By Heather Melton, UTO Staff Officer

You might not know this about me, but I love a good quip about being an Episcopalian, because if we can’t chuckle at ourselves, what can we? One of the jokes I’ve always loved is: “Well, we’ve done it once, so it’s now a tradition.” The pandemic gave rise to a lot of these “traditions” both for my family and for some of us at UTO. For my kiddos, they built leprechaun traps for the first time and have continued to do so each year in preparation for St. Patrick’s Day. For UTO, we started a Zoom book group and have also kept it going. The first year, we participated in the Good Book Club, but after that, we branched out on our own to tackle books about gratitude that I had wanted to read but hadn’t found time for yet. 

Each year our numbers have shifted, and some of you have faithfully attended every year since we started. I look forward to our book club each year and feel anxious as I try to pick the next book to find something challenging, inspiring, and easy enough to read before Easter. It’s also important to note that we announce the next book at the end of the series, so the book we’re reading this year, we picked about a year ago. This year, we are reading “The Ungrateful Refugee” by Dina Nayeri. It was recommended to me by our friends at Episcopal Migration Ministries, and I invited them to join us for our group this Lent. I’m excited to share a bit about the book and club with you as we prepare to dive into this memoir for Lent. 

“The Ungrateful Refugee” is the memoir of Dina Nayeri, who became a refugee when she was 8 years old. She grew up in Iran, and her mother faced persecution because she was a Christian. Ms. Nayeri shares about the displacement she and others experienced. She talks about receiving charity, aid, and help along the way. The book offers us a window into the experience of a refugee, as well as a chance to look at how our desire to help others can create challenges. 

This book is quite different than the ones we’ve read before, but already as I prepare for the first week, I am finding such wisdom about gratitude, particularly in ways we talk about thankfulness that at best fall flat and at the worst cause harm. Each week we’ll look at a section of the book and talk to each other about what stood out to us, what challenged us, and what resonated with us. This year, our book group has grown to almost 200 people, thanks to an outpouring of support for EMM. We are committed to ensuring that there’s a discussion, so we’ll have a presentation on the part of the book assigned for the week, followed by breakout rooms with UTO and EMM staff, followed by time for questions and reflections back to the main group. The final week will feature a panel discussion with EMM leaders on where we are now with refugee resettlement and what our continued commitment to this work as a church looks like. 

I hope you will join us for book group this Lent. You can sign up here. Come for as many sessions as you are able, read along with us as you are able (there’s also an audiobook available), and come wrestle with us as we think about what it means to welcome others, how it feels to be welcomed, and what gratitude looks like in ways you might not have considered before. We look forward to seeing you on Tuesdays at noon Eastern time for our 2025 Lenten Book Group.

Schedule

Tuesday, March 11, at noon Eastern: Part One: Escape, led by Heather Melton, UTO, and Kendall Martin, EMM
Tuesday, March 18, at noon Eastern : Part Two: Camp, led by Kendall Martin, EMM
Tuesday, March 25, at noon Eastern: Part 3: Asylum, led by Allison Duvall, EMM
Tuesday, April 1, at noon Eastern: Part 4: Assimilation, led by Heather Melton, UTO
Tuesday, April 8, at noon Eastern: Part 5: Cultural Repatriation and EMM Panel Discussion, moderated by Heather Melton, UTO