I grew up rurally, where everyone dug their own wells until they hit the water table.  Depending on where you lived that could be 20 feet or 400, and depending on what was underground, your water had a “taste” of the minerals that surrounded it.  If you were lucky that balance had that quintessential “taste” of water (and if you’ve ever drunk distilled water you know the “taste” of water comes from the presence of minerals and not the absence of all impurity!)

Churches (and families and other institutions for that matter) draw on groundwater too: it’s a “taste” that comes from their founding energy and stories and foundational beliefs.  The church I served before I came to Trinity --St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco— was founded around the teaching of Gregory that “the one thing truly worthwhile is becoming God’s Friend.”  That understanding was woven through all that the church did and was.  It was more than a mission statement, it was a deep well that sourced the parish with its best energy.  This understanding was its orienting compass.

I’ve also observed that institutions’ groundwater stories usually have a corresponding story that sometimes eclipses the main story.  It’s often similar in outline to the original, a shadow story.  At St. Gregory’s, a church that had gathered national attention for its liturgy, we grappled with the corollary to Friendship with God: ‘We’re Special’ --sometimes inflated as ‘we’re enviably unique,’ and sometimes deflated as ‘we have a precariously fragile bloom and struggle against uncommon challenges.’

I year ago this week, a couple of days before Thanksgiving, I arrived to work at Trinity.  I’m still learning about our groundwater story.  As the recipient of a significant land grant from the king in the 1600s, which it leverages now to partner with and support ministries extensively around the world, Trinity’s groundwater story likely has something to do with generosity (and I’ve been around long enough to hear its shadow side: scarcity).                                                               
Knowing your groundwater story is valuable.  Lots of churches waste their time on mission statements that project onto themselves something of what they WANT to be true about themselves, without ever stopping to taste their own groundwater, to discover the particular constellation of givens that make them THEM.

It’s also valuable to know your groundwater story so that you can identify and challenge the shadow story that inevitably creeps in and gets told alongside the original.  It takes bold vigilance and dedication to be true again and again to that originating story that is most true about ourselves and provides us with that energy to do what we’ve been given to do.

YOUR TURN: IN THE COMMENTS SPACE BELOW:
What is your church’s groundwater story, the unique taste of your founding story and your core purpose?  What core stories of your community are powerful dynamos for your current mission?

A couple of months ago Trinity took an unused scrap of land in Hudson Square, the transitioning neighborhood of Lower Manhattan which is our legacy of Manhattan real estate, and turned it into “Lent Space,” a temporary exhibition and performance space curated by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for artists in the city. It’s already taking on a personality — halfway to Burning Man, as I’ve described it to friends—and like the Burning Man desert arts festival, it raises some interesting questions that we will have to answer about the nature of shared space and about hospitality. How do we negotiate how this space is used and who gets to do what with it?

I was further fascinated when I read the leaflet in the news box at the corner of the Lent Space yard, written by Adam Kleinman, the curator of the space; he identified a tough but important issue: the nature of boundaries in hospitality:

Is it actually possible to overstay one’s welcome? It is, and as such courtesy requires that loans and visits be of a temporary nature. But then again, the very notion of hospitality demands that with the mastery of the house comes the responsibility to accept whomever or whatever may be in need, without question and without reciprocation. Consider though, that for hospitality to even exist, a host must have defined the limits upon which others might enter with permission, or trespass—a property line, a national border, rules of behavior, and the like— while the guest must recognize and submit to these laws in suit.

I think this is the best description I’ve ever heard of the real challenge facing church hospitality: how we accept whoever comes without question, and at the same time be clear about the outline of what we are offering. Real hospitality, I’m beginning to believe, is not about simply being nice to people, but more about helping people across thresholds, and helping them feel welcomed into a community with a clear shape.

Boundaries CAN be welcome when they are clear, and being welcomed into new and unfamiliar space CAN feel warm and generous if those on the welcoming end are clear about what the newcomer’s need is and what the host can offer.

And then of course there’s the HOW: Ever since our rector, Jim Cooper, gave me this image it’s been sticking with me: Airline attendants’ primary job is managing boundaries: keeping you in your seat through turbulence and keeping you out of the cockpit. They are concerned primarily with the plane’s safety/security and secondarily with your comfort. However, they are so deeply trained (for the most part) in the arts of hospitality that we believe what they tell us over the loudspeaker: that they are here to make our trip more enjoyable.

How do visitors on a Sunday know when they can and can’t take pictures? What to do at communion? Which pews have the invisible nametags of others attached? How to navigate Coffee Hour? I’m fantasizing these days of a class I want to offer for parishioners, ushers, etc. called “How To Be An Extrovert for Ten Minutes”, which would help us all get in (and out) of an interaction with a newcomer in such a way that they would feel that they belonged here with us, at least for the duration of the flight.

Last week Trinity held the funeral of the 15th Rector of Trinity, Robert Parks, in a fall drizzle.  The tower bells rang in a Dorian mode, their clappers half-muffled (half the striker is covered in leather, and so the changes move back and forth between a clang and a thunk; I can’t describe the haunting quality, almost as if they’re peering through the veil.)  The church was full of mourners; the Trinity Choir and Parish Choir were combined; the bishop was present: this was a patriarchal occasion in Trinity’s life.

Our verger of 26 years said he had never seen anything quite like it.  I’m still trying to figure out what it was that made it so compelling.  I never knew the man and I choked up more than a few times.
 
Part of it of course is that a funeral touches everyone with their own mortality; it’s a wake-up call.  And everyone at a funeral is focused on a common theme, and invested, which adds an electricity and level of participation that can’t be brought or built in any other way. 

But there was something more than personal resonance.  Dr. Parks left few instructions for his funeral, but back in the 70s he wrote that he wanted it to feel like Easter, because that deathless power and love of God had fueled everything he had ever accomplished in life (a lot). 

I would echo our verger, David.  I’ve never experienced Easter as fully as I did last Saturday.  In the poignancy of a dead body at the foot of the steps, every verse we recited and song we sung (we closed with the <i>Hallelujah Chorus</i>) had this profound effect of re-imagining us.  Here we were, all blades of grass, soon to wither, singing “in the midst of life we are in death… yet even at the grave we make our cry Alleluia”--this deep drone of life as old as the stars--and feeling in our bones that something we could not quite see or name was true, and truly holding us in life, and beyond.

A word, a gesture, a moment of silence--all simple, ordinary stuff--and suddenly we collectively feel our hand on an eternal pulse and discover that it’s our pulse as well. That’s good liturgy.

And it’s the best Easter we’ve had in years. 

<i>Something is happening at St. Paul’s Chapel.  Nothing exactly “new” is happening --we are not really innovating, rather we are recycling old church practices that have worked particularly well in the past.  We recycle them with a purpose, looking for those church practices that allow the people the greatest amount of participation.

One of those practices is singing together, in harmony, often a cappella, frequently from memory.  As we sing together we keep discovering new things, and I’ve asked Marilyn Haskel, the Music Director at St. Paul’s, to describe one of those new discoveries.  Here is her post.</i>

Years ago I remember one of my singers always praying the Lord’s Prayer in German while the rest of us prayed in English. I think he’d had a grandmother who taught him the prayer in the family language at bedtime. As an adult he said he always “heard” the Lord’s Prayer in German.

Have you ever heard a congregation pray the Lord’s Prayer with each person speaking at their own speed rather than speaking as if with one voice? The resulting sound is a murmur of voices that rise and fall as some speak quickly, others slowly, some loudly, and others barely above a whisper. All sound gradually dies away as everyone finishes.  I know some people pray the “old” Lord’s Prayer version while others the “new”. And yet the action of praying and the common prayer holds it all loosely together.

We’ve been experimenting with singing the Lord’s Prayer at St. Paul’s Chapel. We started by singing it to easy music which people memorized hearing the words in a new way. For a while now we’ve been singing the Lord’s Prayer on one note (monotone) inviting people to add other pitches to the sound as they would like. Rather than sounding like chaos, it becomes an interesting “sound-scape” of many voices each choosing their own note(s) while listening to others and creating music on the spot. Some people sing only one pitch, some sing slowly up or down a modal scale. Some aim for tonal harmony as happened a couple of weeks ago when we spontaneously created a completely harmonic ending that had never happened before.

What this offers is a musical moment created extemporaneously in the context of worship. Everyone creates as their own ability allows. No one is a “non-singer”. There can be no wrong notes. It will never be heard again in the same way. 

Have you ever made up music in church?

This past Sunday was “Welcome Sunday” at Trinity -- a thrice-annual event when we welcome new members and those celebrating anniversaries. On this day we also have the custom of asking everyone to wear name tags. I value this Sunday because it gives me the chance to learn the names of folks who I’ve known too long to admit that I’ve forgotten or never learned their name.

And I am not alone. When I surreptitiously try to learn names by asking an old-timer, committee chair, or clergy staff someone’s name, the response most often is a wince and admission that they too do not know this person’s name. This past Sunday I asked a member who has been coming here for over 40 years what another member’s name was who had been coming equally long and she did not know.

Here at Trinity, to a significant degree, we cannot call one another by name.

And that, it seems, is a real theological and spiritual handicap. Naming is powerfully transformative, and it is one of the most powerful acts in Scripture: God gives Adam the charge to name the animals; God renames Abram when he makes a covenant with him, the angel gives Jacob a new name, Israel, when he wrestles him to the ground at Jabbok; and of course Gabriel gives Mary the name of her son, Jesus, a name which has been sounding through our world ever since -- name above all names as the apostle Paul claims.

The power of naming shows up in all religions: the power of the curse or the blessing is taken seriously, and the same is true in daily life: Nicknames can dog us; titles attached to our names elevate us.

There is also a kind of power in misusing or not using a name. How do you feel when someone gets your name wrong? When you do not remember someone’s name in church -- someone who you have worshiped with for years, how does that affect the strength and quality of your engagement when you speak to them? Calling someone by name and being called by name is a deeply spiritual practice.

I have a vision: I would like to be able to go down the line at Communion and say “Peter, the Body of Christ; Serena, the Body of Christ; Kudzai, the Body of Christ.” Or even if we didn’t use names at communion, I want to be able to greet everyone in the building -- especially the stranger who yet knows no one -- confidently, warmly, by name.

It’s not too hard to conjure this image since we already collectively imagine it three times a year with our Welcome Sunday ritual of name-tagging. I want Welcome Sunday every Sunday!

I am writing from Coventry, England, here for a conference of the Community of the Cross of Nails, an international group that grew out of the bombing of Coventry Cathedral during World War II.  The society works for reconciliation of enemies and conflict around the world, and Trinity/St. Paul’s became a member after the World Trade Center attacks in 2001.

An odd thing happened to me yesterday near the steps of this bombed out cathedral: about a dozen kids dressed like Satan asked me, without irony, to bless them. 

“Goths,” as they call themselves, are free-range feral teenagers who roam the streets, dressed in black with as many piercings and tattoos of batwings and skulls as they can find space for, feigning disdain for everything and care for nearly nothing.  They seem to flock like ravens around the ruins of Coventry cathedral, perhaps drawn by the archetypal echos and the relatively unmonitored public space.  They are an intimidating spectacle. 

I was wearing my collar at the time, and as my parishioner colleague and I passed by them they called out “Hey, are you a vicar?!” When they heard my answer they were immediately much more interested in my accent and drilled us with 20 questions about America, why we were here, etc. etc.  It quickly became clear that these were surprisingly innocent children masquerading as demons, with an astounding hunger for attention and regard.  During our friendly banter, one of them sidled up to my colleague and whispered, “Do you think he would bless us?” 

“I think he will, why don’t you ask him?” she said.

She asked me sheepishly, and I answered,  “I’ll bless you, but you know a blessing is like a boomerang…”

“What?”

“It actually starts with you, not me --would a blessing work if you didn’t believe in it?  You give something to me in asking, and when I bounce it back to you, you can catch what you already had in a new way.”

Then they all packed together like an Addams Family portrait, and I blessed them “in the name of the Eternal One who made you, who keeps you alive, and who will never let you go.”

“Now” I said, “a blessing only works if you do something with it, if you give it away.”  And the girl who asked for the blessing immediately flung her arms around the girl next to her and said “Bless you!”

We all moved off down our very different paths, and I thought in retrospect that I could have made my point stronger if I had agreed to bless them only if they blessed me back.  But a day later I still feel the impression of that encounter, so I guess they did bless me, in their own way. They crossed a boundary toward me and it allowed me to cross a boundary toward them, and we both came away with a gift of unexpected awareness.

That’s how blessing works: It’s not a magic moment of wizardry; rather it’s a small but potentially powerful moment of recognition of an innate connection to God’s power and to one another.  The ritual of blessing (or any other ritual) calls it forward and concentrates it like a laser beam.
I think that’s probably another life-liturgy principle: Expect Blessing where you least expect it.  Even from American vicars abroad.  Even from Visigoths.

What is the Church?  Of course it’s a building, but according to Scripture, the Church is people: the “Body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:27).  People.  Together.  Being Jesus’ hands and feet in the world.

And if it’s going to be more than a poetic statement or a lofty aspiration then it’s got to be so real that others get it instantly.  The early theologian Tertullian reports that the Pagans often said of the early Christians: “See how these Christians love one another, and how they are ready to die for one another!” [Apology, 39.6]

We can find many examples of that love today --AND, as one of my favorite salty but sage bishops, Barbara Harris, sometimes quips:  “No one knows how to hate like Christians!”  It’s often apparent on a Sunday in many churches how Episcopalians got our nickname “God’s Frozen Chosen.”

If Liturgy is an expression of who we are and what we believe, than it’s important that the liturgy be leading us in practical and tangible ways toward the transforming behavior that Tertullian reported.

In other words: the way we pray shapes the way we believe and the way we live.

I think we need more smiles in church, many more ways of looking into the eyes and touching the hands of the Body of Christ.  Trinity has explored that at St. Paul’s Chapel by resetting the chairs so that members of the assembly are actually looking across the altar at one another (Imagine! WE ourselves are sacraments!)  Trinity has also framed all the work of our Faith in Action ministries in language of Incarnation --that we are not merely a social service agency doing good in the world, but that we do what we do in order to touch Jesus in the least of these (Imagine! The Body of God is as big as the world!).

I last wrote that Church at its truest is a community of practice.  How do we practice being the loving, dancing, giving Body of Christ?  It starts in small ways and grows from there: how we treat the person who took our pew seat; the way we engage the parishioner we detest; how we approach the stranger standing alone at coffee hour; how we give our money away; what we stand up and fight for; what we give our time on earth to accomplish. 

Start small, this Sunday, and see where it takes you.

This was my first 9/11 in New York City. It’s still a fresh memory here. And 9/11 at St. Paul’s Chapel is a day where people need to offer things. It’s astonishing to see the amount and force of feeling looking for a way to find ritual expression, to give experience and memory shape and meaning.

Watching people remember 9/11 at St. Paul’s Chapel as moving and instructive. I set up simple table in the middle of the room, placed an oil lamp on it, a bowl of incense, and a cross made of nails (collected from the ruins of Coventry Cathedral after it was bombed by the Nazis in WWII.) I hoped that people would spontaneously start to place things on it, and by the end of the day it was covered with flowers and other items.

I was struck by how many people also needed to tell their story and to link it in to a larger story, a larger meaning. We held a simple service at noon, and I preached on the facile impossibility of “Forgive and Forget,” the black hole of nursed hatred, and the redemptive possibility of reconciliation. Afterward a man came up to me and told me his story:

“Thank you for saying what you did; it took me a long time to learn that I had to forgive in order to survive 9/11. I was a firefighter wounded in the towers, and I had a lot of hate in me. It was consuming me. I joined the military and deployed to Afghanistan. While I was over there something happened that changed my life. See, I had grown up in the Brethren church, and we have a practice of washing one another’s feet, like Jesus washed his disciples feet. But I would never let anyone wash my feet --no way. But then I went to Afghanistan, and they have a practice of washing feet there too, as a sign of hospitality and respect.” He choked up a little and went on: “The first person ever to ever wash my feet was an ex-Taliban commander. It has taken me a long time to let go of my hatred, but I couldn’t hold onto it in the face of that. And now I get it, that forgiveness is the only way I can stay alive.”

I thought of Peter, refusing Jesus, who wanted to wash his feet. It’s just a towel and a little water. It’s just a ritual. But it is ordinary stuff to which we add meaning, which is power. Real power to change our lives. The ex-Taliban Afghani washed years of hatred away from this man’s soul with his towel.

That’s the power of ritual. It daily wears a track in our souls that patterns us in the way we want to be AND once in awhile it is a lightning rod for the divine bolt. Funny, we never quite know when our rituals will be just-going-through-the-motions, and when they will be like keys that unlock whole rooms within us, opening us to a whole new larger life.

We never know when it will happen, but it helps if we’re paying attention.

Something important happened the other morning at St. Paul's (St. Paul's is the chapel at Ground Zero that is part of Trinity Parish where some wonderful old/new liturgical exploration is flourishing each Sunday with a nascent regular congregation of about a dozen, along with about 60 visitors each week!).

St. Paul's prodigiously talented music director stood up to lead the people in a call-and-response tune we've been using throughout the summer. Something happened between her brain and lips that morning, and what came out was not what was intended. There was a pregnant moment of silence -- and the people timidly called back their part. The musician faltered again, and a few more voices jumped in and carried her part -- and the people sang theirs back. Then the people threw themselves into singing both parts right to the end.

When the song ended there was electricity in the room, and everyone felt it, so the Presider acknowledged it: "What just happened," he said, "was not a breakdown, but rather a perfect example of what we're hoping to create in the liturgy here at St. Paul's: We are all needed to make the liturgy happen, and we make it happen together, in tangible, real ways."

That little moment was so important because it refocuses the conventional wisdom that "practice makes perfect" and our tendency to behave as if the best liturgy is error-free, like a professional concert. That's fine for practicing the trumpet, but in our public worship Practice IS Perfect -- it's more like practicing yoga, where the the practice is itself the goal. In fact, there is tremendous spiritual danger in creating too-perfect a liturgy: we can come to believe that we can only bring our best to God and one another -- our best Sunday dress becomes a sort of screen, to closet away those less-than-perfect parts of ourselves. And pretty soon the whole church is walking on eggshells, because hiding who we are from God and each other is a fragile and brittle way to live.

There was electricity in the room that morning at St. Paul's. The people and leaders had unexpectedly learned something about themselves and their worship -- something new about practice and perfection.

I actually LIKE to see breakdowns happen in liturgy once in awhile. Or rather, I like to see the recovery from a collapse, and to notice what it reveals about the life of the congregation. Does everyone freeze and hold their breath, terrified to be off-script and waiting for someone "authorized" to get the show back on track? Do ordinary people feel permission to step in with generosity and confidence to meet the immediate need and help the river flow forward?

The second-century bishop Irenaeus famously said: "The glory of God is a human being fully alive." That's the perfection we find in worship; that's what happened that morning at St. Paul's Chapel.

These first few posts will set the context up:

Liturgy happens in church.  But when exactly does the curtain go up and when does it come down?  Does it happen when the chief celebrant says the first words? When the Deacon gives the final dismissal?

I once visited a prominent church where the liturgy was so sullen and wooden that I just couldn’t believe this many people would show up for it Sunday by Sunday.  I was counting the minutes till it was over.  And the minute the dismissal was given the place erupted in greetings, conversation and bubbling enthusiasm, adjourning to an enthusiastic coffee hour and an hour of exciting and challenging education/formation activities for all ages.  It felt to me like the “official” liturgy was just a required preamble to the real deal, like roll call before the event really gets underway.  Why didn’t this energy bleed back into their worship? What kind of expectations were they imposing on themselves that shuttered all this dynamism and energy?  What did they think God wanted them to be doing with that hour on Sunday morning?

I don’t know the answers, and they probably didn’t either, consciously, but I do know that how they behaved in church came out of some deep assumptions about what they thought God expected of them and who they thought God was. 

You can watch the center of an event to see what people mean by it, but you can also watch the boundaries to discover a lot about what people assume about what they’re doing.  Watch what happens when a church service starts and ends; it can tell you a lot about what the people think of God and what they think God thinks of them.  What do the edges tell you about we think we are doing in worship?  Is this a party? A school room? A dance? A pow-wow? A state occasion? A funeral? A sit-in? A political rally? A business meeting? A lecture hall? A family meal? A dinner with friends? A community sing-a-long?

How can you tell?