Save the Date
SUNDAY, APRIL 27, 2014, 5:00 to 8:00 PM AT GRACE CHURCH

Theme
"Louisiana Bayou Bash." Little Red and the Renegades will fill the sanctuary with the rhythms of zydeco music, and some of you might be moved to dance! Lots of good Cajun-style food to enjoy, too, and games with prizes.

Purpose

The Gala raises money for the Saving Grace Fund, established some 30 years ago to support maintenance, repair and restoration of Grace's buildings and grounds. This year, the focus is on the front of the church proper, its "façade." 

Stone arches around the façade's windows and doors are crumbling. These arches are key to the church's structural integrity, and their deterioration will pose a safety hazard, too, if the problem isn't addressed. You may have noticed netting already in place over the upper windows, to hold the stone in place.

Plan

We've retained Aeon Preservation as consultants on this project. Their principal advisor for our project is Alfonso Narvaez, son of an Episcopal priest and multi-term Junior Warden of Christ Church, Broad Creek!

They have formulated a restoration plan, to be executed by Lepore and Sons, a stone restoration company located in Pennsylvania. Graphic illustrations of the work to be done will be on display in the church and Parish Hall in the weeks leading up to the Gala.

Cost

Estimated total cost for restoration of the façade, or "west elevation," is almost $150,000. And that's just the beginning - restoration of the stone on the north and south "elevations" of the church will cost over $200,000 each. 

A surplus of funds built up over the past ten years will help us pay to get the work started, but we will have to work hard to raise funds to replenish the Saving Grace fund for the north and south restorations.

How to help
First - purchase tickets for the Gala, come, and have fun! Invitations with RSVP cards will arrive mid- to late March. The ticket price, as in prior years, will be $100 per person and $175 per couple. 

Second - if you can make a commitment beyond ticket purchase, please consider doing so. Levels and benefits are:

• Sponsor: $1,400; includes 4 tickets to the event and special listing in the program ($1,200 tax deductible contribution)
• Supporter: $700; includes to tickets to the event and special listing in the program ($600 tax deductible contribution)

Higher-level sponsorships are especially needed and welcome this year. 

Third - help out with the Silent Auction, historically the biggest source of revenue for the Gala. Ways to help: 

• If you can offer a service (assistance with household organization and computer repair and refurbishing have been popular items in the past, as have specially-prepared food and live music for social gatherings)
• if you like your hair salon, fitness club, or some other business you patronize and they're willing to donate a gift certificate
• if you have tickets to a sporting or theater event and are willing to donate them

If you can donate, contact Gala co-chair Scott Murphy or Silent Auction chair Ari Lynn Tonini. They'll be glad to hear from you!

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We're delighted to have Gala veterans Helen Buhr and Scott Murphy as co-chairs of this event, and an outstanding committee consisting of Peyton Craighill, Junior Warden Diana Dick, Paige Hill, Christina Kreutziger, Janet Sale, Ari Lynn Tonini and Crystal Upperman.

And as always, we're very grateful to those who have served in the past, especially last year's co-chairs Hillary Liebtag and Jane Mosbacher Morris, who've moved to (respectively) New York City and Lexington, Kentucky, along with Megan Ching and Tass Hudak, who've moved to Texas. We miss you, Jane, Hillary, Megan and Tass.

We will be rolling out our new Sunday School curriculum for Lent. We are in Year One, which is entitled Weaving our Faith. 

The theme of the lessons will focus on "God loves us and stays with us-no matter what-to bring us back to God's divine love." Isn't that an incredible promise for our children to share in? As we explore this promise we will review the life of Christ leading up to his Resurrection. 

To highlight some of the principles of Jesus's teachings, we will:

1. do a service project with Grace's Table in conjunction with the story of feeding the multitude
2. create a mosaic of rice to visually represent Jesus's Transfiguration, and
3. hopefully for Palm Sunday we will have enough students to create a video reenactment.

These are only a few of the great things we will be doing in Sunday School during this season.

These activities are only possible with the right support. We still need volunteers to teach. If you cannot commit to a whole month, even a week would still be big help. Please email me if you are interested in helping out. 

Jose Marti: "Once the United States is in Cuba, who will get it out?" 1889

We were asked either: "Why would you want to go to Cuba?" or "How did you get to go there?" by those who clearly shared our joy at this adventure.

We were 23 pilgrims with the DC based Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, an ecumenical group of lay people and clergy. We followed Thomas Merton who visited Cuba in 1940 after he became a Catholic, in order to explore the island's spiritual riches. 

Our aim was to connect with the people in Cuba, see the island, and, like Merton, discover its spiritual riches. Our first stop was Matanzas. Here is the only ecumenical Protestant seminary on the island, supported largely by the Reformed Presbyterian church  in the U.S.  

We gathered for prayer, for centering exercises, for hearing and writing poems, for small group reflection, and we found ourselves connecting deeply to one another. The seminary sponsors an organic farm. The Cuban government is said to be very supportive of preserving the environment. The Presbyterian church provides clean water for the seminary through its Agua Viva program. 

We soon got to know the women crocheters who offered their exquisite handmade stoles, purses, and wraps. They had been taught to crochet by the women in the seminary and now share their profits with groups that support Aids education. Many of us brought home a crocheted stole for our priests. 

Cuba is beautiful.  Beauty, however, can be dangerous when it creates desire. Christopher Columbus didn't mince words: "The fairest island human eyes have yet beheld...It is certain that where there is such marvelous scenery, there must be much more from which profit can be made."  

What follows are centuries of exploitation of natural resources first by the Spanish and, after 1898, the Americans who decided that Cuba was theirs for the taking because of geographic proximity and therefore clearly within the area covered by the Monroe doctrine. It seems nobody ever asked the Cubans what they wanted. 

It is necessary to understand the history of so much foreign domination in Cuba which caused the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro. To this day, Castro's socialist regime which displaced the former owners of wealth and power is the subject of fierce emotions, especially in Little Havana, the Cuban enclave in Miami. We did not go to Cuba for its politics, but for solidarity with its people.  

That came about beautifully and movingly at the time of our bilingual retreat. About 18 Cuban lay and clergy prison chaplains traveled to see us, at times 15 hours in rickety buses, and stayed for two days. We ate together, we again sang, danced, and prayed together, we showed pictures of our children and grandchildren (they all like baseball), and we had an opportunity for getting a glimpse into each other's lives.  

"So what do the people in Washington think of the embargo?" One man asked me through one of our interpreters. We answered that outside of Miami many, perhaps most Americans didn't support the embargo and welcomed more contact and trade and travel. 

I then described what my group, the Episcopal Peace Fellowship, is doing which includes witnessing in front of the White House (ok unless you touch the fence) or the CIA, and proclaiming our opposition to torture, Guantanamo, drones, another war, among other things. As I was talking, my listener's eyes grew big and bigger: Those activities are not permitted in Cuba.  

While we were there, a large conference of Latin American nations convened in Havana, under the leadership of U.N. General Secretary Ban Ki Moon, to declare a statement of non aggression with one another. During that time, opposition activists in Havana were put under house arrest or actually imprisoned.  

Amnesty International accuses Cuba of being the only Caribbean nation that has POCs, or prisoners of conscience. Yes, Cuba is a dictatorship with one party rule and no opposition. But, and in Cuba there is always a "but", it appears... Cubans enjoy free education and free health care. The country has an extraordinarily high literacy rate. The arts are flourishing, and religion is no longer outlawed. In fact, churches are providing social services for children and seniors, and they also served as a dispensary for the medicines foreign visitors like us had brought.  

Our pilgrimage concluded with four days in Old Havana, a World Heritage site. The city is resplendent with Spanish style buildings, the magnificent "sea wall "which serves as boulevard for Havanans doing whatever, reading flirting, drinking, fishing.  

We saw the black madonna and her worshippers. Many are adherents of santería, the African style religion which runs alongside Christian worship, as we were told. 

Raúl Castro, Fidel's brother, has loosened economic restrictions.  It is now possible to run a private business, a bed and breakfast or restaurant, for example. Everything else is state owned. 

Members of our pilgrimage group hope, and pray with the Cuban people, that this will continue, and that the enmity between Cubans in Miami and their friends and relations in Cuba will give way to the realization that, more than anything else, we are brothers and sisters of one another, and that embargoes, and sanctions, are not a way toward peace, but toward driving people apart.