October 29, 2006
In anticipation of the annual Hallowe’en UNICEF campaign, Alan Ely, chair of the board of UNICEF Canada, shares with the West Hill community something of UNICEF’s story and its vision for the care of children throughout the world. Health, education, equality, protection. These are the objectives that drive its work. Alan offers concrete examples of UNICEF’s helping presence not only in crises (e.g. famine in Ethiopia during the ‘80’s and the tsunamis in Sumatra on Dec. 26, 2004), but also on continuing basis. Equally important is UNICEF’s role in articulating and promoting a globally accepted understanding of children’s rights. Although Alan speaks of suffering in distant places, he periodically returns his focus to the local scene. Yes, right here in our midst our challenges to our hopes for health, education, equality and protection.
October 22, 2006
Readings are from: Genesis 12:1, 2 & 4; and poem by Pat Kozak from Life Prayers: From Around the World. This morning we celebrate infant baptism, and so Gretta Vosper begins her meditation by reflecting upon the process of birth. Although a natural process that has been happening since the beginning of life on the planet, we have turned it into a clinical event that requires experts. As a result, many of us born in the last hundred years have been separated from our mothers at birth. How has this affected us as a people? How can we nurture our children in the face of our own alienating habits? As the meditation proceeds, something unplanned happens that really makes the point (just imagine Gretta finishing her talk as she walks around with a baby in her arms.) Visit the web site for the Roots of Empathy classroom program.
October 08, 2006
Today is (Canadian) Thanksgiving Sunday. “I recognize that we, in this particular community of faith, have knit ourselves into a bit of a box around how to give thanks on thanksgiving weekend because … we’ve recognized that the god to whom this weekend has almost always been dedicated as the benevolent giver of all that is good also has to be tied down with complicity and responsibility for all the things that are lousy in the universe.” Gretta Vosper observes that much of our understanding of a divinity is of our own creation, but there may be many more ways of experiencing the world which are not grounded in our own limited understanding. We must take responsibility for creating the sacred spaces in our world and for naming them. But how do we give thanks to something that we no longer dress in the clothes of personhood? This is difficult, and on a special day like Thanksgiving, setting aside old ways of thinking and believing is accompanied by a nostalgia or even by a sense of loss. Gretta concludes by reading to the children - The Secret of Saying Thanks, by Douglas Wood.
27.6 Mb; 22:52 min.