​In this Hanukkah season, Fr. Mark and Mo. Rebecca join our voices with other religious leaders in San Diego to call for the end of hatred and antisemitism.

Access video HERE. ​This video begins with a commercial aired on CBS8 and is not endorsed by St. James by-the-Sea.

CBS8 News features The Rev'd Rebecca Dinovo in report on
Volunteers offering services to migrant children arriving to San Diego
The Episcopal Diocese of San Diego says they are looking for faith-based volunteers and counselors immediately.
 
Author: Teresa Sardina
Published: 3:12 PM PDT March 29, 2021

SAN DIEGO COUNTY, Calif. — The Episcopal Diocese of San Diego has been asked to coordinate services for the unaccompanied migrant children arriving at the San Diego Convention Center for the days ahead. Since Wednesday, The Episcopal Diocese of San Diego has checked-in hundreds of volunteers to be available to assist the children.
Reverend Rebecca Dinovo told News8, "Volunteers will provide religious and spiritual care services, bringing comfort, worship, and prayers to these children, hoping this will help with their transition in a new place."
They’re looking for faith-based volunteers and counselors immediately.
Dinovo said there are specific requirements of being a volunteer:
You must speak Spanish
Be fully vaccinated against COVID-19
There will be an extensive background check.
Dinovo said this is just the beginning, members will be at the convention center assessing to see the personal needs of the children. EDSD hopes to have a structured plan in place as of this week to operate effectively to start providing services.
EDSD said their organization is no longer seeking volunteers; however, anyone interested in volunteering should contact SBCS (previously known as South Bay Community Services via their website at sbcssandiego.org/volunteer or by email at volunteer@csbcs.org.  
The Episcopal Diocese of San Diego provided a statement to News 8 on Saturday which read:
“The Episcopal Diocese of San Diego has been asked to coordinate religious and spiritual care services for the unaccompanied migrant children arriving at the San Diego Convention Center this week. Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves, and these are God's beloved children who will be our neighbors for a short time. Caring for them answers God's commandment to love others. We are glad to add their spiritual care to the many other ways our churches help those in need in the greater San Diego area. The Episcopal Diocese of San Diego, led by its Bishop, The Rt. Rev. Susan Brown Snook, is working with our partners in other denominations and other faiths to organize volunteers who would bring comfort, worship, and prayers to these children. Volunteers would need to speak Spanish, be fully vaccinated against COVID, and have a background check. We are thankful for the support of the Pacifica Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as well as the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego, and many other faith leaders in our city, who stand ready to help the children with spiritual care. Working with the contractor providing programming for the children in the convention center, we hope to have an organizational structure in place soon.”

Barbara Alcorn shares this for the encouragement of all our outreach knitters and the general St. James community.

Dear Knitters All -  

Yesterday I took a donation of 48 cans of Oatmeal from Trader Joes to St.  Luke’s for their food delivery today.
Katherine, the Interim Executive Director of RefugeeNet, gave me this. She said she had just gotten it from Ms. Gomez’s office. I had to share it with you. Keep up your mask making and knitting. We are making a difference. It will be posted on the bulletin board at the church.

Everyone needs masks. Have a great day. 

Barbara

By Elisabeth Frausto, Staff, La Jolla Light Writer
Nov. 9, 2020

La Jolla restaurant employee Edgar Uribe has multiple sclerosis that went untreated for a decade, until a local nonprofit stepped in to connect him with the care he needed.
Uribe, a busser at Piatti in The Shores for eight of his 10 years at the restaurant, has been receiving medical care facilitated and paid for by Big Table, a faith-based nonprofit that works to connect workers in the food service and hotel industries with whatever assistance they need.
Uribe said his MS “didn’t get really bad until last year.” He tried to find treatment, which proved difficult due to his citizenship status, he said. “I didn’t get any help.”
Uribe was referred to Big Table through Piatti guest Martha Ehringer, who complimented Uribe’s hard work to the restaurant’s manager, Tom Spano. Uribe was “charming, sweet and helpful,” she said.
When she learned of Uribe’s MS, Ehringer spoke to Spano about referring him to Big Table, which she had just learned about as outreach chairwoman for St. James by-the-Sea Episcopal Church.
Jesse Vigil, city director for the San Diego chapter of Big Table, said Spano submitted the referral for Uribe. Big Table, which has an office in Pacific Beach, does not accept self-referrals.
Uribe “is a great guy,” Spano said. “He works as hard as he can; he’s a good person in and out. We hope his MS can be halted, if not reversed.”
Big Table “got me a doctor, who prescribed steroids,” Uribe said, which “calm down my nervous system.”

​Read the whole article HERE.

By MARCUS C. LOHRMANN, pastor, Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church, La Mesa
NOV. 11, 2020

Prayer is a vulnerable project.
Step back a moment to consider the audacity of the thing: In prayer, meager human beings set out to connect our hearts, minds, strengths and souls with the source of all life and creation. Talk about ambitious!
One psalmist articulates how ludicrous this can all feel: “When I consider the heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and stars in their courses ... who am I that you would be mindful of me?”
Cynics point to this preposterous ambition as its central weakness, yet the inclination towards prayer is an ancient and constant word of “nevertheless.”
Suffering exists: nevertheless. Futility always seems to get the last word: nevertheless. The world isn’t always as it should be: nevertheless, we persist in hope. Suffering and futility never get the last word on us.
To pray is to become vulnerable to the Divine reality of nevertheless.
We are shaped by the daily postures we assume. We are shaped by the positions that our bodies take as we move through the world, as they are bent over by the forces around us. As a pastor, I have become deeply concerned with the spiritual damage that persistent postures of division inflict upon us as communities and individuals.
This inclination towards division has become such a mainstay of American punditry, political speech and water-cooler conversation (or maybe in 2020 we’d say Zoom conversation) that to let the word “unity” dribble out of one’s mouth is to welcome, even to expect, mockery and derision by the cynical.

​READ WHOLE ARTICLE HERE.

Channel 7 NBC News asks for Fr. Mark's perspective on Christmas without inside services.