Rites and Right Thinking

I have just finished watching a series on Netflix called Unorthodox. The story centers around Estey, short for Esther, a young Jewish woman in a community of orthodox Jews and who at age 18 finds herself in an arranged and largely loveless marriage. After a year of failing to get pregnant and a growing discontent with her life as a piece of property, she escapes to Berlin where she falls in with a group of young musicians and is happy. Her husband back in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) and his cousin Moishe set out to bring her back. I leave it for you to watch the program to find out how that goes.

First, I want to say that as far as I’m concerned, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with practicing orthodox Judaism if you can afford the clothes. If everyone in that community agrees to its stringent rules that govern literally every facet of life and are happy living within those strictures, who am I to cast the first stone? But what became apparent in Unorthodox was that rites and rituals and rules and traditions and judgments superseded everything else including, perhaps especially, human happiness. There is something amiss with a religion that professes to worship a loving God and then does not extend the joy of that love to God’s children.

We Episcopalians rather like our rituals too. This year we painfully have had to suspend performing some of the ones that are dearest to us in Holy Week. No Palm Sunday parade, no Tenebrae on Wednesday, no Maundy Thursday Eucharist, no Good Friday veneration of the cross, and no Easter Day celebration of the Resurrection. We have not been able to meet together on Sundays for three weeks and have had to forego yet another of our precious rituals, brunch after church.

In a way, this stay-at-home order has been good for us. For some it has deepened our sense of community and how much we had taken for granted the simple act of seeing each other. We have had to pare down our lives to bare necessity including how we keep in touch. For those who have disparaged the Internet, you might by now have revised your thinking. It has substituted for hugs, handshakes, and across-the-table smiles and while those expressions of our regard for our friends can’t be replaced by FaceTime, we have learned how much we need each other and long to maintain our community. All without any ritual, or very little—we are still having Morning Prayer on Sunday via the Internet.

Like Estey’s husband in Unorthodox we have had to reexamine who we are as people with a tradition, with rites that help identify us, and with observances that provide us with our sense of belonging to our church. Perhaps what we’re learning is that in our yearning for those rites and rituals, there is also our need to preserve community. When we can once again participate in our traditions and they enhance and beautify our faith, they must never become our faith and must never take precedence over our recognition that God loves us unconditionally and that we are called, rites or no rites, to extend that love to others.

Robert Heylmun
8 April 2020

Zoom Zoom! how to connect face to face, remotely

Hi Everyone,
Well, here we are sheltering in place, but thanks to internet magic it IS possible for you to have a face to face conversation with other people!  As long as you have an internet connection, a device with a camera and microphone (laptop, some desktops, a tablet, or a smartphone), you can FOR FREE communicate with friends.  There are a number of solutions, including Skype, Facetime (for Apple folk), and Google Hangouts (if you all have Gmail accounts).  I've compared these options and I find that the EASIEST to set up, and also one of the most common, is ZOOM, which is what we'll be discussing here. It goes across all platforms.

Companies and institutions pay for a zoom subscription that allows lots of people to connect at once. That's what's underpinning some of our St Paul's events.  BUT you don't need to pay for zoom, if what you want to do is connect with a few people for a coffee or  tea or cocktail!

There are two components to meeting by zoom.  The first is that someone (the "host") sets up the meeting and the second is they provide a link to the other people (the "participants").  Once you have set up zoom on your device, you just need to double click on the link a host sends you, in order to participate. Zoom will open the App or the program.

When Zoom asks to access your microphone, your camera, and to use internet audio, say "yes". 

What you need to do:
On a tablet or smartphone, download the ZOOM app to your device from your app store.  It's free!

Click on the "Sign up" button.  DO NOT USE YOUR FACEBOOK OR GOOGLE ACCOUNT:  Use your regular email and choose a password you can remember that does NOT duplicate any other passwords.

Zoom will ask you if it can show alerts, connect to your calendar, etc.  Choose this as you would like, remembering that the easier it is for zoom to connect to you, the easier it is to respond to requests.

After you're set up, when you open Zoom, you'll get a window that has several options on it, including joining a meeting, or hosting a meeting.

Once you go into a meeting, you'll see a screen as at the left below.  The screen on the right is how the hosting person invites others.
































THAT'S IT!  You should be good to go.

On a computer, go to zoom.us and click the sign up for free.  (It says work email, just use your regular email. )DO NOT USE YOUR FACEBOOK OR GOOGLE ACCOUNT:  Use your regular email and choose a password you can remember that does NOT duplicate any other passwords.

When you host a meeting or join one, you'll see a screen like the one below.  You can choose various options as indicated on this image.

Troubleshooting:
The usual problems have to do with the microphone . You need to be sure that your device's speaker is on (not on mute), and that your microphone works.  How you fix those problems varies depending on your platform and device. Let us know if you have difficulties and we will get one of our tech volunteers to help out.

You do need a camera, either built in or a web cam. This again varies by device.

We recommend a set of headphones with a mic, like you would use with a smart phone (your apple earbuds, if you are an iPhone owner....). These can be paired with or plugged into most any device. It cuts ambient noise and dramatically improves the volume when you speak.

Let us know how we can help!

--Susan, blogmaster and photographer.