10 July 2026 - Friday after the Sixth Sunday of Pentecost

Dear friends,

Being part of a community means having our hearts bound up with each other.

More than a year ago, I met Yvonne Borodavka on a Sunnyside Art Crawl that featured our Little Window Gallery. She had just lost her job, and her son Taylor was struggling with alcohol: I promised to pray for her and for Taylor, and I invited her to join us at our next liturgy experiment. She came—and Yvonne has been a pillar of our community ever since: quiet but sincerely faithful.

Since then, Yvonne has found not one but two jobs she enjoys, and last week she got a promotion.

But Yvonne has never stopped worrying about Taylor, praying for him, supporting him—even when he lashed out at her in anger. At our weekly Bible study, we always began with the question “what has been the heart of your week?” Yvonne’s answer was always: Taylor.

One of the most powerful spiritual experiences I have had in the last year was at our Bible Study two weeks ago. While we were reading Psalm 37, Yvonne reflected on her practice of feeling herself flooded with fear for Taylor’s safety in the throes of his alcohol addiction—and offering that up to God. Feeling her powerlessness to help or protect her beloved son—and offering that up to God. “It helps…some,” she said. I was overwhelmed with awe at Yvonne’s courage, the humility and vulnerability of her trust in God, and her commitment to staying present to Taylor in the ways she could.

On Tuesday Morning Yvonne called to tell me that Taylor had died.

Being part of a community means having our hearts bound up with each other—and broken together.

I ask that you join me in holding Yvonne in your hearts, and keeping her in your prayers as she mourns her beloved son, and as she manages the heartbreaking logistics of Taylor’s burial.

We trust that Taylor is at rest in God’s infinite light and love: the prodigal son, embraced with joy by his Father. We trust that Taylor is held in that peace that passes all understanding. And our hearts are broken with Yvonne, and all who love Taylor.

carl+

THIS LITTLE LIGHT is on summer hiatus.

As a community, we take turns giving and receiving—spending time in the spotlight, and doing work behind the scenes.

Can you help out this week? Or in the Sundays to come? Sign up here!

The neighborhood ICE Watch “Office Hours” meets every Saturday from 2-3 pm in the sanctuary. This is a great way to get connected to the work of protecting our neighbors and building power. All are welcome.

We are thrilled to announce three new partnerships that are grounded in our shared values of creativity, solidarity, and integrity. Come September, All Saints Church will become the new home of the Sunnyside Literacy Lab (founded by Anna Young, left), Citation Needed Press (led by Ari Wolff and Cristina Ferrigno, center), and Parenting Style playgroups (led by Janice Chou, on the right). You can learn more about our dream of an emerging ecosystem of mission-aligned initiatives here.

Registration is open for Sunnyside Literacy Labs’ fall programming, and for Print + Build, the Tuesday/Thursday art classes that we will be offering at the church for kids K-5, in partnership with Citation Needed.

If you have questions about these partnerships, or have other ideas about how to use the All Saints building as a blessing to this beautiful and diverse neighborhood, please reach out.

The Peer Support Group, organized through Sunnyside-Woodside Mutual Aid, aims to restore the rightful place of community care. In a culture dominated by the shallow preeminence of self care -- which neglects our responsibilities to each other and frames individual wellbeing as a solitary responsibility & pursuit -- this group insists that that we cannot successfully self care our way out of or through polycrisis, and that healing & care must come from the collective for the collective.

The next meeting is scheduled for July 21st. Reach out to Zehra for more info!

Cristina Ferrigno
Tabula Rasa

Cristina Ferrigno is a Colombian-born, Brooklyn-raised artist based in Sunnyside. Her work explores cultural “in-betweenness” as a transnational adoptee through combined-media practices and ongoing community-based projects. She loves all kinds of prints and printmaking, photography and image-making processes, as well as working with personal and visual archives.

This work grew out of experiments using leftover paper pulp from an intergenerational workshop she led in the church garden in August 2025. This lovely, messy, hot event was an epic collaboration between the Episcopal Mission in Sunnyside and Citation Needed, a community-based press and workshop series where Cristina has served as Studio Director since 2025. So this work invites the question…

What's something you’re working on that feels like a soggy, smelly mess?

Here is a tender response we’ve received this week:

My parenting. As my child grows, I need to grow too, but I feel like I can’t keep pace. So I’m in this awkward moment where my habitual responses aren’t quite right, but I’m also unskilled at the new strategies I think would feel right… So I’m stuck in between and nothing is satisfying.

Let us know what YOU think on the Little Window Gallery website! We’ll anonymously post all the responses there, and on the LWG’s Instagram page. And in a few weeks we’ll randomly select one of the people who responded and they’ll get to keep a print of Cristina’s paper pulp poem—a local work of art for their very own!

Thanks to Cristina for sharing this tender reflection on grief—and for sharing her practice with us in so many ways, and in ways yet to come!

Please—if you're yearning for something that you haven't seen here, reach out start a conversation. This new mission in Sunnyside is made up of...US. So it gets to be what we want it to be...