Thursday, December 27, 2012

On going to church at Christmas 2012


“My favorite season, actually, is Easter.”  These were the first words at Holy Communion, 8 am, Christmas Day, at the Anglican Church.  The celebrant was some elderly superannuated bloke.  The regular vicar preached.  So this celebrant thought it proper to kick off a major Christian liturgical feast by saying something banal and irrelevant about himself.  And of course it had to be something he thought mildly funny.  Otherwise in the service he stumbled through the liturgy, misquoting even the actual Consecration, and frequently fiddling with the radio transmitter he was supposed to keep in his pocket.  At the very end of the service he decided to tell us how, as a child, he had always thought the smoke from the extinguished candles was “the prayers going up to heaven”.

I was present as one of my rare materializations at church these days.  The 8 am at the Anglican seems best to me because it is supposed to be plain and simple, and the worshipper is likely to be left alone.  It seems proper to show up at the Anglican church because our weekly Friday morning Christian Meditation group meets there and a number of its members belong to Christ Church, Warkworth. 

But, oh my goodness…  Some worshippers behave as though they are at a national convocation of the chattering classes.  There are women who laugh uproariously at what they themselves have just said – in the middle of the service.  They turn the Pax in the liturgy into some extra general meeting of the Mothers’ Union.  Last Easter when I was there, one woman called to a friend two pews away, “How was your visit to the chiropodist, dear?”

The art of being reverent without being pompous, the intention to be humbly and attentively present, the courtesy of letting the great words speak for themselves, these things are now largely lost.  It seems compulsory now for lectors to elocute the words with dramatic effect, and even on occasion to tell us how we should be feeling when we hear them.  One woman however read the Lesson simply and clearly, and had made herself well acquainted beforehand with what she was going to read. 

God help us all when it comes to the churches that are currently booming.  Worship in these places starts from the presumption that no one must on any account be at risk of boredom, or left to their own devices and demons for a second.  Everyone must be relentlessly entertained at all times.  Ministers and priests become “pastors” – yet another example of a good word getting trivialized and violated by silly people.  Even prayer becomes an energetic, restless thing with everyone beseeching and making strange sounds.  There must be no perceived clericalism or dignity.  Everything must be loud, over-amplified and compulsorily joyous.  There must be songs, not hymns, of excruciating sentimentalism and banal nonsense, and soloists of the breathy, microphone-gripping variety, trained to scoop up to a note whose actual pitch is forever lost to them. 

I wonder how many people, and I am one, have been actually driven away by this stuff.  I am told the perpetrators “mean well”.  Well sorry… I should hope they do.  I still look for worship that has not become captive to the prevailing culture of excitement, idolatry and superstition.  Worship founded in humility and subjection to the word of God.  People who can preach and teach without placing themselves at centre stage, or trying to entertain.  Music worthy of its purpose rather than the mindless apeing of secular pop based on banging guitars and drums.  Worship open to mystery and reverence.