Entropy's Transitional Turpitude

I can remember the last summer I had. The last summer I knew (see also; the biblical sense). The heat of that summer lept up from the pavement and glared from the windshields of cars. It was the summer of the last time I rode a skateboard. The last summer when the beach of was fun. I can remember it in all its sunburned laziness. It wasn’t the last summer she’d sleep with me, but it was the last summer she’d much want to.

She’d never seen the ocean before. Sometimes I worried that maybe it was the smell of salt and kelp she loved, not my voice in the morning, the way she said. We shared the place more than we “lived together,” and the owner’s golden retriever played gracious host for 6 weeks. The place was mostly kitchen or mostly bedroom, depending on the hour. We mostly assembled sandwiches and salads, more than the other thing. I was nervous about the neighbors we didn’t know. I was the Californian, but she was at home here.

Next we made retreat (see also; the military sense) in the woods of some Midwestern place. I’d known forests, but not the dense, foreboding thicket that woods could be. Or the intransigent maze of play, as well. About there, I mostly remember the deer and the fireflies. And the odd cup of coffee sweltered through mornings that straddled thunderstorms. She had begun to notice that people set to fleeing rarely do so really together, but only in tandem. Only incidentally in the same direction. And yet, there, with no neighbors about whom to worry, we found our proper stride.

The chilled rains of deep autumn in the city broke some fever. Passion turned to good natured bemusement and our lives relaxed together. And city neighbors don’t merit much consideration.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except maybe to ask later which parts you think are true.

Autumnal Anticipation of Advent

First things first; aren’t these just the most attractive white people you’ve ever seen in your life. And aren’t they just living the life? My jealousy is rather unparalleled. And my admiration.

I’m glad to see there are people out there having a lovely time. Or pretending to have a lovely time for a camera so that I can imagine that somewhere in the world, people are having a lovely time. Life has occasionally, lately, let me glimpse into the undercurrent of unremitting loveliness that God pushes intravenously into the world. But only occasionally.

Otherwise, things have been fairly difficult and unlovely. Hopes are often disappointed in life, confirming incrementally that we assume too many promises and never a realistic amount of indifference on the part of the universe. However, having hopes disappointed just in time to fall desperately ill and thereby tumble desperately behind the logistical demands of new semesters, new jobs is enough to bring a generally easy-going young man to despair of ever climbing out. Or, at least, finding a small, natural peace before the supernatural peace of Advent leaps upon us.

Gosh, Advent seems so far away. At least Autumn resides in between. Crisp, crunchy, creaky autumn. Not such an awful in-between, if I can ever get my feet back under me and into a pile of leaves.

I might start writing little pieces of micro-fiction again. I wrote a short story over May and June that I’ve submitted to Esquire’s short story writing contest. I won’t hear anything for months and my hopes are not high that they’ll think anything of it. Still, if I ever get it published anywhere, I’ll be sure to let you know.

I realized I’ve never really commented on the method for those little bits of description and place and person I’d posted here before. I’ll collect a handful of photos (whichever that strike me, for whatever reason) from blogs that I follow, much like the one’s included in this post, and bundle them together around a theme. A color. Or a place. Whatever. Then I’ll open them all up on the desktop of my computer, and just let a scene or a place or an interaction creep out and onto the page.

Then they are all posted together, as you’ve seen. Worse ways to be creative, I suppose.

Once I have a better picture of my new tattoo, I’ll post it.

Godspeed, everybody.

Acting Worship (Last Part)

What Do We Do Now?

Good worshiping is like good acting, only more important. And good acting takes a lot of work and practice. So, as worshipers, there is work we’ve got to do and practice to get to.

What does that work look like?

In acting, one must live a paradox, in which the words and actions are given and known in advance, but they need to be performed as if they are happening for the first time. Somehow one has to be spontaneous and authentic with words and actions that are as familiar as breathing. Well, that sounds just like the conflict between the Traditional and the Contemporary, doesn’t it?

So, first, we must become familiar with our “given circumstance.” This means reading our Bibles so that we know our shared story. This means exploring forms of worship we might not seek out otherwise. This means getting to know our history as a Church, both universal and denominational. It means acknowledging our “scripts,” which are just our own cultural expectations.

Also, we must practice “living honestly.” This means listening to the Holy Spirit, which means seeking out silence. This means we have to learn to be present for the performance, without distraction or self-consciousness. This means we have to be respectful of our fellow performers, by listening to them and being open to their innovations. Open to their honesty.

As much as we’ve all experienced bad performances in the theater or in a movie, we’ve also experienced bad performances in worship. We’ve been in services so rigid in ritual that we can’t seem to engage it with conviction. We’ve also been in services where it was so spontaneous (or messy) that we couldn’t keep up (or relax).

But when we bring these together, the “living honestly”(or the Contemporary) and the “given circumstance”(or the Traditional), we provide a grand performance for God. It doesn’t really matter which “script” or ritual we are packaging the Truth of our worship in. Whether my prayer is liturgical or improvised, I can be just as honest before God, if I am prepared and present. Whether the music is tried-and-true or experimental, I can approach the beauty of God through it if I am listening.

But all of this takes preparation and practice. And patience, for one another. And faith, that God will be present. And hope, that the story we’re acting will come to its full reality. And love, most of all for God and also for each other.

Indeed, our services on Sunday mornings should be a kind of rehearsal for our eternal task before the throne of God; Worship.

Acting Worship (Pt. 4)

Imagining Honestly

So, let’s use our imaginations.

I mean ”use our imaginations” both in the sense of imagining solutions to our division, but also that imagination is the solution to our division. Imagination is the place where the traditional and the innovative are inseparable. The “play” of imagination is where we marry the old to the new.

Worship that is both Traditional and Contemporary is about imagination. It is about, for that hour on Sunday, pretending that God’s promise for the completion of the world is already here. But don’t let the word “pretend” throw you. When we pretend faithfully, God makes good on his promise and provides the very reality we are playing at. A theologian might say that we “incarnate the Eschaton.” Sunday morning worship gives us the precious chance to act like we’re living in the Kingdom of Heaven. We don’t often get to do that during the rest of the week.

In certain substance abuse recovery groups, one might hear this idea as, “fake it till you make it.”

Like it or not, worship is a ritual. Worship is a kind of community performance. Whether there are sensors and kneelers and candles or whether there are video screens and drums and spot-lights, worship is a ritual we perform. Our particular community, our particular culture shapes what that ritual looks like. Sometimes, our ritual is to tell ourselves we don’t have rituals. That’s what a philosopher would call “modernism.”

“But,” you might be thinking, “imagining, pretending, performing and acting are all fake. They are all fictional. They aren’t real.” The Contemporary will especially feel this way, right? Worship shouldn’t be a performance. It shouldn’t be inauthentic. Worship should be true!

Who says that good performances aren’t true?

Let’s take a look at another kind of performance. One that isn’t so stuffed full of our emotions. Let’s look at acting, like on a stage or in a movie.

Good acting is about “living honestly in the given circumstance .” The ‘given circumstance’ is just the script. It tells you both what to say and when to say it. It tells you where the scene takes place. It tells you what goes on in the scene.

The ‘living honestly’ is the courageous task of the actor. We’ve all seen someone who isn’t up to the challenge, right? The words that leave their lips are hollow. The way they hold their body or the way they gesture seems not-quite-right.

But we’ve also encountered the brilliant performance of an exceptional actor. Most recently, I think of Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight” or Daniel Day Lewis in…well, come to think of it, in just about everything. What is going on there that gives us such joy? What do they do that lets us in on the Truth of the story?

On the one hand, they provide us the satisfaction of getting what we paid for. Heath Ledger’s Joker has the face paint and the scary laugh and the flamboyant clothes. We know we’re going to get that from a Batman movie. It comforts us to receive it. It would make us anxious and upset if he never walked on screen in the purple suit and smudged grease paint.

This is what the Traditional values. It desires to know we know where we are. There are familiar words and symbols that help us feel like a part of a community. Like a part of a shared story. It lets us know that when we invest our hearts into Church, we aren’t going to be deceived or left out in the cold. The sight of stained glass and the sound of the organ let me know I’m home.

On the other hand, great performances delight us with innovations and surprises. Ledger’s Joker transforms a character we thought we knew so well. He speaks with the flat, familiar monotone of a Midwesterner. He reveals a horrifying kind of intelligence. We appreciate that he surprises us, because that makes him more than a type. It makes him alive. It makes him ring true.

This is what the Contemporary provides to the performance of our worship. It toys with our expectations to remind us that our Faith is alive. It provides us with the delight of surprise . It shines light on new aspects of our Faith that we might have been underemphasizing. At worst, what we might have been ignoring. A new kind of musical instrument can evoke a new metaphor for God’s power or love. A new word or phrase can open up possibilities we hadn’t discovered.

But in the excellent performance, both of these things happen at once. We are both reassured by our fulfilled expectations and delighted by our surprise. Like when an old hymn suddenly finds new meaning because of our circumstances. Like when a new metaphor illuminates a familiar passage of scripture. This is the tension between the old and the new that siding only with the Traditional or the Contemporary against the other is guaranteed to miss. The Traditional and the Contemporary cannot be separated, even if we so easily distinguish between them.

Acting Worship (Pt. 3)

The Traditional and The Contemporary

We’ll start with the Traditional.

Some of us ache for our old beloved hymns, the long-respected creeds and liturgical prayers with their roots deep in our personal memory and the memory of our community. The reliability of well-worn words and melodies and “the way we’ve always done things” are a comfort to us as we travel through this veil of tears. In simple terms, the Traditional values what is time tested. In simpler terms, the Traditional values what is old, though our culture is very unfair to that word.

And the Contemporary?

If you’ve used a word like “relevant” or “authentic” or “spirit-lead” in the last sixth months, you are probably among the Contemporary. The Contemporary often looks over the church’s walls at the “culture” and sees new and useful tools for expressing the fundamental Truth in the Gospel. New kinds of technology or music or language that, when filled with the Truth of the Gospel and lead by the Holy Spirit can remind us of the fresh and ever-new vibrance of what God has done for us. St. Augustine calls this “pillaging the Egyptians ,” in reference to the treasure Israel carried out of Egypt during the exodus . In simple terms, the Contemporary values what is innovative. In still simpler terms, the Contemporary values what is new, though our culture thoughtlessly elevates that word.

At their best, both the Traditional and the Contemporary are good ways of thinking about worship. They both value things that are really, actually good. That is, when they are at their best. When they are at their worst, they fall to being the opposite sides of the same bad coin.

One group says, “Whatever is old is best!” The new music is too loud. The new technology is too distracting. All that casual dress and casual language is disrespectful.

The other group says, “Whatever is new is best!” Those old songs are boring. Those old prayers are stale and rote. All that lofty language is phony.

Once we get to that point, the conversation is dead. We’re just shouting at each other. Or, perhaps more commonly, we aren’t talking to each other at all. In a case of the all-too-apt metaphor, we end up preaching to the choir. We just roll around in our own chronological snobbery.

“Whatever is old is best!”

“Whatever is new is best!”

Still, each one’s dissatisfaction with the other is reasonable. They aren’t crazy or stupid.

The Traditional feels that the new and “relevant” worship songs and practices don’t carry the weight of meaning that a century-and-a-half old hymn has accrued since it was written. Worse, they are going to bring in those “noise makers ” and banish our beloved organ and choir to that attic.

The Contemporary looks at the traditional structures and content and feels like those things have lost their freshness and vibrance. Sure, for one time and place, they were great. After all, everything was new once. Now, however those old things are clichéd and unmoving.

That both the Traditional and the Contemporary are reasonable positions isn’t a contradiction. This isn’t a game of tug-o-war where, in order for one side to win the other has to lose. That they are both reasonable hints to us that the conflict we are experiencing isn’t necessary. That the division can be bridged.

Or better yet, closed.

That Traditional, scripted worship practices have tended towards rote and lifeless performance doesn’t mean they have to be that way forever. The Contemporary, innovative practices don’t have to let go of their ties to tradition or be completely unstructured. Those are assumptions based on the way things look right now, but they lack imagination about how the Traditional and the Contemporary can meet one another at the altar.

Acting Worship (Pt. 2)

Worship “Wars?”

We usually mean by “worship” something like “the practice of expressing our individual and communal adoration of God through the arts, particularly song.” This way of thinking about our Sabbath gatherings is fairly new in the scope of Christian history, but hopefully this discussion of where we find ourselves will encourage us to take a look at where we come from. Of course, it is okay if that’s a different discussion for a different day.

Worship has been becoming a problem for us as evangelicals for a long time now. If you know the phrase “worship wars,” then you probably already know how we are divided over this, often by generation. We’ve, all of us, probably identified with one side of the divide or the other. Usually, we account for the division by pointing to how the “Traditional” and the “Contemporary” are in conflict.

Of course, this distinction can be found under any number of different names, and the irony of evangelical culture is that even what we label “contemporary” is very rarely all that contemporary. The same goes for our use of “traditional,” most of the time.

I want to offer hope that this conflict is escapable. It is escapable precisely because there doesn’t need to be a conflict. The division we see and feel isn’t a necessary one. A philosopher might say it is a “false dichotomy.” A philosopher also might say that the Traditional and the Contemporary are “distinct but not separable.” Let’s start by distinguishing the two and we can get to how they can’t really be separated later.

Acting Worship: About Imagining Honestly (Pt. 1)

Inspired by this post on the Church and PoMo blog, I'm gonna post (in installments) an essay I wrote a year or so ago about "worship." Many of you have probably already seen this, but I read it again tonight and I'm pretty happy with how it frames (and dismantles) the debate, over-simplifications and all.

Acting Worship: About Imagining Honestly
by Jonathan Heaps

The summer before I went off to college, the church where I grew up hired me as a Worship and Arts intern. I had already been volunteering during the week and on Sunday mornings, mostly creating and projecting song lyrics for our Worship services. My duties were gently expanded and I now had to attend the weekly worship planning meeting on Wednesday mornings. Very early on Wednesday mornings, as far as my teenage self was concerned.

In these meetings we would sit around a table and construct our weekly worship service. The format is, I imagine, fairly standard for evangelical churches in mostly-white, middle class America: A “Welcome” song or two while folks trickle in, a greeting, some announcements, a few more songs, the children are dismissed to Sunday school, the offering, the sermon, communion on the first Sunday of the month, another song and a benediction. Our non-liturgical liturgy, you might call it. We’d stray a little creatively here and there. There would be a skit sometimes. Occasionally we’d incorporate some sort of participatory, hands on artsy-ness now and then. But for the most part, things were done the way things were done.

And yet, even with all those week-to-week consistencies and shared expectation, those meetings would take on the character of a hardened negotiation. I always found that strange, given that we usually entered the room in a spirit of collaboration. Further, I imagined that strangeness was not lost on the others. But there we were, bartering a hymn against a praise song or debating the merits of a skit over a special music. Could an instrumental piece really be considered “worship” music? Is the choir going to get its agreed upon quota of Sundays this year? Are we giving the youth something that will keep them interested? Are we giving the seniors something that will keep them satisfied?

It seemed like there were always two parties advocating for righteous but contradictory agendas. And, if I may speak candidly, it resulted in some disjointed and rather directionless worship services. Worship services that, no doubt, the Holy Spirit used to move and change souls, despite our pulling and tugging every which way. Still, I grew tired and discouraged by this combativeness we seemed so easily to slip into. I also have a feeling I’m not the only one.

(to be continued...)

Gifts You Get to Gander

This was built for a soapbox derby race in Portland, Ore.


"Look Upon Thy Death" is a pretty bad-ass tattoo. And Shakespearean nonetheless!

This makes no sense, and yet I feel like I should be their friend.

Especially if they serve these:

The Blessed And The Bled

It is a good and Christian thing, I think, to sometimes walk headlong into suffering for the hope of love.