From the Rector's Desk

Dear friends,

Under separate cover, you have by now received the announcement of all the events in Holy Week and at Eastertide. I commend them all to you and urge you particularly to give attention to these:

Maundy Thursday – 6:30 p.m.

Good Friday – 12:30 p.m.   

The Easter Vigil – Saturday Night at 8:00 p.m.

These are the liturgies which proclaim and enact the mysteries on which our faith is focused and upon which our hope resides, and I urge you to attend them.

I also write to call your attention to an art showing which should be an excellent way of keeping Holy Week. Douglas Blanchard, who is a member of our parish, has opened a show on the Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision, which will run through 17 April at the Leslie Lohman Foundation, 127B Prince Street. I do commend it to you and urge you to consider attending this presentation. It has been the vocation of artists through the centuries to restate the events of the Christian faith in the idiom and the culture of their own day. This kind of reconsideration is what gives us Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation in which Mary appears to be not a first century Jew, but a 15 th century Italian.

The theological point thus made is this: The incarnation, passion, death and resurrection of Jesus is an event which speaks in all times and to all people. Douglas Blanchard has created a similar reconsideration of the event, suggesting that the same kind of restatement can apply to the contemporary world of gay men and women.

On another artistic subject, the parish is currently planning to receive several paintings for the parish hall by Peggy Anderson, a noted Village artist. She is a member of the Abingdon Square Painters, the same group to which our own friend Jeanne Morrow belongs. Peggy Anderson visits Italy from time to time and her paintings, which are delicately crafted works in what appears to me to be the impressionist tradition, often reflect that culture. We are grateful to Judy Albert who has offered the paintings, and to Jeanne and all her friends at Abingdon Square Painters who continue to keep alive the artistic tradition which is such a part of our history and tradition in the Village. And, at St. John's.

The parish directory is being prepared, as it always is in the winter or spring of each year. Soon there will be a draft directory for you to look at and I hope that all of you—each and every one of you, please—will consider your own entry and be sure to add these essential items:

Your e-mail address

Your birth month and day

We would like to accomplish more and more of our parish publicity by email and we want to remember you in our prayers at your birthday. Having this essential data will enable these two projects to move forward.

Please note, too, the plans for the next unemployment workshop in May, which will be here sooner than you know. And note the advertisement for the class with Rabbi Goldstein and the offer of his new book for your advance consideration.

Faithfully,

The Rev’d Lloyd E. Prator
Rector