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.