Category Archives: Faith and Social Justice

items from Not in Our Town Princeton (http://niotprinceton.org) and Princeton United Methodist Church (http://princetonumc.org)

‘Christmastide’

Dance and the other arts, Faith and Social Justice, ,

Christmastide, an anthem by Tom Shelton, sends chills down my spine whenever I hear it. Today I was fortunate to hear Shelton’s Youth Choir render it twice, in a day of beautiful music, first at morning worship, when the Chancel Choir also sang one of my favorites, Bach’s Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring. They reprised it tonight, along with joyful music from the Chancel and Handbell Choirs, directed by Hyosang Park, in a concert entitled “Rejoice!”

Here is the link to hear Christmastide, from Sunday, December 17 at 10 a.m.

This post is a thank you to the musicians at Princeton United Methodist Church – and to musicians around the globe – who put their hearts and souls into bringing the hopeful strains of Advent and Christmas music into churches and concert halls everywhere. How can anyone not believe in the divinity of our Creator when listening to these harmonies?

So – thank you to these musicians, and as you read their names, you will see that several do double and triple duty. Many of them perform in professional ensembles. But there’s nothing like hearing your own friends make music in your own house of worship. Kudos to Park, who put the program together, as well as to Shelton.

In the Chancel Choir are Mandy Du, Yvonne Macdonald, Joan Nuse, Lori Pantaleo, Françoise Maitre, Karen Hoagland, LaVerna Albury, Jenni Collins, Lindsay Diehl, Stephen Offer, Curt Hillegas, Yannick Ibrahim, and Jim Frisbee. They gave us Handel’s Christ is Born (arranged by Jon Paige) and Shepherds Come Rejoicing by Joseph M. Martin, and Purcell’s Rejoice in the Lord Always.

 In the Youth Choir are Elli Collins, Juli Collins, Maggie Collins, Shermel Morgan, Julia Potts, and Aditi Rapaka. After joining the Chancel Choir for the Purcell, they sang two old world carols and then, with Jenni Collins as soloist, Shelton’s Christmastide.  

The Handbell Choir played News of Great Joy in an arrangement by Arnold Sherman and O How Joyfully, arranged by John Behnke. Ringing were Irene Yu, Diane Peterson, John Macdonald, Yvonne Macdonald,  Joan Nuse, Bob Nuse,  Amy Gardner,  Bill Gardner, Julia Ciccone, Mary Ciccone,  Sarah Betancourt, and  Heather Hansen.

The orchestra closed the program with Handel’s Rejoice Greatly, featuring Bill Gardner on trumpet, along with Elizabeth Rouget, Violin; Myles McKnight, Violin; Paul Manulik, Viola; Gabrielle Hooper, Cello; Scott Collins, Clarinet; Amy Gardner, Clarinet; Bill Gardner, Trumpet; Julia Hanna, Piano. Ian Macdonald and Eric Gillette managed the video stream, available here on this Facebook page. Or on the website.

As Rev. Jenny Smith Walls said, in using the words of Kate Bowler for the benediction, “We have quieted our souls to listen, for your word made flesh is life to us.”  

                       ———————- Barbara Fox

On Christmas Eve at 4 p.m. the Children’s Choir leads a family-friendly candlelight service — and at 8 p.m. a traditional service features the Chancel Choir, Youth Choir, and instrumentalists. All are welcome.

He Wanted Us to Pray

Faith and Social Justice, Memoir

I just watched the “Beautiful Day” movie – how did I manage to wait so long? As a young mother, everything I knew about child psychology, I learned from Fred Rogers, never mind Spock. I’m basking in the memory, playing the trailer, remembering how I started to write a Vacation Bible School curriculum focused on The Neighborhood, was encouraged by the Fred Rogers people, but never got it done.

Basking, I’m looking up various references that you might enjoy. He grew up in Latrobe where his sister has an art center. In this interview he talks about the lessons he earned early in life, and at minute 18 he tells how he learned how it felt when someone turned you down. People desire to be in touch with honesty (minute 20).

“The very first view that we have of our whole world is that view of our mother’s face during nursing. And so we get our very first impressions of what this world is like through our mouth and our eyes. And, if what’s good is coming into our mouth and what’s good is coming into our eyes, we have a mighty strong beginning.”

Tom Hanks was sooo good, but he had to be persuaded to take that role.

“It’s in the pause that the greatest potency is found…” says Matthew Rhys, the Welsh actor who, when he played the Esquire writer, managed to lose his Welsh accent. He and Hanks were interviewed by Judy Woodruff on PBS News Hour.

I didn’t know that the movie plot was based on a true story, that there really WAS an Esquire writer, Tom Junod, who was changed by his interviews with Fred.

Said Junod:  He was leading me to that moment of prayer that whole time that I was with him. And what did Fred want from me? He clearly wanted me to pray. He clearly believed in prayer as a way of life. He prayed every day of his life. He woke up in the morning and prayed, and wrote, and prayed for people. And so I wrote that. The answer to: What did Fred want? He wanted us to pray.

I saw this movie with 30 people at Stonebridge at Montgomery on a Saturday night. The lights went up, people were leaving, but the credits were still rolling and somebody was still singing and I was transfixed. I knew it had to be the REAL Fred Rogers. Finally the credits parted and showed a glimpse of the real Fred’s face.

Alone among those thirty, I was the one — TA DA! – who recognized the real Fred. Here’s the real Fred singing “It’s You I Like.”

Remembering Bob Geddes

Around Town, Faith and Social Justice, Memoir, political, , ,

Robert Geddes, the founding dean of Princeton’s School of Architecture, the William R. Kenen Jr. Professor of Architecture, renowned urbanist and innovative educator, died on Feb. 13, 2023. He was 99.

Robert Geddes
Photo courtesy of Princeton University Press

Engaged with his projects and liberal politics to the last, Robert Geddes entertained and informed fellow residents of Stonebridge at Montgomery at occasional presentations. Aided and encouraged by another resident, the politically savvy Ingrid Reed, he railed against the potential destruction of his beloved Liberty State Park and fretted about the future of Philadelphia’s Roundhouse. He also loved to speak about his former students who now lead departments at prestigious universities, and he devoted time and energy to the work of Princeton Future. 

Richard K. Rein, in his column for TAPInto Princeton. tells about the work of Princeton Future. Rein also discusses how Geddes’ students founded the movement known as “the new urbanism.”

Geddes’ students, carrying on the broad view of architecture and looking purposefully not just at buildings but also at the space between the buildings, became the founders of the movement known as the “new urbanism.” The husband-and-wife team of Andres Duany, Princeton Class of 1971 and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk ’72, along with Stefanos Polyzoides ’69, were joined by Elizabeth Moule, who earned a masters in architecture at Princeton in 1987 and is now the wife and partner of Polyzoides, to form the Congress for the New Urbanism along with Peter Calthorpe (from Yale), and Daniel Solomon, (Columbia and Berkeley).

The founders were joined by several more Princeton alumni to become early leaders of the movement. These include environmentalist and architect Douglas Kelbaugh ’67 *72, landscape architect Douglas Duany ’75, and writer and educator Ellen Dunham-Jones ’80 *83. (Full disclosure: This reporter was a Princeton roommate of Polyzoides, who is now the dean of architecture at Notre Dame.)

Geddes’ obituary from Princeton University summarized how he was “a pioneer in forging deep connections between architecture and the humanities, social sciences, public affairs and urban design. He always focused on the social basis of design — for buildings, landscapes and cities.”

From an early age, Geddes was known to be a convener, locally as a co-founder of Princeton Future. He continued that at Stonebridge, co-founding a “Guys Group” to meaningfully engage with ethical and social problems. After his cherished wife Evelyn died, he was especially lonely on Sunday afternoons and instigated — with help from Julia Bowers Coale, president of the Residents’ Association — informal teas on Sunday afternoons.  

Geddes and his wife Evelyn moved to Stonebridge when they were in excellent health and were still traveling abroad. With their new Stonebridge friends, George and Barbara Wright, they visited museums in New York and Philadelphia and attended performances on Broadway and at Caramoor in upstate New York, Many Stonebridge friends helped Geddes in his last years. After Geddes’ wife died, two residents who knew what it was like to be suddenly alone – Jeff Tener and Barbara Wright –committed to have pizza with him every Friday. 

As for me, busy with my own too many doings, I had only limited time to be with Bob. I wish I had had more time. But I can immerse myself in his website and in his book “Fit,” to glean his “lively, charming, and gently persuasive” wisdom.

Ebenezer on the Couch

Around Town, Dance and the other arts, Faith and Social Justice, ,

At McCarter, Lauren Keating’s rewrite of Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” relates Scrooge’s obsession with money to Dickens’ life story.  Of the two children in the play who have symbolic names, “Want” and “Ignorance,” Dickens was a child of want.

While previous productions delighted audiences with spectacle and magic deployed by the spirits who scare Ebenezer Scrooge into generosity, Keating’s version is much more generous with psychological insights. For instance, it opens with a peddler who introduces all the characters, including Ebenezer’s obnoxious father. Ebenezer, played by Dee Pellettier, skillfully reveals his gradual change. 

As a collector of antique buttons, and a member of the New Jersey State Button Society, I have been doing research on the history of button making and ran across what I believe to be a significant insight into Dickens’ childhood. In 1852, in his ”Household Words,” he described the Birmingham button factories: ‘range beyond range of machines—the punching, drilling, stamping machines, the polishing wheels, and all the bright and compact, and never-tiring apparatus which is so familiar a spectacle in Birmingham work-rooms. We see hundreds of women, scores of children, and a few men… Very young children gather up the cut circles. Little boys, ‘just out of the cradle,’ range the pasteboard circles, and pack them close, on edge, in boxes or trays; and girls, as young, arrange on a table the linen circles…”

Far from being outraged at this child labor, Dickens wholeheartedly approved. Compared to his own experience, the button making tots had it easy. After all, they were with their parents and worked only 10-12 hours a day.

In contrast, when Dickens was 12, his job (pictured above) was to paste labels on bootblack jars in vermin-infested smelly factory with long hours. Meanwhile his father was in debtors’ prison, accompanied by his mother, along with the younger children.

If naysayers object to Ebenezer being played by a woman, oh well. As Keating points out, gender differences were more accepted in Dickens time than in Victorian times. Dickens refers to “the cook and the cook’s special friend.”

If this version more openly preaches the moral of the story, so be it. That’s in the true spirit of Charles Dickens.

The ghost of Christmas Past begins to change Ebenezer in Lauren Keating’s version of “A Christmas Carol” at McCarter Theatre. Photo by Matt Pilsner.

Correction: earlier I listed the Dickens publication as “Household Matters.” Apparently it was “Household Words.”

A Palmer Square Saint

Around Town, Faith and Social Justice, Memoir, women

On All Saints Day I was remembering Mary Hultse, who left this earth in 2018 and left Princeton before that. In preparation for the All Saints Day service on November 6 at Princeton United Methodist Church, we were asked to think about who were the saints in our lives

The name “saint” implies perfect, but according to Derek Weber, who quotes Psalm 149 in his All Saint’s Day meditation for the Upper Room Disciplines book, “saints of God are those who accept the invitation to dance. A saint is someone who knows something of the joy of living, even in the hardest moments of life. A saint is someone who knows something of the exuberance of praise, even when tears fall like rain and sweat falls like great drops of blood.”

As a successful advertising executive at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Mary Hultse commuted to Princeton from an apartment on the Upper West Side, where she was a regular at Riverside Church. Then she bought a second apartment, a fourth-floor corner walkup on Palmer Square, so that she could look out over Princeton University and enjoy walking around town. She retired in 1990.

Mary had such joie de vivre – going dancing, loving beautiful art, anything Hungarian, and clothes. She told stories of escaping Hungary with gold coins sewn into the hem of her dress. With a passion for the arts – she loved to sing, act, and dance – she joined local theater groups and played Aunt Eller in “Oklahoma” at Washington Crossing. She was beloved by the staff at Richardson Auditorium, where she volunteered as an usher. Devoutly faithful, she enthusiastically participated in the life of Princeton United Methodist Church (PrincetonUMC) and was in charge of the Altar Guild. She reveled in her Hungarian heritage and loved the daughters of a Hungarian family as if they were her grandchildren.  

She was a trooper – not just in drama, but in stamina – even with arthritis and knee surgery, she trudged up four flights, 67 steps, to keep her view. She had Moxie, like the name of her former German shepherd.  She had faith and extreme hospitality.  But what we loved about Mary is that she helped us to be our Best Selves.

Everyone she met was perfect – beautiful, wonderful, perfect. When you think about Mary glowing with compliments — that’s the kind of love that Jesus offers. Unconditional love. Like at PrincetonUMC, when we say “You are enough because God is enough.”

The same qualities that made her a good executive – persistence, insistence – eventually evolved into just plain obstinance, masking depression and the beginning of dementia. When she began to fail, she refused to move away from her apartment. It was so hard to help her, because she would agree to something one day and refuse the next day. 

An ad-hoc care team of a dozen PrincetonUMC people did help her stay in that apartment. We alternated taking her places. One woman did her wash. Others brought her home for meals and took her shopping. Walking behind her, we pushed her up those stairs and fetched cappuccinos from the Palmer Square kiosk. We worked with Princeton Senior Resource Center. We worked with Palmer Square management and (surreptitiously) with her doctors. We worked with McCaffrey’s. (Wanting to be independent, she would go to McCaffrey’s on the bus but not be able to get home. They would call us to come pick her up and we would dispatch someone on the Mary Team.) A couple from the church put in endless hours to organize her finances and pay her taxes. Along with her Hungarian friends, we were her family.

In the end, we were the benefactors, because in helping Mary, we got to be the best we could be. We surprised ourselves. We found out how good it felt to act out our faith.

In his meditation Weber refers to the English carol Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day. “In his own voice and with his life, Jesus calls all to dance with joy for this gift of life eternal. . . On All Saints’ Day, we remember those whose dancing with their Lord has given us all hope. And we aspire to follow them in the music and dance Jesus is leading.”

Mary Hultse embodied the spirit of the eternal dance.

Embodied Faith: experience spirituality in a new way

Around Town, Dance and the other arts, Faith and Social Justice,

I’m excited about this. You knew I would be. Annalise Hume begins a four-session “Embodied Faith” workshop on Monday, September 26 at 7:30 p.m. I’m inviting all my friends and movement buddies to attend — by zoom or in person. Here’s how Annalise describes what we’ll do.

“Our bodies hold memories and store our stories. By paying attention to how we feel or want to move, we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and God. Each week we will experience a passage of scripture or theological theme through a combination of prayer, movement, play, and journaling. If you yearn for a fresh way to experience God this year, come and play. No previous dance, yoga, or movement experience necessary.“

ANYBODY can do this. “While the sessions are movement based, our brain-body connection is so strong that you are welcome to do the entire class in your imagination without moving at all. All abilities and disabilities are welcome.”
These four sessions are sponsored by Princeton United Methodist Church and any reader of Princeton Comment will be my guest. The sessions are every other Monday from 7:30-8:45pm by ZOOM or in person in the church’s Fellowship Hall at 7 Vandeventer in Princeton. Register here:

https://princetonumc.breezechms.com/form/1353a5

Affordable Housing? Explained

Around Town, Business, Faith and Social Justice, political

Affordable housing is complicated in every municipality, especially Princeton, where there both a nonprofit agency and a government agency are trying to do the right thing.. Now there’s controversy swirling around two proposed apartment developments near Princeton Shopping Center. Richard K. Rein makes sense out of this in an article in TAP Into Princeton.

Quoting his lede,

“It was a tale of two PILOT ordinances at Princeton Council’s August 22 meeting. There was a “good” PILOT, a tax arrangement by which Princeton would end up with 65 new units of affordable housing, tucked in with and no different from market rate units in new developments loaded with amenities. And there was an “evil” PILOT, a program that, as one prominent critic argued at the meeting, gives away the store to the developers and also ends up costing municipal taxpayers more than they initially perceive.

The clash of good and evil has the happy consequence of forcing us to enter the weeds of this increasingly popular financing arrangement.”

How to decide? When i’m confused, I vote with Leighton Newlin. Pictured above. He’s been around a l o n g, long time. He knows what’s what.

Making sense out of crazy parking conflicts

Around Town, Faith and Social Justice

Confused about Princeton’s parking madness? I’m smilling at Rich Rein’s analysis, always cogent and often, as in this column, entertaining. For this astute deep dive into the controversy he calls, as witnesses, “some of the most dedicated apponents of permit parking” naming homeowners on Hawthorne Avenue, Library Place, and Princeton Avenue.

Even if you don’t know – and don’t care – about this problem, it’s fun to follow how Rein makes his point. “People with parking often don’t want neighbors to get it,” he says. Rein founded U.S. 1 Newspaper and now publishes at TAP Into Princeton. The article: After a Deep Dive into Parking Madness, We Emerge — Not Recovered But At Least Recovering

Read it here and be persuaded. Or at least informed — about your supposedly liberal neighbors.

This Policy Bit Back

Faith and Social Justice

Edward Tenner’s “Why Things Bite Back” investigates the unintended consequences of tech revolutions. Better football helmets encourage more violent play, antibiotics breed more dangerous bacteria, imported wildlife that overwhelms native species, and so on.

I wonder if Tenner would include standardized aptitude tests in his lexicon of bite-backs. I had heard that the Educational Testing Service — one of Princeton’s largest employers — has had to defend its mission and tactics on various fronts. But I had not heard this history of why the College Board wanted to develop the SAT. As published in Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac for today, June 17.

But the biggest proponents of intelligence testing were college officials who were concerned about the rapid influx of immigrants — especially Eastern European Jews — to their student body… These college officials believed that immigrants had less innate intelligence than old-blooded Americans and hoped that they would score lower on aptitude tests, which would give the schools an excuse to admit fewer of them.

How wrong they were.

I would like to get self righteous, but before I point a finger, I need to look at my own heritage. I need to admit that I inherited a very dark pot of prejudice. I’ve scrubbed it up, but I’m not the one who should call the kettle black.

Use stillness – or movement- to meditate?

Around Town, Dance and the other arts, Faith and Social Justice,

I choose “move.”

Told by a shrink that I really really need to find a meditation class, I dabbled in various mindfulness techniques but never found one I could stick with. First, because I am Christian, and when they start talking about chakras, I get an uncomfortable feeling about polytheistic religions. I am fine with however anybody else wants to worship their God or gods, but I need to keep my own wandering and curious spirit reined in.

I choose “move.”

Second, I don’t do “Same.” Routines are supposed to be calming, I’ve been told, because you don’t have to make those minute by minute decisions. (Decision making is another of my weaknesses.)

Third, most meditation techniques emphasize quiet stillness. Since for all my 80 years I have probably had undiagnosed ADD, I have trouble sitting still.

Nevertheless, while I yearned to hear the still small voice of God, to experience the “still point of the turning world,” I remained mired in a “place of disaffection…distracted from distraction by distraction” [Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot.]

Seven weeks ago, I found my answer. On weekdays at 7 AM and on Saturdays at 8 AM I zoomed for Wake-Up Meditations led by — amazingly — a member of my United Methodist church, who had been tapped to be the lay leader of the Adult Education Ministry Team. Claudio Lamsa Da Silva has studied a wide variety of meditation techniques.

 “In my twenties,” he says, “I explored different ways of practicing monasticism through the lens of various religions…. I explored Hinduism in ashrams in India, Buddhism in Nepal, Zen temples in Japan, and Sikhism through my wife.” In 2005, he served as a monk in Zen monasteries in Japan and after that walked the 900-mile Ohenro pilgrimage alone in complete silence. ” DaSilva employs all these concepts, and his ecumenical vocabulary accommodates all religions, but I can be personally comfortable praying to God the Parent, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

As for the formerly despised Routine, I am a changed woman. No longer a night owl with disrupted sleep patterns, I conk early, awakening at 6:15 (or 6:30) to stumble into the kitchen for the prescribed lemon water and lukewarm tea. After tuning in from 7 to 7:30, I am able to be, as we say, “present in my life” and have set my intention to govern the day. This IS what I need to do to age well.

Most valuable to me, the fidgety dancer, is the chance to emphasize a particular thought with movement and touch. Some is the same and some is different every day, Monday to Friday, because each day has a different focus. The movement is easier to do than describe. Anyone interested, I encourage you to take advantage of the free trial for Daily Wakeup Meditation, currently May 31 to Jun3 4 at 7 AM Eastern Standard Time. The daily classes are ordinarily $10 but half that price if you go by the month. Email Claudio@reconcilewithlife.com for information and the link.

If you do, you will join me and people from around the world without having to leave your house. In Da Silva’s words:  We explore together the dimensions of our being (physical, emotional, mental and spiritual) and of our living (relationships with others and with life) through breathing exercises, contemplative meditation and adjusting movements. 

Photos from Reconcile With Life web page and Facebook page.

.