Banner Project

The Banner Project was started to design and fabricate four banners, each representing one of the four elements, to be hung on the south side of the church sanctuary.  The final banner "Water" was dedicated on Sunday, April 20, 2008, exactly one year after the first banner - "Earth" - was dedicated on Earth Day.

The three artists who created the banners - Helen Parramore, Alexandra Bolton-Schultes, and Karen Frank  - are members of our church.  They were assisted by others during the development of the banners: Geneva Nelson, Lori Clement, Betty Perry and Harriet Ha-Sidi.  Not only did they design and fabricate the banners, they also gave meaning to the banners by adding the following words:

Earth - Teach Me

Fire - Lead Me

Air - Free Me

Water - Heal Me

During the dedication of the final banner, Helen Parramore read the following story, which she also wrote, related to her thoughts on the elements:

A PROFOUND GOLDFISH

I have a fishpond in a shady corner of my patio. It is serene and secluded, an uneventful habitat for a 49-cent goldfish that has lived there, a pampered darling of the gods, for three years. I like watching the fish. I feel as if I am peering into a world I can't experience, like looking into the windows of other people's houses at dusk, before the shades are drawn.

One day I watched the fish as it hung suspended in its watery world, effortlessly balanced between the surface and the sides of the pool. The water touched every part of its glimmering body. Its tail, gills and fins moved in elegant coordination maintaining perfect position and balance. The gills, pink and fluttering like wings, pulled the water inside, bringing in oxygen and life and carrying away what the fish no longer needed.

The goldfish, I assumed, could have no sensation of the water as a separate thing from itself. It was at one with its watery environment; its existence was a continuous flow from without to within and back again.

The goldfish could have no awareness of the water unless removed from it, brought into the air where its fins and tail would flail desperately, and the gills would pump dry air to no avail, and its golden scales would pale and curl in the sun. Only then would the fish know what water was and that losing it was death.

We live in an environment similar to the fish's, except that our water is made up of the people we live with and love. We take our environment for granted as easily and as unthinkingly as the fish takes the water. Our give and take, our exchange of ideas, our involvement with those we love, all our human interactions, make a movement like the fish's gills and fins, causing a psychic flow of human energy between us, around us and through us as naturally and as easily as water slipping over and around and in and out of the fish. And like the goldfish, we hardly know where we leave off and the other begins.

However, we are more capable of thought than the fish is, so we tell ourselves how much we love each other, how much we need each other, and we imagine we know. But we don't really know until someone we love is gone, and we find ourselves terribly wounded and gasping for air in a world that is no longer familiar. It is then we realize that we are literally a part of each other.

It is then we realize how necessary love is to human life. It is only then that we truly know how much we love. And that is why when you're in pain, I hurt; and when you hurt yourself, you hurt me; and when you die, part of me dies, too.

If I were to offer a prayer to those I love, it might be: May you never discover how much you love each other. That's a terrifying thing to know, and once perceived, changes everything.