a word from robin . feb 2007

2007 Lenten Study Series: "This I Believe"

Every January I announce the selection of a book to be used in my annual Lenten Adult Study Series. This year, we are doing something very different but we are still using a book! It is a collection of 80 essays detailing the essential beliefs of Americans from all walks of life in the awarding-winning NPR series, “This I Believe.”

If you are an NPR junkie like me, you’ve heard them, and if not, you will be moved by them. “This I Believe,” represents the return of a radio series started by Edward R. Murrow in 1951, when the famed journalist worried America was being driven by fear. This is what Murrow said when he inaugurated the series in days of the Korean War, nuclear nightmares, and anti-communist hysteria:

“We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion -- a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply.

All around us, now high like a distant thunderhead, now close upon us with the wet choking intimacy of a London fog, there is an enveloping cloud of fear. There is physical fear, the kind that drives some of us to flee our homes and burrow into the ground in the bottom of a Montana valley like prairie dogs, to try to escape, if only for a little while, the sound and the fury of the A-bombs or the hell-bombs, or whatever may be coming.

There is a mental fear, which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor’s yard and stampedes us to burn down the house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we had long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging. It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong.”

Murrow goes on to say in such times it becomes urgently necessary to hear the personal philosophies of thoughtful women and men from all walks of life. “In this brief time each night,” he wrote, “a banker or a butcher, a painter or a social worker, people of all kinds who need nothing more in common than integrity, a real honesty will talk out loud about the rules they live by, the things they have found to be the basic values of their lives.”

For fives minutes each day, American heard just that -- from everyday people to famous ones -- Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Keller, Jackie Robinson and Albert Einstein, and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

In 2005 NPR brought the series back and created a national media project to engage people in writing, sharing, and discussing core values and beliefs that guide their daily lives. Three minutes in length, the essays are read by their authors on “Morning Edition,” and “All Things Considered.”

These essays, and the idea of “credo” will guide our Lenten Study Series. What beliefs do we all seem to share, and how does a variety of lived experiences modify, change, and even replace our old beliefs? Where do core religious beliefs come from, and why are they so often largely unexamined? If we were given three minutes to say what we really believe, what would we say?

The actual NPR recordings will be used in our class sessions and in the sermons preached from the class experience. At Mayflower we won’t simply discuss what we are supposed to believe, or what we think society expects us to believe, but what we truly believe. The series and the sermons will culminate with Easter of course -- and a rare moment to express what we really believe about the mystery of that moment. This is where a free pulpit comes in handy!

The books are ordered and will soon be available at Jean Barnes Gift and Book, 2717 N.W. 50th, just east of the N.W. 50th and N. May Ave. intersection. The class will take place on Wednesdays, 7 - 8:30 p.m. in the large Sunday School classroom of the Education Wing beginning Feb. 21, which is Ash Wednesday. A sign up sheet will be available in Milligan Hall. We ask that you PLEASE sign up if you intend to take the class. Additionally, please indicate if you have children who will need child care during the class. 

Grace and peace,

Robin

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