Here is our weekly collection plate of a few of the good things that Episcopalians and their congregations have done that made the news this past week. And other news fit to print.
Then we found out he was also an Episcopal Priest who had recently bought the saloon and, I suspect, been responsible for toning down the crowd.
Now, Don [The Rev. Don Belcher] and Gloria, his wife of 25 years and retired investment counselor, co-manage the place. Don tends bar and Gloria cooks, does the books, and plays classical jazz on the piano for evening entertainment. On their website, they describes the new Dirty Shame as “an attractive bistro,” and it seems to fit.
My mild disappointment didn’t last long. I ordered up a Dirty Shame Burger and an IPA, followed shortly by a huckleberry sundae. I suppose it might have something to do with just riding a hundred miles on my bicycle, but all three were so tasty, I considered doing it again.
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Youth mission trip: teaching and learning
St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Ankeny, Iowa, sent members on a mission trip from July 23 to Aug. 1 at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Kyle, S.D. The group took part in offering a vacation Bible school to about 140 Lakota youths. St. Anne’s college intern says that “Every year this trip makes me a better person, growing up as a young adult. It builds me up to be a more mature person.”
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L.A. church harvests fruit for the hungry
Driving to and from Holy Nativity Episcopal Church’s community garden in the Westchester neighborhood of Los Angeles, volunteers noticed backyard trees producing more fruit than one household could consume. A light went on and Harvest Westchester was born. “We have a community garden at the church, and an outgrowth of the garden is to take everything produced there to a food bank,” said Christine Budzowski, coordinator of Holy Trinity’s community garden and the Harvest Westchester program. “People started to think about the trees filled with fruit as they were driving in to work in the community garden. We wanted to find a way to deal with that — to harvest the excess fruit and take it to the food bank.” Photo/Christine Budzowski
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Episcopal priest finds the SummerFest poetry divine
Eleanor Ellsworth has a few favorite lines in Mark Strand’s “Poem After the Seven Last Words.”
They are in the final canto, where the poet dedicates himself to “a place of constant beginning that has within it what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand has touched, what has not arisen in the human heart … ”
“This really gets to me emotionally,” Ellsworth said. “When I said my morning prayers this morning, that’s what I said. And that’s the thing about poetry; if you spend enough time with it, it becomes part of your spiritual DNA, part of what you live.”
The Rev. Ellsworth, priest-in-residence for church and the world ministries at St. James Episcopal Church in La Jolla, will be narrating Strand’s poem as part of a SummerFest “Poetry and Divinity” program, including Haydn’s “The Seven Last Words of Christ.”
Strand was commissioned by the Brentano String Quartet to provide text inspired by Jesus’ seven final pronouncements for inclusion in performances of Haydn’s work. He has read his poem for several of the Brentano’s performances, including earlier this year at Carnegie Hall.
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