If you are looking for more, then check the link to Ready, Click, Grow Your Faith for personal help in growing in your own faith and understanding.

The book opens as the Searcher, a raccoon, returns to Old Tree after a night of scavenging. Belly full, he climbs into the arms of Old Tree and falls deeply asleep. Throughout the day, a powerful storm swells the sea and shakes the ground. Fierce winds threaten to pull Old Tree up from the roots, but can’t. Old Tree holds firm and the Searcher sleeps through the storm, peacefully oblivious.

Old Tree is not simply a “giving” tree. Old Tree is a symbol of strength, protection, shelter, selflessness, and unconditional love. A twist at the end shows the Searcher is not oblivious to Old Tree’s generosity. They seem to honor each other in their nurturing relationship. One can draw parallels to any caring relationship, but particularly parents and children and our relationship with God.

Mr. McPhail tenderly conveys a symbiotic relationship featuring protection, gratitude, acceptance, and mutual kindness.

Encourage new parents, reassure a child, or simply tell someone you’ll always be there for them. Give them a copy of The Searcher and Old Tree.

The season of Advent, more than any other time in the church year, invites us to embrace the spiritual discipline of waiting. This Advent season, explore in community those things you are awaiting and the ways in which you await them, and discover spirituality inherent in the process of waiting. This group, facilitated by Amanda Akes, will creatively use Holly Whitcomb’s book, Seven Spiritual Gifts of Waiting, to create space for meditation, reflection, and discussion. Whitcomb’s book is not required for participation. Childcare will be provided.

We will be meeting in the Parish Hall on
December 9 at 7 pm
December 17 at 7 pm

For centuries, composers have been inspired by the richness of Mary’s life journey from obscure poverty to exaltation as the Queen of Heaven. Vox Lucens performs luminous a cappella music from the Renaissance, including works about Mary’s mother, Anne; angelic announcements of the births of John the Baptist and Jesus; the visit of the three kings; Mary’s ordeal at the foot of the cross; the resurrection; and Mary’s assumption into heaven.

Highlights include Palestrina’s double-choir Ave Regina Caelorum, Victoria’s exciting Gabriel Archangelus, Gabrieli’s uplifting Magnificat, Lassus’ heart-rending Stabat Mater, and Guerrero’s triumphant Exaltata Est.

Vox Lucens is a 14-member vocal ensemble that came together in 1998 to explore the Renaissance sacred and secular a capella repertoire. For more on the group, visit their website: www.voxlucens.net.

Free-will offerings accepted; all proceeds will go to Church of Our Saviour.

First up, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, a plainspoken book that extends the ideas first presented in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan heads straight into the confusion created by government sponsored nutritionists about the composition of a supposedly healthy diet. He distrusts this advice, pointing out that the political and economic winds seem to blow the healthy diet in different directions from year to year, depending at least on the most recent successful lobbyists. Simplicity and localness are his guide and he encourages us to spend more time and money on food, growing it ourselves, finding it grown locally, and preparing it at home. Michael Pollen lives in Berkeley, CA and is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Enough said.

Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, by Michael Hallowell takes a strong position on the virtue of locally grown food. He explains the environmental consequences of food shipped all over the world in considerable detail. After reading this book, you will never happily eat a papaya in Boston in December again.

Weighing in to challenge the romance of locally grown food is Just Food by James E. McWilliams. “It’s so much sexier to reiterate the mantra of eating local, growing rooftop gardens, foraging for wild dandelion balls, and keeping backyard hens. And this is wonderful. We can keep things local—we should keep things local—but we must also stop insisting that our behavior is, if universalized, a viable answer to the world’s present and future problems,” he writes. McWilliams’ critique of the current assumptions of the “green culture” makes for thought-provoking reading.

For those who like to digest their issues wrapped in a good story, pick up Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: A Year of Food Life. Co-written with her husband and daughter, it chronicles one family’s experience eating exclusively locally in Appalachia. It’s a wonderful story with short segues to inform you on the issues and great recipes to make the whole topic more palatable.

For hungry readers, all four books provide food for thought.

St. Mary’s Food Bank, Feeding America, Food For Free, Boston Area Gleaners, and the Society of St. Andrew are all examples of efforts to glean leftover or wasted food and use it to feed the hungry. The USDA has a webpage about gleaning which is a resource guide on food recovery programs for businesses, community-based profit or nonprofit organizations, private citizens, and public officials. Check them out.