If singing is a spiritual experience for you, we invite you to try a Sunday singing in our choir.  We have the extraordinary opportunity to be conducted and accompanied by Annemieke McLane, who makes every piece in the service a deeply moving spiritual event.  One Sunday a month or so she is off giving concerts in other parts of the world, but this Sunday she will be with us, so come by at 9:00 AM if you would like to sing and have fun doing it with a group of wonderful neighbors.  Annemieke’s Youth Choir meets after worship, starting at 11:15 AM.

This Sunday the service will reflect on what it means to be a community following the sacred way as defined by the Hebrew scriptures and refined by Jesus Christ.  What happens when two or more are gathered seeking the Holy Spirit’s guidance and power?  What benefits come to us as individuals and a local community by our doing so, and what benefits does the world gain?  Can it help us in a time of global danger and upheaval, or a time of personal struggle?

The children will hear the story of the first Passover from Exodus 12:1-14. We will read the prophet Ezekiel calling us to be a sentinel warning a world gone wrong to come back to the sacred way.  We will read a Native American prayer asking the Spirit’s help with that.  We will hear Paul remind us that the one and only rule we need is to love, and that there is great urgency that we live by that rule now.  We will hear Jesus promise that wherever we gather, however few we are, he is there with us.  We will hear encouragement from the great Quaker hero, John Woolman, and Henry David Thoreau, Donella Meadows and Margaret Mead, and our own teacher, the late Frances Wilson.

We will sing the uplifting Robert Schumann tune to the hymn “Lord, Speak to Me That I May Speak,” and the popular Spanish folk hymn “Sois la Semilla (You Are the Seed)” as well as a recent hymn set to the beautiful tune Hyfrydol.  The choir will sing the Hopi prayer, “Spirit, Hear My Prayer,” a verse of the hymn “Many Gifts, One Spirit” and “My Heart Is Ready” by the Amidons of southern Vermont.  Annemieke will play a Chopin Nocturne, a J. S. Bach Invention and a Brahms Intermezzo.