Patriot Day
September 3, 2010
I just learned that 9/11 is officially now called “Patriot Day” by the government. I’ve also been getting a lot of calls to participate in various 9/11 Service Day events, stuff like “Hey, 9/11 sucked and we shouldn’t forget it, so why don’t you come help paint the church library?”
Now I’m all for community service, but there’s a big part of me that still gets bitter when people co-opt the WTC tragedy. 9/11 was a huge red-letter date in my life – I was there when it happened and I spent a year working by the pile alongside the construction crews, the police, the USAR folks, the firemen, and all the volunteers. For my 20-year-old self, it was both formative and traumatizing.
Now, nine years later, I’m kind of surprised to find that I still have resentment built up around that day. I don’t want that chapter of my life to be co-opted for patriotism. I don’t want it co-opted for ecumenism. I don’t even want it co-opted for volunteerism – it just seems manipulative. When perky activists start talking to me about the 9/11 legacy, I just want to say, “You weren’t there. You didn’t smell it. You didn’t see the bodies. You weren’t even in New York. You don’t have the right to appropriate that day.”
It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that this isn’t the healthiest of attitudes. I don’t own 9/11 any more than any one else does, and 9/11 is as good a reason as any to get a bunch of people out volunteering in their communities; it’s certainly be better than everyone staying home and being mopey in their rooms, which is what I usually do. So I’m going to go out and volunteer with everyone else. If anyone wants to join me, I encourage you to.
I’m never, however, going to call it “Patriot Day.”
Essence in Abstract
June 29, 2010
At our last planning meeting, we spent some time talking about the essential elements of Transmission. As our worship community continues to evolve, there are some aspects that are essential to its character; we don’t want to lose them. Here is our list. What are essential elements of your worship community? Let us know what you might add or take away from our list in the comments.
Creativity
User-Generated Content
Food
Un-Dogmatic
Defining Your Own Participation
Intimacy
Welcoming / Inclusion
Personal Spiritual Journey
Transmission Shows Up / Support
Music
Gender Inclusive Language for God
Christian-based
Free
Passover vs. Holy Week
April 2, 2010
On 3/28, several Transmissioners attended the Interfaith Seder, sponsored by Faith House. It was quite a lovely event, well-attended and well-prepared. One thing came to me upon reflection that I wanted to discuss with you, a fundamental difference between the traditions that I hadn’t realized before. In the Jewish tradition, the Exodus is a story of the Jewish people, and it seems to unify as it reminds the people of their history, and of the God who delivers them. Holy Week varies in that we are not celebrating the history of our people. We are remembering the history of ONE person, and it is not a history that we can exactly share. When rabbis tell the story of the exodus at synagogues, they are telling the people their own story, but when priests get up at church this week, they’ll be telling the story of a far more enigmatic character. Although Christian, I don’t feel like Christ’s death is MY history.
So there seems to be a fundamental difference in the sentiments being created by these two remembrances. One tells a people their shared history of survival through the will of God. The other tells a people of the survival of their God, in SPITE of the will of the people. Strange, huh? Both reveal that God is more powerful a force than death and oppression, but in very different ways… Anybody else have any thoughts on the difference between these two?
Maundy Thursday / April Fool’s
April 1, 2010
Isaac Everett: I’m trying to think of ways to combine Maundy Thursday with April Fool’s Day.
Eric Thompson: “And Peter said to him, ‘Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death!’” ought to about cover it.
Sunday Rituals
March 13, 2010
Usually when we talk about ritual in Transmission, we take it pretty seriously. We talk about it in a formal sense, as a performance that transforms someone or something from one state to another, as a space that creates community, as a moment where the usual boundaries can break down. It’s big and dramatic. It’s a wedding, a communion, a house blessing. It isn’t brushing your teeth. That, we like to say, is a habit and not a ritual.
And yet, I find myself thinking a lot these days about that habitual kind of “ritual.” The small and homely kind. Brushing your teeth, reading the paper, kissing someone good night and good morning. It seems to me that these things that we repeat – week by week, month by month, year by year – transform us too. They give shape and order to our lives. They make us into the people that we are becoming.
As the calendar rolled over to 2010, my brother and his girlfriend stayed with me for a couple of days. On Sunday morning over a leisurely breakfast, they pulled up their Sunday websites to share with me: PostSecret and the New York Times Weddings & Celebrations. As we looked over shoulders, the silence was punctuated by sighs, laughter, and the occasional groan. I was moved and surprised. My brother and his girlfriend are completely secular people, and yet their Sunday rituals still carry a sense of setting time aside for something special, sacred even. They bear witness to other people’s secrets. They share in other couples’ joy.
It made me think about my own habitual rituals. Are mine transforming me into a person of empathy, compassion, and joy? Do they shape me into the person that I would like to become? I’ve joined my brother and his girlfriend in reading secrets over Sunday breakfast, and added a dose of dance and poetry. Then I go to church, for the healing of the ritual and the shaping of the habit.
Prayer, Prophecy, Scripture
September 5, 2009
A few conservative bloggers and podcasters recently critiqued my podcast and book for not giving enough recognition to the Psalm’s role as prophecy; apparently the fact that I don’t immediately look for Jesus in the Psalms means I’m not interpreting them correctly.¬† The thing is, I’m not entirely convinced that the Book of Psalms does prophesy Jesus, or that they were originally meant to be prophecy at all.
This has gotten me thinking about the nature of the texts contained in the Bible. The question of whether the Bible is the “inerrant Word of God” is such a hangup issue for so many churches – it’s used as a litmus test to determine whether a believer is a “true Christian” or whether a teacher is a “false Prophet.” When the final version of the Torah was put together (probably shortly after the Babylonian Exile), did the redactors suspect it’d be used as scripture? Well, yeah, they probably did. When Paul wrote his letter to Philemon, did he suspect that it’d be read in churches thousands of years later and declared “the Word of the Lord, thanks be to God?” No, he probably didn’t.
In Jewish copies of the Bible, the books are clearly separated between Scripture (Torah), Prophecy (Nevi’im), and Writings (Ketuvim). In Christianity, the lines between the three are much, much more ambiguous, whether we’re talking about the Psalms or the writings of Paul. Since I’m much more familiar with the Psalms, I’ll focus on them.
Reforming or Conforming?
August 8, 2009
So a few years ago I wrote a rather passionate post about the emergent church. I still think it’s a rather good piece of writing:
http://www.transmissioning.org/2007/01/27/kimball-macarthur-and-me/
Well, it turns out two years later, Phil Johnson felt the need to refute me in his essay “Joyriding on the Downgrade at Breakneck Speed: The Dark Side of Diversity,” published in Reforming or Conforming?
Check out the link – I’m in footnote seven.¬† Although I disagree with his presuppositions, it’s a very interesting read and worth a few minutes of your time.
Kadosh, Sanctus, Holy, etc
July 4, 2009
One of the things I really love about mystical eucharistic theology is the idea that there is only one bread and one cup across all the world and throughout all time. The idea is that since each eucharist is mystically linked with the unique event of Christ’s death on the cross, every eucharist that has ever been celebrated (or ever will be celebrated) happens simultaneously. Mind-bending, huh?
I’m not sure that my own eucharistic theology is quite that high, but I am in love with the idea the eucharistic table is something bigger than the food that’s on it and the people sitting around it – that’s an act that unites us with all Christians everywhere and everytime.
This is one reason why so many liturgical traditions sing a sanctus as part of the liturgy, and why it’s important that it’s sung by the congregation and not just by the minister or choir. Isaiah had a vision of angles singing this song without ceasing, and so when the people sing it at communion they are singing along with the seraphim – when the minister says something like:
Therefore, with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify Your glorious name, evermore praising You and saying…
Or, at Transmission sometimes:
With strangers, neighbors, saviors, ravers, saints and angels, raise a song
As one with some whose work is done and others here or yet to come
This is what’s being referred to.
Angels aside, it is pretty amazing that this song has been song so often, so consistently, and in so many many ways throughout the millenia. Folks have never stopped singing it, but they’ve also never stopped coming up with new ways to sing it. Here’s a playlist of this song through the ages for your listening pleasure:
A sephardic cantor singing it in perhaps the oldest version of it I know:
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Deborah Van Dyke singing it as a meditative chant (kadosh):
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In Dulci Jubilo singing it as Ambrosian Chant (santus):
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Helen Shapiro singing as full-on gospel melodrama (kadosh – the Lord He reigns):
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The Psalters singing it as only they can (hosannah):
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Rachel Cole singing it as Christian pop (kadosh):
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Adom9 singing it as trance electronica (sanctus):
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All of the above are available on iTunes, so if any of them struck your fancy, go buy them!
Pentecost audioscape
May 31, 2009
Happy Pentecost, everyone!
A lot of churches have a tradition of reading scripture in a variety of languages on Pentecost, but the act of sitting and listening to something you can’t understand seems to be the exact opposite of the Pentecost story me. So this afternoon I cooked up a sound piece that tries to convey what it’s like to be listening to a cacophony and suddenly realize that you understand what’s being said.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about how the Hebrew word ruach is the word for both “spirit,” “breath,” and “wind.” This is why in the beginning of Genesis, some Bibles say, “and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters” while others say “and a wind from God moved over the waters.” Personally, I prefer “and the breath of God moved over the waters.” Curiously, this synonym also exists in Greek – Pneuma could mean either spirit or breath, and even in English “spirit” comes from the same root as “respirate.”
So I encourage you to take a moment today to think about your breathing, how it’s constantly a part of you, how it connects you to your environment, and how natural it is. Use your breath to connect to the Spirit of God, that aspect of God which lives inside each of one of us.
A Renaming Ritual
May 30, 2009
I recently had the pleasure of attending a renaming ritual for a friend of mine, a transman who has only recently begun the process of switching gender identities (formerly Joy, currently James). Anyone who’s watched a friend grow into a transgender identity knows how difficult it is to switch to a new set of pronouns, a new name, etc, and even the most supportive of friends find long-held habits hard to break.
So, since ritual is probably the best tool in existence for creating transformation in a community, we decided that we needed to have a “renaming ritual” for him, officially giving the support of the community to him and adopting his new name and gender. (Note it’s likely to be confusing, but I’ll refer to Joy/James as “she” before the ritual and “he” after the ritual, since that’s the way in which the ritual was constructed.)
Like most Transmissions, this one was held in the home of friends with lots of home cooked food, but everyone in attendance had been instructed to come wearing clothes of the other gender. (As someone who is not into gender-bending myself, I found this part to be incredibly uncomfortable, which was probably the point.) We spend the first hour or so just hanging out, eating for, playing music, and enjoying each other’s company.
Over the course of this hour, each of us would take a turn putting a braid into Joy’s hair (she had hair down to her waist or so). Then, once her entire head was put into braids, we gathered everyone together and each one of us cut off the braid we had made and had the opportunity to say something privately to her, before her transformation. We were also given the choice of keeping the braid or donating it to locks of love. Once her hair had been shorn, all of us, including her, took of the clothes we’d come in and put on clothes of our “appropriate,” gender – it’s amazing how much more comfortable I was after I was allowed to wear boy clothes which, again, was probably the point.
At this point, Joy no longer dressed or looked like a girl, and hostess of the event introduced him to the crowd as James. It felt quite similar to the moment after a baptism when the preacher holds up a child and introduces him or her to the congregation, or at a wedding reception when the couple is introduced to the crowd as unit for the first time. We each had the opportunity to go to James, shake hands, and say whatever we wished, and the party continued.
This was not a Transmission event, but it felt very Transmission-ish in that was a home-brewed ritual focused on efficacy and built around a community. By the end of the ritual, I found it very easy to refer to this person I’d known for almost a decade by a new name, and he felt affirmed and supported in his journey. I spent much of the time thinking, “Wow, I wish I were still in Seminary so I could write a paper about this!”
It also led me to think about the fact that there are many important transitions in life for which we don’t have liturgies. At The Crossing, an emergent community in Boston, they recently laid hands on a community member about to undergo gender reassignment surgery, and she described it as one of the most moving worship experiences she’d had. Perhaps Transmission should make a project of collecting liturgies which will never be printed in a prayer book…