A Message From Senior Minister Donna Schaper

I write as the earth warms itself to warm you with good news of modest social change and encouragement coming from the “Little Church That Could.”  We don’t want to brag so much as engage (and we have a long way to go on every issue that we have engaged!)  We have many hearts left without encouragement, but a few have been warmed, a little has changed, and for that we are glad.

We would love it if you could help us fund these changes and this encouragement.  Even a little help goes a long way, and you may know some people who could give us a lot of help!   We are growing in members and ministries again this year, and our new Tuesday night worship service (6:00 p.m., weekly) is drawing large, eager and open crowds.  But we need more staff if we are to satisfy the soul urgencies walking through the door.  If you know people who can help us, with money or time or both, let me know.  I see my job as securing the joy and warmth that comes from the little church that does and can.

The New Sanctuary Movement continues to protect undocumented immigrants and their children.  Its expanding base is at Judson, where a dozen volunteers and organizers are at work every day, keeping families safe, even after the ICE has raided their homes at dawn or put a “bracelet” around their leg to monitor their movements.  We are also organizing a new project to deal with the media’s use of hate language against immigrants. 

We continue to work to secure the right of women to choose an abortion.  This spring we will join Planned Parenthood and others in getting a New York State “Roe” passed.  Its name is the Reproductive Health and Privacy Protection Act.  We need your help in getting it passed.

Eleven Community ministers work part-time at Judson to both learn how to be effective and prophetic ministers and to do nitty-gritty work.  One has helped to organize a TransMasculine network, another to teach methods to fight addiction, another to work on Washington Square Park’s disrespect of the community.  Still another has helped Judson work against torture with the city-wide anti-torture community and to join “Manhattan Together,” a community organization that works on housing and immigration.  Another continues our long-term pastoral ministry with LGBTQ youth who have run away or are in personal trouble.  All keep the meaning of Sanctuary alive.  Without these community ministers, we couldn’t begin to cover this many issues or connect with this many people; with them, we can.  They also engage the congregation and keep it well.  We are very proud of this model project.  It has long-term and short-term pizzazz.

Finally, I hope you see that we continue to provide hospitality to dozens of New York City arts groups and social action groups.  Our Arts Ministry is also expanding, especially through the provision of hospitality and space.  The little church that could is full, morning, noon, and night.  Arcade Fire was hardly the only famous group we’ve hosted this year.

Permit me to turn the page on this letter to a more spiritual message in this Eastertide.

You may by now have read Donald Hall’s poem, “String Too Short to Be Saved.” In it, the author goes to his grandfather’s attic, after his grandfather’s death, and discovers a box marked in an old man’s hand, “String too short to be saved.”  The box was full of little pieces of string.  That is the Easter Evidence.  It is not so much extravagant belief as it is modest hope.  We save things that are too short to be saved, even ourselves. 

Some of you may have seen the recent show, “Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting,” at the Museum of Arts and Design.  It showed the current renaissance of venerable handcraft traditions in the work of 27 international artists: blowtorches, fiber optics, shredded currency, and knitting needles the size of telephone poles join a gown with long, knitted veins that illuminates a whole body; two commercial backhoes knit a 35-foot American flag; hundreds of individual optical fingers create a chandelier that glows with light.  These are not your grandmother’s crocheted doilies and knitted legwarmers, but instead fiber functioning on a tangible, spiritual, and aesthetic level.  Some of the installations show how fabric falls apart.  We who once were a whole cloth get torn in pieces.  We hang together by a thread.  AIDS took away our partner and we are diminished beyond belief.  We still hang on.  I have come to have great respect for thread, for lace, for the holy threaded intestinal bloody and bloodied Grail of what happens when we keep our claims small and our hope active.  I think of Judson as a little string, a little thread.  We get what we need for what we must do. 

If strings aren’t strong enough for your Eastertide hope, consider what E. B. White said of his wife, Katherine.  Katherine Porter White was a strange gardener.  She wrote a lot about gardening, but mostly was the very precise editor―the fastest pencil in the East was her nickname at the New Yorker―of a lot of famous people, one of whom she married, becoming a strange wife to E.B. White, whose whimsy entertained many.  Katherine and E.B. gardened in Maine and lived in New York.  As a weekend gardener, she often wore her well-tailored blue suits and modest pumps in the garden because she didn’t take time to change.  She was the kind of gardener who gardened for precise bouquets for the “luncheon” table.  Thus, season after season; E.B. observed her, keeping her pumps from the mud and picking flowers for the luncheon table.  When it was clear she was soon to die, they made a last early November trip to Maine.  There she picked a few stranded posies that had survived the early frosts and put in some bulbs for the next year.  On that day E.B. wrote the first line of her eulogy, which was way too soon to be given: “There was Katherine, blue suit, pumps, but kneeling, putting bulbs in the soil, CALMLY PLOTTING THE RESURRECTION.”  At our best threaded, Judson does just that.

Come hang with us!  Hang by a thread.  Hang by a check.  Hang around.  We need you.