On Sunday Javier and I will head out to an ancient dry lake bed in the middle of the Nevada desert, participating in the Burning Man arts festival. I’m reprising below an article I wrote for Trinity News this summer as a way of giving some context for the trip, as I hope to blog daily from the site, noticing the anthropology and spirituality of people making individual and collective meaning (and a lot of fire). If you DON’T hear from me next week it means only that the fragile (and surreal) wi-fi links to the outside world have failed me, but I’ll be sure to come back with a full account after Labor Day. 

Now here’s some background on why I put myself through 110-degree heat, freezing cold, and blasting wind/dust storms...

Burning Man is a sort of extreme summer camp, as 50,000 people survive the elements to create a tent city for a week that features large-scale art, free-spirited personal expression, and of course, fire. I have said only semi-jokingly to colleagues that I think every seminarian should be required to go to Burning Man to study liturgy. As important as it is to learn the Prayer Book rubrics, it is more important to learn the rubrics of the human spirit and at this festival an important human pulse is very close to the surface. At Burning Man I have learned more about how people need to participate in liturgy to be engaged by it than I have anywhere else.
One of the annual large-scale constructions is a “temple” built outside the city. It houses no god and is ruled by no creed, but is rather an open space where people bring their intention. From it they watch the sun rise and set, and they make every corner and inch of it their own. They bring mementos: photos of lost loves and estranged kinships, little relics of personal transformations in all shapes and sizes. They write on the temple: prayers of release and forgiveness, psalm-like prayers of anger and loss, messages of connection and blessing to those who have passed beyond the veil. By the end of the week the temple has become a visible pile of prayer, a sort of collective dumping ground of spiritual exchange.

At the end of the week, most every art installation that can be burned is set ablaze, including the namesake of the festival. “The Man,” an effigy that signifies anything or nothing, is burned with great pyrotechnic fanfare out of sense of “tradition,” honoring the first combustion twenty-some years ago by a guy and his buddies on a San Francisco beach for some reason long since forgotten.

The temple is burned the following night. Without any of the fanfare and pyrotechnics of the previous night, the remaining 30,000 participants gather around this colossal structure in the desert. Everyone initially has his or her own idea of how this burning should be ritualized: some try to get others singing, some sit, some stand. Those sitting shout at those standing, those standing shout back that they have every right to stand. Sound familiar? Eventually, and seemingly instinctively, the entire crowd settles down to silence. Thirty thousand people in open-ended silence is quite a sound.

When the temple is lit, without any fanfare, the entire crowd sits in complete and uninterrupted silence for about twenty minutes, listening to the crackling of the temple and its contents. When I have turned to look back at the lit-up faces, many of them are wet with tears.
Very few of these people at Burning Man would call themselves religious. Most have fled the churches because of what they perceive as a toxic blend of hypocrisy and absence of soul. But they have not fled meaning. Watching their hunger and engagement assures me that the human soul is still adept at expressing its awareness of the divine. Rob it of one language and it will quickly create another, not always healthily: the language of war and of nationalism and victimization is religious language.

In the fourth century, as souls grew sick of the decadence of the Imperial cities, a few brave ones removed to the desert. Soon others came out by the thousands to join them, and the Christian monastic movement was born. Something similar is happening today. Where I live, in Lower Manhattan, the polls say that only 17% of the neighborhood’s residents are interested in spirituality of any type (way below the national average). These people have discarded religion, and even spirituality, but they are starving for meaning. Liturgy that does what it does because that’s what it does will not attract them; it barely attracts me.

Our rector, Jim Cooper, likens good liturgy to the kind of Broadway play that, when you step back out into the street afterwards, has charged the world with color and new meaning. It is an event that reveals and transforms, allowing participants to touch something below the surface, some deep meaning that makes the ordinary luminous and liminal.

Of course a ritual repeated weekly will not draw out the same emotional fireworks of a one-time catharsis, but both should have the same invitation to go deep; both open a door. The keys to that door are intentionality and participation. That’s why the faces at Burning Man are wet with tears. All the people prayed for are there in the flames. They have been brought there by the people present, who are also there in the flames. It is a moment of profound communion and release. When ritual and tradition are regularly and deeply engaged, they become heavy with meaning, dense and complex. When ritual and tradition are not reflected upon, but maintained and recited, they become heavy in another way — like the drag of barnacles on a ship’s hull.

Without intention and reflection and occasional reform, liturgy’s meaning is increasingly found in its comfortable repetition so that the meaning becomes the repetition. It becomes an anesthetic to life rather than a concentration of life’s meaning. Then we try to protect liturgy from change, and when we succeed it grows old and brittle, not resonantly ancient and alive.

I have logged enough hours in ordained ministry to confirm that the preparation of our rituals does not get the attention it deserves. Liturgy and preaching courses in seminaries are some of the first to be cut when budgets tighten. And I have worked long enough in parish ministry to see that much of our liturgy is designed to comfort, protect, and preserve, rather than provoke encounter and transformation. My best illustration is the true story of encountering a sign on a highly polished brass railing leading up the steps to the communion rail that read: “Please Do Not Touch the Railing.” I’ve never heard it said better than by Annie Dillard:

Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

When the temple burns at Burning Man on that last night, the waking god draws people out to where they can never return. People are surprised by their tears and don’t quite know what to do with them. This might not be a sustainable solution to spiritual hunger, but it’s a good barometer of it.

At Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel, located provocatively at the head of Wall Street and on the lip of the rapidly developing Ground Zero, we feel that hunger all around us. We are beginning to talk about growing the congregation with renewed effort, and as we do I’m focusing our liturgical work especially on those two keys I mentioned: intentionality and participation. We built our Easter Vigil this year with generous doses of both, and people’s faces and reflections afterward made me think that the waking god had drawn us out to where we could never return. It felt a little like Burning Man.