Sunday, July 11th, 2021, 10:00am PDT

Program:

Host-Nadine de Jong 

Welcome: Tom Werder

Meditation-Mary Lyans

Remarks on June’s theme-Lance Ozier

Invited Speaker Introduction-Maria Rosales

Invited Speaker-Rafael Jesús González

Discussion,  Q&A, and  announcements

About Rafael Jesús González

Blog: http://rjgonzalez.blogspot.com/

Born in the bicultural/bilingual setting of El Paso, Texas/Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, Rafael attended the University of Texas El Paso, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, & the University of Oregon. Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & Literature, he taught at the University of Oregon, Western State College of Colorado, Central Washington State University, the University of Texas El Paso, and Laney College, Oakland where he founded the Mexican and Latin American Studies Dept. He was Poet in Residence at the Oakland Museum of California and the Oakland Public Library under a "Writers on Site Award" from Poets & Writers, Inc. in 1996. Four times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, he was honored by the National Council of Teachers of English for his writing 2003. In 2013 he received the César E. Chávez Lifetime Award and in 2015 the City of Berkeley also honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2017 he was named the first Poet Laureate of Berkeley.

Program: Host: Nadine de Jong

Welcome: Carmen Dominguez

Meditation: Irene Webb

Short Readings: Yella Werder

Speaker:  Tom Werder who will spoke on The Possibility of Love and Relationship.  Tom is a valued member of the Tranquilo Leadership Team, a seasoned speaker and workshop leader. He is certified teacher of Robert Holden's Happiness Project; he's led numerous Landmark seminars; he is the leader of our Enneagram Group .

Thank you to our wonderful community for participating in our May Not Church on the topic of Possibilities. Below are Yella's quotes and Gary Marks' poem.

QUOTES

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.  For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”  — Albert Einstein
 

“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I  may learn how to do it.”  
— Pablo Picasso
 

“Whatever you do, or dream you can do, begin it.  Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”  — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
 

“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”  — Dr Seuss
 

“The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was.  Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.  They’re in each other all along.”  
— Rumi
 

“Heroes are ordinary men and women who dare to see and meet the call of a possibility bigger than themselves.  Breakthroughs are created by such heroes, by men and women who will stand for the result while it is only a possibility - people who will act to make possibility real.  We discover that as human beings we can live in a possibility instead of in what we have inherited.”  — Werner Erhard
 

Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery - by Richard Selzer
I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face post-operative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish.  A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed.  She will be thus from now on.  The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve.
Her young husband is in the room.  He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private.  Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry-mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily?  The young woman speaks.
“Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, “it will.  It is because the nerve was cut.”
She nods and is silent.  But the young man smiles.
“I like it,” he says. “It’s kind of cute.”
All at once, I know who he is.  I understand and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god.  Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I so close that I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate hers, to show that their kiss still works.

GARY'S POEM (author unknown)

I know that I know and that I don't know, but sometimes I forget

I see the blinding light in everything, but sometimes I am blind.

But this is the way that it should be because at the end of every forget...  I remember!  

Program: Host: Nadine De Jong

Special Remarks and Welcome: John DiCecco

Short Reading: Sandy Stadelmann reading from The Little Book of Big Lies

Meditation: Mary Beth DiCecco

Introduction to the speaker: Kath Batesole

Invited Speaker: Tina Lifford

Learn more about Tina’s work at The Inner Fitness Project. You can find the tools to navigate your Surviving Self; Thriving Self and Infinite Self to “to nurture the inner you and move beyond the past….” in Tina’s book, “The Big Book of Little Lies” is available on Amazon.

ABOUT TINA: 

Author, actor, spiritual leader, Tina Lifford  has visited the La Misión area many times and last spoke at Not Church in 2013, when her first book was just out. The Little Book of Big Lies is in it’s second edition by publisher Harper Collins.  We’re excited to have Tina back at Not Church for her talk, “Rising Above the Surviving Self."