You are invited to the in-person Worship Service on August 20 at 10 am. The bulletin for this Sunday is available for viewing HERE.
You can worship live on ZOOM by clicking the link below:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9658816441 or Meeting ID: 965 881 6441
You can also watch Sunday services at your convenience by going to our website “watsonville1stumc.org” and click YouTube or Facebook. Each Sunday worship will be uploaded on Sunday afternoon for your viewing.
Ordinary Time
Sunday, August 20, 2023, 10 am
Children’s Time “House Built on a Sand” Pastor John
Special Music I Have Dreamt Vanessa Yearsley, Soprano
Composer, Bernard Herrmann
from Emily Brontë’s noble, Wuthering Heights, Act 2:
In this opera by Bernard Herrmann, the character Cathy sings of her feeling of transformation as she transitions between the realm of the living and that of the spirit or dream world due to a tragic love affair with Mr. Heathcliff.
“I have dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me forever
and have gone through and through me like wine through water.
And have altered the color of my mind.
I dreamt once that I was in heaven and that heaven did not seem to be my home.
And I broke my heart with weeping to see the heath again.
And the angels flung me back to earth.
And wuthering heights where I awoke sobbing, sobbing for joy.”
Ms. Vanessa Yearsley is here to sing for us while she takes a summer break from her master’s program at the Mannes conservatory in NYC. She comments, “I relate to this song I Have Dreamt of change and spiritual transformation both for the character and me personally.”
Since their publication in 1847, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights have attracted fascination and repugnance, praise and censure in an age of an expanding empire and shifting gender roles. Despite being told at the time that “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life,” the Brontë sisters persisted and created two of the most influential English-language novels ever written that were polarizing and a catalyst for change in their own era and beyond.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre follows the story of an orphaned governess. The book drew controversy for its sensitive depiction of a woman in rebellion against her lower-class status, as when Jane asks, “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?” One reviewer decried Jane as “the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit.” Today, she is regarded as a feminist heroine.
Similarly, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights both scandalized and inspired Victorian readers with its plot about violence and a love that transcends death, yet it is now revered for its sheer emotional force and daring experiments in narrative form. As Virginia Woolf wrote, Emily Brontë is “the rarest of all powers…by speaking of the moor [she could] make the wind blow and the thunder roar.”
Message Breath Work: Rev. John Song
Part 4) “Discovering Your Deepest YES!”
Listen to what this body is saying. Breath Work increases our awareness of ourselves. What feels stuck and stale in you? What wants to birth through you? What feels alive in you that wants to break out and live?
In this Breath Work, together we’ll be Listening, Allowing, Opening, and Moving Towards our YES. And we’ll be leaning into where the YESs are coming from and befriending and enlarging YES.
“Whenever God asks me, I will not say ‘NO’.”
~ St. Therese of Lisieux, the 19th century of Carmelite nun in France
Everything is Waiting for You by David Whyte
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions.
To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings.
Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus,
crowding out your solo voice.
You must note the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things to come,
the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness
and ease into the conversation.
The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink,
the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness
and seen the good in you at last.
All the birds and creatures of the world
are unutterably themselves.
Everything is waiting for you.