FOYER DINNER SIGN UP

The Foyer Dinner program has been a long standing St. Thomas' tradition that brings small groups of parishioners together each month to share a meal in each other's homes. These are wonderful get-togethers where conversations are wide-ranging and laughs are many! There's not an easier way to get to know one another. Nearly thirty parishioners participated in the last series.

Please join us! The dinner groups will be assigned after the completion of the sign up period. Each group is limited to about six or seven parishioners - a number that allows for great conversation and community building in even the smallest of apartments. Participants gather for four meals over the three month, early October to early January, period. The dates and times of the gatherings are flexible and decided the month before by group consensus. Your participation in the series helps St. T's to build community one meal at a time.

Sign up on the door to the Guild Room (coffee hour room) from Sunday, August 28th through Sunday, September 18th. As you sign up, we thank you in advance for your faithful commitment to assuring the success of this parish program. For further information, see or e-mail Jerry Donahoe at maineescape@aol.com.

If you, for whatever reason, you miss sign ups, please contact Jerry and he will help you join a group even if we are midway through the cycle. The next foyer dinner cycle will begin in February.

Weekly Thursday Evening Prayer Service

Beginning September 15, at 7 p.m.

Starting Thursday, September 16, a new lay-led Evening Prayer service is being offered to help balance the pace of urban life and make space for God in our lives in the midst of the workweek. This is a great way to calm your mind, spirit, and body after a trying week. Please join us as we come together as a community to begin the process of quieting ourselves to listen to God. Members of the community who seek peace, support, and prayer are especially encouraged to come.

This lay-led service begins at 7 pm in the Sanctuary, with optional small group centering prayer at 6:30 pm.

If you are interested in leading the service in the coming weeks or months, please contact Topher Bengtson at kris@krisbengtson.com . We are also looking for people who would be willing to lend their vocal or musical talents for parts of the service.

The Terror Trap

Posted by Wayne Floyd
September 09th, 2011 | Category: Civic life,civility,Radical Hospitality,Terrorism

Opening up the newspaper or going online for news recently has been far more of an adventure than even many news junkies and sensationalism mongers could have expected. I was on vacation, but couldn't get away from news about

• the country, if not the world, teetering on the verge of an economic cliff

• hurricane Irene and an earthquake on the east coast in a single week

And then this morning's headlines warned of a "specific but unconfirmed threat" of a car-bomb terrorist attack in New York or Washington this weekend.

The economic crisis was a human- not a natural-disaster, and could have been avoided by different decisions being made. And the hurricane and earthquake, we must remember, were natural-disasters, but not vengeful "acts of God." While the Weather Channel let us see the former coming, despite the fact that we couldn't do much but hunker-down until it passed, the earthquake caught absolutely everyone by surprise, leaving Washingtonians and others up and down the east coast literally as well as psychologically rattled in the aftermath.

Terrorism, however, is a very different beast. It is the result of human actions, and at the heart of any act of terror is the desire to remove all of the potential victim's sense of control from the victim, leaving no action that can be taken to prevent it. Whenever "they" threaten to strike, "we" feel helpless to do something in advance to guarantee a lack of success. In spite of this, there's no way to hunker-down until the threat is gone, like in a monster storm, because by its nature the threat of terror is ongoing - it does not pass us by to move on elsewhere. Yet like earthquakes, acts of terrorism catch us off guard, and once we've experienced one, they leave us with varying degrees of PTSD responses.

So what are we to do? Make preemptive strikes against potential terrorists? Close off streets around public buildings or install detectors that seek to ‘see' a threat before it materializes into action? Be on guard against ‘them' by racial- or ethnic- or religious-profiling? Install walls and fences at our borders to keep ‘them' out?

The fact is, we have as a people tried all of these, and many people still find such responses ‘necessary' even if ‘unfortunately' destructive of the very patterns of normalcy that terrorists' themselves wish to bring about. This is what I've come to think of as "the terror trap" - becoming so paralyzed by our anticipatory anxiety that we lose a large measure of our quality of life, even as we "succeed" at temporarily forestalling the next attack.

"The Terror Trap" is what happens when we allow ourselves - consciously or unconsciously - to internalize the strategies of terrorism into our daily lives with one another, for example, through bullying behavior or actual domestic- or societal-violence. We walk around trapped in our fears of others. And we also use our financial or social or political power to entrap others in their fears of us and what we might do to them, such as stealth drone attacks in the night in Afghanistan.

However, "evil," according to the great western Christian theologian Augustine, is not some "thing" with it's own reality that needs defending against because "it" may otherwise get us. "Evil" instead is what is left when we remove the "good" from our own lives or the world around us.

The absence of intentional acts of goodness entraps us in the void of what we experience as "evil" - those places where love, compassion, forgiveness, justice, and radical hospitality no longer empower who we are or what we do.
The "evil" of terrorism is that it threatens to entrap us in places of suspicion, rather than love; self-interest rather than compassion; retribution rather than forgiveness; unfairness rather than justice; and exclusion rather than hospitality.

"The Terror Trap" isn't really something that "they" control; it is a trap that we build inside ourselves that captures the goodness that resides in each of us and holds it hostage to fear, doubt, suspicion, and anger. We have a lot more control over this than we usually realize, but we hesitate because it means changing the habits of our hearts to free the goodness that we allow otherwise to remain trapped within us. Terror is a trap, whether external or internal, that sucks the air out of the room and leaves us smothering in the void; and in the absence of the good, we begin to create the very terror we abhor.

DATE: TUESDAY, JULY 19

TIME: 7:00 P.M.
PLACE: GUILD ROOM, ST. THOMAS' PARISH
WORKSHOP FACILITATOR: DAVID KUCHARSKI

 Attention gay men: Whether you're single or already in a relationship, do you struggle to balance your romantic and sexual needs with your calling to live Christian principles?

Plan to attend the workshop "Christian Relationships for Gay Men" at St. Thomas at 7 pm on Tuesday, July 19th, in the Guild Room (first floor meeting room).

Facilitated by Dave Kucharski, a St. Thomas parishioner who's a former theology student and a licensed psychotherapist for individuals and couples, the workshop will help you discover how to be the boyfriend/partner/husband God wants you to be.

For more information and to RSVP if you plan to attend (we'd like to have a head count), contact Dave at davidkucharski@rcn.com

A number of our parishioners and their friends and family deserve special prayers this week, including:

•  Grace Crane, parishioner and mother of Brian Crane. Grace broke her hip and is having surgery Wednesday. Grace is our "wisdom figure" and senior-most member of St. Thomas' Parish. She has done "a lot of everything" here over the years; most recently she designed the new St. Thomas' banner that is in the sanctuary. 
• Ed Cloninger, the father of our Junior Warden, Matt Cloninger.  Ed is having a serious heart procedure Wednesday.
• Jeremy Ayers, parishioner and regular lay preacher.  Jeremy's house was recently broken into.
• Joe Kafka, a long-time dear friend of Joe Zuniga.  He died this week from suicide.
• Donald Thomas. a member of one of the AA groups that meets in the Godly Play Room weekly.  Donald died last week, and his friends will be having a memorial service for him at St. Thomas' later this month.

"Almighty God, we entrust all who are dear to us to your never-failing care and love, for this life and the life to come, knowing that you are doing for them better things than we can desire or pray for; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen."