Cue it up

When I was in college, I was a DJ for the campus radio station, WHPK (“So alternative, we don't even like their old stuff”). This was in the pre-iTunes, pre-CD era, and we spun actual vinyl records. You had to cue these records up, scratching them back and forth on the Technics turntable until you found the beginning of the song and then rolling it backwards a quarter turn. This enabled the turntable to get up to speed before the music started. You had to start the turntable a split second or two before you wanted the music to start. We took great pride in timing our fades and transitions between songs so that there was a seamless transition between each cut.

We also discovered that if you simply cued it up right on the start of the track most songs made an awesome “wwvvooorp” sound as the turntable revved up to speed, and we occasionally would do it deliberately for effect. We thought this was cool, clever, and anti-establishment.

I thought of this while leading sung Morning Prayer the other day in chapel. I've gotten to where I can sing without making people hide under the pews, but I'm still no fabulous voice. Starting canticles and hymns a capella is particularly challenging. What's gonna come out of my mouth? Will I find the note? Will WE find the note? The general grogginess of everyone in the morning only adds to the challenge. Sometimes we find that note just perfectly and sail into the songs of lamentation, petition, and praise seamlessly, like a choir of heavenly voices. A lot of times we have to slowly find it together, and the collective effect is like that badly cued record, “wwvooorp...us sing to the Lord, let us shout for joy to the rock of our salvation.....”

I've decided, though, that just as in college, I kind of like the wwvoorp sound. I wouldn't record it for posterity, I wouldn't recommend it if you are the National Cathedral in Washington and trying to show people the beauty of Anglican hymnody. However, it can have a lovely feel, that moment of doubt and fear followed by the deep joy and relief when we find a key we can work in harmony; the satisfaction as we collectively search each other out, hear, and then find our voice together.

Saddle up, people.

I write this blog from the Oakland Airport, my flight delayed, probably the 7^th or 8^th roundtrip I've done this semester.

I'm not much of a blogger, that's clear.

But here's some thoughts on seminary, Year 2. One-fourth through the year. 7/12's done with seminary. Not that I'm counting.

Seminary is different, better. Better with some seminary under my belt. The existential crises are passed for now. I actually feel like I know why I'm here. It's a good feeling. Time to get down to work.

Seminary is also harder. The work is harder. More reading for my classes. More writing, meaning more deciding. Giving sermons in front of my peers, an audience both friendly and demanding. Looking directly at God, or at least as best we can when we seek God. If I thought that I had a few assumptions challenged last year, that was an introduction. Time to re-think God. There isn't much more fundamental than that.

Seminary is good. It's a good feeling. Let's put some things together. Saddle up, people, time to figure out your theology for today. What a gift, to be able to have time and help to do that.

Seminary is different. Seminary is different after a summer spent in the hospital with people dying, grieving, suffering. Families looking at me and all I can do is be there. Different after a good program that made me take a hard look at myself. A little perspective never hurts.

Seminary is different with some new faces. My face from last year. People struggling, trying so desperately to listen to a God who is mysteriously right there and so, so, far away.

“Listen, I will tell you a mystery!” St. Paul says (1 Cor 15:51a). Time to make friends with mystery. Amen.

Have you seen the gates of deep darkness?

As part of research for a paper in my Introduction to the New Testament class, I went over to the Cal Berkeley library and checked out a moderately obscure book. It was published in 1967. As I'm fond of doing whenever I check out an old (or older) book, I flipped to the little library circulation tag in the back to see how the book has been checked out in the past. Sadly, Cal Berkeley doesn't put names (you'd be surprised how often you find out some famous scholar also used the book), but they do have dates. The book had been used in waves. It was checked out on a fairly even basis after they obtained it. It languished until the late 70s when it changed hands a lot. It was either totally unused in the 80s to the mid-90s or the library was using some other circulation tag which is now lost. It was heavily used in the late 90s and early 2000s, but it was last checked out 5 years ago.

What struck me was that, despite the relative obscurity of the topic, and the long periods of disuse, the book does continue to get picked up, used in research and probably in the development of students such as myself. One of the things that got me changing careers here at mid-life is that I felt like, no matter how awesome my research might be, it was likely to be completely irrelevant in less than 50 years. Very little research is timeless, if only because the questions we are interested in change. Among a whole host of other reasons for choosing this path, I felt that I needed to do less research and more community work here and now.

I think I have to adjust that perspective a bit. The circulation record of this little book reminds me that we don't always know how or when what we do is going to be useful. The truth is, I've checked out books even more obscure than this one and found that even they get occasional use. Most clergy that I know will tell you that they are often surprised at how some minor thing they did years ago was one of the most helpful or meaningful things they did for someone or for a community. It is hard, perhaps impossible, for us to see the overall picture of what we are doing and how it fits into the purpose and life of the world (“Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare if you know all this.” Job 38:17-18). Perhaps walking in faith also means doing what you have done your best to grasp is your purpose and calling in the world and doing so despite not seeing the benefits you may, in fact, be creating.

Back of the Envelope

When I was a kid, my Dad would tell stories about going to college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He described how the cafeteria tables would be littered with equations written on the back of napkins as the students and profs would furiously work out ideas over their meals.

In my previous job, I would periodically have to clean my office of the accumulation of back-of-the-envelope sketches and notes; on actual envelopes, on the flip side of memos, buried in the middle of legal pads. If enough time had gone on, it was a bit of an archaeological project; both to sift through the layers of the sketches that I put together furiously, always thinking aloud and visually with someone else, and to try and interpret them. What is the meaning of this oblong oval with the little boxes on it? Was that something we were excavating? Was it a general schema for a sampling strategy? Hmm.

This weekend we did another back-of-the-envelope, or in this case, napkin calculation. Our seminary class organized and attended a retreat. We designed our own prayer together, following mostly Morning and Evening Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP). This napkin is our notes for Evening Prayer last night. It is mostly the sequence of service music (canticles) and hymns. We had a great time working things out. We talked about the mood of the group, what we wanted to convey in the prayer, tried out different songs, began picking out music, and then realized we had better start writing it down so we wouldn't forget. I used the napkin to help keep the prayer flowing smoothly through the service.

Like all good quickie calculations, it uses a combination of code and actual misspellings. If you have been doing a lot of Morning and Evening Prayer, you can see our thinking: Pick the version you want of the Magnificat (Mag) because it is such a major part of the service, then the Phos Hilaron (Phos), then the Nunc Dimittis (Nunc). Now that the fixed elements are out of the way, pick a closing hymn (we looked long and hard for an Easter Hymn, but settled on 376, "Joyful, joyful, we adore thee" to the tune of Ode to Joy") and then, because we were in a good mood, we added an opening hymn (372, "Praise to the living God!"). I then decided to make it easy to remember the order in the service by adding the numbers (in practice it goes Phos, Mag, Nunc), and I threw in the Psalm as another reminder. After nearly two semesters of practice, it's enough to get you through a service without anything other than the BCP and Hymnal themselves. I'm tempted to secret it somewhere so that future archaeologists or textual scholars can puzzle over it.

I love all back-of-the-envelope calculations. They almost always spring out of working together, of pushing ourselves to do more with each other than we could do alone. They recognize the playfulness in all creativity. They remind us that creation is an ongoing act, that we participate in it, and that it is a bit of a rough-and-tumble art!

To hear clips of these hymns, click HERE.

Create in me a clean heart

“Today if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts” (Psalm 95:8)

Morning Prayer traditionally includes recitation of Psalm 95, “Come let us sing to the Lord,” also known as the Venite (from the Latin for “Come”). Usually we stop at Verse 7 (“Oh that today you would hearken to his voice”), but during Lent you can add Verses 8-11, which are a little harsher, calling on the people of Israel not to harden their hearts as they did during the 40 years of exodus in the desert.

Today I drove over to the Marin Headlands, right on the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge. I wanted to take a break from theology and look at some geology. The Marin Headlands has some fantastic outcrops of Franciscan Complex chert (see image to left). They date to the Jurassic Period (about 145-199 million years ago). They are formed from billions of tiny skeletons of ancient marine creatures gradually turned to rock that was then beautifully heaved, folded, and exposed by the sea. I went to a place called Kirby Cove, and I had the beach to myself.

I poked around to my heart's content, checking out the geological formations, examining the sand composition, and generally enjoying doing geeky things that few others ever want to do with me. I also spent some time in meditation and prayer. It was an easy place to contemplate the grandeur of God.

I cleared my head by praying the Venite, but since we have been adding Verses 8-11, I automatically began adding those verses as well. Just as I said “harden not your hearts” I looked over at this tough outcrop, jutting up out of the ocean, slowly being shaped, and worn, and changed. I realized that this rock and my heart have a lot in common. I have, in fact, been hardening my heart for quite some time; that hardening my heart is the simplest way to characterize my struggles over the past months. But I also realized that maybe I could take some hope from this rock.

Thanks to the support of my home parish, to kind and direct insights, emails, and caring responses to some dramatic pleas on my part, I've managed to begin to truly open my heart to this path. I realize now that I've spent quite a bit of time hardening my heart to my church, to the words of other people, and to God and I've hardened my heart to the changes that this path has already begun to bring.

I looked out at the rock outcrop and thought about how it, hard as it is, is still being shaped as part of God's creation. Here you have what are essentially billions of tiny animal skeletons, that sank to the bottom of the sea in the Jurassic Period. They were buried, heated, hardened, and heaved back up, and now they sit, slowly rounded, moulded, and shaped by the sea. I thought, I may be a bit rocky myself, but I can do that too. I can let God and God's creation work on me. I can harden not my heart; be folded, rounded, shaped into what I'm supposed to be now. I can find my new place in creation. Not a bad start to Lent.

Expanding Our Sense of Sacred Community

This past week I attended a conference, Epiphany West, which gave me both a necessary credit and some new insights into theology and the environment. The theme of the conference was “Sacred Elements,” and our sessions and speakers focused on ways to develop new theologies and even new spirituality for confronting and dealing with the growing environmental crisis. Throughout the week, the anthropologist in me kept kicking in. The more I thought about our environmental problems the more I thought they are really people problems - our inability to honor the gift of the earth given from our ancestors in the past, our inability to adjust our personal and corporate behavior now, and our inability to adjust what we do to ensure that future generations will enjoy the gift of this world. I was particularly struck by an insight from a panelist in a session called “Muslims Going Green.” He argued that the fundamental crisis was not a behavioral crisis or a policy crisis but rather a spiritual crisis. I felt that was very true and it also resonated with my growing sense that there really isn’t an environmental problem as much as an anthro-problem.

The very last talk, by Dr. Marion Grau (theology professor at CDSP), bumped me in a little different direction. She argued that we religious and faithful folk need to explore “re-sacralizing” or “re-enchanting” the elements - earth, fire, air, water. These elements are fundamentally sacred in many religions, even if we have somewhat drifted from emphasizing their sacred and holy quality in Christianity. Her emphasis on these elements as a focus for our theological reflection and for spirituality made me shift my focus on us humans. Perhaps it isn’t simply a matter of a human-caused problem with a human-centric solution. OR, maybe we simply need to expand our idea of community to include these elements. Perhaps we need to sacralize them by granting them the same sacred import we grant to human life. What if we included our world’s elements - earth, fire, air, water, their chemicals, their glorious combinations, in our community of care in a profoundly fundamental way, with the same import as we give to our human community members? I’m looking forward to seeing where Dr. Grau’s theology goes.

In many ways I was drawn back to my faith and religion because it helped me get beyond my own narrow ego. Say what you will about religion, but I think good ones remind you that you are not the center of the universe. Faith and religion also gave me daily reminders to focus on community, on my obligations to others starting with God. I’m now pondering effective ways and ideas that can help us all to grow our community even more, to include the very elements of our world.

Sarah Laughed

“Then one said, 'I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.' And Sarah was listening at the tent entrance behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age, it had ceased to be with Sara after the manner of women. So Sarah laughed to herself...” Genesis 18:9-12a.

I've always thought it was fairly reasonable for Sarah to laugh here. As the narrator points out, what was promised was a biological impossibility; she was asked to believe something that is in many ways absurd.

I've been doing a lot of reflection on absurdity during my time between Semester 1 (of 6) and Semester 2 of seminary. It has been a huge struggle, and hasn't involved a lot of laughing. I've mentioned before that after the honeymoon wore off last semester I've been questioning following this path. Here's the essence of the struggle: Commuting to seminary as I am doing, being away from my family most of the week every week, has been harder than I expected. It's the only way for us to do it for a variety of reasons, but it is extremely difficult and no fun whatsoever. Seminary is also expensive; I will spend between 70 and 100K of our own money by the time this is done. Seminary can also only be so much. While I have learned and grown during the past semester, the learning and growth has not (and probably, reasonably, cannot) match the cost to me for doing it. Put in business terms, it is a poor return on investment. Not a horrible return, but perhaps more than a bit absurd.

So, the question I have had to ask myself is, “should I keep doing this absurd thing?” I could quit right now, cut my losses, and all would be just fine. It hasn't been fun to reopen this can of worms. To date, I have followed the feelings of joy that put me on this path, and they have in many ways evaporated as I face the realities of the sacrifice itself; as I write each multi thousand dollar check and get ready to get back on the plane, leave my wife and daughter (what kind of fool does this??) and head back for what will undoubtedly be another semester of a few good classes, a few mediocre classes, a few worthless classes, and another incremental bit of formation and growth.

In the end, I have returned over and over again to an inexplicable but unshakable feeling that this absurd path is, still, the one I should follow even if I can't exactly find a good intellectual justification. It is a path, not an investment. I felt strongly called to start on it. It was absurd when I started, nothing substantial has changed. I knew it would be a sacrifice, now I can point to the details of the sacrifice. So, I'm going to laugh a bit at the absurdity and try, again, to trust a bit; not so much in a divine promise but in the absurd possibility of a divine call.