divine mystery

So far in my life, I have been present for the death of one person.  I don't remember exactly how far she was into her nineties at the time, but she had lived a full life.


I got a call from her kids, both in their sixties or seventies at the time, and went down to the nursing home where I had visited her a number of times over the years I'd been one of her pastors.  As we stood around her bed that day, we talked about the funeral for a minute or two.  Then, we made small talk as we watched their mom's breathing get slower and slower.  As the pauses between breaths lengthened, and we watched more closely, it seemed that time itself paused in the space between our breaths.

That day, in a perfectly ordinary room in a perfectly ordinary nursing home, I experienced the presence of the divine in a more powerful and palpable way than I do most days.

I was surprised to be reminded of this as I sat in an interfaith prayer service on the tenth anniversary of the destruction we saw on September 11, 2001.  In that cathedral, as Christians and Jews and Muslims each shared a glimpse at their own scripture and tradition, I couldn't help but think that we Protestant Christians have lost the sense of encountering the divine in mystery.

It was most obvious when the Christian leader read from the Gospel.  It was a fine reading, well read and well chosen ... but in contrast to the beauty of the chanted Qur'an passage, and in contrast with the beauty of the chanted Torah section, I felt that the reading of the Gospel that night (compared to the reading of the other sacred passages) fell short. 



We can never truly and completely understand how the ancient sacred stories work in our soul, or even in our mind.  But, for some reason, we continue to come back to hear these stories ... I think because we know, somewhere deep, that we need them to shape who we are. No, we don't need to chant them in their original language to experience the depth of their mystery, but I don't think it hurts to allow the text to work on us in more ways than one.

It seems to me that we sometimes try to manage the mysterious, to control those things which perhaps we ought to simply experience. I love my tradition as Lutheran Christian.  I love our practices, our history, our theology, and sometimes our culture.  But I also find it beneficial to glimpse the way other people experience communion with the divine, and with divine community.

I'm not interested in cultural appropriation.  Especially from my position of sociological privilege (straight, white, male), I'm not interested in taking the 'cool' parts other people's religious practice and pretending that they "mean so much to me". 

But I can't help but to think that my life of faith, and more importantly that our society, will benefit by each of us being willing to entertain the possibility that G-d might just be bigger than any one of our religious boxes can contain. 

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Music and the Sacred

I'm not a big fan of 'Christian' music. When I say 'Christian' music, what I mean is, for the most part, 'praise' music to be sung in church, and 'Christian Industrial Complex' music that is played on 'Christian' radio stations.

(I'm also not a fan of using quotation marks to make a point. However, I'm not convinced that the music I'm thinking of is necessarily always Christian (see especially the thoughts on theology below), but many people think it is and refer to this music as Christian ... so, you get quotation marks. Sorry about that.)

Some of it is melodically decent, some of it is not theologically vapid (if, for instance, you can substitute the name of your boyfriend or girlfriend, instead of Jesus, and it sounds like a pop-music love song, it's theologically vapid). Very little, in my humble estimation, is both musically and theologically palatable, and most of 'Christian' music isn't even worth listening to. Now I understand that many people appreciate, like, and even meet G-d through the medium of this music; however, that doesn't make it any more interesting to me, or make me want to listen.

Earlier today, I was reading an article about sacred art, particularly about sacred music. Now I like much of what we call sacred music. But it made me wonder whether megachurch praise music is sacred. We don't often refer to it in this way. But if sacred music is that which is written for use during the sacred time and space of worship, then I suppose it must be.

There, though, is where it breaks down for me. It seems to me that (what people call) the contemporary church has intentionally moved away from any sense of the sacred. Pastors (ministers, preachers, or whatever title gets used) no longer dress in vestments, or even in nice suits. The trend has been toward dressing polo shirts and khaki pants to stand in front of latte-sipping families sitting in movie-theater chairs. Please don't hear me saying there's anything wrong with any of these things ~ I'm absolutely in favor of intentionally changing what's normal in order to make a point or change people's perspective. And I, for one, am happy to drink my coffee in church. But I'm wondering, in the creating of space that is comfortable and welcoming and as similar to regular life as possible, whether we've lost a sense of time and space being set aside as sacred, and whether we've lost the sense that the music that belongs in that space is sacred as well.

But then I wonder about the music that I do like, and whether that is typically considered sacred music. Bluegrass gospel, black gospel, southern gospel ~ are these sacred? I'd tend to think so, but they're not ordinarily referred to as such. Is it only classical and choral music that fit that category?

Which brings up a bigger question for me ~ with the shrinking of the world through fast travel and readily-available technology (laptops, cell phones, skype, etc.), where and what and when do we set aside as separate and set apart and sacred?

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