How to Curate the Unspeakable (in 3 Easy Steps)

by | August 26, 2011

This post was written by Jonathan Perrodin.

Why is there something, rather than nothing?

This has been a perpetual inquiry for thinkers from the beginning of time. We could say all theology, philosophy, art, and science are attempts to answer this eternal question. It is an arresting investigation; one that continues to draw me into that beautiful complexity of the not knowing.

The way you answer this question is a good indicator of how you will handle mystery in your worship planning. I came from a tradition which takes all the mystery out of the mysterious. The answer would be little more nuanced than “because God said so.” Some authors with more theological complexity would describe it in summary as “for God’s glory.”

While both these answers may be true in a certain sense, and we can certainly find biblical foundations for both views in Job or the Psalms, is there not a nagging feeling that these answers deflate the mystery and leave us less inclined to continue to search the depths?

The finality of these answers, while they may satisfy us today, in the long run do a disservice to the divine and most likely hinder us from deeper faith. They leave off the beauty that often follows the mysteries of both heaven and earth. We stand at the Grand Canyon and look in awe. In that moment of awe and wonder, never mind the geological question of how, give me answer to the question why. It can’t be done, we must simply stand silent. And I argue that it is that unanswerable mystery that draws us to worship.

The work of curating mystery is
to open people up to the infinite depths
not to close us in with answers.

If we accept the premise that mystery is good, that we shouldn’t be quick to answer every why question, that in the unknowing of the mystery we find the divine and are drawn to worship–if we accept that–then how do we do it in our church worship gatherings?

First let us distinguish what counts as mystery. Simply put: Everything is mysterious! Any theme, text, season can be interpreted through a hermeneutic that allows room for mystery. We must realize that we will always be missing things in our interpretation. We see through a glass dimly as Paul put it. We need to realize this and thereby open ourselves up to the text itself. Let the text speak to us instead of us reading it.

Question everything
Questions are the entryway into mystery. We have to ask questions of the text, trying to see into, around, and through it. This requires making the text a central element of the planning and execution of the service. It requires asking a lot of questions and then listening as they echo in the silence.

This questioning will create tension. The puzzle pieces won’t want to come back together. And that’s okay. Actually that’s the point. This tension creates a dynamism to the service which can’t be found without conflicting objects.

It seems all the events that I’ve curated have an element of tension to the planning and execution. The tension comes between preparing different elements, which while exploring the same theme are expressing it differently. When these different elements are placed alongside each other in an event, we see the theme from different angles, allowing for a fuller view, though it is one held in tension.

Bring the same questions (without answers) into the event itself. They are a central aspect of the event. The question is haunting; it draws you into the unknowing. Most everything else is setup for the question, so we can see the question anew, see the text/theme/topic with fresh eyes. So that we must seek God in faith for the answer.

Allow for conflicting voices
As curators you want a unified event, but you also want to keep a diversity of voices in the service. This can be difficult if you are working by yourself or the leader of the group has too strong a voice. Without diverse people working together it is all too easy to have an unintended hegemony.

Mystery is better held intact when we let a diversity of voices be heard, without giving privilege to anyone voice over another. This isn’t simply a weak pluralism, where we blindly say all interpretations are equal. No, this is an acknowledgement of the difficulty of faith, an invitation for everyone to wrestle with it.

Leave it unresolved
Curating mystery isn’t about explaining the mystery, but rather it is about plunging us headlong into the mystery so that we all might experience it. We curate to open a space for the mystery to dwell within.

Words © Jonathan Perrodin
Image © iStockphoto

 

Jonathan Perrodin is Curator of Worship Arts at Vintage Fellowship. He created Vintage Vespers, an experiment in art, worship and transformation that hosts monthly events. He along with his wife and two children live in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Track Jonathan online via twitter @perrodin and his blog hiddenbehindnothing.

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Worship Thresholds

by | August 25, 2011

Denver, the city that I “allegedly” live in according to Twitter, holds a small collection of old Victorian mansions, carriage houses and the like. Granted, in our city’s plebian newness, our version of “old” tends to be laughable in the face of centuries-long standing architecture that our brothers and sisters to the east (and even farther) can boast of in their cities. Still, the snapshots of our beginnings – of an industrial cow town trying to be a big city, a luxe city – stand around as monuments to our beginnings and aspirations. Being a complete and total history nerd, I love every opportunity to walk through the old buildings, though most of them have been converted to offices, B&B’s or just odd reliquaries of the past.

My favorite part of the old architecture: vestibules. Thresholds. In-between spaces that usher you from one place to another. Our modern and contemporary architecture doesn’t possess this same value. Trust me, I love how my little 1950’s bungalow flows – all the space bleeding into each other, the layout designed for openness; but I have a longing for the front entry of the old houses and that past value on in-between-ness, on taking a moment to pause, orient yourself and prepare for whatever was waiting on the other side, what was happening on the inside.

If I was forced to sum up my role as a worship curator, this is the picture I would use. I’m a threshold designer. I admit frankly, I get a little creeped out by worship leaders who say that their job is to give people an encounter with GOD, to create it. The experience of GOD cannot be manufactured or “created,” boxed or invoked – that’s what experience and those older and wiser have taught me. And certainly, within my human limitations and small speech, I don’t even know if it can be named without robbing it of the power.

Stephen Mitchell, a linguist and scholar, interprets some of the names for GOD to be Unnameable One, Unknowable One, Deep Well of Mystery. (Mitchell’s book, A Book of Psalms – selections adapted from the Hebrew, is a dog-eared, marked up go-to resource for me in my planning and praying.) In the Merriam-Webster, “Eucharist” is actually listed as one of the definitions for mystery. My own anecdotal experience has taught me that the longer I live and the more I know, the less I actually understand. This is the Cloud of Unknowing.

My caution for worship leaders: the notion that we can within our own power create an experience or encounter of mystery is arrogant or at least very, very naive. What we can do – with integrity and beauty and a tremendous amount of imaginative intentionality – is to create thresholds, liminal spaces, where people can enter into mystery. The great author Henry Miller said, “Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.” Our philosophy has given us actions that lead us to and from places of action – whether it’s in the natural world, in the compassionate work of relationships, or in the prescribed ritual of communion. It seems to me that, if we embrace the piece of our philosophy that calls us to worship the Unnameable One, the Deep Well of Mystery, that each of these actions would bring us back to wonder. Back each time to wonder: the vestibule of mystery.

As we contemplate the thresholds we’ve passed through to discover mystery on the other side, I invite you, I urge you to consider how we create thresholds with our spaces, our words, our images, and our deep intentions. How do we practice wonder? How do you do this in your worship? How do you do this in your home? Or relationships? I would love to hear your practices.

Image © iStockphoto

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Bunyips Are Beautiful

by | August 24, 2011

From Big Foot to the Yeti, all cultures have mythical creatures. Some are terrifying monsters invented by adults to keep adventurous children from wandering into the woods. But some are creatures cobbled together from various stories of the time something unfamiliar moved in the bushes, a way of naming the unknown. In Australia, it’s the Bunyip, an elusive creature which is said to lurk in swamps. As a child, one of my favorite books was The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek, which tells the story of a lonely bunyip, emerging from a swamp to ask various creatures “What am I?” (He’s so mysterious he doesn’t even know himself!) At one point in the story he comes across a man and their interaction goes like this:

The man was busy with a notebook and pencil, and did not look at the bunyip.

‘Sh,’ he said, ‘I’m busy.’

The bunyip waited for a long time, and then he said, very slowly and clearly, ‘Can you please tell me what bunyips look like?’

‘Yes,’ said the man, without looking up.

‘Bunyips don’t look like anything.’

‘Like nothing?’ said the bunyip.

‘Like nothing at all,’ said the man.

‘Are you sure?’ said the bunyip.

‘Quite sure,’ said the man, and looked right through him.

‘Bunyips simply don’t exist.’

Every time I turned to this page, my small heart could hardly contain the strength of my hatred for this man. Even as a child I understood that although he thought he was so clever, he was blind to the fact that he was having a conversation with the very creature he claimed didn’t exist.

But we all can be like this man, unwilling to admit we don’t know, clinging to the certainty of the known. And yet, the ability to grasp our limited understanding is one of the best ways to understand God! Afterall, if God were within our understanding, it would make him smaller. It’s only when we know how little we can know about God that we get a tiny taste of what He might be.

Let’s look at how silence, metaphor and questions can reveal the unknown.

Silence
Incorporate times of silence into your worship time without feeling the need to give structure or instruction. Silence raises questions and makes statements of its own. In times of silence we are able to see that silence is not only an absence, it can be a presence.

As with this moment in Revelation, sometimes silence is the only response:

When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. Revelation 8:1

In The Language of Mystery, Edward Robinson says:

There is a view common to many traditions that silence alone can do justice to the mystery. Even so, that is a silence that is not like other silences; it is a silence that can communicate; it is a quite specific silence.

Metaphor
Ask worshipers to share spiritual metaphors that are meaningful to them from life, nature, scripture, literature. Discuss together how it is that metaphor often has more potential to create awe than very objective language does. How does it draw on emotions and the senses? Why do you think artists don’t like to explain their work? What is ruined if we talk too much about metaphors?

Provide various images or random objects and ask worshipers to find spiritual metaphors in them.

The mechanism by which spirituality becomes passionate is metaphor. An ineffable God requires metaphor not only to be imagined but to be approached, exhorted, evaded, confronted, struggled with, and loved. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought.

Questions

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable his judgments,
and his paths beyond tracing out!
Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor?
Who has ever given to God,
that God should repay them?
Romans 11:33-35

Ask worshipers to write questions about the depth of the riches of God’s wisdom and ways. Things like “Does having that much capacity for love hurt?  Is the love worth it?”  “What is it like to remember everything?” or even “Why did you make guinea pigs?”  Challenge worshipers to see how the questions open a mental space where God can breathe. Assure them it’s okay to make friends with the lack of resolution.

Have a reading of Questions about Angels (excerpted here):

Do [angels] fly through God’s body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors? …
If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?

Listen to Billy Collins read his complete poem.

How do you use silence, metaphors or questions? How can we understand enough to know that we live in mystery, without removing the mystery? Is our first reaction, on seeing a gap in our knowledge, to try to stuff it with answers? How can we be comfortable with the unknowable?

Image Public Domain

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Someone Said

by | August 24, 2011

A minister says words and performs actions, but at a deeper level, it is Christ who is presiding. We share in bread and wine, but the reality is that we are taking Christ into us. It looks like this is all occurring in time and space, when in fact the boundaries of time and space are being shattered, when for a few moments “heaven and earth are full of [God’s] glory.”

When all is said and done, though it may look like we’ve done nothing more that re-enact a routine religious meal, in fact, as the concluding prayer notes, something terribly significant has occurred: “You have graciously accepted us as living members of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ, and you have fed us with spiritual food in the sacrament of his body and blood.”

Or as the Lutheran prayer suggests, as a result of sharing the bread and wine, we will be filled with “heavenly blessing and grace,” receive “the forgiveness of sins,” “be formed” to live as a “holy people,” and share in “our inheritance of all [God’s] saints.” It sure doesn’t look like any of this happened. Looks like we just ate bread and drank wine and said a few prayers. Looks like a handshake between two ball players. But the liturgy constantly reminds us that we have instead bumped into a divine reality. Keep doing this for a few years, and you’ll soon be looking at the whole world differently.

First, you’ll start looking differently at people in the pews around you. You’ll start seeing that they are a holy mystery to be treated with as much reverence as you do the bread and wine.

Mark Galli, Beyond Smells and Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2008), p. 52-53.

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De-moralizing Holiness

by | August 23, 2011

“To be holy is to be morally blameless,” says Jerry Bridges in his 1978 book that sold more than one million copies.

To be sure, the concept of holiness contains the idea of “moral goodness.” Especially in the New Testament, there are frequent direct links between holiness and morality. 1 Thessalonians 4:3-5 is just one example. Is it correct to claim that holiness is about perfect morality?

Framing holiness in moral terms is a practice as incorrect as it is old. Of the over-emphasis of the moral aspect of holiness, Rudolph Otto says

The fact is we have come to use the words ‘holy’, ‘sacred’ in an entirely derivative sense, quite different from that which they originally bore. We generally take ‘holy’ as meaning ‘completely good’; it is the absolute moral attribute, denoting the consummation of moral goodness… But this common usage of the term is inaccurate… if the ethical element was present at all [in the term], at any rate it was not original and never constituted the whole meaning of the word. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 5

I was raised in a non-denominational, evangelical home and church in which “holy” was regularly defined as the best synonym for moral purity. To this day, it is very difficult for me to read or hear the word “holy” and not think about abstaining from something immoral. Ironically, this way of thinking is incredibly demoralizing, in the truest sense of the word. To re-frame holiness correctly, it would help us to shift the conversation from its focus on human holiness, to considering the holiness of God. Here, we will begin to see that our narrow conception of the holy is missing its middle.

God is holy. Does this mean primarily that God is Good? Sinless? Moral? To be sure, these attributes are included in God’s character. What more can there be to the idea of the holy? Rudolph Otto – who wrote on the topic fifty years before Jerry Bridges did - links holiness not with morality, but with mystery.

Otto coins a term as he re-builds the concept of the holy. His word “numinous” derives from the Latin numen, which means “divine power.” The numinous describes that moving, deeply spiritual feeling one has during an encounter with that which is wholly other. The numinous encounter is rich with fearful, awe-fulness (not the same as being afraid). An experience with the numinous also gives way to a sense of urgent excitement, and feelings that the object beheld is utterly unapproachable and incomprehensible.

When I think about the physical location for such a human-holy encounter to take place, I do not imagine a classroom, the air filled with rationalistic arguments about theology and discussions about the finer points of doctrine.

I imagine, instead, a worship space.

The numinous is felt, not comprehended. It is non-rational (not to be confused with “irrational”) and can only (if at all) be described in metaphorical terms. It is beyond understanding, but not beyond contact. The worship space is the context in which we make our most intentional and fervent attempts to touch the spirit of God, and is therefore an hospitable environment for the numinous to appear.

If we continue to pursue holiness in our gatherings as that which is simply moral and good, it should be enough to pass around copies of the ten commandments, WWJD wristbands, and an assortment of chastity-belts. But holiness does not equal morality. And, the holy is less something we plan to acquire, and more someONE we experience in unexpected, rapt adoration and with trembling urgency. To de-moralize (in the hyphenated sense of the word) the holy in the context of our worship could serve to positively mystify our meeting with one another and with God.

To curate holiness in worship, then, is to artistically and pastorally facilitate numinous encounters. While it may not be possible for us to “teach” the mysteriousness of holy God, it is entirely plausible for us to invite people to an experience of the holy. As Otto points out, the numinous “… can only be evoked, awakened in the mind; as everything that comes ‘of the spirit’ must be awakened.” (Otto, 7).

This in mind, what are your next steps as you set about creatively awakening the minds of your people toward deeper experiences of God in all her mysterious, holiness?

Image © iStockphoto

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