Holy Redeemer Lutheran Church
1948 The Alameda
San Jose, CA 95126
San Jose, CA 95126
Most of us know who George Carlin is. He started out being a comedian who wore narrow ties and suits, with clean shaven cheeks and short hair. Then he let his hair grow out and grew a beard, and he traded in his ties and suits for jeans and pullovers. He told us about the 7 dirty words, and helped us figure out what part of our stuff was really important to us. And, he was anti-establishment at its best.
I am told that George Carlin went in to his office every day at 8am and punched a time clock. He sat down at his desk and faced his computer and worked 8 hours at his craft. George Carlin. Anti-establishment George Carlin worked more regular hours than most of us do – in order to hone his skills and to become a master of his trade.
As we try to change the world in which we live, perhaps there is a lesson there for us to learn.
I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside.Rumi
Prayer is neither passive nor an empty act. On the contrary prayer “works.” The only problem is that when we pray we get what we seek. What we want out of prayer determines how we go about it. If we want security and protection, we say suffrage prayers; if we want serenity and enlightenment, we meditate; if we want immersion in the mind of Christ, we immerse ourselves in scripture. Prayer is not one kind of activity. It is many. It nourishes the spiritual life; it also reflects it.
When we are young religious, we “say” our prayers. When we get older in the religious life, we “go to prayer.” But when we begin to see prayer as the undergirding of life, the pulse of the universe in the center of the soul, we become a prayer. First, as Gandhi says, we have words and no heart; finally, we grow into a heart without words. The truth is that the way we pray says something about what we believe about God and about what we believe about life itself. To the monastic mind, prayer is the marking of time and the pursuit of the known but unseen, the fulfilling but unaccomplished. Those qualities mark the prayer life of a monastic community in both form and substance.
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Trouble the Water takes you inside Hurricane Katrina in a way never before seen on screen. It's a redemptive tale of two self-described street hustlers who become heroes-two unforgettable people who survive the storm and then seize a chance for a new beginning.
The film opens the day before the storm makes landfall-twenty-four year old aspiring rap artist Kimberly Rivers Roberts is turning her new video camera on herself and her 9th Ward neighbors trapped in the city. "It's going to be a day to remember," Kim declares. With no means to leave the city and equipped with just a few supplies and her hi 8 camera, she and her husband Scott tape their harrowing ordeal as the storm rages, the nearby levee breaches, and floodwaters fill their home and their community.
Seamlessly weaving 15 minutes of this home movie footage shot the day before and the day after the storm, with archival news segments and verite footage shot over two years, directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal document a journey of remarkable people surviving not only failed levees, bungling bureaucrats and armed soldiers, but also their own past.
Directed and produced by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal and Executive Produced by Joslyn Barnes and Danny Glover of Louverture Films, edited and co-produced by T. Woody Richman, with additional editing by Mary Lampson, Trouble the Water features an original musical score by Neil Davidge and Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack, and the music of Dr. John, Mary Mary, Citizen Cope, TK Soul, John Lee Hooker, and the Free Agents Brass Band and introduces the music of Black Kold Madina.
Trouble the Water has been supported by grants from the Sundance Institute, the Open Society Institute, and is a project of Creative Capital.
I Am My Own Wife is the miraculous and fascinating true story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who survived the Nazis and then Communism behind the Berlin Wall. When the wall came down and the West walked in, Charlotte was still standing. Her incredible life story, told in her own words to the playwright through a series of interviews, is also about what dark secrets she chooses not to tell, and how it colors Wright's efforts to chronicle her amazing life. The end result, says The New York Times, is "a story that is both moving and intellectually absorbing [and] quite powerfully makes the case for storytelling in our lives."
The rise and fall of ancient Rome has been on American minds from the beginning of our republic. Today, we focus less on the Roman Republic than on the empire that took its place. Depending on who’s doing the talking, the history of Rome serves as either a triumphal call to action or a dire warning of imminent collapse. In Are We Rome? the esteemed editor and author Cullen Murphy reveals a wide array of similarities between the two empires: the blinkered, insular culture of our capitals; the debilitating effect of bribery in public life; the paradoxical issue of borders; and the weakening of the body politic through various forms of privatization. Murphy persuasively argues that we most resemble Rome in the burgeoning corruption of our government and in our arrogant ignorance of the world outside – two things that must be changed if we are to avoid Rome’s fate.