Frog Liturgy: Future and Present in Liturgical Prayer? Just back from some time in southeastern Alaska and observation of the Tlingit totems, I am musing on the frog as one of their prominent figures. Among other things, the frog lives its life on two levels, submerged in the water with its eyes scanning the horizon and its nose penetrating the life-giving air. Evelyn Underhill plays with the same connection somewhere in her writings on spirituality and prayer. Richard Valantasis, in Centuries of Holiness: Ancient Spirituality Refracted for a Postmodern Age (Continuum, 2005), proposes that the Christian seeker “lives in two worlds simultaneously: the current real world of daily existence, and the even more real, emergent, eschatological, and divinized world toward which the [seeker] works.” (p. 109) In other words, the church lives in God's future as its dialogue with the present. What an amazing vocation! God calls us into a dialogue of living fully in the world as it presently e
Posts
Confession of an Ancient-Future Worshiper “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land,” asks the Psalmist. It was a question the exiles asked. It is my question too as I visit churches in my journeying around the United States. No, I am not a Mystery Worshiper for the Ship of Fools ( http://ship-of-fools.com/Mystery/index.html .) You may think that is odd for a Christian to feel like worship in any church is a foreign land. So, I will be specific and charitable, as I mean no harm. Consider this a confessional rather than negatively critical. Last Sunday I worshiped in a nearly 15,000 member megachurch at the invitation of a friend. The high-tech music, lights and sound was professional and effective. The preaching was strong, compassionate and visionary. On the scale of excellence I would give this congregation high marks for what they do according to their aims and purposes. Here, however, is the confession: I was not at home here. It was more than the theology that I couldn’
“Wild Spaces” in Western Culture and Churches (In “Ethical Metaphors” I hinted that the metaphors of the liturgy are ethical in direction, but in order to have converting torque in the assembly’s life they need deepening attention to the “wild spaces.”) I’ll admit I am a contender for the liturgy—the patterned enactment of praise and prayer to the triune God around central public symbols. I will also admit that I and many who find deep meaning and formation in praying the liturgy do not consistently pay attention to God’s heart of love for life in all its forms. Wherever I worship I am continually struck but the meagerness of the assembly’s prayers—whether or not they are “liturgical” communities. (I will say that those who are liturgical generally engage in a form of encompassing and expansive intercessions. However,...) Liturgical worship or not, the circle usually seems small: family, relatives, friends we know, and maybe our troops or hurricane victims. Seldom are there voices rai
Ethical Metaphors In a previous post, “On Doing ‘Our’ Liturgical Thing,” a commentator responded “Your comments are most appropriate for those who were born within the confines of the circle. But what of those who were excluded by birth, by skin, by national edict?” She ("Desert Mother") raises the issue of oppression relative to liturgical texts and practices born of the hegemony of the privileged. Her comments brought a needed word to this conversation about liturgy around the central things (bath, story, and meal) and justly recalled attention to God’s open doors—the wide horizon of God’s gaze upon the thriving of all life. I will leave to liturgical historians questions of whether or not what has become in our time the historic, ecumenical liturgy (sometimes referred to as the “ecumenical consensus”) was born of privilege and power, or in what sense it comes to us as a gift of the Spirit working among the least ones in the Greco-Roman world (inclusive of Egypt and North A
Desert Mother's Comment and My Reply I am grateful for a comment made to "On Doing 'Our' Liturgical Thing" by Desert Mother. I responded to her comment. In part I wrote to her: Well said and you do my "strait corner" expand. Yours is powerful poetry. I am grateful for your bringing a "wild space" (see Sallie McFague, Abundant Life --Fortress Press) to this matter. I use "wild space" in the sense of where one does not fit the white, male, Western, heterosexual, youthful, educated, able-bodied, middle-class and successful definition of “human being”. Such wild-spaces (you represent one or more in your comment) open windows from which to see the matter from another perspective. I urge you to read her comment and my reply as context for the next blogs.
Eviction from Our Snug Homes In “Lecture II” ( New and Collected Poems 1931-2001 , pp. 493-494) Czeslaw Milosz writes of the banality of 20th century, pre-WWII culture and how it failed to challenge the rise of Nazism and the holocaust. In the poem he lists what Jesus “has” (note the tense) to face (a seemingly harmless list of human artifacts and activities inclusive of coffee, philosophizing, clocks and landscape paintings) and muses that nobody would have taken him seriously. The Jesus Milozs juxtaposes with the culture looks too much like a Jewish drifter—the kind the State catches and disposes of. If the list of what Jesus has to face were in terms of 21st century churches, what would “Jesus have to face”? Hymns? Praise choruses? American flags next to Christian flags? Sermons without skeptics? Parking lots full of SUVs driven by we who over consume and live careless for the planet? Bible studies without discipleship and accountability? Baptisms without conversion and intent towar
On Doing Our Liturgical “Thing” Many of us have been tempted to alter or paraphrase a prayer, litany, or liturgical text to “be more accessible” to the congregation. Perhaps we thought the ritual text was opaque to contemporary seekers. And, many of us have suffered (or been delighted by) such at the hands of others. What are we not aware of in these undertakings? John Donne’s poem, “Upon the Translation of the Psalmes,” (a response to the translation of the Psalter by Philip Sydney and his sister, the Countesse of Pembroke) begins: Eternall God, (for whom who ever dare Seek new expression doe the Circle square, And thrust into strait corners of poore wit Thee who art cornerlesse and infinite) Donne, in this little knot of convolution, as I call it, seems to be wrestling with the limits of creativity and human innovation. Might this at least be a caution to us “who dare” to make “new expressions” in the church’s prayer? Is everything our hearts, minds, and words conspire to articulate
The blog name—StrongCenterOpenDoor—seems to contradict the postmodern context that I want to address and explore in relationship to liturgy. In the opening blog I carelessly wrote: Postmodernity is increasingly decentered and deuniversalized. It would have been better to say that our world is increasingly decentered and deuniversalized. The two “d” words are synonyms for the postmodern world and experience. Oddly, my intent for this blog is to affirm central things in Christian worship while also acknowledging the wide horizon and diverse dimensions of psychic, social and cosmic life. While I accept that Christian worship is diverse and quite messy in each local expression, I am convinced that it is critical that worship find focus in its historic and ecumenical center: liturgy enacted around font, lectern and table. All the candles, crosses, songs, and worship centers in the world will be so much froth on our beer if seekers and seeking communities don’t engage with the God who meets
In our postmodern context, worship ways are wide open and increasingly diverse. At the same time there a desire for a "generous orthodoxy" that listens, questions, and explores ancient-future understandings and practices in the emerging churches around the world. Postmodernity is increasingly decentered and deuniversalized. Yet there is a yearning for center and attention to global realities. On this blog I will be attempting to reflect on emerging worship from a perspective that holds in tension paying attention to a "strong center"--the central things that give substance and a centeredness to the worship of God (praise and prayer in bath, word, and meal) and paying attention to God's radically open door to the world. I am indebted to Gordon Lathrop for this tension between center and periphery (See his bookS--HOLY THINGS, HOLY PEOPLE, and HOLY GROUND.) Liturgically, we are living in amazing times. Churches are experimenting, risking, trying new things, frustra