a creative worship design blog
Date: December 4, 2011
Time: 8:05 am
Location: 7834 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Church: St. Peter Evangelical Lutheran Church
Caption: Praying together.
Photo © Ed Kay
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Eleven days ago – three days before the memorial of the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks – the New York Times reported that
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has come under attack by some religious and political leaders for not including clergy members as speakers at Sunday’s official ceremony at ground zero on the 10th anniversary of the attacks.
I don’t know all the reasons for Mr. Bloomberg’s decision. It does seem reasonable to think that he simply chose the easy route – the route through which potential differences of opinion and belief would be kept apart and conflict avoided. Smart.
It’s kind of like that rule you learn as a kid: “If you don’t have enough cookies for everyone, then nobody gets a cookie.” If everyone doesn’t get to pray, than nobody gets to pray. Sad, but fair.
Bloomberg is the mayor of New York City, one of the most religiously diverse cities in the world in one of the world’s most religiously diverse nations. But, much of the rest of the world today is equally diverse. As result, when confronted in our societies with opportunities for acknowledging the sacred, we have only two basic options to choose from:
Clearly, the latter option is most difficult. Immediately, practical problems arise such as, Who do we address when we pray? A generic “god” or multiple “gods”? What about those major religions that don’t always involve a “god”? There is a long, long list of deeper issues related to this.
In your local context, what have you done when circumstances call for the most broad spiritual response? Have you ever shared prayers with those of another faith? If so, who organized this? What did the gathering look like? What did it sound like? Who was present? Who was invited but decided not to participate? Who participated but seemed to do so inappropriately?
This week on Clayfire Curator, our quotes and posts will discuss interfaith dialogue, including the ways we approach interfaith worship – if worship of this kind is even possible at all.
Take a few moments to share your personal experience of interfaith interaction with us in the comments of this blog post.
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Jesus said ‘yes’ to eyes.
Once, he was confronted by two persistent blind men. Jesus asked if they believed he could heal them. The moment they said “Aye!” he declared them well, based on their faith (Mt. 9:27-29). (With an added touch of humor, Jesus commanded them, “See that no one knows about this.”) There are many other instances in the Gospels of physical eyes healed by Jesus.
Jesus said ‘yes’ to physical eyes. But, he was also concerned with spiritual eyes.
In Matthew 6:22-23 (TNIV), Jesus is quoted:
The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
I suppose one could argue that Jesus is talking here about physical eyes. Here is an example where literal interpretations fail miserably. Jesus is talking about the light of goodness. The light of God. Of course, he’s using the metaphor of physical light rays, entering our cornea, continuing on through our pupil and iris (the eye’s “aperture”), and focused by the muscular lens of the eye, through the vitreous gel of the eye-ball, onto the retinal wall at the back of the eye. But, what happens next? Scientists remain baffled when it comes to exactly how our brains convert reflected physical light through healthy eyes into mental images that are not only viewed in real-time, but are often stored nearly as vividly in our memory cache.
What does Jesus mean, “If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light.”?
This saying of Jesus follows a significant passage on prayer and fasting in the text. Could there be a connection between what we see – both physically and spiritually – and how we pray?
The great religions of Eastern Asia maintain a strong connection between sight and prayer. For the Hindu, the greatest act of worship one can perform is darśan (“seeing”). To see the crafted statue of Ganeśa (or of another one of thousands of gods) – and to ‘be seen’ by the god, through the eyes painted on stone, bronze, or wood – is an indispensable act of devotion and prayer. Generally speaking, in Buddhism (a religion birthed out of Hinduism), a similar practice of seeing and being seen by god is engaged.
In Christianity, we find some similarity between the Hindu practice of darśan and the Eastern Orthodox practice of icon veneration. In reference to Orthodox prayer, Henri Nouwen has said that icons “offer access, through the gate of the visible, to the mystery of the invisible.” (Nouwen, Behold the Beauty of the Lord, 14)
While it may be uncomfortable for those of us in the Protestant realm to pray and worship with images of god – even Orthodox icons – our current age, profuse with images, is slowly warming us to the idea that what we see must play a larger role in who and how we worship. In this idea of visio divina - that pictures can enhance and deepen our experience of read scripture – we find a more humanly holistic approach. Ears and eyes do not function solo but in concert.
Is it possible that the physical light, bounding to and fro, bouncing from painting and sculpture and photograph and in through the “windows” of our bodies, is easily converted by the Spirit into spiritual light? The kind of light that not only enlightens the retina, but also the human spirit? Perhaps this is one of the connections Jesus was making.
Tell me again why we pray with our eyes closed?
I’m an Evangelical. There. The cat’s out of the bag. Grant you, I feel the need to point out that I’m a “E”vangelical, not an “e”vangelical. I use the word to give one of those labels that make us more comfortable because it aligns us with a particular tribe, a common-unity and makes us at least a bit understandable. You are there and I am here. In this case, it defines my creed and statement of belief but not my culture so much, in case you hadn’t already figured that out. You’re a smart bunch.
This last weekend, I took my little Evangelical self to the Wild Goose Festival in Shakori Hills, North Carolina. Wild Goose… a festival to celebrate art, justice, music and spirituality. Talk about a diverse tribe. One of the most beautiful things about Wild Goose: the demographic spanned every possible life stage and age bracket without any crazy skew towards one group. The grounds were animated by just as many laughing, dirty-faced children and silver heads with wise-lined faces as there were inked up thirty-somethings or youngish hipsters with little square glasses and cowboy shirts. In my mind, that in and of itself is a statement. Hey, there’s something stirring, something afoot, something curious and mysterious at work in the Church.
Nonetheless, my tribe seemed to be in the minority at ye ol’ Wild Goose. This became most evident when I headed over to the geodesic dome for a conversation with my friend and one of my favorite writers-thinkers, Dr. Tony Jones. (I’m throwing the Dr. part in just in case Tony reads this. GOD knows, he earned it and I make fun of him enough to off-set it anyway.) The Geodesic Dome, aside from just being a pretty fantastic physical space, was a forum where a thinker or “expert” would come in and present a question to which they do not have an answer. And then we dialogue. Tony’s question: Why Pray?
My first reaction: Excitement. These topics weren’t overwhelming the line-up at Wild Goose. We were talking about something that had to do – very concretely – with spiritual formation. With Christian tradition and discipline. With something that, honestly, I was curious to know how the other Emergents (yes to Phyllis Tickle, no to Mark Driscoll) would handle it. I’ll let you in on a secret: I sometimes entertain this idea that maybe hip Emergents don’t pray, read the Bible, engage in The Hours or the disciplines because they’re so in tune with the GOD-at-Present that they believe these things to be trite, unenlightened, maybe even a bit superstitious. Here was a chance to hear a group of diverse but unified people converse on this topic.
Heading into the conversation, Tony took about ten minutes to set it up, to lay out his process and thoughts to this point. And then he threw the ball to the group: so if it’s not x or y or z, then we do we pray? The conversation turned existential very, very quickly. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a girl who’s always good for a good turn around the philosophical dance floor; but Tony’s question was an apologetic one, as he kept reminding the group. “What makes prayer a uniquely Christian practice?” Apparently, this was not a concern for the bulk of us gathered since some of the most common responses were “Why does it need to be?”
It was an odd place to be — standing between the enharmonic of why prayer doesn’t seem to matter and the importance of why it should. It’s not making the world a better place in any visibly monumental ways. It’s not theologically inclined to the notion that it forms us into the image of Christ. So, um…
But the other odd place here in this dome was the space created where the teacher was decidedly and purposefully standing in as the student. While Dr. Jones was still present, tossing out the grand process of his thought around this topic and even grander ideologies, every sentence ended with a vibe of “don’t you think?” or “could it be?”
There were a few comments Tony made that flew at me in 3-D given the audience and the context. The first was this: “There’s lots of things [Jesus] didn’t talk about that we have opinions on, but he did talk about prayer… and he did [pray].” Here we were – sitting in the middle of a phenomenal landscape with a radical group of spiritual people, really seeking out the Divine imagination around issues like creation care and sexuality and being ready to carry those flags in the name of Christ (and for that I say, thanks be to GOD) but in that one statement, I felt like Tony captured my fear and struggle with my own faith and with the context in which I must work that faith out.
I don’t fit in with my old tribe, the “e”vangelicals. And I sometimes fear that we progressives and creatives are just creating a new subculture of Christianity – just a little more hip, cynical, and edgy. We have our celebrities, our music, our group think. Wild Goose made me think about it – with her beautiful fluidity of engagement smattered with the occasional moment of spiritual consumerism. It was a vibe definitely not geared to those of a less wide-open persuasion. The dialogue that Tony facilitated intrigued me for that very reason but his summation moved me to a deep inner recognition that seemed to buzz through the whole dome, regardless of ones tradition or cultural persuasion:
I pray to be obedient because Jesus says to pray. This is my prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me a sinner.
Yes. Exhale.
I’ll be honest with you – some days, that’s the reason I worship too. Because Jesus did it. Not because I get it or I’m more enlightened or in touch or spiritually eager. (Sorry, red wine just came out my nose on that one.) I don’t have all the answers and sometimes I feel like this is our own little geodesic dome right here with me throwing out a question and hoping the dialogue will give me something to move forward again. It’s not always popular and certainly not seemingly enlightened to show up at church Sunday after Sunday with the kids in tow and no great argument for why we need to be there, or at least not a good Christian apologetic.
Wild Goose was an extraordinary community experience that I hope you will consider attending next year. In the meantime, I lift you all up in my prayers – some of you by name, some of you by proxy – all of you in spirit.
Image © iStockphoto
My then eleven year old daughter – a bright and imaginative girl who I’m quite certain came from the same Divine imagination that created unicorns and Portuguese music – finally asked me the mysterious question that everybody eventually asks and nobody completely answers: “Sooo… one GOD but three… huh?” We sat and talked long enough about this great and magical idea of the Trinity to make me think she needed to play more video games. Eventually she and I both left the table realizing that it’s not about getting it, but maybe about realizing that we can’t; just look for GOD in faith, realizing that there’s more to GOD than we can quantify, qualify or understand. I thought that was a parenting score, if I may say so myself.
So I can’t explain the Trinity, obviously, but I’ll be perfectly honest: I’m glad. I dread the day that we can tidily box the essence of GOD up into neatly labeled compartments with the smug demeanor of people who “get it.” Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. This is not to say, however, that I’m coming from what may seem like the other pole of “don’t care to over-think this so I’ll just lump everything in the Jesus bucket.” If you are unfamiliar with this particular bucket, I urge you to listen to your local Christian radio station’s music for a small taste of it. Everything about the essence of GOD, every act, every purpose, every title seems to actually be “Jesus.” As best I can tell, this is far more a trait of Christian culture than it is of any particular denomination, but since Christian culture pervades across those lines, a little thoughtful inventory wouldn’t hurt any of us.
So why does it matter? That seems to be the first and most obvious question. Why does it matter – what we think of – or maybe even if we think of – the Trinity in our prayer and our worship?
Let’s start here at the seeming impossible – defining the Trinity…or at least paying homage to the identity and essence of the Trinity with our limited language. The Trinity is all that is in the very essence of GOD’s identity about community, interdependence, and risky love. The Trinity is about the creative impulse, new life, rebirth, the tension of true beauty as it appeared in the dawn of time, worked out through the cross, and appears now in our now-and-not-yet world. The Trinity is about restoring what is broken, returning what is lost among the seen and unseen. The Trinity is about co-creation and collaboration. About turning expectations inside out, turning over tables and over turning hearts. And all within the interwoven desires and work of GOD-the-Mother-and-Father, Christ-the-Son, and the Holy Ghost, each with their respective roles and essences. To steal shamelessly from the evangelical theologian Stanley Grenz in Theology for the Community of GOD:
The ‘Father’ functions as the divine program for creation. The Son functions as the revealer of GOD, the exemplar and herald of the Father’s justice, love, and grace for creation, and the redeemer of humankind. And the Spirit functions as the personal divine power active in the world, the completer of the divine program.
Not the most poetic explanation (ah, the poetic theologians… so jealous the Lutherans have one) but a solid and expansive one.
What does this mean for worship? For prayer? For the daily inhaling of all that is divine and sacred?
I’m throwing this out there for consideration: If we aren’t acknowledging the essence of the Trinity – creative, redeeming, moving, relational, mysterious, inconvenient, interdependent, giving of salvation – then it would stand to reason that we are worshiping an artificial god that we’ve created to satiate our felt needs. When we make our worship all about the Jesus we can relate to – our brother, redeemer, savior – or when we attribute to Jesus all the welcome work of the Trinity without the more dangerous invitations of the Spirit or the bigness that is the GOD-head, we create our own safe, comfortable, satisfying and wholly incomplete god — our golden calf. We practice a kind of self-help that may have some beautiful therapeutic value and even some possible overflow to our neighborhoods and relationships, but ultimately we fail to participate in the radical transformation in our own lives and in our communities that comes when we abandon the Jesus-GOD and embrace the interdependence and overturning life of the Trinity and the Trinity’s co-creative work.
This is more than creative praxis or scholastic theology. This is about thoughtful participation in the ongoing Story of GOD and celebrating that in our worship. But even greater – it’s about seeking to undo our limited understanding or overly-concrete expectations of GOD and purposefully moving into a collaborative life with the Trinity. I would be remiss if I didn’t say that I encourage you, even I beg you, to consider the mystery and the great overturning that is waiting in this kind of life, in this kind of prayer and worship.
How do you honor and acknowledge the Trinity and the work of the Trinity in your worship? In your prayer? How do you empower those you serve to see the world through this lens?
Image © iStockphoto
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