Possibilities for Post-Christian Worship, pt. 5

Fifth in a series. Bibliography will be included with the final post. Back to the first post in this series.

(D) Post-Christian preaching?

The centrality the act of preaching, of the sermon, characterizes nearly all post-Christian common worship. Of course, I acknowledge that not all post-Christian congregations will include sermons in their worship services; in particular, post-Christian congregations within the Quaker tradition of the unprogrammed meeting will not have sermons per se. However, a key characteristic of the post-Christian congregation is that is has been shaped by the Christian notion of the importance of the Word and the service of the Word; and the post-Christian congregation is trying to figure out what the significance of the “word” means when is when there is no longer consensus on the divinity of that “word.”

(Parentehtically, I also acknowledge that many post-Christians will find continued importance and relevance in the Service of the Table, i.e. communion or eucharist. However, as someone who has been deeply influenced by Quaker thinking, I won’t participate in or officiate at standard communion rituals, so I feel utterly unqualified to speak about the possibility of post-Christian service of the table.)

As an exoteric, easily accessible ritual, it is easy to argue that preaching deserves to remain at the center of post-Christian worship. We might well ask, then: What differentiates post-Christian preaching from other preaching in liberal Christian traditions, where preaching is also the central act of worship? In order to answer this question, I will look specifically at Unitarian Universalist traditions, although most of what I have to say will also apply to other post-Christian groups.

We Unitarian Universalists often characterize ourselves by our insistence on the use of reason in religion. But we mean reason in a very specific way; not, for example, the kind of reason that results in technological progress. I would suggest that preaching in our tradition aims to lead us to meditative thought as a means to redemption; in distinction to Christian traditions where thinking alone is inadequate.

Let me be more specific about what I mean by meditative thought. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1999), in his essay “Thinking as Redemption: Plotinus between Plato and Augustine,” tells how in nineteenth century theology “the concept of gnosis meant the false doctrine that man [sic] can bring about his salvation from mortality and fallenness by means of his own striving for knowledge and elevation to divine truths.” (p. 79) Ralph Waldo Emerson (1838/1961) intended this kind of meditative thinking and speaking when, at the end of “The Divinity School Address,” he spoke of the virtues of preaching, exhorting his listeners to a certain kind of preaching:

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Adventures in local food

It’s hard to eat local food in the winter here in New England — only one or two growers are as adept as Four Seasons Farm at growing vegetables year-round in our climate. So unless you live near Four Seasons Farm (which we don’t), if you want to eat local food in the winter you have to figure out how to store it yourself.

That can be difficult for those of us who are apartment dwellers. Without a basement we can’t have a root cellar, of course. This year, Carol and I bought some extra local apples and carrots to store in the bottom of the refrigerator, but those were gone by Thanksgiving. We bought half a dozen extra Butternut squash and some pumpkins, but the ones that were left by Christmas time had begun to spoil and we had to throw them out. But this fall I also got a Hubbard squash at Verrill Farm in Concord. The blue-green rind of Hubbards is so thick they keep well for months, even at room temperature. We decided to cook ours yesterday.

A Hubbard squash is big, typically weighing five to twenty pounds. They can be tough to peel. The way I usually open up a Hubbard squash is to whack it with a hatchet. Then I chop it into manageable chunks, which we cook (rind and all) until the orange part is soft and you can scoop it off the rind with a spoon. But when you hit that Hubbard with a hatchet, little chunks of squash rind fly everywhere: in your face, off the walls, down the hallway. It’s a mess.

This year I had a better idea. I held an axe on the ground with the sharp edge pointing up, and Carol dropped the Hubbard onto the axe. The squash split open, but without little pieces flying everywhere. We did that a couple more times to break up the pieces. Then I attacked those smaller pieces with a chopping knife (think “Samurai chef!”) until they were small enough to cook: whack! whack! whack! whack! It was very satisfying.

Now we have several pounds of cooked Hubbard squash in the freezer. Sure, we could have gone to the supermarket and gotten little boxes of the same stuff. It wouldn’t have tasted nearly as good, it would have used gallons of Diesel fuel to truck it here, and I wouldn’t have gotten out all my aggressions (whack!).

Next year, I’m going to get three Hubbards.

Sustainability network

Carol organized a great first meeting of a sustainability network for the South Coast region of Massachusetts. She asked me to facilitate the first meeting — group facilitation is one of two things that I actually know how to do reasonably well, so I said I would. I thought maybe twenty people would show up (I would have been happy with ten), but more than forty people came.

One of the best ways to keep a network networked is through a Web site. Since the one other thing I know how to do reasonably well is make a small Web site, I said I’d whip together a quickie site for the group. Which I just finished, and if you live in the area, you should go check it out: link.

Possibilities for Post-Christian Worship, pt. 4

Fourth in a series. Bibliography will be included with the final post. Back to the first post in this series.

(C) Private devotions and small group worship in a post-Christian congregation, continued

(C.2) Small groups

Small group worship occupies a middle ground between private devotions and common worship. At its best, small group worship offers a continuing opportunity for renewal and reform. James Luther Adams (1976, p. 85) talks about this aspect of small groups when he describes the ecclesiola in ecclesia as a possibility for ongoing reform of voluntary associations:

In the modern period the ecclesiola has been the small group of firm dedication that sometimes promotes the disciplines of the inner life, sometimes bends its energies to sensitize the church afflicted with ecclesiastical somnolence, sometimes cooperates with members of the latent church in the world to bring about reform in government or school or industry, or even to call for radical structural transformation.

Small group worship can take on this positive, reforming aspect in post-Christian congregations. Feminist worship groups in the second wave of feminism (1960’s and 1970’s) may serve as an example of small groups helping to sensitize larger congregations to the possibility of ecclesiastical somnolence. Many such feminist worship groups worked on developing new worship language and new forms of worship that allowed men and women to be true equals (the wide-spread “Water Communion” in Unitarian Universalist congregations in fact originated with a small feminist worship group). Certain Neo-Pagan groups within a larger Unitarian Universalist congregation have operated in this way, challenging liturgical and theological assumptions of the congregation, particularly in the areas of feminism and environmentalism, while remaining fully connected with it. Outside Unitarian Universalism, we might consider the revolutionary role assigned to small groups (base communities) by practitioners of liberation theology.

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Odds and ends on books and blogs

I’m usually not a big fan of Internet quizzes, but I couldn’t resist “Which science fiction writer are you?” I knew I was going to be Ursula K. LeGuin, and that’s who the quiz said I was. Except of course that I’m not, because I don’t have her talent and skill.

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New blog by a religious professional called Open the Doors: The Ministry of Welcome, written by the thoughtful and insightful Chance Hunter. Chance has just become the Welcome Ministry Coordinator at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta, Georgia. I’m looking forward to hearing about his thoughts and experiences in congregational hospitality and growth in a program/corporate size congregation.

*****

I miss going to the Seminary Coop Bookstore in Chicago, which remains for my money the best academic bookstore in the United States — at least for the topics I’m interested in: religion, ecology, philosophy, cultural criticism. Today I discovered to my delight that their Web site now allows you to browse The Front Table, the books they currently stock on the famous front table of their 59th St. store — there’s always one or two books on that front table that I decide to buy.

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Will Shetterly, the Unitarian Universalist and science fiction writer who writes the blog “It’s All One Thing,” has recently stopped eating meat as part of his Three Steps To Save the World. Since that first post, he’s done a number of other posts on vegetarianism and veganism (link, link, and most recently link). He’s convinced me — this week I went back to being a vegetarian. I still eat eggs and butter, and I’m willing to eat small amounts of locally-raised organic meat, but today’s meat and fishing industries are way too polluting and non-sustainable.

Possibilities for Post-Christian Worship, pt. 3

Third in a series. Bibliography will be included with the final post. Back to the first post in this series.

(C) Private devotions and small group worship in a post-Christian congregation

(C.1) Private devotions

Private devotions, the act of an individual worshipper, appear to be as necessary as common worship. James Luther Adams (1976, p. 64) notes that individuals are not “wholly comprehended in the community or the state of the family or the other associations. Individuals possess an integrity and freedom of their own”; thus implying the possibility and even the necessity of a private devotional life. At the same time, Adams (1998, p. 122 ff.) is equally clear that an inner life of devotion is not enough. What, then, is the relationship between private devotions and common worship?

Liberal Quaker philosopher and theologian Douglas Steere (1992), speaking from a liberal Christian theology, beautifully describes the tensions between private devotions and what he calls corporate worship:

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Winter

Today, for the first time this year, I saw ice floating in the harbor. Even though today the temperature almost got above freezing, you can finally see the effects of the cold snap of the past week. There was a shelf of ice in a sheltered area on the Fairhaven side of the harbor. The wind broke off small pieces of it. Three gulls sat on one such piece, drifting along towards Pope’s Island, surveying the world as the piece of ice spun slowly around. On the other side of Pope’s Island, I watched two Harbor Seals playing in the deep water of the main shipping channel. With the cold weather, the seals have moved back into the harbor again. One stuck its head and neck up out of the water; through the binoculars I could see its dark eyes and its whiskers dripping water.

Possibilities for Post-Christian Worship, pt. 2

Second in a series. Bibliography will be included with the final post. Back to the first post in this series.

(B) What is worship for a post-Christian congregation?

What is the purpose of worship in a post-Christian congregation? The Unitarian Universalist Commission on Common Worship (1983) says of worship:

Though it is often defined as reverence given to a divine being or power, it need not have supernatural implications. The origin of the word “worship” is in the Old English weorthscippen, meaning to ascribe worth to something….

This is a start towards an understanding of why we worship, although it leaves unanswered the question of what that “something” is to which we are going to ascribe worth. James Luther Adams (1998) goes further, saying:

The free church is that community which is committed to determining what is rightly of ultimate concern to persons of free faith.

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Life in the city

The coldest day so far this year: it got down to three degrees Fahrenheit last night in New Bedford. It was thirteen degrees when I went out for a walk this afternoon, with a twenty mile an hour wind. A Harbor Seal surfaced in the channel just below the swing-span bridge. Lots of ducks huddling together in the water on the lee side of Pope’s Island. The Buffleheads are usually wary and fly away before I get within a hundred yards of them, but today they just paddled out a few more feet and stayed there, keeping an eye on me. A Lark Sparrow, its feathers all fluffed up, let me come within six feet before it flew up into the shelter of a pitch pine. Bitter cold winter days are the best days to see animals in the city: with so few humans walking around, and no dogs, the birds and some of the mammals become quite tame.

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This past week I’ve stayed at home, studying and writing, and I haven’t moved my car in all that time. I was going to get some groceries for lunch, so I went over to the Elm Street parking garage to get the car. I noticed broken glass on the pavement and then realized that the front passenger’s side window was smashed in. Whoever had done it had rifled through the glove box and the junk I kept in the bin under the cheap car radio; they took a portable CD that was broken, and left twenty dollars in quarters. Go figure.

The police were polite but bored when I called: “We’ll send a cruiser out. Where will you be?” “How long will it take?” I said, thinking to myself, It’s cold out, I’m not going to stand around waiting for the cops to show up.” “Um, why don’t you leave us a phone number… Or you could come in and make a report…” I said I’d come in to the station, knowing I wouldn’t bother. Instead, I called my insurance agent and got immediate and friendly service: “Call this number, it won’t cost you anything, no paperwork.” I called the glass company, and the window was fixed within hours.

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At lunch time, my car was getting a new window, and Carol was busy writing her next book. “I’ll buy you a sandwich,” she said. That sounded like a good idea. We walked two blocks up to Cafe Arpeggio, where Carol got some kind of Portuguese soup, and I got a sandwich. Lunch hour was in full swing, and the cafe was packed: people coming in and slowly shedding coats and hats and gloves; people standing up to leave, wrapping themselves with scarves and sweaters and coats. It was a great way to get out of the house on a frigid winter day.

Then this evening, Carol walked across the street to the monthly “After Hours” social event at the Whaling Museum, with music by a local blues band. I decided not to go — I can no longer tolerate loud music due to tinnitus. But I stood in the window for a while and entertained myself by watching the people coming and going.