“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.
