Taize Friday

At the risk of this becoming a running narrative of my toe-dipping at St. Joe's, I feel like I need to balance Ash Wednesday, and what might have sounded like a depreciation of "intimate" worship experience.

I've long been drawn to the unique worship that grew out of the community of prayer that began as Brother Roger and a few associates sought some refuge from the horrors of WWII Europe in Taize. It's simple, it's ecumenical, and it is grounded in Spirit. It allows for silence, and at least for me invites a deep attention to the movement of Christ's passion and the words of Scripture that are spoken.

No surprise that I would want to attend when it was announced on Ash Wednesday that there would be a time of Taize prayer on Friday....4:30 P.M. "to make it easier those who don't want to go out at night." No surprise, either, as we made our way into the dark sanctuary that there would be none of the searching for seats that impressed me on Wednesday. A pianist, cantor, reader, and maybe a dozen other souls sat quietly, waiting for that moment of beginning.

Maybe one of the things I find powerful about this service is that I somehow am able to abide my own brokenness as the quiet chants, and the breath that sings them, fill me in ways that accommodate the slow leak--the quiet hissss that singing Taize feels like to me. I am peripherally aware of the other worshippers, and at times my mind flits to what it is that they seek in the sounds and silence of this place and time, but I spend a good part of the service with eyes closed, aware of myself in the dark.

I'm never quite sure what will touch my soul, but there are very few times that I have been a part of Taize prayer that there's not been something. Yesterday, it was a chant I'd sung a hundred times...."Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." It was clear from the first notes that I would not croak along with this one--it was to be sung for me. Aware of that thief who hung beside Jesus, with Wednesday's reading a sort of echo (as Jesus was questioned as to how he could possibly eat with tax collectors and sinners) I wonder why I for so long have tried so hard to be somehow worthy of God's presence in my life.

Felix cupla! Blessed fault! It is just that brokenness, and our need for healing, that draws God close, yet in that quiet place I feel the quickening of my reformed, Calvinist pulse. Yes, it is our sin that draws God close to us, oddly at the very moment that we seek to pull away from God! But what chokes me mid-chant? "Jesus, remember me..."

It's one thing to be found by that God who leaves the 99 to find the lost 1. It's another to ask to be remembered. and I'm not even all that sure what the difference is. I know that the rock-solid witness of the Gospel is that God will in no wise forget us. Not a sparrow falls to the ground that God does not know. "Forgetfulness" was the fear that haunted and prodded the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and I guess Heidegger resonated so deeply for me because the fear of being forgotten--"left behind"-- has been so palpable for me. "Jesus, remember me."

This particular Taize service ends with a longer time of chant, as people are invited to pray at the cross in silence while those gathered create something like a sound-fort around them: "Stay with me, remain here with me, watch and pray, watch and pray." This week it was just fine to be part of that Greek Chorus that chanted along. Maybe that's why community is so very important to the Christian journey: because when you are on the verge of forgetting, or fearing that you are forgotten, there's someone a few pews back staying, remaining, watching, praying. It doesn't take a church filled to the last row of the balcony. A couple handful of praying folk, gathered for whatever mixed motive will do.

It's not a Taize tune, but it was in my ear as we stepped back into the twilight:

I will never forget you,
My people
I have carved you
on the palm of My hand
I will never forget you
I will not leave you orphan
I will never forget My own

Ash Wednesday Thoughts

There's no great shock that the beginning of the season of Lent attracts considerably less attention in the broad world than the beginning of the other great fast of the Christian tradition, Advent. The malls will not be decked for some time, though I guess at some point an Easter Bunny will appear for photos with the kiddies, but Lent just does not sell the way that days before Christmas do. You can only eat so many Peeps, I suppose.

For the past 14 years this first day of the fast has been marked in what is politely called an "intimate" service at the Lord's Table. I simply learned not to expect more than 10-15% of the congregation to trudge out in the middle of the week, in order to hear the "invitation" to examine our lives, and prepare for the wonder and mystery of the Lord's passion.

So it was a little bit of culture shock when we drove up to St. Joseph's parish last night. The sanctuary was nearly as full as it had been on Christmas Eve (though admittedly the great hall next to the sanctuary was not outfitted with the video link it had for that service.) We ended up in the balcony--a great vantage to see hundreds of the faithful line up to receive the imposition of ashes.

I understand that the church is in trouble when it allows itself to be drawn into a numbers game, but I admit to being impressed by a corporate sense of piety that seems to draw believers together, not just for the highest of holy days, like Christmas and Easter, but at these beginning moments of the story. One dare not guess the motives of all those gathered, and I understand that something like a "holy day of obligation" can still tug at people's hearts long after they've shaken loose any need to listen once they're there, but the mood and spirit of that worship service (by the way, one of three announced at Mass last Sunday) suggested at least to me that there was something very right going on.

I'd decided some time back that the impostion of ashes was not something I was comfortable with in those "intimate" services that had become the rule of life for the congregations I served. It always felt like "playing with symbols" that we were not really ready to embrace. Don't take the ashes, I thought, if you were not going to commit to the walk of the season, and truly engage the Fast. As I watched from my bird's eye view as women and men, young and old, infants, adults, seniors, all stood quietly as their forehead was smudged with a reminder of their mortality I realized how much we'd lost along the way.

A good friend started my Ash Wednesday with a lovely call to the Lenten discipline: "Go forth into the period of Lent as the humble people of God. And may the ashes of our grieving become the soil for our growing, the footsteps of the Christ be seen in the earth before us, and the Spirit be found beside us on the way." As I stood myself in front of someone I'd never met, and felt the ashes smudge my brow, I wondered how hard it would be to grow a faith without this soil. The celebration of Nativity just passed reminded me that the work of salvation began in the most meager of human settings. I realize today that that seed grows, not in the sterile clay of holy vessels, but in the living and dying loam of life.

There is much about where I find myself these days that makes me a little crazy, but I am only thankful that I had the space in my life last night to be where I was. "Turn away from sin, and believe the Gospel." Indeed!

The Banality of Decency

Don't ask me why, but Utne Reader seems never to make it out of our house once it comes in, which is only a partial explanation of why I happened to be paging through an old issue (March-April, 2006, to be precise!) when I stumbled upon this most exquisite phrase--"The banality of decency."

You might guess that it had something to do with a play on words taking off from Hannah Arendt's famous evaluation of the defendents in the Nazi War Crimes tribunals, and the "banality" of their "evil." The article I stumbled upon was by one Sam Smith, writing for the on-line Progressive Review, but reprinted in the Utne from DESIGNER/Builder, which the end note indicates is "environmentally driven and socially conscious."

Pause for just a moment to respect the absolute serendipity of me quietly reading in my living room in 2010 from a periodical from 2006, quoting the September/October, 2005 reprint from an obscure architectural magazine with a social consience...and note that on the website of DESIGN/Builder is the sad note: "Due to the untimely death of beloved publisher Kingsley Hammett, further issues of DESIGNER/builder magazine are on hold until further notice." How DO ideas bounce around in this universe, anyway?!

Back to the article, by Sam Smith, reflecting on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and wondering what it is that we learn from evil. Smith ambles through his first experience of the horrors of the Nazi death machine in a 1956 Social Studies class. I resonate with his reflection: "The concentration camps were gruesome, but the movies Nazis had made to celebrate thmselves were in some ways even more horrific, depicting millions of Germans voluntarily surrendering their souls as millions of others involuntarily lost their lives."

I nodded in appreciation how Smith's journey had led him through William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free. There is an unsettling truth in observing that it does not take extraordinarily evil people to accomplish extraordinarily evil ends. Just about anyone will do, if you can so structure the odious tasks that no one really has to take responsibility.

But then, this exquisite paragraph:

"If you watch good people closely, you see that their good comes as naturally as evil came to Eichmann. It does not have to be propped up with memories of great wrongs; it is just the everyday unconscious behavior of those graced with honor: the banality of decency."

I associate William Sloan Coffin's name with the thought that in the long-term a Christian cannot help but be optimistic, which means in the short term she can be nothing but a pessimist. There's no doubt but that left to play by themselves you will see people act in thoughtless, mean, calculated, and yes, sometimes even evil ways. Want proof? Drive the speed limit in the left lane next time you are on the highway! Take away their food, their homes, any sense of hope, and it may well be that people will act in ways that offend our human sensibilities. But before you just throw up your hands in frustration over this great human experiment, notice what Smith named: that uncanny, unrehearsed goodness that seems just as present in the world you move through from day to day.

For me, this morning, it was the waitress who "promised to bring the Promise," the salesperson at Barnes and Noble who humored me with an introduction to their e-book reader knowing I already have a Kindle, the server who cleared my plate at the Rotary meeting on Tuesday, who, in a room of 150 people who probably could not have cared less how she was, had that tone in her voice when she asked if she could take the plate that made me know she really did care if I wanted or needed anything else. Yes, yes, they're all told to be nice and helpful. But if you watch people closely, you see that the goodness comes naturally.

Sure, that goodness is in the envelope right next to the one that opens with fear, suspicion, malice, self-justification, and there's just as much danger in thinking people are essentially good as there is in thinking they are essentially evil. We're mixed beasts, moral mongrels all for the most part looking for our next meals, but always, the teacher from Ecclesiates reminds me, with that "hint of eternity" planted within us. If we could only nurture it, cup it, like a communion wafer in our hands, warm it with our breath and take it into our hearts.

I want to give good Mr. Smith the last word:

"The frightening thing about Auschwitz is not that some would deny it but how real it still seems. The frightening thing about Auschwitz is that our leaders go to honor it while still denying Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and Palestine. We will know that we have finally learned the Holocoaust's lessons when we no longer hear new echoes of it."

Or maybe, better, when we hear the echoes, with all of their bitter dissonance, with ears tuned to a deep, broad, long, even eternal touch of decency that sees and acknowledges, yet neither condones nor forgives the evil that is its banal brother.

Ruling and Teaching

http://www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2010/10108.htm

I don't always find myself agreeing with Joe Small--nor do I know why i should!--but in this press release I find his thoughts right on the mark.

For context, a lot of my reading in the past couple of months has waded through materials on leadership and its challenges in the 21st century. One of the things that has impressed me along the way is the extent to which effective leadership is so often undermined by over-reaching. Knowing the limits of your role, and how to use especially the edges of authority in order to move people into truly creative change, is I think one of the most important facets of trying to lead just about anything these days, from a community organization to a church and beyond.

What Joe suggests is that Pastors have been encouraged, and allowed themselves to be increasingly defined in ways that would look an awful lot like the Executive Director of a modest Nonprofit organization. Guilty as charged. Knowing where all the lightbulbs are, what line of the budget accounts for the paper supplies, and where to order chalk might not be the best use of a seminary education. It can keep things moving with some efficiency, but is it faithful?

He then harkens back to language that slipped away from Presbyterians through merged mergers: "teaching elders" and "ruling elders" with I think a really nice highlight: "ruling as in measuring". "Ruling elders measure the congregation’s “fidelity to the gospel” and the “spiritual health of the congregation.” Well put!

Of course, if you take Calvin as your model, that teaching role can be quite forceful. There's a reason he got run out of Geneva the first time round! Calvin used pulpit and lectern to create a new and radically different image of what a church could do and be, and we're still living into all the implications of that on the Reformed side of the Christian house. Teaching is decidedly not telling people what they want to hear when they want to hear it, but in this unique Presbyterian way Joe Small set my mind to pondering, it is always set alongside the "rule" of those ruling elders.

I suspect the impact would be great if we, as a church, sought to live back into the roles that tradition carved out for us, while pushing them into the future instead of trying to make the present fit old paradigms like a size 10 foot in a size 8 shoe. It's that balance I want to hold in my mind for just a bit: finding the new possibilities in old language and categories without letting that old language bring with it all the baggage of the old world that birthed it.