Ongoing Response to COVID-19
Weekday Email to Members and Friends – 2021-05-20
Thursday, May 20th 2021
To Members and Friends of
First Presbyterian Church, Champaign
Dear Friends,
We grieve the shootout yesterday morning that left Champaign Police Officer Christopher Oberheim dead, another officer wounded, and a suspect involved, identified as Darion Marquise Lafayette, dead. We pray for all involved, all grieving families, and the Champaign Police family. O Lord, most high and kind God, hear our prayers and make us agents of your peace.
* * *
Last night’s Wednesday Zoom was water on the moon with Janice Harrington regaling us with humor, poetry, and stories. Here are two more of her poems, and two others that sprung to mind when she read to us.
ASH
Janice Harrington
Vernon, Alabama, 1961
I think about that winter in Vernon
when it was just the two of us and cold,
and December sifted snow over the red
dough boards of yard and roof,
and you made the terrible pilgrimage each night
in bare feet from bed to stove, to stoke its embers
and add the meager coal. Afterwards, you shivered
across the linoleum, across its worn and cinder-
bitten roses. Do I remember you leaping
from petal to petal, your sallow feet shining
like beacons? I don’t know. It was long
ago. But I know you climbed beneath
the sheets and “opening your shirt”
placed my hands against your belly.
We lay banked beside each other, unmoving,
asleep in a house as slanted as a cant of snow,
where we were Websta’s gal and her baby girl,
where we waited for the colored serviceman
who belonged to us, until waiting
was also winter, a weather we knew.
How lovely we were then, the two of us,
huddled in that darkness, surrounded
by the dull glowing of red roses
and comet-cinders, cast out and briefly bright.
* * *
REVIVAL
Janice Harrington
Through the cooling dark,
they walk, Lillian, Webster, Riley, Anna,
MacArthur and Eurel, returning
from Heavenly Father and Yes, Jesus!,
from paper fans with little brown
girls in Sunday bonnets “M-hmmmm”
from the communion of sour juice and crackers,
ah weh-lll, from church mothers in nurses’ uniforms and rills of sweat spilling from black brows.
Have mercy on us, Father.
Look down upon us, Father, and give us
your blessing, in Jesus’ name . . .
Above a darkened bough, a wing
beats, and in the pitchy shadows crickets
shrill, and a frog repeats, repeats,
repeats. Maybe Anna holds her father’s
hand. Maybe the boys tussle and pitch
stones into darkness while their mother
watches, humming and holding
her Bible more firmly than an ax handle,
or maybe they go weary on and quiet.
It is only their steps you hear, only shifting sand.
On a rural route, a family walks
while the night begins its long sermon, and the miles go by, and the miles go by.
If an owl calls from that darkness,
then someone will die. If a hound keens
one long, longing vowel, they will shudder.
If a star plummets, that too will have meaning.
This is faith, the road that takes them home.
* * *
Those Winter Sundays
Robert Hayden – 1913-1980
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
* * *
Grass
BY CARL SANDBURG
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
* * *
Much love to you all.
Matt Matthews
matt@firstpres.church
* * *
Enough rain! Sunday weather says partly cloudy with a high of 88 … a great day to join us for a Sunday in the Park at West Side Park at 11 am following the 10:15 am in-person worship. See you Sunday!
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Weekday Email to Members and Friends – 2021-05-19
Wednesday, May 19th 2021
To Members and Friends of
First Presbyterian Church, Champaign
Dear Friends,
Tonight at 7:00, our Wednesday Zoom will feature poet and children’s author—locally and internationally known—Janice Harrington. She’ll read some of her poetry, talk about the creative process, and answer our questions in a way that only a poet can begin to answer. Join us. Invite a friend.
The Poetry Foundation says this about Janice: Poet and children’s author Janice N. Harrington grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both those settings figure largely in her writing. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is also the author of The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home (2011) and Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin (2016). Her children’s books, The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County (2007) and Going North (2004), have won several awards and citations, including a listing among Time Magazine’s top 10 children’s books and the Ezra Jack Keats Award from the New York Public Library.
Harrington has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for emerging women writers. She has worked as a public librarian and now teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois.
* * *
Join the conversation tonight. The link follows at the end of this email. Invite a friend.
Here’s a poem by Janice.
SHAKING THE GRASS
Evening, and all my ghosts come back to me
like red banty hens to catalpa limbs
and chicken-wired hutches, clucking, clucking,
and falling, at last, into their head-under-wing sleep.
I think about the field of grass I lay in once,
between Omaha and Lincoln. It was summer, I think.
The air smelled green, and wands of windy green, a-sway,
a-sway, swayed over me. I lay on green sod
like a prairie snake letting the sun warm me.
What does a girl think about alone
in a field of grass, beneath a sky as bright
as an Easter dress, beneath a green wind?
Maybe I have not shaken the grass.
All is vanity.
Maybe I never rose from that green field.
All is vanity.
Maybe I did no more than swallow deep, deep breaths
and spill them out into story: all is vanity.
Maybe I listened to the wind sighing and shivered,
spinning, awhirl amidst the bluestem
and green lashes: O my beloved! O my beloved!
I lay in a field of grass once, and then went on.
Even the hollow that my body made is gone.
* * *
Much love to you all.
Matt Matthews
matt@firstpres.church
* * *
Enough rain! Sunday weather says partly cloudy with a high of 88 … a great day to join us for a Sunday in the Park at West Side Park at 11 am following the 10:15 am in-person worship. See you Sunday!
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Weekday Email to Members and Friends – 2021-05-18
Dr Rhiannon Lloyd is a former doctor of medicine and psychiatry. She first committed her life to Christ as a 16- year- old in 1963. Since 1985, beginning with a time of training with Youth with a Mission, she has been in full-time Christian work, ministering extensively in cross cultural situations. Before the Rwandan genocide in 1994, she specialized in teaching courses for Christian workers and ministering to people with deep emotional wounds. Dr. Lloyd is Welsh and her ministry is called “Healing the Nations” (www.healingthenations.co.uk)
Rev. Dr. Nyamutera is a pastor in the Pentecostal Church in Rwanda who lived through the genocide. He is the director Rabagirana Ministries in Kigali. He has extensive experience in “Healing Hearts, Transforming Nations” both in Rwanda as well as other countries of Africa and beyond.
Ms. Sztojk is a Roma leader and Reformed seminary student from Hungary.
Rev. DeVuyst is a missionary with Resonate Global Mission in Ukraine. He first because interested in the missionary as a result of the Russo-Ukranian conflict. He is one of the leaders on the “Healing Hearts, Transforming Nations” team.
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Weekday Email to Members and Friends – 2021-05-17
Monday, May 17th 2021
To Members and Friends of
First Presbyterian Church, Champaign
Dear Friends,
Our youngest graduated college two weeks ago, and me and Rachel and our other two sons gathered to celebrate. We all took a brief trip to Litchfield Beach afterwards and spent a week in a condo overlooking the ocean, cooking, walking on the beach hunting shells, and exploring the Brookgreen Gardens where I delighted in petting a friendly goat and watching an alligator sunbathe. We fit in a game of putt-putt and a few games of Scrabble, walked a labyrinth and miles of beach, and generally chatted, relaxed, read, and slept in.
While we enjoyed one another, our hearts were heavy because every transition brings a certain amount of gravitas. John Mark said goodbye to some really good friends at school. One begins a job in Pittsburgh. Another accepted a fellowship in South Africa. Like runners in a race, they stretched young bodies, stepped to the start line, and awaited the gun to signal the start. But no one sprinted away from that line when the gun sounded. They hung back for a few last conversations.
And we all remembered Jeremy Chen. He graduated Riverside High School a year behind our Joseph and a year ahead of our Benjamin. All my boys knew and liked Jeremy. He was whip-smart, all-state clarinet, drum-major of the band, all-around nice guy, beloved by teachers and students alike. Jeremy got colon cancer last year in a California grad school, and died last week, a short year later. A friend, Hope, flew out to California to see him and reported that just three days before he died, he could still crack up a room. God bless him and all his grieving family and friends.
Transitions are bittersweet. The old life slips away. The new life begins. Just like that. It’s really wonderful. And sometimes a little scary. And sometimes you’ve worked so hard, and run so long, you just aren’t ready for the next leg of the journey. But ready or not, it’s time. It’s time to leave this home for a new one. We are made for the journey. In John Mark’s case, it will be to Baltimore. He’ll spend two years with Teach for America there, and maybe some grad work at Johns Hopkins.* Jeremy heads for a more distant shore—even as our hearts are full, carrying his heart, as we do, in ours.
Emily Dickinson so grieved the death of her parents that she wrote, “Home is so far from Home.”
Know the feeling?
Rachel and I drove 889.5 miles on Friday. It was a long day behind the wheel. Traffic was light. Many gas stations were out of gas, but we found the ones that were able to fill our tank. We wanted to get home because, well, it was time. We made the drive in one marathon day because we wanted to wake up in our own bed, and get to the Saturday Farmer’s Market and bump into fresh vegetables and old friends.
Emil Cobb, The Button Guy at the market, made us a refrigerator magnet of a picture of our boys and us sitting on a sunny, windswept deck at Murrell’s Inlet waiting for an early dinner. We were all smiles on that sunny day. And Rachel and I smiled as we watched Emil make our magnets as we waited. He serviced the soda machines at the University before he retired. We’ve been stopping by his booth for four years, every Saturday. He’s like family, as is Phil Strang in the booth on the same row; his new painting is of a rabbit. It’s hard for Rachel to like rabbits; they eat all the leaves off her flowers and tomatoes, but they’re part of the family, too.
Home includes these rabbits and Phil and Emil and you. Sometimes home is so far from home.
And sometimes home’s boundaries are so far flung it’s impossible ever to leave, no matter how far the journey takes you.
Thanks for sharing the journey with us.
Much love to you all.
Matt Matthews
* (Johns Hopkins’ brother (?), Ferdinand, sent money to the woman in Arkansas he read about in the Presbyterian Outlook who were picking cotton in order to raise funds to build a new sanctuary for the Presbyterian church in 1913. That was my first call out of seminary!)
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Weekday Email to Members and Friends – 2021-05-14
Friday, May 14th 2021
A Weekday Emailer from
Matt Matthews
To Members and Friends of
First Presbyterian Church
Champaign, Illinois
Dear Friends,
Here’s a Friday letter to you that I borrowed from Rev. Bill McLean, our Presbyter for Congregational Care of Southeastern Illinois Presbytery. It’s good food for thought.
I look forward to seeing you on Sunday.
* * *
This week a friend who serves a Presbyterian congregation in Indiana shared the story of a former member who had left the congregation and moved prior to the pandemic. Over the past year, this former member has reconnected with the congregation for a variety of pastoral and personal reasons.
While the person has not been physically with the congregation they have been supported through the connections and pastoral care provided virtually over the past year. This person now regularly participates in fellowship, learning and worship events from their home in another state.
It is a wonderful story, but the amazing thing is that this story is not unique to this one congregation. Similar stories are occurring in our presbytery and across the nation.
Individuals are connecting and reconnecting with congregations in new and meaningful ways. The excitement is not because someone is counted in a congregation’s ministry contacts for the past week, but because someone has been able to connect with God and God’s children in a new and meaningful way.
While the pandemic has meant changing how we interact with each other, it has not meant that we are not connected. It has just meant that we are connecting and reconnecting in alternative ways.
I am saying “alternative” intentionally because while the ways we are connecting may be new to us, they may be remarkably familiar to those of previous generations. While there are congregations who are worshipping virtually using technology platforms that I had never heard of, there are also congregations who are worshipping through pastoral letters like those used by the early church.
Scripture calls us to “O sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth.” (Psalm 96:1 NRSV). Sometimes the new song is completely new, like when we experiment with virtual connections. And sometimes the new song is modifying existing ways, like visiting with family members through the two sides of a window instead of sitting together in the living room.
Both are approaches of lifting a new song because both are ways to connect in meaningful ways. Even as we begin returning to some in person activities it is vital that we do not leave behind those who have been able to connect because of the new song we have sung this past year. It is important that we remain connected with those who gather in person and those we connect with us remotely.
What alternative ways have you found to connect in meaningful ways during the pandemic? And how will you keep singing these new songs in the weeks and months ahead?
Grace and peace,
Bill
Rev. William “Bill” McLean, II
Presbyter for Congregational Care
Presbytery of Southeastern Illinois
* * *
Much love to you all.
PEACE,
Matt Matthews
Cell: 864.386.9138
Matt@FirstPres.Church
* * *
News:
From your Nurture Team — Naomi Rempe was the first to correctly identify last week’s photo of Ginny Waaler.
Here’s this week’s photo.
Visit http://fb.com/groups/
Please join in the fun! We are running VERY LOW on photos, so we would like you to select a photo from your younger years (grade school, high school or early adulthood). Photos need not be professional. Candid shots are welcome. Please send your photos to photos@
* * *
Some great covers of old songs/ Higher Ground:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
A traveling (metaphysically) song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Music transcends. Watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Again…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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