Our library in Hewett Centre is open every Sunday after service during Coffee Hour, and now the Library Team will be offering related reading lists based on the topic of Sunday service. Here is their list for the upcoming service.
VanU library books related to this Sunday’s sermon:
1. Shoreline – Water Poems, from the Canadian Unitarian Council, 2007, 821 CUC.
2. From Beginning to End: The Rituals of Our Lives, by Robert Fulghum, 1995, 128 FUL [From LibraryThing: “… My thinking was set in motion by those who, knowing I was a parish minister for many years, have asked me for advice about ceremonies and celebrations. They wanted words to use at graduations, funerals, and the welcoming of children. They inquired about grace at family meals, the reaffirmation of wedding vows, and ways to heal wounds suffered in personal conflict. People requested help with the rituals of solitude, such as meditation, prayer, and contemplation. . . . Rituals do not always involve words, occasions, officials, or an audience. Rituals are often silent, solitary, and self-contained. The most powerful rites of passage are reflective–when you look back on your life again and again, paying attention to the rivers you have crossed and the gates you have opened and walked on through, the thresholds you have passed over. I see ritual when people sit together silently by an open fire. Remembering. As human beings have remembered for thousands and thousands of years. FULGHUM From the Paperback edition”].
3. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2015, 305 KIM [From LibraryThing: “… As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowing together to reveal what it means to see humans as “the younger brothers of creation.” As she explores these themes, she circles toward a central argument: The awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgement and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the world. Once we begin to listen for the languages of other beings, we can begin to understand the innumerable life-giving gifts the world provides us and learn to offer our thanks, our care, and our own gifts in return”].