Yarning to Care meets Monday, December 22, at 1pm in the Parlor.
Yarning to Care is a group of fiber artists which meets monthly to create prayer shawls and baby blankets. These items go to those who are ill or in bereavement and to the babies who are baptized at FCCR. You can also join us just for good conversation.
Contact the office, office@churchofreading.org, to be added to the distribution list for reminders and additional information. …
Our book group meets next on Tuesday, January 6, at 7:30pm on Zoom.
We’ll be reading Edmund de Waal’s acclaimed memoir, “The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance”, recounting the story of his inheritance from his great-uncle of a collection of 264 netsuke—small Japanese wood and ivory carvings. He traces his family’s history through this collection, from fin de siècle Paris to twentieth-century Vienna and postwar Tokyo.
Reach out to the church office at office @churchofreading.org to learn more or be added to the email reminder list.
Our Book Group meets next on Tuesday, December 2, via zoom. We’ll be discussing Table for Two by Amor Towles.
Table for Two is a collection of six short stories and a novella by the novelist Amor Towles. It was published by Viking Press in April 2024. The book is divided into two parts, with the six short stories connected to New York City and the novella set in Los Angeles.
Reach out to the church office at office@churchofreading.org to learn more or be added to the email reminder list.…
Reach out to the church office at office@churchofreading.org or 781-944-0205 to learn more.…
Food Insecurity has been in the news and at the top of our minds, so the timing of our November Food Drive couldn’t be better.
There are black shopping bags in the corner of the sanctuary, and shopping lists in your bulletin. These items are what the Reading and Lawrence food pantries have designated as most needed items. You can shop for the items on the list or purchase other nonperishables that are on sale to get the most for your money.
Suggestions:
The Food Pantries have asked that you don’t bring items in glass jars, but there are usually plenty of options in cans, plastics, or bottles.
Please fill a bag and bring it to the church by November 23rd when we will also be presenting a check to Simone Payment from the Reading Food Pantry. Thank you in advance!…
Our second all church read is “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” by John Koenig. Get the book and read it – discussion after church on November 16th!
Once again, the Mission Ministry will celebrate the arrival of the Christmas season with collections for vital local charities.
This year our first recipient will be the Coat and Holiday Shop, which benefits Greater Boston communities.
Subsequent collections will be the gathering of toiletries for Emmaus House, Inc., and of food and household items for the Reading Food Pantry. The main collection box will sit just inside the church Sanctuary.
Our collection schedule is as follows:
More specific details on the later collections will be posted closer to the dates. Thank you in advance for your participation and generosity in this holiday season!
After Church on November 23
Mark your calendars! Let’s give thanks together! 🦃🍽️
We are so excited to gather as a church family for our annual Thanksgiving Dinner!
Join us immediately following the worship service on Sunday, November 23rd, for food, fellowship, and celebration. It’s the perfect way to kick off the holiday season with your church community.
More details will be coming soon, but for now, please save this date! We can’t wait to see you there!
Dear Church,
“Pace e Bene!” Peace and good things! St Francis greeted everyone with this phrase, and today you can see it all over Assisi, his home. I just returned from a pilgrimage to Assisi where I spent a little over a week with 13 other clergywomen studying, discussing, and visiting the places and stories of St Francis and St Clare. I will share more about this trip during a presentation after church one Sunday (probably in January after the holidays). I’m still processing so much of this trip, and the depth of learning I experienced.
What I find most compelling about pilgrimage is the idea that for hundreds of years, millions of faithful people have physically walked the same steps. Pilgrimage is an embodied spiritual discipline where we physically visit and lay eyes on the material things associated with the Holy. For medieval pilgrims, the goal was to visit a specific place (the basilica de Santiago in Spain, where the remains of St. James are buried, or Jerusalem itself) to receive pardon for themselves or a loved one so that they would enter heaven and not suffer in purgatory. I may not hold the same theology as these medieval pilgrims, or even the pilgrims that I share the space with today. What I learned through this experience was that the practice (or “spiritual discipline”) of going on pilgrimage flexes the powerful muscle of imagination. It’s not an easy discipline (with all the change after centuries have passed and the modern world around us) but in each location, I found myself activating my imagination to summon up images of what these places looked like in the 13th century. For example, I could envision St Clare walking down the road outside our hostel, leaving her family and expectations of marriage, filled with devotion and conviction to follow a life of poverty like Francis. This took the books I read and turned historical fact into lived reality (a humbling experience).
The most challenging place we practiced this spiritual discipline was outside a teeny-tiny stone chapel without any windows off the side of a highway (and really, in the backyard of someone’s modern house and garden). Somehow, this little stone church continued to stand for nearly a millennia — throughout wars, industrialization, and modernization. There, under an overpass, we were invited to imagine a medieval Lepersarium: a whole complex of buildings and community for the lepers outside of the city of Assisi. Here, regardless of whether you were born into nobility or poverty, all were rendered equal by leprosy. While they lived outside the city, they were not alone; loved ones would visit and bring food, and Francis and his brothers would care for them. They would have said mass in this …
