Category: church

well, no, actually

wonderfulexchange9 Comments

Three times today, in very different contexts, and with totally different emotions attached, I was faced with the language of church-as-democracy.

The church isn’t a democracy.  It never was.

Democracy is a political structure in which the people decide– and in which all people have an equal vote, and equal say (which sounds great, so long as you remember that we also need safeguards for those who can’t make themselves heard, or who are in a minority at risk from the tyranny of the crowd).  I like democracy, on the whole; though if I were fully honest, I suspect I’d prefer a benevolent meritocracy.

But however you define it, that is not the church.

In the church, authority doesn’t derive from popular vote, but from what we believe to be true of God.  It derives from the structures of the church (in our case bishops in synod) and the collective wisdom and insight of the community of faith.  It derives from who and what God calls us to be, and how that call is affirmed in the world.

In the church all God’s people have a voice and all have a right to be heard.  But we do not decide what is right, good or true by popular vote.

I’m sure many things would be easier if we did.

Not better, mind: but easier.

And that is seldom God’s way.

a good thing

wonderfulexchange9 Comments

At coffee today, I found myself having a conversation about tears in church:  a terrible embarrassment, or a gift of grace?

I suspect you know where I stand on this.

I hate crying in public. I get annoyed at myself when it happens.   But I think it’s absolutely essential that people are free to cry in church.  And sometimes (often) I think that the right response from those near by is to do nothing.  To accept that tears are normal, that engaging honestly with pain in the presence of God is good, and that we needn’t, shouldn’t try to ‘fix’ it or get it to stop.

I am always grateful if someone is being honest enough to cry in church.  And I love it even more if at the same time, others feel safe enough to laugh, to beam, to be unembarrassed in their joy even if their joy shares the room with someone else’s pain.

The apparent gap between laughter and tears — the apparent faux pas of having people doing both at the same time — just evaporates when both come from God.

Now don’t misunderstand me:  I can still get frustrated with my own tears.  I think it is farcical that in good times or bad, I seem unable to get through Spiritual Direction without a box of kleenex very near by.  But on the whole, I am still thankful to God every time I sense the truth coming near:  in tears, in laughter, in uncertainty, in hope. In the grace of letting people be present to themselves and to God, whatever that means.

 

 

 

expressed

wonderfulexchange6 Comments

There was quite a long time between the building starting to hum, and my realising what it was.  Even longer before I chose to break the spell and find the source of the drumming.

What I experienced in the mean time was an extraordinary freedom.

This is fundamentally my trouble — with life, with church, with who it is I am called to be as a priest:  I think that York Minster is of an appropriate scale.

And that is just not realistic.

But it is glorious for time of standing there, still, while the whole nave hums.

I feel endlessly frustrated by the ways we domesticate God.

Yes:  I can sense the presence of Jesus in a child’s laugh, or a meal shared.  But when I do, those things become bigger — rather than God scaling down to size.

The reality of God is too intricate, beautiful, complex, vast to be held on a domestic scale.   I need something less manageable, less predictable.

Thus the resonance of the cry across the plains, the cry across the nave, the hollow sound of voice-meets-wind echoing through the stones.

But I long for that sense of vast freedom to be embodied, realised, expressed.

When I finally broke from the blazing cross, and left the nave for the transept I could tell the drum was near.  And oddly, the nearer I got, the smaller it sounded.

All that sound was in fact the result of two men, sitting amidst a clutter of instruments:  large drums and flutes, grand piano and sound board.  They were playing for —

what?

a group of people dancing.

a group of people preparing to dance.

a group of people doing T’ai chi?

a group of people embodying prayer, freedom, longing, peace, joy.

I had never seen anything like it.

It was most like T’ai chi.  But they were dancers.  I say ‘they’.  In fact, I stood watching only one woman, whose every movement was un-self-conscious beauty.

I later learned that what I was watching was their warm up.  There would be a more choreographed performance later on.  With costumes, I suspect.  And it would have been good to see the leader looking less odd.  But I just ignored him, and watched the embodied elegance of woman in front — flowing through ballet-meets-martial-arts-meets-prayer.

I cannot explain it.

The rhythm, the repetitiveness, the stretching and flow and shift of tempo — they spoke most clearly of prayer.

I had been thinking (amidst the wildness; against the memory of more common domestication.  amidst the flashing of cameras and the crashing of scaffolding.) — what we do to God is terrible.   How can we learn to express God’s freedom? order? beauty?  grace?

And then, there she was.

being all that I wish the church could be.

But I can’t create that for you here. Maybe you’ve seen her?

What I saw today was something called Moving Visions —  part of Rambert’s cathedral dance research.  But don’t follow the link, because it won’t show you.  It will look like other dance performances you’ve seen; or worse, stir your prejudices against liturgical dance.  And that’s not what it was at all.  (though if you do look, the one I couldn’t stop watching is the one who flies.  the one who was utterly grounded.)

I’m glad I got lost on the ring-road and that I fell into the minster’s pull.

I’m glad I fought through the crowds at the door and the terrible ticket desk that tries as hard as it can to tell you that you are a tourist, and that God will be back on Sunday.

I’m glad that the building knows otherwise, and the drummers, and the dance.

But I still don’t know how to do it here.

unexpected song

wonderfulexchange2 Comments

I stood where I always stand, in the centre of the nave.

There’s a spot — two-thirds of the way back — where the building offers itself whole. The nave stretches out in front of you:  altar, crossing, rood screen, high altar.   You can see just enough of the tower that it seems to rise forever into the light.  And you can sense– rather than see– the breadth of the transepts and the chapter house misbehaving in the corner.

I love the simplicity of it.  The complexity of it.  The perfection of scale ( all the more endearing for the oddities of the rood screen).

I stood for a long time, letting the stones still me.  Accepting that they had, in fact,  faced far worse atrocities than the current entry system.  I stood till all was calm and I had found myself again in proportion.

And then the building began to hum.

I have spent many hours in York Minster.  More that you might think, given that I’ve never lived anywhere near.  I have prayed quietly and joined in large congregations.  I’ve heard concerts, crowds, and construction.  But never anything like this.

I could feel the wind through the open West Door.  Maybe that was it?  Some odd coincidence of open doors and atmospheric pressure, turning the nave into song.

Then I though it was perhaps one of the bells, sent vibrating by a similar confluence of wind and  movement, buzzing in sympathy with a struck stone.

I wondered if it were angels, archangels, and the whole company of heaven (bass section).  And even thought that it could be the same sort of vibration that starts a bridge swinging, bouncing, snap.

If the building was about to rearrange itself, the experience would be worth the risk.

So I stood still.

In time, I began to realize that the sound was the echo of a drum.  African drums, it seemed (perhaps something in the crypt or naughty chapter house?)  And as soon as I had decided on the truth of that I heard a cry — a song of sorts– the sound of a voice, carried across the plains, that speaks to some deep ancestor in all of us (reinforced no doubt by modern recordings from Africa and Hollywood laments of Indian Chiefs).

The thing is:  it felt so right.

The building knew it was right.  At last, a song that was big enough to honour the stones.  A song that was wild enough to echo the yearning.  The spaciousness of God in reflection, held and filled and free.

I stood for a long time, dwelling somewhere above the crossing.  Then when yearning turned to peace, I came down to the cross that was by then alight on the altar.

Eyes can do funny things in the midst of the spaciousness of God.  But words are not as clever, so you will just have to take that on faith.

I eventually did move.

And I learned what had set the building humming.

But that’s enough for now.  I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow.