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?

IN LIKE SKIN

Carrying death on our backs

Everyone has a fine time talking about Sin and Evil and Why Bad Things Happen.  Where’s the discussion of Desire, Delight, and Intimacy?  Getting outside of your own skin in a good way.  A real way. This is NOT about sex.  Nor is it about the abyss that faces us.

This post about three things:

1.  Crossing the skin barrier with senses, which is the first step towards meaning.

2.  Crossing the skin barrier with empathy, which is the fifth step toward meaning
        (2,3,4 are brain processing functions.  See earlier posts.)

3.  Escaping the skin barrier with wonder, mysticism, virtual worlds -- which isn’t a “step” but something that happens.

Lesley Hazleton

Let me start with a story from a blog I read which is by a hard-headed female international journalist living on a houseboat in Seattle.  She told about an experience that was either funny or tragic, depending on how you look at it.  It’s on the line between mysticism and science, one literal “point of view” unaccountable and another a test-able explanation.   (You could google for it.  Try “sky phenomena” for starters.)

Here’s a severely edited version of Lesley Hazleton’s account.  To get to know her, try her TED talk:  http://www.ted.com/talks/lesley_hazleton_the_doubt_essential_to_faith  Her blog is Accidentaltheologist.com/  She posted this story on Oct.23, 2014, and called it “Sun Dog.”

“People experience awe in very different ways. One person’s exhilarating glimpse of something infinitely grand can be another’s nightmare, to be denied, even exiled from consciousness.

“. . .The sun began to rise over the mountains to the east – a large, fuzzy sun, the color of a white daffodil. Mesmerized by its slow ascent, I waited for the moment when it would detach itself from the mountain ridges and assume a perfect, independent roundness. Except it didn’t. Just when I expected to see clear sky between sun and mountains, there seemed instead to be something beneath the sun, pushing it upward, and I realized that there were now two suns rising — two suns of equal size, conjoined, one on top of the other. “A sun dog!” I shouted.

“My friend came running up from below, took one look, and froze. “That shouldn’t be happening. That can’t be happening,” he shouted, adamantly refusing to believe the testimony of his own eyes. “That’s impossible!”

“. . . Something awful is happening, against all the laws of nature.” . . . But he only dashed back down into the cabin for shelter from the sky, leaving me alone to watch as it became still more extraordinary. The lower sun assumed a deeper color and more definite form as it rose, and as the upper one faded, a thick pillar of white light took shape between the remaining sun – the real sun — and the mountaintops. It occurred to me that it may have been as well that my friend was below deck: a pillar of light was so damn biblical. And then that in turn gave way to a huge double rainbow in an ellipse around the risen sun, and I could only stand there shaking my head and laughing, tears in my eyes, knowing that I would never again witness a sunrise as stunningly eerie and beautiful and grand as this.”

More conventional depiction of a sun dog (parhelion) often seen around here in winter.  

Some say it's what the ancients called "Elijah's Chariot Wheel of Fire."

So Lesley, open to her own senses, was able to accept this sky phenomenon while her companion, a preacher’s son, was so conditioned to think that anything out of the ordinary must be perverse, became terrified and rejecting.  Happens all the time.  Institutional religion is forever afraid it will sail over the edge of the world.

Especially here on the east slope of the Rockies where Pacific moisture, basically little prism droplets, meet the dry, windy, often very hot or cold, light-bending air of the prairies and creates something like a chandelier.  I need several metaphors.   

Our sky canopy is full of ruffles and tucks that we can’t see until they are beaded with water.  Enough airplanes leak or deliberately dump volatile fuel, possibly burning, that exhaust plumes add embroidery and spangles.  Wind shear can twist it into knots.  We know that the aurora borealis with its transparent chiffon veil dances is really ions from the Sun, which doesn’t make them any less miraculous-looking.  

To change the metaphor, it is as if the sky were the underside of a crystal geodesic dome against which someone is pointing laser lights, making shining pillars and flaring rainbows.  Some people don’t want to know what the display “really” is -- they’d rather let their imaginations play -- but others (probably the same ones who want to know how movie effects are made) only feel enriched by understanding the behavior of light refraction.  

When musicians play certain chords exactly in tune, a note that isn’t played at all will be heard.  They’re called “overtones” and can be described and predicted by the physics of vibration, particularly with strings and columns of air.  Something like overtones exists in the human brain and perhaps it is an explanation of mysticism, the perception of something imperceptible -- that is, to ordinary senses.  

If one has rich experiences and is open to what is mysterious, exalting, and gorgeous, it’s not hard to imagine angels and aliens.  Why discourage this?  Aesthetics is a kind of morality, a guide to rewarding behavior, sometimes shared -- maybe not.  Lesley is a person who has traveled the world, studied other religious systems, seen terrifying and horrible violence.  Yet she is capable of amazement at beauty.  She knows it is a kind of redemption.

We struggle to survive as individuals and as groups, but why?   What is the name of “the force that through the green fuse drives” but desire.  It’s desire that pulls us through the narrative trajectory of our lives, both the suffering and the bliss.  Sometimes the world opens around us like a jeweled rose blooming and other times the torment of dark, cold, suffocation, plummeting is overwhelming.  They say that the worst outcome of torture is the loss of desire -- no longer wanting, no longer remembering, no longer even feeling.  It is separation from Being Itself.

In our struggle to preserve ourselves and others who are too different to understand, at least in the terms we know, we push those others off the edge of the world.  No room!  No room!  Not enough food!  You scare us!  Foolishness.  This planet is a sphere.  If you push the others out, they’ll just travel around and come up behind you to bite you in the butt.

Sorry this is mono-sexual.

I’ve moved my understanding of the basis of salvation away from virtue and into participation.  To participate in the webbed life of the planet, the movement of air and water, the dance of creation, the surprises and efforts -- these are what make life worth living, worth the survival.  It IS survival, no matter the length of your life, how rewarded your gifts, the magnificence of your status.  If you were there, you saw, you figured it out, that’s enough.  You did your part for the group and yourself. 

As a compliment, some people are described as being “comfortable in their skins,” meaning that they are neither pretentious nor shrinking and therefore good to be around.  Some say that one of the important characteristics of humans is that they can enjoy the creation, wherever it came from, and know that they belong in it, even if only as observers.

This post is a birthday message to a close friend.