Last Friday I stayed for common cathedral’s Bible study after Boston Warm. I’ve been a bit hesitant to join Bible study because of some negative associations it brings up for me about my own religious upbringing, but lately I’ve been trying to approach it with a new perspective. I decided to look at the Bible study group as a way to not only continue to spend time with this community and practice therapeutic communication skills, but also as a sort of assessment time to learn about the spiritual perspectives and themes that community members are currently dealing with. Continue reading
Tag Archives: common art
Let the art speak.
I first visited my internship site on Ash Wednesday a year ago. I still remember how nervous I was that day and so quietly hid among the people. Reflecting on myself this year, I have learned a lot from our community, about such things as my leadership skills, the history of its diverse cultures, cultural competence, nonverbal communication skills, and different life-stage experiences. The joy of self-growing also includes knowing so many beautiful souls here. They have welcomed me to join, even if it has taken time.
Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn
February is the national Black History Month in the United States. This is a way of remembering important people and events in the history of the African diaspora. I understand so many hurt souls have been mistreated for a long time. As it is never too late to have a space for discussion of social justice, this week in common art we started a group-based art project focused on it. Using a black marker to draw a line, each person connected to the line of the next person. After creating a group image of a line, we created art to express our intention toward a social issue we cared about. ( I want to thank my professor for bringing our class the idea of the structure for this exercise.)
Group Play
Playing is an essential part of everyone’s life. Children learn and develop their skills from playing; they play almost all the time. As adults, we sometimes forget the simple joy we play with. In my culture, if an adult is still playing, it somehow means that person is not mature enough. However, after leading this week’s art project, I think we can still learn something from playing and enjoy our simple joy in the community.
Bringing Myself into the Community
It is the fifth week since I joined Emmanuel Church. Time passes so fast, especially this season! Bringing art projects to Common Art and Cafe Emmanuel groups, I focused on art in nature. When I noticed all the color changes on the street, the idea of creating art with nature just leaped to my mind . So I brought some origami plants to Common Art on Wednesday.
Trading Cards
This week I really felt my growth as a facilitator. Over this past year I have worked on building my confidence and my ability to identify what art activities will be well received by the community. While I can come up with many ideas of art to make, not all of them are going to be of interest to the artists. So, in order to lead a successful art-making idea I need to have built my own confidence as well as an understanding of what the community enjoys. I also need to know what small challenges could be embraced.
The Harvest of Righteousness
Advent 2C. 19 December 2021. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
Baruch 5:1-9 Take off the garment of sorrow and affliction and put on the robe of righteousness.
Phillipians 1:31-11. And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God
Luke 3:1-6 All flesh shall see the salvation of God.
God all merciful and all compassionate, grant us the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may and cost what it will.
As I said last week, Advent is a season for communal and institutional reflection and repentance, for collective atonement and reparations. Our readings for this second Sunday in Advent are so full and big with calls for repentance and reparations; it is almost as if they are pregnant with possibility. The prophet Baruch and the evangelist Luke are both reminding their hearers about the words of the prophet Isaiah. And Luke draws a picture of John the Baptist that is just like the prophet Jeremiah, consecrated before he was born, and just like Elijah by the Jordan in the wilderness. Luke also has already explained that John’s work was so closely related to Jesus’s work, their purposes were so akin to one another, that it was as if they must have known one another before they were even born. Continue reading
A Shade Braver
Proper 28B. 14 November 2021. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
1 Samuel 1:4-20. The Lord remembered her.
Hebrews 10:11-25. Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds.
Mark 13:1-8. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.
O Eternity, O Word of Thunder, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
We are nearing the end of our liturgical year. This is the last we’ll hear from the Gospel of Mark for another three years. It’s highly ironic to me to pray the beautiful words of the opening collect about scripture (to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest) on a day when our appointed Gospel lesson is the beginning of the apocalypse in Mark. Episcopalians generally don’t like dwelling on the fact that we have apocalyptic scripture. We don’t know what to make of it, and we’d rather not have to try. Next Sunday, which is the last Sunday in our liturgical year, we will hear a passage from the Passion narrative of Gospel of John. It is a jarring lectionary move; you’ll have to keep your knees bent slightly so that you don’t topple over! Continue reading
Reflection on Our Loss
This past week was very difficult. Last Tuesday we lost one of our community members, Roger. The news of his death hit me very hard, so I was grateful that I was told the day before common art. That let me take care of myself first, so that I could be there for the community the next day. Moving through the day with the weight of this loss was challenging, but we found that we could share the burden together. Continue reading
Farewell, Amanda!
This week at common art we had another staff member leave us. This was Executive Director Amanda Grant-Rose’s last week. On Wednesday at a big celebration in her honor many of our community members gave speeches and goodbyes. It was wonderful to hear everybody share stories about what an impact Amanda had on their lives over the seven years she worked here. This experience made me think more deeply about how we can influence each other’s lives and my own role here at common art. Two weeks prior we had lost our barista. I spoke a little bit in my previous blog post about the effect this loss has on the community. Both he and Amanda played big rolls in the lives of our community for the years they were here.