A Message from Pastor Heidi
(from March newsletter)
Dear friends,
The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Isaiah 50:4
I have been deeply blessed by many people who have courageously told their stories in ways that teach and sustain we who are weary of exclusion and injustice of many kinds. I would like to share one such story with you from David Clenny, who has generously given permission to share the following. It is a story that quite literally sustains the weary in our church. David is a musician who has organized a Bel Canto Festival of operas to raise money for Trinity Place, our shelter for homeless LGBTQ youth.
The operas David has produced here are filled with romantic treachery and betrayals. David grew up with a different kind of betrayal. His parents could not accept that he seemed different from other children. He was beaten severely and abused verbally. He made his operatic debut at age 11 as a boy soprano. It bothered his parents that he was singing “like a girl,” which earned him more abuse. The abuse became more violent in his teens. Nothing, however, could extinguish David’s musical passion. His father tried to talk him out of his Carnegie Hall debut as a soprano saying that David would be beaten up when he came out of the theater. David prevailed. He left home after high school and went on to a successful career in opera.
For the past few years, David has faced a different sort of treachery, the kind that comes from cancer. He has undergone numerous, painful and exhausting treatments, and yet, in the midst of them, David rises from his bed to direct the opera series to raise money for our shelter. He says it keeps him going to know that he is able to help other youth escape the horror he lived with. His gift of bel canto, beautiful song, offered with such courage and generosity does indeed sustain the weary. It sustains me. I share it in the hope that it will serve to sustain you as well.
In Christ, who sustains us all,
Pastor Heidi
Dear friends,
The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Isaiah 50:4
I have been deeply blessed by many people who have courageously told their stories in ways that teach and sustain we who are weary of exclusion and injustice of many kinds. I would like to share one such story with you from David Clenny, who has generously given permission to share the following. It is a story that quite literally sustains the weary in our church. David is a musician who has organized a Bel Canto Festival of operas to raise money for Trinity Place, our shelter for homeless LGBTQ youth.
The operas David has produced here are filled with romantic treachery and betrayals. David grew up with a different kind of betrayal. His parents could not accept that he seemed different from other children. He was beaten severely and abused verbally. He made his operatic debut at age 11 as a boy soprano. It bothered his parents that he was singing “like a girl,” which earned him more abuse. The abuse became more violent in his teens. Nothing, however, could extinguish David’s musical passion. His father tried to talk him out of his Carnegie Hall debut as a soprano saying that David would be beaten up when he came out of the theater. David prevailed. He left home after high school and went on to a successful career in opera.
For the past few years, David has faced a different sort of treachery, the kind that comes from cancer. He has undergone numerous, painful and exhausting treatments, and yet, in the midst of them, David rises from his bed to direct the opera series to raise money for our shelter. He says it keeps him going to know that he is able to help other youth escape the horror he lived with. His gift of bel canto, beautiful song, offered with such courage and generosity does indeed sustain the weary. It sustains me. I share it in the hope that it will serve to sustain you as well.
In Christ, who sustains us all,
Pastor Heidi
Pastor Neumark's Award Winning Book
Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx
Available in paperback.
$17 in bookstores.
$10 at the church.
ELCA News Service
Neumark Tells Women of the ELCA that Bold Sisters Change the WorldJuly 12, 2008
". . . Bold women on the edge of the Jordan River take action that ripples across the centuries and borders all the way to the pages to the American Bar Association Journal and on to us here by the waters of Salt Lake City," Neumark said. "Isn't God amazing? Cannot bold women do awesome things with the help of God?". . . (more)
