Treasure Hunt for Bargains at Tree of Life Service Auction

Fireworks and fun at last year's Tree of Life Service Auction.  More of the same Saturday Night.

An array of entertainment, dining, outdoor activity, and party opportunities are just some of the opportunities available at the Treasure Hunt Service Auction at the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation,  5603 Bull Valley Road in McHenry Saturday evening 6:30 pm.  There will also be art work, jewelry, sports equipment, fire wood, and services ranging from college counseling to real estate closings in the exciting open auction.

There will also be an extensive silent auction with gift baskets of food, wine, crafts, and home life style actions as well as restaurant gift certificates, an array of gift cards, and hand crafts.

All will be available in a gala atmosphere enhanced by live entertainment, hors d’oeuvres, deserts, adult beverages, coffee, and soft drinks.  It is a whole evening of fun and entertainment and an opportunity to get your Christmas shopping done early all for a good cause.

There will also be actives for children—a perfect family night out.

For further information and a look at the auction catalog visit http://treeoflifeuu.org/2016/11/09/2016-service-auction-booklet-now-available/  .

Murfin’s Christmas Verse—Let Us Be That Stable

A very early church fresco, attributed by some to the early Master Giotto, depicts the Mass in the Grotto at Grecio at which a living Nativity scene was created.  St. Francis is depicted holding the Christ Child in adoration.

It’s Christmas Day and time to reflect on the Christian religious origins of this holiday with traditions borrowed from pagan times and which has been overlaid by more than one secular celebration. 

In 1223 St. Francis of Assisi is said to have created the first recreation of the birth scene in a cave near Greccio in Italy.  He was inspired by a recent trip to the Holy Land.  It was a living Nativity tableau, with people representing the Holy Family, shepherds, Magi, and angels and live animals, including an ass and an ox for realism.  The custom quickly caught on and spread across Europe. 

Soon the scene was being reproduced in religious art, both paintings and in sets of figurines to be displayed in the Nave of a Church or, eventually, in the manors of the wealthy.  By the early days of the Renaissance the scene was somewhat standardized.  Instead of St. Francis’s Grotto, the birth place was usually portrayed as a stable, often with a thatched roof with skeletal or broken walls, the participants garbed as peasants and lords of the day.  

A Renaissance  Nativity by German Martin Schongauer typified the  developing conventions of depicting a simple stable with a thatched roof and open or broken walls.

It is this familiar scene, often erected in religious homes and adorning countless Christmas cards, that most of us have firmly in our mind when we hear a reading of the Biblical nativity story.

With that in mind, I composed a poem for a Christmas Eve service at what was then still called the Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock, Illinois a more than a dozen years or so ago.  I used the classic crèche as a metaphor for the Congregation.  The poem was included in my 2004 collection of poetry, We Build Temples in the Heart and has frequently been used in Unitarian Universalist and other worships setting since. 

A typical home crèche

Let Us Be That Stable

Today, let us be that stable

            Let us be the place

            that welcomes at last

            the weary and rejected,

            the pilgrim stranger,

            the coming life.

Let not the frigid winds that pierce

            our inadequate walls,

            or our mildewed hay,

            or the fetid leavings of our cattle

            shame us from our beckoning.

Let our outstretched arms

            be a manger

            so that the infant hope,

swaddled in love,

may have a place to lie.

Let a cold beacon

            shine down upon us

            from a solstice sky

            to guide to us

            the seekers who will come.

Let the lowly Shepard

            and all who abide

            in the fields of their labors

            lay down their crooks

            and come to us.

Let the seers, sages, and potentates

            of every land

            traverse the shifting dunes

            the rushing rivers,

            and the stony crags

            to seek our rude frame.

Let herdsmen and high lords

            kneel together

            under our thatched roof

            to lay their gifts

            before Wonder.

Today, let us be that stable.

—Patrick  Murfin

 

No Knuckle Draggers There—Great Art and Holy Places

On September 12, 1940 four teenage boys chasing their dog Robot into a partially obscured cave mouth came upon something extraordinary.  Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, and Simon Coencas stumbled upon a vast trove of paintings on the walls of the cave complex near the village of Montignac, in the Department of Dordogne, France.

The Lascaux Cave complex was eventually found to include several rooms or galleries including those designated as The Great Hall of the Bulls, the Lateral Passage, the Shaft of the Dead Man, the Chamber of Engravings, the Painted Gallery, and the Chamber of Felines.  Together they contain more than 2,000 figurative pieces, mostly of animals and abstract patterns of dots and geometric figures. 

The most commonly represented animals are horses, 364 images, and stags, 90 images.  Among the most impressive are aurochs or bulls, one of which is depicted in a painting 17 feet long.  Other animals shown include bison, bear, rhinoceros, cave cats, and a bird.  The animals were executed in color with, often with great skill.  They were presented in profile, but with heads turned to that features like two horns could be seen.  Many appear to be in motion.  There is only one depiction of a human, the so-called “dead man” who appears to be lying prone on his back.  This figure is rendered with considerably less skill than the animal images that surround it making scientists wonder if it was a standard stylization—or even graffiti from a stone age vandal.

The paintings were made over an extended period of time, some images overlapping and obscuring earlier pictures.  The earliest images have been carbon dated to about 17,000 BC and images continued to be added over the next 2,000 years.  The artists were the modern humans who supplanted Neanderthals in Europe about 40,000 years ago.  The earliest images are already so well developed that scientists assume some form of painting—perhaps on perishable hides or bark—had been developed over a long period predating the work in the cave.  At any rate, the sophistication of the images completely revolutionized how scientists viewed Paleolithic humans and their culture.

Lascaux and similar discoveries in caves around southwestern France and northern Spain, were apparently never used as habitations but were visited over millennia for ceremonial purposes.  Many caves are oriented so that a setting sun on or near the Winter Solstice would illuminate an inner wall.  This has led some scientists to conclude that dot patters, or even major points on some of the animal paintings, may depict the stars in the night sky as they would have been seen thousands of years ago.  Some have said that they have matched patterns to specific constellations or portions of the sky.

Others believe that the paintings are meant to summon game and that chambers where images have been painted over may represent rooms that the artists believed were successful.  Yet the most common food source for these people, as identified from fire pits in inhabited caves in the same area, was reindeer which are entirely missing from the walls.

After World War II as images of the cave paintings circulated, Lascaux became a tourist attraction with thousands of visitors a year.  By 1955 carbon dioxide produced by 1,200 visitors per day had visibly damaged the paintings. In 1963 the cave complex was closed to the public.  The paintings were restored to their original state and monitored daily.

In 1979, Lascaux and other prehistoric sites in the Vézère Valley became  UNESCO World Heritage Sites.   Lascauz II, with reproductions of paintings in two of the main rooms, opened to the public in 1983 just a few hundred yards from the cave entrance.

Despite the precautions, and possibly even because of air conditioning installed in the cave for climate control, damaging black mold was found invading the site in January 2008 and the cave was closed for three months even to scientists and preservationists.  It has been re-opened only on a very restrictive basis.  The mold has not yet been eliminated, and attempts to remove it in some spots have left a black smudge obscuring a few images.  The integrity of the whole complex and it priceless contents remain in jeopardy.