Comfort Ye

To the right you can see what it looks like when an admitted liturgy-geek does liturgy planning. CDSP does a lot of liturgy, 15 services a week. The main service is the Thursday evening Eucharist, which is designated as community night. I was put on the team for the Eucharist this past Thursday, which meant I got to participate in the planning for said liturgy. What you see is a suite of hymnals, a midi keyboard (to plunk out hymns and see how they sound), various prayer books, and other resources I used to draft up what I thought the liturgy should contain. I then met with the rest of the team and we put all our ideas together. It took a great deal of effort, probably two hours each for a group of about 8 people. In other words, two full days of work for one person. I thoroughly enjoyed it and loved the intentionality and specificity it brought to the service when we finally worshipped together.

The really interesting thing about this service is that we deliberately toned down our usual liturgical variation. At CDSP we typically do lots of different kinds of liturgies-Rite I, Rite II, Enriching our Worship, as well as newly constructed liturgies borrowing from all around the Anglican Communion and beyond. When we met to plan we looked at where we were as a community (half-way through the semester, just before a week break for Reading Week), and unanimously decided that what the community needed was something familiar, something easy, something comforting. We basically took Holy Eucharist Rite II, the most familiar form for most Episcopalians, made careful hymn selections, tinkered a bit with where to chant and where to speak different sections of the service, fiddled with the choice of prefaces, and called it good. It seems to have worked. People expressed appreciation for not having to "think too much for a change" and for the ability to follow along easily, enabling more reflection and prayer.

Coming home for reading week to my home parish, I had new appreciation for the level of consistency in our prayer and worship. Like many parishes, and unlike a seminary, we don't do much liturgical tinkering or change. Having capped off six weeks of lots of services that demanded your full attention with a service designed to be comfortable, I had a new appreciation for the freedom that a comfortable and familiar liturgy gives for personal spirituality. I do think that it is important for a seminary to expose us to different liturgies. Each community has its own comfortable style and I have no idea where I'll end up. I also think that communities can benefit a bit from a little liturgical innovation, or at least careful planning and intentionality. If liturgy is too comfortable it can become so easy and familiar that it doesn't speak to where you are now or to where you need to go. But a little comfort can give space for the Spirit to work.

Christian Conflict Resolution

When introducing a Gospel reading during the Daily Office (Morning and Evening Prayer) do you say “A reading from the Gospel According to X” or “A reading from X?” This question engenders strong responses here (and, truth be told, probably elsewhere). I was taught one thing during a class on worship fundamentals. I then had an opportunity to put the teaching into practice at Evening Prayer the same night. I was strongly informed by someone else that I had done it the wrong way, causing me to literally bang my head on the lectern in frustration (during the rehearsal, not the actual prayer). I then decided to stir the pot a bit and raise the individual squabble to a community discussion. Having seen this form of debate over liturgical practice occur in other settings and over other issues, I decided (in consultation with other students) that it was time we solved the general problem, which is: How do you decide what to do when something isn't specified? I raised the issue at a Worship Committee meeting, emails have ensued, and the conflict is on.

The problem stems from lack of explicit details in the rubrics. The rubrics, or official church details regarding liturgical (and other) practice, are the small font, usually italics, in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer (BCP) or the nature of the text itself that give directions for how to conduct public prayers, worship, services, etc. In this case, the BCP specifies “One or two Lessons, as appointed, are read, the Reader first saying “A Reading (Lesson) from ________” (see pages 84 or 118 of the BCP). There is a lot of space in that blank. Space enough for “the Gospel According to X” or for “X.” Communities usually fill in those blanks in the rubrics with customary practices, things they have settled on that work in the particular community. Sometimes these are codified in an actual text, or “Customary.” In the case of CDSP a draft customary has been under revision for quite some time, leaving all kinds of room for little battles over these issues.

The wonderful side of these conflicts is that they show that we really do deeply care about worship, including the most minor details. My wife was stunned that we could even be perturbed over such a small set of words. It turns out that those who favor “A reading from X” want to make absolutely sure that the Gospel is not “proclaimed” in the Daily Office, as it is during the Eucharist. The rubric for introducing the Gospel reading during the Eucharist specifies saying “The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to ______” (BCP, page 357). About half of the community wants to distinguish the proclamation of the Gospel in the Eucharist from the sense of simply reading a text in the Daily Office; they prefer to drop the “according to” phraseology during the Daily Office and to replace it with “A reading from X”. Others prefer to always distinguish the Gospel from other texts and “according to” does that very nicely. It turns out that, at least in the learned opinion of a distinguished liturgical expert here on campus, either is actually acceptable.

So how will we settle it? My hope is that we will find a way that is either distinctly Christian, or at least encapsulates our values of respecting all people, paying attention to the marginalized (in this case the quiet ones who never say anything), and seeking reconciliation. I am supposed to be learning how to live and operate in and even lead a “Christian” community, not just any community. I hope I'm not being too literal in wanting to actually discover what, concretely, this entails. So far, the process has been fairly typical of any conflict resolution in any organization I've been in. We've had meetings, sent emails. In the discussion, many people have shared stories of being “chewed out” over some perceived violation of rubrics, customaries, or some such. Sadly, like all communities, we frequently hurt each others' feelings while trying to enculturate them. Where will the “Christian community” solution come in? Will it be in the details of what we do, or will it be in how we do it? Or both?

Formation

Before I came to seminary, I received a lot of ominous warnings from priests and other former seminarians that seminary was going to be a new challenge for me, not just another graduate school. Not a lot of detail was given. Many statements were made about how it would work on your whole person, but I wasn’t quite sure that meant. Being who I am, I naturally took these predictions seriously, but was mostly left wondering what strange beast I might be facing.

Well, having now completed five weeks of seminary, I can say I’m still not quite sure what strange beast I’m facing, but I had perhaps a glimpse of it. Earlier this week, after a morning of lecture classes, I spent time with my music professor and he tried to help me wrap my mind around singing music on a two-line staff notation and give me tips on practicing my chanting. It was an hour in the chapel that was almost entirely centered on my throat and mouth and trying to make my body do something it didn’t naturally want to do. I left that and hustled across the street to the library where I sat down and immediately fired up a different part of my brain to thrash through an exegesis of Paul’s concepts of sin and salvation. The article mentioned the Greek genitive case. Multiple times. I finished that and worked on reading historical texts, which needed a different part of my brain. Then I hustled off to Evening Prayer to try and sit with God for at least 30 minutes. I might have had a spiritual experience and I might have just coasted through the service on autopilot, hard to say. I then went to dinner, where, though I don’t remember the conversation, I can basically guarantee that at some point my table-mates and I got into an intense and highly animated discussion about how to integrate some part of this into actual faith community life. Then back to the dorm to practice my chanting and then maybe read the Bible for another class.

I frequently hit 9 p.m. wiped out in a deep way. Working all of you indeed.

Defining Church Community

I just had a lovely visit from my wife and daughter. I'm doing a very odd commute to seminary. My wife has kept her job back home, which does a lot of things (financial) and otherwise, for our family, making commuting a good option. Most weekends I fly home, sometimes they come out. This weekend they visited, and we had a great time. We puttered around the Berkeley waterfront and hiked in the hills, we ate out, saw a movie, and also hung out with seminary folks. We helped with a fundraising event, ate in the dining hall, and, most importantly, attended the Thursday night Community Eucharist and dinner. The latter is a big deal here on campus. The Eucharist is planned carefully well in advance, and it is followed with a communal meal. It is the CDSP version of a regular Sunday service for a parish.

Of course, being who I am, I kept second guessing myself. Am I doing enough to integrate my wife and daughter into this community? Are we the weirdoes that no one ever sees? Of course, when I really think about it, we aren't unusual here. The community is no longer defined by the bounds of walking distance. We have people living right across from chapel in the dorm, people a block away in student apartments, people living across town, and people living several hours away. I commute a particularly long distance but I'm not the only commuter. Some of these folks I see frequently, some I almost never see.

Are we all weirdoes? Truthfully, I think CDSP is now mirroring most communities. Our ability to travel greater distances means that what used to be a “church community” defined by the geographic area within which folks could walk to church, is now less and less common. Back at my home parish, no one flies in for services, but some folks do drive from distances of 30-45 minutes. We have communities where the ties that bind are not geographical proximity, but shared interests, hopes, dreams.

This gives me hope for the role of churches in communities today. They can be one place where what draws people together is a sense of longing, higher purpose, a desire to serve, something outside our personal desires. It is no small thing that a weekly Eucharist is a big deal.