Dear Friends,
Welcome once again to Kenmore Uniting Church. Some of you who know the church will remember that last year Rev. Dona set up a wilderness scene in the Sanctuary at the beginning of Lent and each week more life was added to the scene. Here is how it looked on Palm Sunday. As usual, just click PLAY under picture.
When you finish the service, you might like to listen to thisvery moving new song from Italy composed in the midst of their struggle. The music and words for Rinascero, Rinascerai are inspiring as are the beautiful images of Italy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=D5DhJS5hGWc&feature=youtu.be
Previous services will be on the link Past Recorded Services.
When this amazing song was first sent to us, there was an explanation in English about how it was created only about a week ago. This doesn’t seem available any more, so we are including here some information for you.
MILAN — Roby Facchinetti is the singer and co-author of “Rinascerò, Rinascerai” (literally, “I will be reborn, you will be reborn”). The song and its accompanying video are a tribute to Facchinetti’s beautiful hometown in Northern Italy, Bergamo, which is one of the country’s — and the world’s — worst-hit communities of the coronavirus pandemic. He tells how the song came about:
How did the song come about?
It began when I saw the footage on the news of army trucks taking away coffins. This was just 50 meters from where I live here in the center of Bergamo, and so it was even tougher to watch. Two days earlier, two of my relatives had died. It was very painful, and so I sat down at my piano. This is because my whole life has been in music and it has always been the best medicine in the most difficult moments. I simply wanted to play the piano in order to take my mind off things, and the melody and harmony just came. I immediately rang Stefano D’Orazio. I told him about the tune and that I had these two words in mind — “Rinascerò, Rinascerai” — and I asked him, “Could you write the lyrics?” And in just a few hours, he sent them to me, and they were perfect, pure poetry. And we immediately got to work. Of course, nobody could leave their home, and so we organized the recording, the post-production, the chorus with a young choir from Bergamo, all of whose members recorded themselves individually at home.
The video.
It features the staff at the Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital in Bergamo, where my wife Giovanna is a volunteer. The doctors and nurses all appear holding a sheet with the words “Rinascerò, Rinascerai,” and this was mixed in with images of Bergamo. Some of the players and coaches at Bergamo’s major league soccer club, Atalanta, also took part.
Bergamo
My city, in particular, has been badly hit. Every family here has lost at least a member or a friend. Many priests and nuns have died, as there are a lot of convents here, not to mention rest homes. All the elderly people have the virus. And a third of the doctors in the province of Bergamo have caught it and some of them have died. Each doctor had a thousand patients, and so these people no longer have a point of reference. This is far worse than a war because during the war, air-raid sirens would go off when the bomber planes were approaching and everybody took shelter and lives were saved. Now it’s worse. There are even children in hospital who have the virus. In the Bergamo area, there are 1,800 people in their 30s who have it. It’s like being in a never-ending nightmare. Fortunately, there are signs that the infection rate could be slowing down.