Playing with God

I had lunch today with the Rector of a nearby church. We see eye-to-eye on many issues having to do with how to do ministry in our various contexts and find it mutually rewarding to share with each other. I know people that don't know how to have these kinds of conversations, and that makes me sad for them. How can you learn if you can't listen? Not that I'm always such a great listener, but at least I try.

I've been trying to understand some of the things that made the conference so exhilarating for me. It's not just that I learned some new techniques or listened to some interesting ideas. I think that what really, really turned me on was playing with God. My own spiritual temperament has always been keen on holy play, but somewhere in my training for ministry I learned that you're not supposed to be that way when you are leading worship. It's serious, life or death business that requires concentration and intentionality and focus. This sort of liturgical theology is closely tied, IMHO, with notions of worship-as-sacrifice. I know priests that say that the primary value of the saying the Office is that it is a sacrifice of time. They feel good about the fact that there are million things that they would rather be doing. That it be prayer is besides the point in this theology.

So lately I've been breaking that open by exploring play in my private devotional life. That is, I've been praying the Office in a manner that plays with God. I'm just messing around as I experiment with singing or by sitting in a different place or burning incense or whatever else might come to mind. The point here is that I am giving myself permission to be expressive. What could be more "correct" than that?

I'm not saying everyone should pray crazy--I'm just saying it's working for me this week!

-t

Another Example of Paperless Singing

Here's another example of Paperless singing--this time it's Marilyn Haskel (from St. Paul's Chapel, NYC, and Church Publishing) teaching the conference group a Fraction Anthem she composed...

Between these two clips I think you can begin to hear what this is about. I especially like the way you can hear the energy of the group. Note how we self-corrected as went along. Neat...

-t

An Example of Paperless Singing

People near me have been hearing me froth about the singing we did at the Conference, so here's a quick clip of what it sounds like in person. Keep in mind, we had never sung this piece before, and we didn't have any paper in front of us with the words or notes. Emily Scott (who overlapped Betsy and me at YDS/ISM), the Director of Worship at Riverside Church, simply stood up and taught one half of the room one part and the other half the second part and then put it together. Cool, heh?


-t

Aaron

I really love what they did with the classic vestry mirror. This is where us clergy love to look at our pretty selves all dressed up for the party. At St. Gregory's they etched the poem below into the mirror to use as the "Vesting Prayer" they say before every service...

AARON.

HOLINESS on the head,
Light and perfection on the breast,
Harmonious bells below raising the dead
To lead them unto life and rest.
Thus are true Aarons drest.*

Profaneness in my head,
Defects and darkness in my breast,
A noise of passions ringing me for dead
Unto a place where is no rest :
Poor priest ! thus am I drest.

Only another head
I have another heart and breast,
Another music, making live, not dead,
Without whom I could have no rest :
In Him I am well drest.

Christ is my only head,
My alone only heart and breast,
My only music, striking me e'en dead ;
That to the old man I may rest,
And be in Him new drest.

So holy in my Head,
Perfect and light in my dear Breast,
My doctrine tuned by Christ (who is not dead,
But lives in me while I do rest),
Come, people ; Aaron's drest.
-George Herbert

Nice, heh? Beats the heck out of the traditional vesting prayers. I used the old ones for a few years (even before serving at the Anglo-Catholic St. Mary Mag's), but find the theology to be somewhat out of synch with where I am now (a bit too donatist). So lately I just make something up as I vest, but I really like the idea of etching the mirror with something like this....

-t

A Few Pictures

Here are a few of the hundred-some pictures I took during my time in San Francisco...

That's Sara Miles, who founded the St. Gregory's Food Bank, talking to us about the healing power of touch

Here's the Lectern at St. Greg's--
note the similarity to a Jewish Bimah

A few of the dancing saints...

A display of some of their liturgical umbrellas

This the Vestry Mirror--
Note the poem "Aaron" by George Herbert etched in

On a field trip to St. John's, Mission District--
note the lack of pews

Field trip to Grace Cathedral

At the beach with some friends

The ocean

More ocean

The Last Day

The conference wrapped up today. In the morning we met at Grace Cathedral to look at some of their worship spaces and talk about how they work and don't work. Side note, Grace has famously bad acoustics for speaking (huge reverb) and recently invested in a new sound system based on the same technology that I advocated for SMM--linear array speakers. They are so thin (about 3 inches) as to be virtually invisible against the columns, but thanks to sophisticated digital sound processing they create an incredibly articulate perception of the spoken word. I hear that SMM did get a new sound system, but I havedn't heard it.

Anway, after spending some time at Grace we went back to St. Greg's and experienced their famous food pantry first hand. They typtically distribute food to about 500 people, and what's really interesting is that this ministry supports itself entirely thanks to a few key gifts and low overhead. It's only costs about $1 per person, and they can raise that easily enough. so at this point they have used the extra money they raise to found 14 other food pantries throughout the city. It's an amazing story worth more desciprtion, but suffice it to say that they are clearly doing God's word and it's a beautiful to behold. The stories of how this ministry has changed people's lives can easily move you to tears to hear.

Afer that we spent time listening to each other talk about change how it can transform communtities in amazing ways. After that there was time to reflect as a group about what we had been through, and then it was over. Now I have another few days to enjoy SF and then it's back to Toronto. So much to share when I get there. These last few days have been amazing!

-t

Improv

My friends are going through the rituals necessary to put their 3-year-old to bed, so I'll make some comments about the day.

Equipment I brought with me....

1. Video Camera
2. Digital Camera
3. Digital Audio Recorder
4. GPS
5. Cell Phone

I know--I'm a nerd. But I'm a nerd who is coming back to Toronto with lots of material to share. For example, I recorded a fascinating talk about how to lead "paperless" congregational singing. This stuff is amazing to experience, and recording it will make it much easier to share with others!

Morning Prayer this morning was neat. I found singing the Gospel improvisationally be as amazing as I hoped. I was able to find an emotional center in some sections, and that is very cool to convey with voice.

We spent some time in our conference sessions working on improv. At one point we were put into small groups with the task of acting out short snippets of assigned Gospel stories--and we couldn't use words at all, not even as we planned what to do. The idea was to convey the emontional content of these stories without relying on traditional narrative. The results were stunning. I ended up playing the Good Samaritan, and as I collapsed to the ground having been struck, I had moment of really inhabiting that role.

From there we ended up doing some work around how to "land" your communications. That is, there is a subtle way in which an actor or preacher can "land" his words on the people in the congregation. This is the opposite of the kind of preaching where eye contact is considered a good embelishment of a act which is still really about conveyance of the written word. This is advanced teaching, and yet totally intuitive. I think it's something people respond to in my preaching even when the "understandings" I convey are not particularly profound or remarkable.

there is much more to say--I'll be reflecting on this trip for a long time, I think. Good thing I brought plenty of equipment to capture some of it.

-t

Live From SF

I'm exhausted, so this will have to be a short post...

The conference is blowing my mind. It's about 40 energetic, creative, and bold folks from all over North America (Oklahoma, Vancouver, Indiana, New York, etc.). The content of the talks and the exercises are interesting enough, but then there is the Spirit in which we do them. It's incredibly inspiring and prayerful and playful and supportive. I have many stories to tell. It's revolutionizing my approach to some key aspects of the liturgy--but it will have to wait as I'm increibly tired and have to get up by 6 A.M. to make to Morning Prayer at St. Greg's. BTW, Morning Prayer is compeletely a lay initiative at St. Greg's. They have four to about fourteen people show up every morning to pray--how many parishes can claim that kind of corporate prayerfulness? And tomorrow I'm on to chant the Gospel lesson as the morning reading IMPROVISATIONALLY! We're not talking doing the stardard chant tones from the back of the Altar Book--we're talking about doing sometime much more free-flowing and expressive. And you know what, it feels really, really good. It's incredbily liberating to sing what you feel as you read the words and not be thinking at all about what you are "supposed" to be singing. This is something my voice teacher has been talking about for ages--chant as elevated speech.

Time for bed. It's all blessings. God is good, etc.!

-t

Dear Anonymous...

My last post elicited an incredibly angry response from some reader who refuses to reveal himself or herself--so I've exercised the right to moderate comments and deleted it. I may repost it later to comment on it, but basically the writer thinks that my choice to observe MLK was the evidence of a kind of trendiness that is not theologically orthodox enough. I wouldn't mind someone making such an argument in a reasonably civil way, but the pure venom of it was simply unworthy of Christian community.

Christians can have arguments, but I'm not going to spar with someone who doesn't have the moral courage to reveal his or her identity. It seems to me that this person is more interested in making me look stupid than engaging in a real conversation--so I've disabled anonymous comments and will screen comments before they appear on this blog in the future.

So if this person wants to have a grown up conversation, then I'll discuss why I thought recognizing a 20th Century Martyr (who has a statue in Westminster Abbey, of all bastions of Anglicanism) was liturgically justified. Otherwise, keep it to yourself!

-t

MLK Sunday

This morning we celebrated Martin Luther King in church. MLK isn't on the Anglican Calendar of Saints, but he should be. He's on the American church's calendar as well as various others, so I felt we were on solid ground recognizing his feast as a local custom. The service itself was excellent. Matthew went all out in organizing the music and trying some new things. The Prelude, for instance, consisted of an LCD Projection of MLK's "I have a dream" speech on the wall behind the altar while the choir sang "We Shall Overcome." Very nice.

My sermon went well (and wasn't dogmatic in the pejorative sense at all). Here it is:


Now I'm going to watch some football. I've got a long flight tomorrow...

Anonymous Notes

This morning I found this anonymous note in a place where I would find it:

Any sermon, or just dogmatics??

I suppose this was left by someone who doesn't care for my preaching style, though I don't think of what I do as being very dogmatic. It's not a very stinging criticism. It's also possible that this was left by someone from the AA group that meets in the space on Saturday nights.

From time to time I get these kinds of critical notes, I suspect most pastors do, too. The usual advice given about these things is that you should ignore any anonymous criticism, because if you let it change the way you do things than you create a very toxic and passive-aggressive kind of dynamic. So I'm doing to ignore this one, too, but I wanted to post it here just because it's an interesting artifact of parish ministry.

-t

On Telling Stories

Susan, on her blog This Passage, quotes this wonderful bit from Elie Wiesel's The Gates of the Forest.

“When Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening…it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and misfortune averted. When his disciple, Magid of Mezritch, had occasion to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say, Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer.” Again, the miracle would be accomplished. Later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save the people, would go into the forest and say, “I do not know how to light the fire. I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient.” Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, head in his hands, he spoke to God: “I am unable to light the fire. I do not know the prayer. I cannot find the place in the forest. All I can do is tell the story, and this must be sufficient.”
And it was sufficient.
God made man because He loves stories.
--Elie Wiesel

Isn't that great? Reminds of the Desert Fathers, naturally.

-t