WORSHIP DESIGN THEORY

Sanctuary of First Unitarian Church of Chicago

At my seminary the students prepared a short worship service as Vespers on Friday close-of-day.  We were encouraged to be experimental, which interested me very much after some eye-opening events when I was a lay person attending a Leadership School. They were simple designed events with deep impact.

In seminary we used a small side chapel at the cathedral-like main sanctuary of First Unitarian.  A firewall normally separated the two spaces, but it was stuck, fully raised open, leaving a dark chasm where one sensed the height of the stone interior even with lights off.  I was struck by this “feeling” of unseen emptiness and remembered a scrap of poetry about facing the void, how what we see is somehow ourselves.  So I organized a conventional sequence of song, reading, lesson, prayer, but all on this theme and with everyone seated looking into the dark past a big mirror where we were reflected.  It was pretty effective.

Years later, when serving a small congregation in Canada that was in love with the UU practice of lighting candles adapted from the Catholic practice by adding words by the lighter to the congregation.  They never got enough of lighting candles on Sunday before the service, so that sometimes the entire hour was taken up with candles lit for things ranging from deep grief to trivia.  One Christmas Eve I decided we’d just go with it.

I arranged the space with rows of chairs on each side and a line of folding tables down the center.  Down the middle of the tabletops, I set up dozens of candles, using Pyrex drinking glasses half-full of salt as candleholders.  The theme was babies: our babies, other people’s babies, dead and lost babies, climaxing with the Baby Jesus.  Each section was begun with a short reading, then the people were invited to light candles.  Soon we were all shimmering in heat waves.  (Do not do this without a good fire strategy, even if it’s only buckets of water ready to throw onto the tables!)  Tears poured down cheeks, laughter met song, and people talked about this for days afterwards.  I doubt that anyone has forgotten it.

Abrahamic liturgies that developed into today’s mass used by various denominations have their roots in sacrifice -- some say human, certainly animal, and gradually becoming less bloody, diminishing to symbolic substances  (water,oil) and merging with communal meals, accompanied with study of written materials that so dominate religious experience even now.  The Christian branch has kept an echo of sacrifice in Communion, shared food considered to be intimate recognition of the life of Jesus.  The Jewish sequence is anchored in Friday Shabbat, a family congregation that shares bread and lights candles.  Muslims ask for prayers throughout the day, wherever they are, but always with their heads pointed to Mecca.  Fasting is their sacrifice.

Blackfeet ceremonies like opening Bundles with song and dance have no written material but rather use songs associated with specific animals whose hides are in the Bundle as prompters.  At the opening of the Thunder Pipe Bundle in spring --  meant to beg for protection from the lightning strikes that walk across the land with thunderstorms, -- a big bowl of sarvisberry soup is eaten after everyone picks out the biggest berry and passes it up to the smudge altar to prompt a good crop.

Heartfelt ceremonies in the face of danger strong enough to threaten survival will have much power that crystalizes into forms that are natural to daily life.  The trouble with designing powerful ceremonies today is that most nice prosperous people who attend mainstream churches slide along grooves without much intensity, mostly controlled by media promotion of events as opportunities to buy.  

Depression, despair, ennui, meaninglessness, skepticism, drug-taking are the result of lack of contact with the fundamental reality of our animal selves: the senses.  Research now suggests that the neurons of the body (not just the dashboard in the brain) provide information about the out-of-skin-world to the in-body self through hundreds of perceiving cells, not just the five senses.  And these sensate codes are stored in other specific cells according to the moments of first perception.

The coded information may be very simple and subtle: the perception of being along the edge of a space, the information that your head (still attached) is leaving the top of your body, where it ought to be, because you are bending over.  Some people have eidetic memories which means they can store so much sensation that they can summon up pages they have seen and “read” them from memory.  Most of us might remember when looking for something written that it was in a book that had a red cover with a picture of a tiger and on a page about halfway through, printed halfway down.   Some researchers suggest there are as many as 200 different kinds of perception, some of them linked to memory more than others.  Mostly never rising to consciousness.

The sensate codes developed by experiencing moments and linked to memory may be the sensing of one’s own interior emotional state, which has its own perceptual system (the autonomic nervous system) operating with both electrochemical strands of nerve fiber and excreted molecules, floating in blood and plasma, from various sources with various effects.  Most people know that twisting squeeze of the guts that goes with high excitement, maybe awareness of danger.  Others are so used to denying, controlling, forcing the appearance of compliance, that they have sealed off awareness.  Many techniques try to recover code in memory or possibly to create new ones.  The line between therapy and worship gets blurred in the process, but that doesn’t seem like a bad result.  It's not the practice but the content that might be disturbing.

Intense awe and the humbling of cosmic awareness are harder to provide, but it seems to be coming to us now through what some have called Mystic Science: the feeling of being part of a whole far beyond our ability to perceive.  No longer do we believe in the protection of a big humanoid ruler, but we still remain vulnerable to the impact of looking at a long vista on earth or the limitless spaces a time-linked telescope can reveal.  I have no idea which organ secretes what (though there are suggestions) or which cells respond to "Eternity", but something certainly seems to make the body respond and since the body is the substrate of felt meaning, the response can be measured by instruments.  

Personal behavior is a little trickier.  If survival is predicated on control and domination, reinforced by a religion’s assurance of the right to domination, then -- unreasonably -- violence and destruction of threats, real or not, the results will be (in my book) Evil.  If the response to awe is an impulse to participate and protect others, it can slip the issue of survival over to the whole complex of the planet, including all beings without worrying about the priority of humans, of living things, or any one “ideal” state.  Then the focus goes to the ongoing torrent of time, which tears everything apart -- then reunites them in transformation.

Our societies around the globe seem to be re-enacting this now.  The imagery of holocaust is nuclear/drought/famine based.  We see the images daily but without a powerful, emotional, sense-coded feeling of belonging and participating.  What ceremony can we design that will provide this?

EMERGING FROM THE SOLSTICE

(Posted a bit early to coincide with the actual Solstice.)

It’s the Winter Solstice, one of those natural events that is the substrate for a multitude of human religious ceremonies and paradigms, one that escapes all dogmas, all priesthoods, all institutions, all nationalisms, to tilt through our lives once a year whether or not we pay attention.  On the prairie we never escape awareness of where the sun is or the effect on the Great Winds that rule our lives as much as if we were seafarers in the great winged ships of the past.  The jet stream is often overhead and sometimes in our yards.

One of my cousins is a California Prosperity Christian (claiming that he had to overcome his natural narcissism and hubris to achieve that state).  His adversary, he thinks, is secular humanism, so he was a bit disconcerted to be told that our paternal grandparents were quietly dedicated prairie humanists.  This was revealed when a grad student studying the movement in Canada found their names on an organizational roster and inquired through this blog what we descendants knew about them and their ideas.  As it turned out, not much.

Glenn W. Smith

http://www.dogcanyon.org/2010/02/07/prairie-humanism-the-just-now-emerging-progressive-movement/   This blog post is a good place to start.  Progressivism and neighborliness in response to very hard times, self-reliance combined with co-operative organizations, are certainly what I recognize.  But also, the fuzzy future envisioning, the weak ability to form a future, the craving to know more, are part of that strand of my Strachan family which started with immigration from Scotland in order to farm where the Brulé Sioux had just been cleared away.  In the end they didn’t do much better than the tribe.  South Dakota is a tough place to live.  Any prairie setting left by the great inland sea that once covered North America.

Glenn W. Smith has taught at Starr King, the UU California seminary I passed up in favor of Meadville, the Chicago version.  His “skew” is political and if you google him, you’ll find that he’s been fighting the good fight for a long time.  My own “skew” is cosmic.  I did a sideways step from Meadville to identification with the U of Chicago Div School, but even they are merely global.  I was taking writing classes from Richard Stern, sitting alongside the wife of David Schramm, the wildman astrophysics prof who was always seeking the missing “Dark Matter,” not as a metaphor but as what he hoped was a reality.  He died in a plane crash, the sole occupant and pilot.  I lost track of that writer wife.  The planet is full of dark matter.

David Schramm

I find that somehow, though I respect and will claim prairie humanism, my faith center is not there.  Many have suggested fanciful ideas about how to name another forming “faith” that many don’t even recognize as existing.  “Scientific Mysticism” will do.  Non-anthropocentric, often represented in science fiction (especially if one includes the work of people like Ursula LeGuin and the visions of pop film), welcoming to indigenous “spirituality” (whatever that is, so long as it’s land-based), the space program, and the persisting Aquarian thought represented by the Edge, some TEDtalks, the Bioneers, and other think tanks, including Smith's www.dogcanyon.org

Paul Tillich used to say that symbols can’t be imposed on people like advertising icons, but must be “found.”  That is, they are emergent from our lives.  This is certainly true of Scientific Mysticism which tries not to be anthropomorphic by including all life as neighbors.  On the other hand, the science part of the syndrome is emphatically NOT about magic and superstition, but rather about the interwovenness of all existence whether it is T-cells trying to resist HIV virus or the nursery of the stars where new fusion-based entities create energy.  We come to understand our bodies as aggregates of cooperating cells organized into -- well -- “organs” and our brains as an orchestra that plays the symphonies that are our consciousness.

Salvation is not found in virtue, but in participation.  Eternal life is not found in the persistence of one skin-enclosed entity but rather in the long-time influence and sharing through eternity.  Once defined, our impact may be small but it is forever.  No “faith” is necessary, just communication, action, connection.  One of the strong influences on the Strachan generations has been a baby named Archibald who lived only seventeen days.  He was the first child of my paternal grandmother, immediately preceding my father. 

The loss of that baby, which my grandmother believed came about because she was so desperate for the company of others that she went to town in the wagon, even knowing she was close to term in her pregnancy has meant a legacy of sadness.  The birth came on the isolated homestead.  Archibald was kept alive for a little more than a fortnight in the warming oven of the woodstove.  My generation didn’t know of the baby’s existence until I read through the boxes of journals my grandmother kept.  Neither did we know that her sister had died in childbirth and we still don’t know what happened to that baby.  Live babies and conceived but naturally aborted babies are lost every day, often undetected, often due to bad code.  But it has meant that my cousin wants safety, assurance, "faith."

Now we understand that all is code.  The first response, like that of the US government, is to hoard code, to try to get hold of all information in the effort to save everything, like a mechanic making sure to save all the pieces. But this is not the way.  It leads us to the problem of the centipede who was asked how he knew to walk with so many legs to manage.  He ended in the ditch with his legs in the air, a symbol that emerges again and again.  The way forward, as Smith recommends, is a function of desire and focus.  The goal may not be reached, but the minutia will be pulled into some kind of purpose.

Oh, yearning!  Oh, vulnerability!  I listen, I watch.  My kitchen has a big east-facing picture window where I often stand and look up the long alley that reaches to a close horizon, a bulge in the terrain.  From behind it rises the full moon, coloring the snow blue but draining the color from the feral calico cats I can’t resist feeding just under the window, their tails forming a mandala around the dishes of cat food.  It’s a good depiction of the mental and emotional life of a single old woman in a defensive small town, using a fancy education in a way it was never intended.  (One is supposed to become a success in one’s field, usually through affiliation with an institution, but when it comes to them I’m strictly a feral cat.)

Words don’t serve as well as music.  Consult Paul Winter.  The Winter Consort at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. http://solsticeconcert.com  

Of course, this is the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.  We are all connected.  Survival drives evolution; evolution responds to the rhythms of the world.  We are emergent and something will in turn emerge from us.