reflections on disorientation: good friday, spirituality and popular culture - part two

NOTE:  This is another part of a short essay I am working on to give some shape and form to our conversation about liturgy, popular culture and the Christian story. In the first part of this essay, I made a few contextual observations re: Pittsfield, the local arts renewal/creative economy taking root over the past seven years and the changing reality of First Church.  In the second part let me turn our attention to my understanding of doing "liturgical art."  And in the third part I will share some insights about how and why I blend popular culture into the core of our liturgical art meditations.  In this I hope to clarify the importance of why creating an "aesthetic experience" for those who have lost communion with a sense of awe can help some seek out a "religious experience" with the very source of the transcendent.

Part Two
A month before our church band, Between the Banks, presented this year's Good Friday meditation - "Disorientation: An Evening of Song, Silence, Scripture and Solidarity" - the band asked me (very kindly) to explain "what the hell is going on with this liturgy?" What I shared with them became the core of my comments that night.

The poet, Mary Oliver, recently wrote:

The man who has many answers
is often found
in the theaters of information
where he offers, graciously,
his deep findings.

While the man who has only questions,
to comfort himself, makes music.

That’s why we’ll mostly be making music tonight – music that is comforting and

disorienting, music that wrestles with the questions of God’s presence in the midst of our pain and music that comes from almost everywhere except the church – but  before the music I’ve been asked by my comrades in arms to say a few words about why we do what we do  So, with the risk of saying something too puffed up, let me try this on for size:  tonight’s meditation in song, silence, scripture and solidarity is our artistic expression of what it feels like for God to come to us as light in the middle of our darkest time.

As artists we share a belief that holy aches to be with us in our suffering AND brings healing to whatever is wounded – that is a core belief – something that almost every spiritual tradition holds as true.  In the Christian world we say that in all things God works for good – NOT that all things ARE good nor that all things are as God wants them – but rather that God can take the worst the world throws at us and redeem it.  That’s what the Cross tells us:  even shame, suffering and pain can be transformed by God’s loving into something greater and even something holy.  And when we discover the sacred presence in the midst of all our muck, it is disorienting…

You see, most of the time when we operate according to conventional wisdom, we don’t trust this truth.  We live like God isn’t really God because we believe that we have to fix everything, heal every hurt and take control of our destiny because that’s what healthy, constructive and successful people do.  And when we wake up to find out that playing by these rules still leaves us powerless over some things – or that being a “good boy or girl” has become destructive, addictive or even ugly – ooh Lord THAT is really disorienting.  Cut to the music we’ve chosen for tonight:

+  We began by trying to give shape and form to the feeling of disorientation by using an ancient prayer – o blessed fault - o necessary sin – felix culpa – with the weird industrial groove of “Purple Haze.”  If it made you uncomfortable, it was supposed because our hope is that this creates something of the tension that exists in how God brings healing and hope into the ugliest human realities:  surrender and serenity, you see, are married to acceptance – and this always feels disorienting.

+  As the music continues it tells us that we live in a “Mad World.”  We may start to know that something is going wrong and want to “get outta Dodge,” but we don’t know where to go – and don’t know what to do – so we keep on keeping on and  “Keep the Car Running” even when bad becomes worse.  If nothing changes we can wake up to discover that all our “Roads” lead to despair – and we find ourselves “At the Bottom of the River.”  More often than not, it is only when we run out of options – when we have no more “High Hopes” – do we let God greet us with grace and begin to sense that even in the worst moments, God didn’t give up on us.

In Judaism this truth is honored in the observation of Passover, in Islam in the stories of Allah’s guidance that leads the Prophet through his darkest hour, in Buddhism it comes when Siddhartha endures the fears of illusion before enlightenment awakens and in Christianity it takes place between Good Friday and Easter.  We’re talking about an emptying – a hitting bottom – that is never just about us but always pregnant with grace bringing light into the darkness.

Tonight’s meditation is a musical pilgrimage that begins in madness but concludes by saying:  love wins – grace trumps karma!  And knowing this – trusting it – and practicing it can make all the difference between life and death.  The playwright, poet and one-time Czech President Vaclav Havel put it like this:

Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. . . It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it does turns out.

Our conviction – as musicians, theologians, poets and artists – is that God can work good in all things.  I am grateful to work with such creative souls – and to have the artistic freedom of the pulpit that is part of this congregation’s long history.  So let me offer these closing practical words:  Tonight’s program will be like going to MassMoCA – you will probably love parts and hate parts and not grasp what the devil is going on in other parts – that happens to me every time I go there.  And that’s ok, it is part of the creative process.  Give yourself time to wrestle with it all. And now let me invite you to go deeper with us into a musical Serenity Prayer of sorts as we share with you:  disorientation.

After the presentation, two different people said to me:  "I get it: You are a 'liturgical artist' using the liturgy of the church as your chosen canvas or medium."  Now that was a helpful albeit not entirely clear way of describing the experiment I have been working on for the past 15 years.  You see, for those who know anything about liturgy, to call my artworks "liturgical art" suggests that I make physical art, pottery or tapestries for use during worship. 

This is not true. I explore the arc of both the human and the sacred story embodied in a particular liturgical experience (i.e. Good Friday) and then search for popular culture synonyms in the realm of twenty first century visual art, poetry, music, film and dance.  That is to say, I am grounded by belief and practice in the revelation that God has shared with the church through the journey of the liturgical Christian year.  I not only experience deep wisdom and truth in this journey, but also believe by faith that it offers all people a taste of God's grace and hope.

Increasingly, however, fewer and fewer trust the story of the church.  For a variety of reasons, both good and bad , most people never darken a sanctuary's door.  But they are open to the creative arts.  Music in our culture is ubiquitous. Through social media and the Internet, many are flooded each day with images, words, ideas and emotions that race past us in a variety of ways that are all too fast to comprehend and almost impossible to evaluate.  William D. Romanowski, Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Calvin College, put it like this:

Popular artworks provide us with maps of reality that can acts as guides for getting around in the world, establishing a cultural orientation.  In this sense, they can be understood as models both of and for life in the form of stories and songs.  The popular arts facilitate our (contemporary) cultural conversation by aiding us in our communication, social criticism, social unite and collective memory - for important roles historically associated with (high) art. (Eyes Wide Open, p. 99)

My practice of "liturgical art" might be better understood as midrash on the historic worship experiences of the Christian community. As I understand Jewish midrash it involves playing with contradictions, filling in the gaps of our Biblical stories so that real life questions might be explored and answered with insight and humility.  Midrash deepens the oral tradition of God's people by going beyond the obvious or literal moral codes.  Another way of thinking about this type of liturgical art is to see it akin to the way Clarence Jordan (1960),J.B. Phillips (1983) or  Eugene Peterson (2002) recast the words of Scripture within the cultural context of their generation.  All three utilize contemporary language as a necessary foundation for communicating God's grace to the world, while striving at the same time to be faithful to the original intent of the text and the Christian tradition. 

For example, Phillips reworks Romans 12 in a brilliant way that speaks to an industrial society: Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity. There is poetry and pathos in this reworking that speak to many who feel trapped like a cog in a machine.  Peterson does something equally revolutionary with Matthew 11: 28-30:  Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.

For this year's experiment on Good Friday, I started with an intuitive hunch:  the journey from Good Friday to Easter "feels like" disorientation.  I don't know why this idea came to me - call it inspiration - call it being attuned to the times or just weird luck or the Holy Spirit.  Whatever the reason, I kept thinking about the foundational text for the Paschal Mystery - the teaching that God can bring a blessing out of the worst tragedy - Romans 8:  We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose... therefore I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

So first I read through the Passion narratives in all gospels using three translations - Peterson's The Message, the New Revised Standard Version and the Jerusalem Bible - to see which elements of this story "fit" with my emerging theme.  I also started to make a list - and asked others for suggestions, too - of songs that spoke to them about despair, confusion, hitting bottom, running away, betrayal, grace, healing and hope.  I had a hunch that I tested out with my bandmates that on a personal level the arc of the Passion story is not unlike working the 12 Steps of Recovery, too.  Over the course of a few weeks, the Biblical stories began to point towards contemporary songs - and another Good Friday experiment in "liturgical art" took shape and form.

We practiced - and prayed - and left a lot to our discipline as artists who also rest in God's guidance.  This note from a couple who joined us that night arrived on Holy Saturday and expressed our deepest hope about what "disorientation" might communicate:

What a gift to be carried by the music you created on a deeply poignant emotional journey through human and spiritual history; pain and longing; surrender and hope. We were truly transported. Please thank all of your incredibly talented musicians for their willingness to be so vulnerable, and thank you for your willingness to transcend the typical to create something truly magical on Good Friday. It was conceptually brilliant and flawlessly delivered. You all touched our hearts, leaving us filled with tenderness, hope, and joy. We were blown away. We felt surrounded by and filled with love. 

Believe me, it is rare to hear something like this about Good Friday worship - from long time church folk or new believers - not only because so many of our current liturgies are truly lifeless and filled with cruel, outdated theology, but also because so many people simply stay away from church on this day.  I think there is something to this experiment in "liturgical art" and in the next installment I'll try to point to some clues.  (I also hope to have the event posted on Youtube soon, too.)