Pastor Annette's Blog
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"OF ALL THE THINGS GOD HAS SHOWN ME, I CAN SPEAK BUT A LITTLE WORD . . . NOT MORE THAN A HONEYBEE CAN CARRY AWAY ON ITS FOOT FROM AN OVERFLOWING JAR."
~ MECHTHILD OF MAGDEBURG, 13TH CENTURY MYSTIC |
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May 28, 2024 Beloved: My little yard took a beating from Sunday’s rain but has recovered beautifully. Finally there are hummingbirds, one anyway. May 28th feels late but maybe they were shy to come around until now. I’ve started a new feed in a little pan feeder called Birdacious Bugs & Bits to which the bluebirds are flocking. Both my new bluebird houses contain well-built stick nests but no birds, which is a mystery. Maybe the families were called away, or found a better set-up elsewhere.
vine. I’ll pick basil in a few days. Someone apparently switched the plant tags because my cucumber claimed to be a bush variety which it most definitely is not. I may just let it crawl all over the boxwood shrub it’s so determined to befriend.
As you go about your day, I pray you find some time to spend in the springtime light and air. Of course, pray for the world as you go. The news abroad is as bad as it can be. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette
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May 21, 2024 Beloved ~ Pittsburgh is further than six and half hours away on the map of my mind, while in reality it’s a little better than halfway to Philadelphia. It rests in the western crags and curves of the Appalachian mountain range, with more in common with West Virginia coal and textile communities than east coast cities. The dead steel mills have been replaced with software companies, full of workers who ride their bikes to riverside* office buildings. I also didn’t expect it to be so beautiful. Those 19th century industrialists and bankers built schools, parks, museums and churches and filled them with art. They gave them to the city, for anyone to enjoy for free – though the upkeep costs are staggering – and as a legacy to themselves.
listening to the music and the prayers. The relief and restoration such full-on sensuous worship must have allowed. I hope and pray, at least, for them and for me. I expect they also struggled to put aside their worries, not the least of which were financial. How frustrating to be given a cathedral, when higher wages and decent working conditions would have been their own relief and restoration, if not so soaring a legacy for a single family. That kind of worry must surely distract from one’s worship, even in the most beautiful of spaces.
An industrialist’s motives aside, I find something holy about these sacred spaces smack dab in the middle of cities positively teeming with humanity. All that hustling capitalism and the poverty it generates, people working at jobs they love or hate or tolerate, the poor and broken down just trying to survive. So much constant activity, and every day all that humanity passes by these cathedrals housing the open, sacred space in which all are welcome to come and sit and rest and breathe and pray and know that what goes on outside those walls is not all that’s true in this world. These spaces testify to the reality of a peace and quiet below all the noise and trauma of this life, of relief and healing from the damage experienced, and forgiveness for damage inflicted. They testify to that path of reparation, redemption and restoration for those willing to come into these sacred spaces and submit to the way community works within these walls. Even if the walls are made of 1990’s sheetrock, not 1902 stonework. Within those walls is quiet and peace. Relief and restoration is there, in the palpable Spirit of the Creator who made the mountains and the rivers and our very selves. That same spirit binds us to one another and to the rest of creation in ways that make a city we’ve barely thought about a place that welcomes us like a neighbor if we are open enough to be so welcomed. All of which is to say, I started my conference itchy and uncomfortable and finished it soothed and grateful for the experience of worship and community I treasure every year in May. I’ve come home to the most beautiful weather and a yard that is exploding with life. I pray the day is treating you kindly and you have the chance to get outside. I hope to see you tomorrow night at church supper. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette *The Ohio River is formed in Pittsburgh, where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers converge. **East Liberty Presbyterian Church ~ https://cathedralofhope.org/ . Cost to build in 1935 - $4M. In 2024 - $91.5M. This amount reflects inflation only. Calvary Episcopal Church - https://www.calvarypgh.org/art-and-architecture May 7, 2024 Beloved: I was buying some lengths of PVC pipe and asked the cashier if she knew the best way to cut them. Ron, another Habitat Restore volunteer, overheard and offered to help. He sold me a hacksaw for $1.50 and explained how to use it and how to replace the blade. Here’s a picture of my new container garden, in the only sunny spot of my little yard.  Yesterday I got really ambitious and wondered if I could cut the dead half of a serviceberry tree. Yes, as it turns out, and I didn’t even hurt myself. I still need to cut up the base branch into some manageable lengths, but turns out I am an entirely left-handed sawyer, so it takes me a minute to get through a log thick as the fat end of a baseball bat. The better part of that tiny tale is not that I can cut down the dead half of a tree but, rather, the amazing efficacy of a sturdy old hacksaw. The handle is wrapped in duct tape. The blade needs replaced, according to Ron, and will definitely cost more than the saw did. Yet it went through that wood more easily than a table knife through cold butter. I did a quick search and learned this: “. . . the modern hacksaw owes a great deal to Max Flower-Nash Clemson. He conducted a series of experiments in the 1880s looking at ways to increase the efficiency of saw blades via heat treatments and by changing the size and number of embedded teeth. He was eventually granted an official patent for his improvements.” Which got me to thinking about tools in general: the tackle of our everyday lives so embedded in our routines we only notice them when they skip or fail. Utensils, gadgets and machines; from irons to airplanes, even baby bottles, constantly being reengineered to do what they do better. Max Flower-Nash Clemson (I’m itching to know how he got that name!) needed a better saw for cutting metal, so he built one with wavy teeth, which turned out to cut plastic better than anything on the market. On the push instead of on the pull, which was also kind of revolutionary too, apparently. Behind it all, an ingenuity we are quick to consider human, but is present throughout creation. An orangutan chewed a plant and rubbed the medicine paste on his own nasty facial wound. It healed completely within a month and left me in the same place I so often am ~ the land of amazement ~ at the wonder of it all. People, plants and animals channeling the wisdom of the Creator within our own construction, rearranging elements to suit whatever needs arise along the course of our existence. To say the least, amazing. An invitation out the door into the yard. Lay a string around a patch of grass and see what goes on within its border. Grab a magnifying glass and look some more. A whole universe beneath our shoes. I can barely stand it. I pray this glorious day finds you heart and hands to the tasks that give your life meaning. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette |
I write a Tuesday morning devotional to members and friends of UBC. It is also posted here.
Enjoy! Pastor Annette Copyright
Everything on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons license, which gives you permission to copy freely, provided that you attribute the work to me, that you use the work for non-commercial purposes, and that you do not produce derivative works. Archives
June 2025
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