After giving a worship workshop this past weekend in New Jersey, and lecturing the week before that on liturgical ordo, I have been thinking some about the ways in which structure the elements in our worship services -- why we put in the elements we do, and why we order them in a particular way.
This led me to remember an article I wrote last year while at Fuller seminary, about experimenting with the worship ordo of our All-Seminary Chapel services.
We were struggling with three related problems: liturgical boredom, thematic coherence, and sacramental expectation. To summarize, our default liturgical structure was on the simplistic side: 20 minutes of singing (led by a group from the right hand side), followed by a sermon (preached by a professor from the left hand side). In addition, it was hard to give that "singing time" any focus because we often didn't learn what the professor/preacher was going to talk about in enough time to do anything about it. Finally, both the singing and sermon time became freighted with sacramental expectations that neither could regularly meet.
Our experimental solution was to borrow a simple worship pattern from the rites of daily prayer. Those rites were developed long ago as the devotional times used by monks and academics in the precursors to our universities and seminaries. We divided up our time together into four categories, mnemonically remembered as "Praise / Psalm /Proclamation / Prayer." We found this pattern most helpful for a number of reasons...
But exactly how it did that is a bit too much for this family blog. Instead, check out WorshipHelps, where I've re-posted the whole thing.
Well, it's Shrove Tuesday, (or to those of French extraction, Mardi Gras), which means that tomorrow we begin the Lenten journey.
We've often decided collectively, as a family, to engage in some modest mortification as a part of our devotional discipline during this season. Some years we've given up television, other years chocolate. We have chosen the usual suspects, things in which we indulge and that do us little good, and perhaps some small harm -- things we would be better off without, so that suffering their absence we are made aware of our dependence upon Christ. We tell the kids that this discipline is like doing weight training. You work and strengthen your "I can say 'no' to that" muscles during Lent. Then, if (or rather, when) you are seriously tempted by something you know is best left alone, by God's grace you've got what it takes to turn away.
Well, this year we don't have television in the house; and so the discussions have begun about what else we might give up during the upcoming 40 days. I am not sure that this year we'll all choose the same things. The kids are now old enough to identify budding dependencies and recognize the wisdom of nipping them now. Pip is considering a season without computer games. More than a month without Moose Trax ice cream will be a genuine sacrifice for Mia. Jacob will work on foregoing his need to get his own way in encounters with his little brother. And me? Well, I think that I would do well to put aside my daily web-trawling. Though I sometimes find interesting bits of information, there is way too much by-catch.
Debra, however, is in a rather different spiritual place than the rest of us. She doesn't need much toning of her "I can do without that" muscles. No, she's the Arnold Schwarzenegger of self-denial. She is working so hard these days at Calvin, and so long... and truth be told, lately without much enjoyment. Life circumstances and spiritual disposition have given her an especially deep awareness of her own shortcomings, a keen sense of her many responsibilities, and along with these, the melancholic outlook so fitting for Lent.
We are wondering therefore, if what she needs to mortify, i.e., what she needs to put to death this Lent, are the overbearing senses of privation, obligation, and condemnation she carries with her. She needs not less of the world's delights, but more of them. More music, more poetry, more prayer, more laughter, more chocolate -- more sabbath repose in the good gifts of God.
Of course, if she ends up indulging in all the things the rest of us are denying, it will make for a rather interesting 6 weeks around here.
So I was trawling the web the other day, and found this item on TMZ.com, about a fellow we know, and some bumps on the way to the sequel to High School Musical.
For those of you who don't know, HSM was Disney's huge movie last year. Soundtrack #1 in the nation in 2006, massive DVD sales, a traveling concert tour, and more. Well, the Disney folks aren't dumb: they're rushing to make a sequel. But turns out that some of the cast members from the first flick aren't so dumb either. Now that Disney has locked themselves into using these same actors (with promotional materials and a poll offering ordinary viewers a chance to help write the storyline), three of the young folk are in a rather strong negotiating position. So they're refusing to go to rehearsals -- holding out for a slice of the merchandising pie. It doesn't take much to see that could be quite a lot of pumpkin.
Well, one of the hold-outs is Corbin Bleu, a fellow we got to know just a little bit during our time in California. His sister, Hunter, was on Mia's soccer team, and we often sat on the sidelines with their whole family. We can personally verify that Corbin really is the sweet, pleasant guy he appears to be on screen. He comes from a terrific family, especially his folks David and Martha, two immensely gifted but down-to-earth, warm, funny people. By the way, if you think Corbin is good-looking, you should see his three gorgeous sisters.
Anyway, our family loves HSM, partly because there are no drugs, no gangs, no angst, and only the most innocent sort of romance. It's a reality-challenged Disney fantasy world and hooray for innocence and youthful energy.
Still, the Disney Corporation is not all sweetness and light, and we've seen reports about their hardball negotiations, especially with child actors. So it's nice to see that by holding out in these negotiations, Corbin is willing to do what teenagers do best: stick it to the man mouse.
Of course, this strategy will only work if all the holdouts cooperate. In the words of the hit song,
We're all in this together Once we know That we are We're all stars And we see that We're all in this together And it shows When we stand Hand in hand Make our dreams come true.
It's a bit cold around here lately. The temperatures are supposed to reach all the way to +5° degrees later on today with the promise of sunshine; right now it's -10°F, with windchills in the -20 to -30 range. Yeesh.
Plus about a foot of snow.
So we've been stuck inside for the whole weekend. No events Saturday, Church canceled Sunday, and school shut down today.
I actually got out of the house Saturday -- doing quite a bit of shoveling, trying to keep up with the three types of snow we have in Michigan: Falling Snow, Blowing Snow, and Drifting Snow.
But on Sunday, I didn't shovel even once. Why? Because all my neighbors -- members all of the brand-new Christmas-present snowblower club -- seemed to be competing with one another to see who could do more good deeds by blowing the drives of the block's less fortunate. I guess they were feeling either very full of love for their fellow human beings, or guilty for not going to church, and thought that blowing the driveways of those who hadn't yet was a way for them to earn God-points. I'm not complaining. :)
So we had a very restful Sunday afternoon. We read, played and listened to music, and the boys enjoyed quite a chess tournament, using their favorite alternative chess pieces. I'm hoping for more of the same today.
Once again the three-ring circus that is the Symposium on Worship has concluded. After six worship services, a dozen presentations, and countless encouraging and stimulating conversations with people doing and teaching and loving worship, Debra and I are both exhausted.
One of the best parts of Symposium is that because so much is going on, it is a hot house for serendipitous connections: connections between gospel music and liturgical dance; between the cruciform glory of God and alternative worship practices; between old and new friends.
Some of this year's highlights included a fun Friday night at a local brew joint with a collection of our favorite Fuller folk (and honorary Fuller folk): Clay Schmit, Fred & Dottie Davison, Luke Hyder, Todd Farley, Chuck Fromm,Mary Hulst, and Eric Jacobsen. Whatever else you say about folks in California, manifesting the eschatological joy of the kingdom (i.e. partying) comes a bit easier to them than it does to us dour and frozen Midwestern Calvinists. We don't really deserve to enjoy ourselves, we think.
Deb presented on her/our recent work on words in worship; I presented on developments in the emerging/alt church.
I think my presentations went well, but suffered from their context. That is to say, the fellow presenting just before me was Doug Gay. His topic was similar to mine (he's one of the authors, in fact, of the book on alternative worship, titled Alternative Worship). Add to this the fact that he was brilliant, charming, tall, and... to top it all off, Scottish. So he spoke brilliantly and charmingly from on high about "Altairnative Woarship" while I followed him speaking competently, if nasally, a bit closer to the ground, about "Alternutive Wuurrship." Fortunately, I had a lot of pictures in my presentation.
Even more fortunately, Doug had some free time when Symposium concluded, so he came to church with us yesterday morning, and then came over for brunch. Another serendipitous connection between two practitioners and thinkers that is now a connection between friends.
I had a wonderful lunch meeting today with a friend of mine, and fellow worship-wonk, Sue Rozeboom. We talked liturgy pedagogy and Ph.D. work and all sorts of other stuff, continuing a conversation we'd begun a few weeks ago while in a minivan on the way to Toronto for NAAL - the conference of the North American Academy of Liturgy. It was during that conversation, that ride up, that I came face to face with my inner dweeb (again), and during the conference that I really owned it. Sue and I and our companion, John Witvliet, were talking about a particular Swiss liturgy of some centuries ago, and one of us made a joke -- I can't even remember the details now -- a joke about whether or not that liturgy had a "split epiklesis." And we laughed. In our defense, we did then laugh at the fact that we laughed. But still. No, if you're wondering; split epiklesis is not suggestive, it's just dorky.
"Huh." I said to myself. "I am far gone. This Ph.D. thing is doing it, I think. Maybe Mia (my daughter) is right about me. Perhaps I belong in the abyss of utter and hopeless nerdiness." I discovered at the conference that in that abyss are some wonderful people. But they are odd. Odder than most academics. They have the mild-to-severe social awkwardness of your average "smartest kid in the class" types. But these are liturgy wonks. So you have to factor in the "church nerd" component (increased not by simple addition, but by an order of magnitude), and it turns out these folks we folks are off the charts. So yep: I belong.
Further proof: the "worship wonk" annual academic conference this year was held in early January in TORONTO. Brrrrr. (Ok, to be fair, last year was in SanDiego; but still -- Toronto?! Ever heard of the Bahamas, people? Or some choice island in the South Pacific? Doesn't anyone want to do a study of liturgical hulu dancing?)
Further proof: one of the best practical conferences for folks like me is held in late January in Grand Freezing Rapids. But more on that in a few days.
Don't miss it -- tomorrow night (that's Friday, January 19) is the premiere of my baby sister's new TV show, Ms. Adventure! It's on at 9:00 p.m. on Animal Planet. Since we don't have cable, we're going to a big party my folks are hosting to celebrate.
We've been watching rough cuts of the episodes as she sends them to us, and the show is funny and informative and just plain entertaining. Be sure to check it out!
Yesterday's post about drum circles reminded me of a funny song lyric written by our genius friend Andrew Burnett. He wrote it for the comedy show we started together at PTS in 1992, Theologiggle. The lyric doesn't mention drumming explicitly, but the reference is there for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
The opening skit of the show was a spoof Gilbert & Sullivan musical number, "I Am the Very Model of a Princeton Seminarian." It consisted of a handful of seminarian caricatures each singing a verse introducing themselves.
there was the brown-nosing, nerdy super-student, who sang: "I've memorized the dates and times significant in history/but the other kind of dating, I'm afraid, is still a mystery."
the insufferably arrogant Old Testament Ph.D. candidate: "I gladly share my knowledge of the sources extra-biblical/That show the Hebrew scriptures for their time were pretty typical."
the crunchy-granola eco-feminist: "I've done my best to rescue the rain forests of the Amazon/in winter I turn down the heat and put my wool pajamas on."
the pragmatic, about-to-graduate senior: "I've got new glasses, done my hair to make my image glossier/I've heard it's the first thing they look at your dossier."
And the theological adventurer, whose whole verse goes thus:
I am the very model of a Princeton Seminarian. When I arrived, it's true, I was a boring Trinitarian; Confined within the constructs of my heritage confessional; But now I can equivocate just like a real professional.
I've known the tension and the angst of circles hermeneutical; My quest for authenticity has been so therapeutical; I've been a fool; thought I was cool for being neo-orthodox; But now I've seen the light while dancing naked at the equinox.
I used to think in black and white my doctrines Calvinistical; But now I know to claim absolute truth is egotistical; I thank thee, God, that I am not like Hodge predestinarian, I am the very model of a Princeton Seminarian.
It's pretty cold in Michigan on March 21, but I make no promises about where I'll be that night. Especially if there's a full moon.
As I mentioned in the last post, Deb got me a wonderful Christmas present this year: a beautiful djembe drum. It's hewn from a solid piece of Indonesian mahogany, and has great decorative carvings on the side. Deb got it from a far off (and far out) guy in California who spends his days surfing and tending to his, er…., exotic herb garden. But he also plays and skins and tunes and sells drums. And he carves messages into the bottom of them.
One could reasonably wonder: On what occasions could a pastor and Ph.D. student in worship possibly make use of a drum? More than you'd think, as it turns out:
1) I played in a drum circle on New Year's Eve at the home of our good friends the Keeleys. Around the hour of our arbitrarily designated transition moment from one year to the next (because of small children we don't wait for midnight), we made a small drum circle -- me and Bob and Bryan and Meredith's boyfriend Calvin, and whoever else picked up some sort of percussive noise-maker. The movie here is from early in the night; later on Bob found a great groove in 5/4 and we worked that for a while. It's a much better way to spend New Year's Eve than getting smashed on champagne and kissing whoever happens to be close by at midnight.
2) Then this past Sunday I played in our church, for the first time as designated percussionist. I've played guitar and clarinet and recorder before, but this was quite different. While everyone else was trying to hit or tune the right notes, worrying about the key modulation on verse four, or just finding their place on the page -- I sat there with an empty music stand at my side, and a drum in my lap, trying to find the groove. I'm not so worried about owning it just yet. Just trying to find it.
3) It turns out Greg is also the leader of our church's drum circle, which meets this week Thursday night. I can't wait. Now, I know all the jokes about drum circles and male bonding. After all, I went to grad school in the 90s. I know about Robert Bly and feminist backlash, the myth of Iron John (or Iron Ron) and the news stories that tell, in a chuckling sort of way, about male-bonding retreats: gangs of sweaty and hairy men, dragging their sons into the woods at astrologically propitious times to howl at the moon, tell stories of the hunt, and bang on goat-skin drums. But Greg tells me the church drum circle is not like that. Our drum skins are sheep, not goat.
Anyway how cool is it that our church has a drum circle? We are about as far from "alt" worship as you can find, but the last time I did a drum circle in church was in L.A., at a very emerging congregation called "Tribe." One of the unique things about Tribe is that when they worship on Sunday evenings, everyone gathers in a large circle in a dimly candle-lit room, and grabs a drum. (The worship leader is a professional percussionist).
Though there is a bit of an electronic keyboard providing some harmonic structure, it is the rhythm that channels and focuses the congregation's energy Godward as they drum and sing their praise and prayers and Psalms during the first 20 minutes of worship. It's visceral and different, and exactly right for this congregation. I don't know if I could do it every week, but it was pretty great a few times last year.
So thanks to Deb, I now own the drum. And thanks to Bob and Greg and others, I may someday own the groove. Right now, I'm enjoying just leasing it.
It's not surprising that over the holidays the whole family fell prey to whatever flu-like illness is going around this year. Once the pressures of school and work let up, our bodies' immune systems pretty much collapsed without the constant adrenaline reinforcement. (Skeptical? Here comes the science). It lasted 24 hours for me, a bit longer for the kids, and a stubborn strain laid Debra low two separate times, leaving her weak during the intervening week. Thankfully, after a massive surge of homemade turkey soup, emergenC, and prayers for healing, it appears as though we've finally got the bugs on the run. And so, time to once again blog instead of bluurgh.
While not being sick these past weeks, various members of the family enjoyed doing typically seasonal things -- including a visit to the reindeer at Meijer gardens, a wonderful Christmas worship service at CoS, a gourmet meal prepared by my nuclear radiologist brother-in-law, lots of fun conversations with uncles and aunts, an afternoon of bowling with cousins (it would have been sledding, except for, well, global less-cooling, I suppose), and the sorry embarrassment that was the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day.
Of course, there was also our only moderately reluctant ritual participation in the pagan Santa cycle of acquisition/consumption/disposal (thanks, Dell deChant). It yielded a Lego Star Wars ship for the boys, an iPod Nano for Mia (see her next year depicted here), a book of Roz Chast cartoons for Deb, and a Kalimantan mahogany djembe for me.
We can hope that by doing our dharmic duty we have once again appeased the gods of the Economy. But I'm not taking any chances when it comes to divine retribution: I'm playing my djembe in church on Sunday. That way, I sound my gratitude to the God of the Universe with the instrument of my placation to the god of the economy. If either is the appeasing kind, that should do the trick. Don't know how Deb and the kids can swing something like that with their gifts. Let's hope they don't incur some sort of punishment. Like getting sick.
In Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, Ebeneezer Scrooge is visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future -- ghosts revealing to him what once was, what now is, and what will soon be. As a result of his encounters with these yuletide apparitions, Ebeneezer turns from his miserly ways and determines to live life differently from that day forward.
At this time of year, as much as I enjoy Dickens and the numerous TV and film adaptations of his short story (kinda prefer the George C. Scott version), my preferred holiday haunting comes not from the ghosts of past, present or future, but from the angel Clarence, from Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, or as I consider him, the Ghost of Christmas Pluperfect Subjunctive.
Clarence gives the movie’s protagonist, George (who is having a very, very bad day), a “great gift”: an imaginative exercise in the pluperfect tense (past completed action), subjunctive mood (contingency or hypothesis). George gets to see what the world would have been like if he had not been born.
Deb and I love this movie, but we haven’t seen it in a few years because the kids are often around when we watch something on the tube, and we don’t want them to see it just yet. We think you need a little more wear on life’s tires before you can really appreciate Capra’s message. You have to have lived awhile with some precious dreams, and some dreams deferred. You have to have seen some tragedy up close, and some tragedy averted. You have to have stood up for what’s right when it cost you something. You have to know the love of family, and of loyal friends. You have to have had some very, very bad days.
The kids aren’t there yet.
But we are.
I think it’s fitting, especially during this season of reflection, to spend some time following George’s path of wonder. I don’t usually go so far as to consider the state of my hometown in my absence (let alone a broader world -- I can’t imagine things would be much different), but simply to consider my own life and the choices I’ve made, and to imagine my life:
if I had joined choir instead of orchestra in junior high
if I had been a better friend to Craig in college
if I had continued working in advertising instead of going to seminary
if I had let someone else teach my kids to read
if I had studied Latin in high school (sigh)
if I had prayed more each day
if I had prayed less each day
A small choice here, a tweak there, and the trajectory of one’s life changes altogether. I can imagine an alternate universe – one in some ways perhaps better than the one I’m in now, and in other ways quite a bit worse.
The exercise is tinged with some regret, but as I look at the particular path I’ve walked these 40-odd years, with its adventures and accomplishments, its sorrows and celebrations, I mostly agree with Clarence: it’s a wonderful life.
After giving a worship workshop this past weekend in New Jersey, and lecturing the week before that on liturgical ordo, I have been thinking some about the ways in which structure the elements in our worship services -- why we put in the elements we do, and why we order them in a particular way.
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