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.