Ash Wednesday with Faith House
April 26, 2011
DUST IN THE WIND: Ash Wednesday
At FAITH HOUSE, March 9, 2011
PROGRAM (90 minutes)
Opening – When The Night Becomes Dark – Taizé (5 min)
When the night becomes dark, your love, O Lord, is a fire;
Your love, O Lord, is a fire.
PART I “Remember You Are Dust”
First Reading – Genesis 3:1-24 “for dust you are and to dust you will return” (5 min)
First Speaker – Share a personal anecdote, provide context for dust/creation/sin, instructions for next activity (5 min – ULA)
First Activity – Write confession on paper, burn in aluminum bowl (10 min)
PART II “And to Dust You Shall Return”
Second Reading - Ecclesiastes 3 “all come from dust, and to dust all return” (3 min – Caleb)
Second Speaker – Personal anecdote, provide context for mortality and Ash Wednesday, instructions for stations (5 min –SARAH)
Second Activity – Stations –pour soap and ashes into tin foil molds, Savasana, imposition of ashes, read Obituaries in the NYTimes, recorded music TBD (15 min)
PART III “Lent, a Season of Preparation”
Third Reading – Matthew 6:1-6,16-21 (3 min – Elaine)
Third Speaker – Personal anecdote, provide context for season of lent/practices/giving things up, instructions for small groups (5 min – DAN)
Third Activity – get into groups of three, each person names something they can give up, something they can do regularly for charity, or a new prayer regiment they can practice regularly (10 minutes)
CLOSING – O Lord Hear My Prayer
Prayer w/ Taizé as opening, closing and antiphon between petitions (10 min – Bowie lead)
O Lord, hear my prayer O Lord, hear my prayer When I call answer me
O Lord, hear my prayer O Lord, hear my prayer Come and listen to me
Acknowledgements & Announcements – Bowie (5 min)
Gene Robinson’s Inaugural Invocation
January 21, 2009
Here’s a copy of the Rt Reverend Gene Robinson’s opening prayer which kicked off the inauguration festivities.¬† Sadly, it wasn’t broadcast – HBO, for whatever reason, felt that it wasn’t worth putting on TV.¬† I think HBO is wrong, so I’m putting it here.¬† Enjoy!
The Gold Star, though, goes to Joe Lowery, who did get broadcast but is worth watching a second time:
Some Thoughts on Ritual Installations
August 13, 2008
I recently had lunch with my friend Clay Morris, who also happens to be the chief liturgical officer of the Episcopal Church, and he gave me an interesting thought puzzle. How could one do a low budget but meaningful morning prayer for a community of people who work together in the same building, but who don’t necessarily arrive at the same time?
First, it seems that the ritual should allow people to spend as much or as little time as they wish, preferably delivering a significant ritual experience whether someone gives it five minutes or thirty. The most obvious way to do this is with an art installation – unlike a traditional liturgy which has a fixed a beginning, middle, and end, an art installation allows participants to manage their own experience. An installation can also be left up all day if folks would rather experience it during lunch or on their way home.
The ritual installations should be useful both for those who want to participate every day and those who would only participate occasionally. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to do a series in which each day is predicated on the one before it. Further, each day ought to be different enough from the preceding one that it’s worthwhile to come back each day, which means that the installation either needs to be replaced each day, change each day, or have a high repeatability factor.
I think the best way to accomplish this would be focusing on user-generated content, a method that a lot of websites use to bring in traffic. Basically, the website puts up a story, article, or something similar and then allows visitors to the site to either comment on it or alter it. Occasionally visitors to the site just read the articles, but others come back multiple times a day to check on conversations, etc. It started with blogs and webforums but it’s become mainstream – even CNN.com is allowing comments on its stories these days.
Thinking in this way would allow the design team to create weekly installations rather than daily ones, saving time, money, and energy, and it also creates a very emergent atmosphere in which the participants become co-creators.
What would this look line in practice? Here are some ideas:
Simple installations:
- place a pad of yellow stickies on an altar and write a prayer request on the top sticky. When a person comes to the altar, they tear off the sticky and take it with them, promising to pray for that thing throughout the rest of the day. They then write a new prayer request on the next sticky down. This extremely low-budget option allows folks to come back as often as they wish and builds community by getting the entire building praying for each others concerns.
- Buy one of those “make magnetic poetry” kits, the kind in which you can write your own words, and make a magnet for every word in that week’s psalm. Put them up on a white board, along with all the left over blank magnets, and allow folks to write their own psalms with the magnet poetry. You might need several kits for this since some folks will be hesitant to destroy someone else’s creation and replace it with their own. The majority of folks will probably just stop in each morning to read what others have created, but some inspired people will go nuts with this.
- Display a large print out of the week’s gospel reading, along with a poster-sized piece of paper with the word “questions” written at the top. Invite folks to write down the questions they are left with after reading the scripture (and discourage answers). I’ve seen these sorts of question lists become brilliant discussions as each question is influenced by the ones written before it.
- For a penitential season, Build a wooden cross (or more, if you need them). Leave little slips of paper on which participants can write an anonymous confession. Leave a hammer and nails so that they can nail these to the cross. Encourage them to read the other confessions and pray for absolution for those who have come before them.
Complex installations:
- For All Saints Day, create a flickr account and leave instructions for how folks can upload pictures to it. Set up a projector and an internet-connected laptop that projects a slideshow from the flickr account. During the work day, folks can take a five minute break from what they’re doing to look around on google for a picture of someone they consider a saint and upload it for the rest of the community to see. Since the slideshow would be constantly changing, there’s plenty of reason to come back each day.
- Set up a wiki online with pages for the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. In the chapel, set up three projectors, one for each page. Hand out the url for the wiki and encourage people to change the creeds to reflect what they actually believe, including the option of resetting it to the original. This could also be done with a white board and erasers, or it could be done by allowing people to annotate (rather than edit), the text.
- For Advent, borrow ten sets of computer speakers (shouldn’t be hard in an office building) and set them up in a circle around the room. Also set up a recording station (like a confessional) in which participants can record the hopes they have for God’s plan in the world. Send these recordings as separate channels, one to each speaker, so that participants can walk up to individual speakers to hear what they have to say, or stand in the middle and hear it all as one big cacophony. Note that this requires an audio interface with multiple outputs, like a MOTU ultralite, as well as an audio program that can manage multiple channels, like Live or Logic. You could also go low-tech with 10 walkmans.
Transmission on July 16 – the Empire and the Church
July 14, 2008
Hey, Transmissioners -
This Wednesday, July 16, 7pm, we’ll be gathering at Bowie and George’s new apartment for a ritual focused on what it means to be both a Christian and a citizen of an empire, looking at our current context through the lens of historical relationships between Empires and the Church. Featuring fancy sandwiches and deviled eggs by Isaac, Bible history by John, church history by Bowie, and a ritual by all of us, this one will be both educational and transformative. Hope you can make it!
Sabbath Poem (Anne Carson)
February 16, 2007
Literary sculpture, originally uploaded by davosmit
“A group of books in the moorland near the Bronte village of Haworth”
THOU
The question I am left with is the question of her loneliness.
And I prefer to put it off.
It is morning.
Astonished light is washing over the moor from north to east.
I am walking into the light.
One way to put off loneliness is to interpose God.
Emily had a relationship on this level with someone she calls Thou. She describes Thou as awake like herself all night
and full of strange power.
Thou woos Emily with a voice that comes out of the night wind.
Thou and Emily influence one another in the darkness,
playing near and far at once.
She talks about a sweetness that “proved us one.”
I am uneasy with the compensatory model of female religious experience and yet,
there is no question,
it would be sweet to have a friend to tell things to at night,
without the terrible sex price to pay.
This is a childish idea, I know.
by Anne Carson, from The Glass Essay
post inspired by…
* The Sabbath Poems on Samir Selmanovic’s Faith House blog (Samir is moving back to NYC this summer to start an interfaith emerging community)
* Our V-Day conversations about God blessings erotic love, but also being lover for many Christian celibates through the ages… (see posts below)
* My delight with Glass, Irony, and God (from whence this poem came)
EASTER @ AVALON : dreams of resurrection
February 6, 2007
Jenn & Isaac facing back of hall, originally uploaded by bowiesnodgrass.
Hi. We’re planning to do an Easter Service at Avalon (used to be Limelight), in Holy Communion Episcopal Church – which was founded by William Augustus Muhlenberg
AVALON – Avenue of the Americas @ West 20th Street
6pm – all are welcome
Come join us for an experimental melange of ritual celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. We’ll be touching on the story of King Arthur and Avalon
We will also be focusing on Mary Magdalene’s role in this tale. Mary was one of Jesus’ best apostles, both during and after his time on earth. In the early centuries of Christianity, the church conflated Mary Magdalene with prostitute characters in the bible – and for the next millennia and a half, most christians believed Mary was once a worker in the world’s oldest profession. Maybe she was. Jesus hung out with a lot of hookers.
And so did Muhlenburg. In the 1870s, this priest set up a network of Episcopal dioceses to participate in the Midnight Mission , a radical outreach effort for sex workers (which for him included both mistresses and brothel workers). In a very 19th century way, his effort was to help these fallen women find new homes in wholesome, Christian houses in the country…
130 years later, we find ourselves in a very different NYC. But in America 2007, sexuality is still a great divider and money something we don’t like to talk about‚Ķ so it‚Äôs time for us to start living a little more like Jesus. Let‚Äôs have a party for Easter and celebrate the first women who knew that Jesus was no longer dead, but alive… again!
Please contact us if you would like to participate in this effort.
Our first planning meeting will be held on February 21st (Ash Wednesday). We will have a short ritual to kick off Lent, followed by a meeting with food. More details to follow.
We see in a mirror, dimly
February 2, 2007
This week marked the first ritual prepared by Katie, and it was really excellent. As I understand it, the ritual was largely about the limited capacity of language (and, by extension, scripture and theology). It’s pretty hard to adequately describe that kind of ritual with words, so instead I’ll just describe my experience of it.
The ritual began by setting up paper lanterns, taping pieces of paper together and setting them around a candle. Each candle had two quotations on it, one from the Christian tradition and one from an Eastern tradition. Not only did this create a beautiful effect, but the texts actually obscured the light – a very important metaphor.
The sides of the lanterns which did not have texts had rorschach inkblots on them (abstract shapes used in psychological evaluation which look like whatever the viewer wants them to look like). Once again, another very important metaphor for the Bible and theology.
After several minutes wandering around them room, gazing at the inkblots, and reading the texts, Katie called us together again and handed out 12 inch square mirrors and dry erase markers. We were told to take some time to express our ideas about God. Trying to write about God while staring at myself in the mirror was surprisingly difficult – I was forced to remember that my conception of God is suspiciously similar to myself (just like Malcolm X’s God seemed quite a bit like Malcolm X, Bonhoeffer’s God seems a lot like Bonhoeffer, etc). So I eventually gave up on being objective and instead just drew a picture of myself with some incarnational words. I thought I was being all creative but two other people also incorporated pictures of themselves into their mirrors…
After finishing our mirrors, we set them up, wandered around, meditating and praying with the each other’s mirrors just as we did with the texts. Finally, Katie brought out a big basin of soapy water and we washed the mirrors clean, reminding ourselves that it is God whom we worship, not our conceptions of God.
This ritual worked for several reasons. First, the activities engaged us visually, verbally, and tactilely. Secondly, although we were given things to think about, we were also given the opportunity to explore our own ideas, share them, and get to know one another just a little bit better. Finally, the ritual made no doctrinal demands of us; Transmission is made of a pretty diverse group of people and the ritual allowed everyone to participate regardless of where they fall theologically.
All in all, a great service.
The texts used are reprinted below…
Katie’s Mirror
February 2, 2007
Katie’s Mirror, originally uploaded by bowiesnodgrass.
Katie planned an awesome ritual last night (which hopefully she or Ike will blog about – hint, hint). One part involved meditating on readings from sacred scriptures and Rorschach inkblots, taped into a rectangle, set over a candle. In another part, we were all given mirrors and dry-erase markers and asked to reflect on our faith in God. We then traded mirrors, and later shared our personal reflections.
* You can check out photos on flickr.
* And here’s my favorite reading from the evening –
Whence all creation had its origin,
He, whether He fashioned it or whether He did not,
He, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
He knows – or maybe even he does not know.
~ Rig Veda
Baby Jackson Gets a Bris!
January 18, 2007
Excerpt from letter: John to Jackson, Jan 13, 2007
To read full text, see more pictures, and read more letters, visit
www.myspace.com/thomasjsnodgrass5
Dear Jackson,
Tears and laughter, blood, betrayal, singing and dancing, Hebrew and primal scream – this has been your second week.
I guess this biggest news of this week is your conversion from Animism to Judaism. The Jewish midwife, who was good enough to assist with your birth on the Sabbath, recommended I call 1-800-BABY-BOY, which connected me with a really nice Rabbi named Jehoshua Krohn who exclaimed that you needed a Bris right away, and offered us a cut rate for letting you be a quick stop between other gigs.
We Forget.
January 13, 2007
two poems from our Advent stations apt.church. I found them while cleaning up my place. written by two of our participants. collage below by Gareth, our friend from Moot.
In darkest despair
In brightest light
Oh holy star
Oh sacred night
I cry out to you Lord
Take this pain away
Bring unto us
The dawn of a new day
We are a forgetful people.
God is faithful –
we forget. God sustains –
we forget. God provides –
we forget. God delivers –
we forget. God’s ways endure
– we forget. God made us
in His image – we forget!
Peace on Earth originally uploaded by bowiesnodgrass.