Mrs. Matthew Hurley Ms. Terri Lyn Huston Ms. Lynnette Iannace Mrs. Cheryl Johns Mr. & Mrs. Edward Johnson, Jr Mr. & Mrs. Robert Johnson Mr. & Mrs. Ian Jones Mr. & Ms. James Kastner Ms. Barbara Kennedy Mr. Robert Kingscott & Mrs. Susan Mara Mr. & Ms. Garland Knight, III Mr. & Mrs. Michael Labadie Mrs. Ann Lesesne Ms. Lynda Loch Mr. & Mrs. Mark Lorenger Mr. & Mrs. Terrance Lynch Mr. & Mrs. Edwin MacKethan, III Mr. Brian & Dr. Lisa MacLean Mr. & Mrs. Kevin Magee Dr. Michael Marsh Mr. David & The Rev’d Maureen Martin Mr. & Mrs. Roger Mason Mr. & Mrs. Charles Mathews Ms. Nadine Mathis Mrs. Margaret Maycock Mr. & Mrs. John McCormick Mr. & Mrs. Kenneth McIntyre Mrs. Helen McKnight Mrs. Lucinda McMahon Mr. & Mrs. James McMillan, II Mr. & Mrs. George Nicholson, III Dr. & Mrs. Peter Nickles Mr. & Mrs. Frank Niscoromni Mr. & Mrs. Blair Osborn Mr. & Mrs. Dennis Partridge

CROSSINGS | Christ Church Grosse Pointe/Advent 2024

Mr. & Mrs. Brian Peabody Mr. & Mrs. Tedmund Pryor Mr. & Mrs. David Redfield Mr. & Mrs. Michael Reich Mrs. Nancy Renick Mr. & Mrs. Alfred Reuther, Jr. Mr. & Mrs. Brendan Ross Mr. Charles Ruifrok Mr. & Mrs. Gregg Russell Ms. Helen Santiz Mr. & Mrs. Lloyd Semple Ms. Penelope Slough Ms. Carol Smith Mr. Jeffrey Smith & Mrs. Lisa Vallee Smith Mr. John Snyder Mr. & Mrs. Conrad Squitieri Mr. & Mrs. Jan Starr Mr. & Mrs. Frank Stellingwerf Mr. & Mrs. George Sutton Ms. Amie Sweeney Mr & Mrs Donald N. Sweeny III David Tarrant Ms. Sarah Teachey Mrs. Emily Tennyson Mr. & Mrs. David Tobbe Mr. & Mrs. Allan Torp Mr. & Mrs. Richard Trost The Rev’d & Mrs. Andrew Van Culin Mrs. Charlene Vickers Mrs. Barbara Wachter Mrs. Beverly Walsh Dr. & Mrs. Kenneth Walters Mrs. Salome Walton Mr. & Mrs. John Warren, Jr Adam and Rema Waugh Mrs. Lynda Webster Ms. Karyn Weir Mr. & Mrs. Timothy Whims Ms. Kathy Williams Timothy & Elizabeth Wood Mrs. Margaret Woodford Mr. John Woodhouse & Ms. Susan Vercruysse Mr. & Mrs. Luther Zinn

Epiphany

Procession Sunday, January 12 | 4 pm Christ Church Choir

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Annual Meeting & Report Sunday, January 26, 2025

(following the 9 am Service in the Undercroft) The Annual Parish Meeting will be held for the election of Vestry Members, the presentation of the Parish Annual Report, financial statements, and additional church business.

Children are welcome to gather in the education wing, for movies , pizza, and fun!