You may recall Sarah Beauchamp’s wonderful story about her recent trip toSri Lanka. If you missed it, you can read it here, on our blog:

Transforming the Lives of Deaf Children

If you are moved by her story, and would like to donate, here are instructions from Brenna Beaver, our financial administrator:

If people would like to donate online for Sri Lanka, these are the steps necessary:

Go to the SSEC website: http://www.ststephenshouston.org

Click on “Donate to St. Stephen’s.”

Login or create an account.

Click on “Give Now” at the bottom of the page.

Enter the amount to give, choose Special Offering and in the comment box type “Sri Lanka”.

Choose payment method and process.

One of the highlights, besides walking up to the top of Sigiriya (Lion’s Rock in Sinhalese), was meeting Deaf Sri Lankan children at Rohana Special School, where we volunteered.   We did an ASL storytelling time and arts & crafts with them. The students were absolutely delightful, creative and very well-behaved. Before we worked with them on projects, we took a tour around the school, where they sleep, eat and learn.   As I’ve traveled to many different places, it was not a terrible sight to see. It was well kept and organized. They do have beds to sleep on. They have a place to eat. But, they do not have proper classroom facilities; this has hindered their learning process.

We as a team decided to take on a fundraising project to raise money to allow Rohana to build more classrooms for secondary level students, so teachers wouldn’t have to share a classroom at the same time. As we say, the gift of education is pretty powerful, and it goes the same at Rohana Special School (http://www.rohanaspecialschool.org/).

The Vestry of St. Stephen’s has agreed to let me use our website to ask for your help, and to forward as you see fit to your network. I am trying to raise $1000, as my share of the goal. Next week on the church website, there will be a link to give, if you’d like.

- Sarah Beauchamp

So I have decided to use this forum as a way to explore and share Christian faith.  “Apologia” is the traditional word for a defense or presentation of a belief or truth.  I also recognize that Christians have much to apologize for in the usual sense My point here is to engage, not to proselytize .  While I don’t share the “whiteness” of many hipsters, I do get the ironic perspective on the world, a longing for greater authenticity and purpose–apart from commercial value.

I use “hipsterati” as a way of interacting with those who value ideas, beauty, individuality, and novelty.  I share a common longing with those who seek the edgy places and ideas; who want honesty and to care truly for their neighborhoods in urban, evolving places.

So I begin this walk around faith in my neighborhood.

The Reverend Lisa Hunt

The island’s dark tonight.
The radio crackles with static, news
of a blackout, the voice
coming through first loud, then soft,
as if a storm were moving
to cut all lifelines off. My one-room
cabin has a bed, a table, a chair.
Living this way, I understand better
that scene by an anonymous
illuminator: a row of monks
eating at a rough table, diagonals
of light slicing across the room
to fall, as if by accident,
on their simple meal. The black
and white tiles on the floor
a symbol of the formal repetitions
of the simplest life, or maybe
an oblique allusion to a paradox
of theology: the complementary nature
of good and evil. Is evil possible here
where everyone lives so individually
and nature appears to be neutral
toward everything but itself?
Some mornings I wake too suddenly,
the light on the wall
brilliant and unfamiliar, and wonder
for a moment, where am I?
I answer myself, my disembodied voice
high and far off
like what I imagine saints and martyrs
heard in moments of ecstasy: Swan’s Island.
Lightheaded, I rise, make coffee,
settling into the simple ceremony
of another morning. Outside the sea birds
pick the clam flats clean, fly off,
returning late in the afternoon
looking for more to scavenge.
Good days, I swim in the quarry,
sun myself on the rocks, and plan
a diary. One entry: I feel
this place to be a rough approximation
of heaven, the heaven of the lost …
But then I wonder if a diary
would be superfluous and put it off.

Days pass here, weeks slip away,
and even when it isn’t,
it seems to be Sunday,
irreal, subdued, the queer, slowed-down
feeling of late afternoon
spreading through the hours
of an entire day. Impersonal, yet benign,
the sun rains indiscriminately down
on everything, instead of singling out
particular objects, so that
even the rocks out by the tide line,
normally gray-brown, become heightened,
false, and I have to turn away.

Sometimes the lobstermen wave to me.
I must seem frivolous to them,
an outsider, with my pants rolled up
to the knees, standing knee-deep in water,
a shell or rock in my hands.
We have a code. I wave a white
handkerchief above my head,
they blow their foghorns back.
Once means the mail’s in,
twice, a storm by afternoon,
three times, the weather
will clear by evening.
But really, after a month
in a place like this, there’s no use
to wonder why the sea does this or that,
what time it is, or whether
the approaching storm will be a bad one.
If I think of anything here,
it’s the peculiar way
the sea gets into everything,
softening the crackers I seal
in an airtight jar, rotting the armchair
where I sit in the evening,
looking into the evening’s afterlight.
It smells peculiar, damp,
as if it had been tossed overboard
from a dory, thought better of,
and hastily retrieved.

I have a fantasy: to walk on water.
Not eastward, the Atlantic far out
scares me, but long, island-hopping
giant steps up and down
the coast the way as a child
I’d make my “two-legged” compass
walk the map. Walking to school
a thousand winter mornings,
I imagined each thought, each step,
an exercise in good and evil;
or, after confession, I’d cup
my hands around my breath,
saved for an hour, knowing I’d sin
again, the scars on my soul
whitening like the scars on my hands
where I burnt them on the stove.
Swan’s Island. A world
existing side by side with yours,
where love struggles to perfect
itself, and finally perfect,
finds it has no object.
The waking dream’s intact-
the world continues not to change,
and staying the same, changes us.
Elizabeth Spires, “Letter from Swan’s Island” from Swan’s Island (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997). Copyright © 1985 by Elizabeth Spires. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: Swan’s Island (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1997)

$12 = 1 NET = 3 LIVES

The Diocese of Texas has partnered with NetsforLife® and Episcopal Relief and Development to distribute insecticide-treated nets in remote regions of sub-Saharan Africa. Our goal is to have each family in the diocese donate at least one net in 2011.  One $12 treated net can last up to five years and saves three lives.

Every day in Malawi, more than 110 people die of malaria – nearly half of them under the age of 18.  Throughout Africa, 3,000 children die each day from this disease. Malaria is still Africa’s biggest killer of children. Almost 50 percent of deaths among children under the age of 5 are attributable to malaria and every year 300-500 million people are infected with this deadly yet preventable disease.

Even when the illness is not fatal, it has serious socio-economic implications.  Frequent bouts with malaria mean that families have little time to tend the food needed to raise strong, healthy children.

The most effective way to prevent malaria is through the distribution of mosquito nets.  Since 2002, more than 4 million insecticide-treated nets have been distributed in Malawi where the Diocese of Texas has a partnership relationship with the Diocese of Southern Malawi.

Watch a video, learn more and make your donation at: www.inspirationfund.org.

Episcopal Relief & Development’s NetsforLife^® Inspiration Fund is a three-year, grassroots campaign to raise awareness and support for the NetsforLife^® program partnership, which distributes insecticide-treated nets and provides malaria prevention and other health education in 17 sub-Saharan countries.  The NetsforLife^® Inspiration Fund website has resources for congregations and dioceses to start their own local campaigns, and staff provide support and tools to help organizers succeed.

To receive the NetsforLife^® Inspiration Fund newsletter, email Chad Brinkman at cbrinkman@er-d.org or sign up at the top right of their homepage.

This season after the Epiphany we have been focusing on letting our lights shine.  Our focus has been on the world—how we may serve in Jesus’ name.

One of the best gifts I got this Christmas was a heavy duty purse-sized flashlight.  I thought at the time that it was kind of a curious prize—I would never think to buy such a thing for myself, let alone to give to someone else.  It was the size and heft of an industrial can of mace.

It turned out to be fantastic.  After all, when you or someone else is in the dark, there is no substitute for light.  This is obvious literally.  But it true figuratively as well.

If a group or oneself, for that matter, is gripped by fear, hate, ignorance or prejudice, light is the very thing that dispels the fog.  Light may take the form of laughter, joy, information, poetry, action, kindness.  Where there is light there is no darkness.

As we head into Lent, let’s not forget the wisdom of the season after the Epiphany and shine on!

If this is true about your family today…Remember

¹⁶See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me.

Isaiah 49:16