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GratiaCorpusChristi
Guest
I'm really tired of going into church in a parish that celebrates using various forms of historic liturgies and coming out feeling only two things: boredom and annoyance.
Now I'm certainly high church, and definitely don't want anything more contemporary. That would drive the annoying to chalkboard-meet-nails levels. But there is passion and emotion to a well done liturgy that is just absent from the way it is done in my parish, and from the well I feel it is done at many other parishes in my denomination and in other denominations.
Good Friday is a case in point. Where was the gravitas? Where was the pathos? Sucked out by sticking a mediocre homily after the passion narrative and by a sad lack of preparation. Annoyed.
Oh, and humor. Sometimes it's humorous. Like when the pastor says that Jesus cryed out on the crosses "llama llama llama sabachtani." Then more annoyance. Or when the lights were supposed to go out at the end of the service (although it wasn't exactly a Tenebrae service or even a Seven Last Words-Tenebrae hybrid service, which annoyed me even more), but someone forgot to turn off the lights over the choir and over the organ, which made the altar fully visible. Annoyed again.
I took everything I had not to feel these emotions during the service it. I was gripping my chotki and praying the Jesus Prayer and using all my meditative techniques to keep from feeling them. But it's over, and it's out now.
But on a more regular basis, there are just annoying things. Like the fact that the Offertory ends, and only once the music is over do the ushers proceed to the front, hand off the plates, and the pastor puts them up on the altar with the cute little rhyming prayer (speaking of things I hate, rhyming prayers). Silence is a great thing that we need to appreciate more, but that eternal 10 seconds of avoidable silence is awkward and avoidable silence, not purposeful and structured silence. The same goes for the fact that between the final hymn and the postlude, we have to wait a full 60 seconds while the altar boy extinguishes the candles before we can leave. Why can't that process start on the final verse of the hymn? The lack of preparation, narrative flow, rhetorical care, and coordination isn't awful, but it is extremely distracting. And to a stereotypically cynical man on the boarder between Gen X and Millennial, that hits me right in the gut and fully kills any sense of joy or sorrow or serenity the liturgical season, readings, or particular day are supposed to engender.
Now I know some people are going to come back and say "It's not about the quality of the music or the rhythm or the timing, but about what it all means." I hear you. This is partially, perhaps mostly, my own fault. But these are also easily fixable things that create breaks in a liturgy that is designed to have flow.
And I'm sure some Lutherans will come back and say my focus on feelings is wrong, even Pietist (cue scary music). But feelings aren't wrong, they're part of a healthy, integrated spirituality. Emotion is an important part of the experience of liturgy and Christianity. And it seems to me that a lack of professionalism and flow breaks up what is supposed to be a liturgical drama, a reenactment of salvation history.
I feel like I've focused too much on the breaks in the service, too. It's not just that. It's doing things like using the non-metrical version of O Sacred Head (LSB 450) instead of the metrical version (LSB 459) when we're singing with only words printed in the bulletin, without notes. How is anybody supposed to pick up a non-metrical, completely atypical rhythm without notes? A similar goof: The very first week of Lent we sang Thy Strong Word, which ends each and every verse with the A-word! Just stupid, stupid, stupid.
So boredom, annoyance, or cynical fun. That's what I'm getting out of church now. And while I really want to try to be better and use my chotki and the hesychastic meditation techniques to focus, these pastoral and ministerial and administrative failures are working against me. And yet when I bring up the awkward silences, I'm told silence is good. Or when I bring up other changes that would be positive in the face of cynical Millennials (going paperless, taking down a board of Chick-style CPH tracts in the Narthex), I'm told I'll offend everyone and that nobody wants change and a whole variety of excuses and get pegged as the low-church rebel that I'm precisely not.
And finally, I write this for myself, but especially for others, because I know for a fact there are other people out there who feel the exact same way.
Now I'm certainly high church, and definitely don't want anything more contemporary. That would drive the annoying to chalkboard-meet-nails levels. But there is passion and emotion to a well done liturgy that is just absent from the way it is done in my parish, and from the well I feel it is done at many other parishes in my denomination and in other denominations.
Good Friday is a case in point. Where was the gravitas? Where was the pathos? Sucked out by sticking a mediocre homily after the passion narrative and by a sad lack of preparation. Annoyed.
Oh, and humor. Sometimes it's humorous. Like when the pastor says that Jesus cryed out on the crosses "llama llama llama sabachtani." Then more annoyance. Or when the lights were supposed to go out at the end of the service (although it wasn't exactly a Tenebrae service or even a Seven Last Words-Tenebrae hybrid service, which annoyed me even more), but someone forgot to turn off the lights over the choir and over the organ, which made the altar fully visible. Annoyed again.
I took everything I had not to feel these emotions during the service it. I was gripping my chotki and praying the Jesus Prayer and using all my meditative techniques to keep from feeling them. But it's over, and it's out now.
But on a more regular basis, there are just annoying things. Like the fact that the Offertory ends, and only once the music is over do the ushers proceed to the front, hand off the plates, and the pastor puts them up on the altar with the cute little rhyming prayer (speaking of things I hate, rhyming prayers). Silence is a great thing that we need to appreciate more, but that eternal 10 seconds of avoidable silence is awkward and avoidable silence, not purposeful and structured silence. The same goes for the fact that between the final hymn and the postlude, we have to wait a full 60 seconds while the altar boy extinguishes the candles before we can leave. Why can't that process start on the final verse of the hymn? The lack of preparation, narrative flow, rhetorical care, and coordination isn't awful, but it is extremely distracting. And to a stereotypically cynical man on the boarder between Gen X and Millennial, that hits me right in the gut and fully kills any sense of joy or sorrow or serenity the liturgical season, readings, or particular day are supposed to engender.
Now I know some people are going to come back and say "It's not about the quality of the music or the rhythm or the timing, but about what it all means." I hear you. This is partially, perhaps mostly, my own fault. But these are also easily fixable things that create breaks in a liturgy that is designed to have flow.
And I'm sure some Lutherans will come back and say my focus on feelings is wrong, even Pietist (cue scary music). But feelings aren't wrong, they're part of a healthy, integrated spirituality. Emotion is an important part of the experience of liturgy and Christianity. And it seems to me that a lack of professionalism and flow breaks up what is supposed to be a liturgical drama, a reenactment of salvation history.
I feel like I've focused too much on the breaks in the service, too. It's not just that. It's doing things like using the non-metrical version of O Sacred Head (LSB 450) instead of the metrical version (LSB 459) when we're singing with only words printed in the bulletin, without notes. How is anybody supposed to pick up a non-metrical, completely atypical rhythm without notes? A similar goof: The very first week of Lent we sang Thy Strong Word, which ends each and every verse with the A-word! Just stupid, stupid, stupid.
So boredom, annoyance, or cynical fun. That's what I'm getting out of church now. And while I really want to try to be better and use my chotki and the hesychastic meditation techniques to focus, these pastoral and ministerial and administrative failures are working against me. And yet when I bring up the awkward silences, I'm told silence is good. Or when I bring up other changes that would be positive in the face of cynical Millennials (going paperless, taking down a board of Chick-style CPH tracts in the Narthex), I'm told I'll offend everyone and that nobody wants change and a whole variety of excuses and get pegged as the low-church rebel that I'm precisely not.
And finally, I write this for myself, but especially for others, because I know for a fact there are other people out there who feel the exact same way.
