Music That Makes Community: To the Bath and the Table

This is a really nice piece of Paperless Music. The Cantor's part has a bunch of really neat verses, of which Emily sings only the first in this example.



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The Awesomest Staff Meeting Ever

Spent the morning getting my blood drawn for tests as part of my yearly physical, then went to another clinic to get my H1N1 Vaccine. It turned out to be pretty anti-climatic. I haven't noticed any change.

Back at church--AWESOME staff meeting. First we spent 45 minutes or so arranging chairs and liturgical furniture in the space to explore possible Advent configurations. The last few times I've done this it's been basically a lone-wolf exercise in liturgical planning. This time, I had THREE different staff members with me chipping in with excellent ideas and refinements. Between the four of us we came up with an arrangement that is better than what any of us had in mind individually. It will require acquiring a few small pieces that we don't have already (such as a brass menorah), but we have time to get them before the season begins.

After that we spent some time reflecting on the last two Sundays and incorporating the results into some changes to be implemented next Sunday. Some of the things we noticed won't be incorporated until next year.

Then we hunkered down and did some exciting planning for Advent and Epiphany. There are lots of projects and possibilities emerging, and the neat thing is that many/most of them are coming from the staff or the congregation! Wow! Really great to watch stuff start to spring up from fertile ground. Extremely rewarding for me to see and hear how well our group is working together for the building up of this community. Beautiful. Simply beautiful.

At the end of the staff meeting we prayed for the church and for various pastoral and personal concerns, then we sang the Lord's Prayer together. We each walked away with a list of "to-dos" and much excitement.

Have I said lately how much I love being a priest at the Church of The Messiah? This is such a great job!

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Music that Makes Community: Come light of lights

Emily Scott leading "Come Light of Lights" on Friday at the "Music that Makes Community" conference that Eric and I attended. Note how little direction she uses--real economy of communication greatly facilitates leading this kind of music.



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Tell It Like It Is

One of the books we had to read in advance for the Preacher's College last week was Tell It Like It Is: Reclaiming the Practice of Testimony by Lillian Daniel (our guest presenter at the College). This book is based on her D.Min. dissertation and focuses on reclaiming the tradition of Testimony for "mainline" churches (think Congregationalist, Methodist, Episcopal, Lutheran, even Catholic). She developed a practice at her church in New Haven (and brought it with her to Chicago) of inviting lay members of the congregation to give testimony from the heart (usually only for about 7-8 minutes) about their life with God. The only real rule (besides the time limit and the fact that these folk were specifically invited by the pastor) was that Testimonies could not be "godless." What she didn't want to hear was, "What I learned about myself in psychotherapy," nor, "What civic minded people can accomplish when they work together." The point is to talk about how God is active in your life.

The practice was very successful and brought people closer together in the congregation. It also helped to spread out leadership and foster both discipleship and (yes) stewardship.

So she wanted to talk to us about how this practice can be helpful to congregations as well as how the use of personal testimony in preaching can be a powerful tool. To this end she had us read a book she co-wrote with Martin Copenhaven, This Odd and Wondrous Calling: The Public and Private Lives of Two Ministers. This book reads as a series of essays reflecting on different aspects of the pastoral vocation. Many of them are amusing, thoughtful, and certainly familiar to those of us "in the cloth." It would be a great book for anyone considering ordained ministry, and was written to be a counterpoint to such books as Leaving Church by Barbara Brown Taylor (which focused on the problems of life in pastoral leadership) and the You-Can-Make-Your-Mega-Church-Grow-with-Jesus'-Help kind of books. It provides some good examples of how personal narrative can be used to make theological arguments in a far more compelling way than the products of "illustration factories." You know, those cutesy generic sermon illustrations you can find on various sermon-writing websites.

The "College of Preachers" is run by St. Clement's Church here in Toronto but is really meant to be a National programme. They have a sermon number of slots for Toronto priests and then the other half are taken by priests from around the Anglican Church of Canada. You have to be nominated by your bishop to attend. The College happens every two-years.

About a week before the event I was told I would be preaching at Morning Prayer on the first day of the conference. I had no idea what the readings would be, so I prepared a sermon that made good use of personal narrative and was pleased that it did, in fact, go with the readings. Mine was the first sermon heard this year, so I was naturally more nervous than usual. But it went well.

As our days together went one we heard talks by Lillian and then broke up into groups hear each other preach and critique. We also had times of prayer and recreation.

It was wonderful to be with other clergy and talk about preaching, though not without some interesting disagreements on things like the usefulness of the lectionary. There was also a fruitful discussion about one should preach at wedding and funerals (seems like a great evangelism opportunity to me, but some pastors disagree). Lots of discussion of clergy role, boundaries, etc.

David Montgomery (one of the priest's at St. Clement's) did an excellent job with the Offices. He even did some "Paperless Music" using the Music by Heart Hymnal. He's the first person I've seen use it (besides Eric and I) in Toronto, so I was very excited to see how easily he was able to do it. Naturally I told him that I would meeting with the All Saint's Company folks that wrote that hymnal in a few days!

There is an interesting quality to praying together at these sorts of retreats. Something about having a roomful of clergy praying together makes for a very special atmosphere. Something about the shared ministry and collegiality makes for really rich prayer time together. Nor is it necessarily limited to ordained clergy, I experienced the same thing with the mostly lay-group in Atlanta.

I had to leave the College after the last full-day. I missed the banquet dinner and the last Plenary talk and Lillian's sermon, alas. But I had to catch my flight to Atlanta, which I will blog about soon....

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Home

What a week. I was at the College of Preachers Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Then Wednesday night I flew to Atlanta. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday I was at the Music that Makes Community Conference with my Minister of Music. It was an exhilarating, but exhausting. I flew back this evening and have church in the morning. Sunday afternoon and Monday I expect to be nearly useless.

Did I learn much? Of course! Spending three days working of preaching was very worthwhile. Really it was a "Master Class" in preaching. It was also neat to reconnect with Lillian Daniel, whom I met at Yale when I was there. She would come in and give guest lectures on preaching. The topic for the three days was the use of personal narrative in preaching. Of course, I already do a fair amount of this, but it was still worth working on with the group.

It Atlanta we studied "Paperless Music"--which is the recovery and use of methods to get congregations and groups singing without relying on the congregation having music-in-hand. In other words, using techniques like call-and-response, echo (lining hymns), and so forth. There are many advantages to using this kind of music in worship, which you'll hear about later!

So it was three days of working on how to lead (and compose) this kind of music. It was a lot of fun. Great to catch up with some friends from All Saint's Company like Donald, Rick, Marilyn, Emily, and Scott. I knew Emily at Yale, so that's other Yale Divinity School connection this week. We sang and sang and sang. Worthwhile, and I have more to say about it later.

Right now, time to go to bed!

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Holocaust Education Week Photo

Here's a nice picture of me with Jenny Eisenstein and her sister by our church sign. What a great event that was!

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Holocaust Education Week

We had a really great All Saints Service at Messiah this morning. Besides being the feast of All Saints, it is also Holocaust Education Week. I had been approached several months ago about having Church of The Messiah be one of the sites participating in HEW. As plans evolved, it was decided that Jenny Eisenstein, an Awschwitz survivor, would present a tribute to the Jewish spirit. She gave a 15-20 minute presentation of music accompanied by Anna Vanesyan on piano and Omer Strumpf (a 12-year-old Cello prodigy).

As it turned out, attendance was fantastic: 105. About a third of our congregation was Jewish! Now, Eric and I had spent some time thinking and planning the liturgy and it really showed. We did a Litany of the Saints, for example, that was very cool. I'll see if I can find a link to it. For the Psalm Eric had Marili Moore (our Honorary Assistant Priest and un-official Resident Hebrew Scholar) and Laura Roth (Cantor) sing the verses in Hebrew while the congregation sang the refrain in English. Not only that, but he found and adapted a traditional Hebrew chant melody (based on the Djerba chant, I believe). It was gorgeous, and I was incredibly impressed with Marili and Laura's performance.

After the Gospel I welcomed our guests and said a few words to help make them feel more at ease. Jenny's presentation was intense and beautiful and evocative. She started off with a piece she learned as a child in the concentration camp because people would singing it together on their way to the gas chamber. Some of the songs were in Yiddish. She sang some in English and other in Hebrew. I'll see how the recording turned out.

During Communion the choir sang a really nice anthem--"Justorum animae" by Orlando di Lasso. Again, I looked over and thought about how utterly impressed I am with our church's music programme. We really have an excellent group of musicians.

The organizers for the event were extremely impressed with our ability to make the Christian liturgy hospitable to our Abrahamic brothers and sisters. That was, of course, intentional. We didn't water it down, by any means, but we did make intelligent choices. Replacing the Creed with the Shema/Summary of the Law, for example. Also, I changed the wording of the "Prayer over the Gifts" that precedes the Sursum Corda by swapping "...the triumph of Christ..." for "...the triumph of God..." The theology of that particular prayer works equally well.

This is one of my favourite liturgies I've done at COTM. Certainly in my top five. It was the best and fullest and most unapologetic expression of our Christian faith I can imagine--yet it was perfectly able to accommodate some 45 Jewish guests! Everyone walked away feeling really good about the whole thing and deeply moved by the reality of the Holocaust and stories of Jenny's survival.

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Cat Herders

OK, I can't resist posting this classic ad. One of my favourite of all time. It relates to ministry... somehow.



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Mission Church--like building a plane in the air

I was at the Fresh Expressions Working Group meeting today. This is the Diocesan Committee that looks after church planting. I'm new to the committee, which is an Episcopal Appointment, and found it very exciting to hear about many of the new churches which are being founded around the Diocese. I knew about most, but not all, of these projects.

Needless to say, Missional Church was much discussed, and we (like everybody else) are really learning how to do it as we go along. In relation to this, (Diocesan Missioner) Jenny Andison told us about this video:

Yep, that feels about right. We build airplanes in mid-flight in the church!

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RIP Stephen Bélanger–Taylor

Stephen Bélanger–Taylor, the artist who created Messiah's famous East Window, passed away this summer. One of the Staff at the Diocesan Centre was sharp enough to notice and to pass this obituary on to me. It came just in time to help inspire my Dedication Day sermon:

Stephen Bélanger –Taylor died unexpectedly at this home outside Geraldine, New Zealand in mid July. He had been diagnosed with cancer last Fall, but after chemo and radiation treatments, was declared disease –free about 2 weeks before he died. His death was a result of a seizure he had in the night. The irony…..

As many of you may know, Stephen’s wife Denise is a glass blower. They built a beautiful hot and cold glass studio on their country property on the south island of New Zealand. Their two sons, Michael and Kevin live on the north island. Michael and his wife Donnelle have a son and they have just had twins, so Denise has some very concrete and life affirming diversions for the moment.

Born and raised in Britain, Stephen’s art education began at 15 when he won a scholarship to Wimbledon School of Art where he was introduced to stained glass and learned the skill of restoration. He then won a place at the Royal College of Art in London where he continued his study and apprenticeship of stained glass and glass painting.

He immigrated to Canada in 1968 after receiving a stained glass commission at St. James Cathedral in Toronto through Yvonne Williams’ Toronto stained glass studio. As we know, he went on to develop a significant career in Canada doing numerous liturgical and residential stained glass commissions throughout Ontario.

He took the tradition skill of glass painting to a new and contemporary level with the use of double and triple matt layers. His line work was definitive, simple, and elegant. His bold colour sense and organically abstracted landscape shapes blended to create windows with very strong presence.

A strong presence was also a trait of his personality. My first meeting with Stephen was in a studio he was using in downtown Toronto. He was working on a large painted liturgical commission. I was meeting with him to talk about the possibility of apprenticing with him. At this point I had been doing stained glass as a hobby, with no formal art training at all. I walked into a darkened room. The only light was what was coming through the painted glass on an incredibly large easel. Stephen was in front of the panel with a brush and mull stick in hand. It was a rather medieval scene. In lieu of a regular introduction, his first words were “So you want to do stained glass do you?” “Are you a masochist?’ That cackle laugh of his followed the question. He proceeded to give me a reading list 2 pages long, most of which were published in England and dealt with the esoteric, philosophical, artistic and technical aspects of the art of stained glass. I knew then that this was the teacher for me.

The depth of training he had had was of a level that hardly existed in Canada. His standards of professionalism around his work were very high. He was openly very critical of what he considered mediocre work presented as something more. He was often seen as arrogant and intimidating. In fact he was a shy man, with bold opinions, based on a standard of excellence that he had been trained for, an accomplished stained glass designer, an amazing builder and innovator in the technical construction of glass furnaces, a generous, gifted teacher, and a dedicated artist in the way he lived his life, a committed father and partner.

Some of his most notable works can be seen in Toronto at Church of the Holy Trinity (4 south windows), Church of the Messiah (East window), St. Luke’s Thornhill (South altar window), St. Michael’s All Angels (Etobicoke), and Picton Town Hall.

Along with his commission work, Stephen also taught and influenced many students at Humber and Georgian Colleges, lecturing at U of T and conducting private apprenticeship courses.

After spending time in New Zealand in the 1980’s and 90’s, Stephen established what would be a long creative working relationship with New Zealand artist Beverly Shore Bennett. He collaborated with her on many commission throughout New Zealand. This eventually led to the Belanger-Taylor family moving to New Zealand in 1995 where Stephen continued his glass career with much success.

The Window he created is probably my favourite piece of art in the whole church. It was created from the broken pieces of glass collected after the fire here in 1976. When I first saw it I thought of the Burning Bush motif, and I still that is one possible reading of the window, but actually he intended to express something about how God's Holy Spirit encounters humanity and we respond to that grace with praise.

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The Search for Earhart

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With a new movie about aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart coming out, there have some interesting stories in the press about the effort to find her final resting place. When she went missing over the pacific on July 2, 1937, my grandfather was a young carrier pilot flying off a carrier (not sure which one--Perhaps the USS Lexington (CV-2)). His squadron participated in the search, and he maintained an interest in her fate ever since.

The most likely scenario currently proposed is that she ran out of fuel near Howland Island and made an emergency landing on a small, uninhabited island known as Nikumaroro Atoll. It had a smooth, flat reef that would have been possible to land on, however the waves and strong wind would have likely eventually have pulled her plane into the water. Radio transmissions were heard from Earhart after her landing, which would have required the plane to be able to run its engines (dry ground), which is further evidence for this theory.

Days later, one of the search planes piloted by at Lt Lambrecht flew over Nikumaroro Atol and saw signs of habitation, but couldn't spot the plane or Earhart. Recently researches tested how visible a person on the island would be to an observer in an aircraft (the answer--not very). It is very sad to think that Earhart may have been so close to rescue.

In 1940 British Colonial Service Officer Gerald Gallagher found a partial skeleton on the island of European descent and consistent with Earhart's build. Crabs had taken away the rest. He also found a woman's shoe. Unfortunately, the shoe and the remains were lost.

An expedition to Nikumaroro next summer will look for more evidence to help determine what happened to the famous aviator.

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Patrick O'Brian at Sea...

A friend of mine sent me a link to an article a sailor wrote about his experience having Patrick O'Brian on his large sailing yacht for several days of voyaging in the Mediterranean. Apparently O'Brian's practical knowledge of sailing lags significantly behind his historical knowledge of sailing!

Underway to Menorca beneath a sunny sky with a twenty knot following wind, the sailing was marvelous and O'Brian was delighted. I introduced him to the helm, but he seemed to have no feeling for the wind and the course, and frequently I had to intervene to prevent a full standing gybe. I began to suspect that his autobiographical references to his months at sea as a youth were fanciful. He had no idea of the limitations of even a big yacht like Andromeda in terms of the handling and actual distance we could cover in a day. However, he and Mary adapted quickly to the yacht with no trace of seasickness. (source)

O'Brian worked on his novel The Yellow Admiral while aboard, as well...

Every afternoon between two and five, Patrick retired to my on-board office to work on his novel The Yellow Admiral, then in progress. He borrowed the yacht's charts of France, particularly the area around Brest, to incorporate detail of the blockade of Brest which is featured in that book. Very much to Mary's surprise he showed me each day's progress. She said that he had never shared his work with anyone before completion. Later, Patrick sent me the original manuscript for this volume which I still keep aboard and which I treasure.(source)

Kind of a neat story that gives you a sense of what O'Brian was like. The fact that this persona was an invention of the author (real name, Patrick Russ), adds another layer of meaning to the whole "Patrick O'Brian" phenomenon.

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