The Gathering 2019: Head, Heart, Hands, featuring Amy Julia Becker

‘Head, Heart, Hands’ Features Author Amy Julia Becker

The Gathering 2019

Author Amy Julia Becker describes her childhood growing up in Edenton, N.C. in the early 80s as the ‘good ol days,’ playing in backyard puddles, piano and ballet lessons, church, loving parents who never argued. Her parents had moved to Edenton from the northeast before she was born, so she didn’t know a life that didn’t include Caroline and Vera, the housekeepers and Samuel, the gardener. An avid reader, it never occurred to her that Caroline didn’t know how.

“I loved Samuel and Vera and Caroline, but I never stopped to think what their lives might have been like if they had grown up in a different place or a different time or with a different set of social expectations,” she says in her book, White Picket Fences — Turning Toward Love in a World Divided by Privilege. Not until she was an adult did she learn that Caroline stopped going to school at age 6 because her mother hadn’t thought it was safe.

Amy Julia’s family moved back to their native Connecticut when she turned 10, and it was then she faced a different view of her home, the South. Kids in her class called her racist and prejudiced, all because of where she was born.

Amy Julia will come to St. Michael’s as keynote speaker of The Gathering: Head, Heart, Hands, Feb. 8 &9 of next year. Our bi-ennial event for women will be designed to explore privilege and how women of faith can bring God into the middle of our privileged lives and use it for the better good of the world.

A graduate of Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary, her essays about faith, family, and disability have appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, Christianity Today, the Christian Century, and online for The New York Times, ABCNews, the Atlantic, Vox, and The Huffington Post.

Amy Julia, the mother of three, first began exploring privilege when she was searching through her family’s bookshelf and discovered a startling lack of diversity in the titles. The African American Studies minor at Princeton, she had studied under author Toni Morrison while seeking her degree. “I never intended to write about privilege,” she says. “I was going to write a book about how to choose books for children.”

When her oldest daughter, Penny was born with Down Syndrome, she began to see the world as prejudiced against disabled people.

“I have come to believe that privilege harms everyone,” she writes in White Picket Fences. “Those who are excluded from it and those who benefit from it. I want this story to open up the conversation we are afraid to have, to prompt questions we are afraid to ask, and to lead us away from fear and toward love, in all its fragile and mysterious possibilities.”

What if, in this broken world, we turn toward each other in love rather than hate? What if we use our heads, hearts and hands to listen and to learn, so we can participate in healing work in the world?

Join us for The Gathering 2019, Friday & Saturday, Feb. 8 & 9, when we’ll explore how to set our divisions of race, privilege and circumstance aside. Amy Julia will lead us in learning and fellowship so we can discover our unity as God’s people. We hope to be empowered with faith & joy and, once renewed, use our lives to be a symbol of Christ to the world.

Registration is now open at https:// stmichaelsgathering.eventbrite.com. Early-bird tickets are $35 through Dec. 24 and includes the full event. Regular registration is $40.

The event has been streamlined this year, with a Friday welcoming reception and book signing, followed by the keynote and Compline. Saturday’s program will include Morning Prayer and Hymn Sing, followed by a

Schedule Friday, Feb. 8 6:30 p.m. Opening reception and book signing 7:30 p.m. Keynote: Amy Julia Becker 8:30 p.m. Compline

Saturday, Feb. 9 8:30 a.m. Coffee 9 a.m. Hymn Sing & Morning Prayer 9:30 a.m. - 11 a.m. Head, Heart, Hands workshop with Amy Julia Becker 11:30 a.m. Q&A

Please note: There will be no lunch served at this event.