I saw the best minds of my generation...

What do you think about mixing Isiah 53 with Ginsberg's "Howl" for part of our Good

Friday liturgy? We're going to push the envelope a bit farther this year with something we call: A Good Friday Experiment with Sound, Song, Space and Silence - Finding Your Path in the Brokenness.  My hope is that we will use the entire Sanctuary - front, back, sides, Chancel and balcony - for prayer, song, rest and movement. One of the wildest but most theologically solid has to do with how this all gets set up: an improvisation featuring pipe organ and drums. There will be some Taize, too as well as a hint of jazz.  Some quiet, acoustic indie folk songs - all with NO amplification - everything will be play it as it lays.

I don't know if it all works - I just forwarded my second draft to some of the band - and I will await their reactions and critique. We've talked about it in planning but haven't quite found the form until tonight. When I put the scripture and the poem together, things started popping! We shall see.

Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? He grew up before us  like a young plant, like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness… He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and well-acquainted with grief… he was despised and we held him of no account. I saw them starving, hysterical, naked, dragging themselves through the broken streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…(there were angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, souls in poverty and tatters, hollow-eyed and high… in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz… staggering angels on tenement roofs… who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.