Worship as community Drama -a review

One of the premises of this book is that we should look at what people do and how they experience worship, not just do theoretical mind games about it where we think and talk over the heads of those who are the majority of participants in worship. It is how the texts and actions that are authorised or imposed by wider bodies are actually 'received', inhabited, resisted or overturned that is important and indeed the reflexivity and interaction between those things. And that creates the possibility that what is intended by a liturgical committee or a writer may not be how it is understood. This liturgical point is the reflex of interpreting cultural artefacts more generally not as top-down endowments of meaning but as bottom-up improvisations of meaning. Until we understand that as worship -leaders we run the risks of disconnection, formalism, petty rubricism and /or misunderstanding. Implicitly, this set of studies of worship occasions involves a kind of study of the events as cultural artefacts. And in my book that's good. It's not the only thing we might want to do or to say, but it is a necessary and often neglected thing to do.

I really enjoyed the phenomenological approach. Looking at concrete acts of worship and what actually goes on rather than seeing them as basically texts which happen to be 'performed' or through the lenses of theology or of the liturgical correctness police. This is important because in reality worship is the intersection of texts, people who have a cultural and church background, theology, practicalities and artefactual availabilities. It was interesting too to see the acts of worship being considered as having a place in discipleship or Christian formation of communities and individuals.

The start was with televised RC masses and these are a really interesting window into theology and a set of questions. From there, a not illogical move to masses in Notre Dame cathedral with the further issues of congregation and setting and explicitly raising the question of faith and culture. Since both were televisually accessed there is also a helpful discussion of the cultural differences in setting and also in theology relating to the channels each was aired by. I found this compare and contrast of RC output in the USA and in France also quite enlightening about the diversity of RC approaches. That said, there remains a fundamental critique of the continued reproduction of hierarchical attitudes through deployment of signs and symbols in the liturgies.

The presentation and consideration of research by Willow Creek church in church life and spiritual growth was really interesting and helpful in introducing a way of thinking about and assessing the discipleship effects of different congregational ways of operating both in worship and more widely -including decision-making and authority. The case-study involving a radical RC USA-black-culture church was eye-opening and raises many questions beyond the scope of the book. It does serve as a great illustration of brave creativity in enacting a thorough understanding of a culture using its own richness to determine how an inherited tradition from another culture might morph to serve the expression of worship in another. And therefore of the kind of challenges this can pose to inherited ways of being church or doing church. Because of the author's own personal history, the RC Church is the test case for the discussion of authority, church governance and congregational participation. The implicit message, as it came over to me, is that centralised authority is a dead hand on participation and Christian formation.

There was some observation of papal masses which were contextualised in the wider picture of RCC politics. I wasn't always convinced that it was all needed to help understand the masses though it does serve later in the book to help understand the way that liturgical correctness works in the RCC. On the other hand, discussion of camera shots here and in other places is good in helping to understand the way that messages about the mass are also conveyed by these means of editorial choices. There was also a consideration of the way that crowds responded to and, in fact, made use of the cameras and, indeed, smartphones.

In essence, this is an academic thesis modified for publication. That's okay, but it isn't a popular work and there is a good bit of space given at the start to methodology, justifying the approach and explaining the format and process of presentation. As a part-time academic it feels a bit like reading a dissertation -which essentially, I think, it is- I just triggers the marking reflex in my and I want to put things in the margin and comment on the development of the argument.!

For me, this is an important observation, not only for the RC Church.

The issue of faith and language needs to be raised, not only in terms of linguistic translations but also in relation to cultural traditions. Today the Catholic liturgy is celebrated in the vernacular, i.e., the local languages of around the world, but many people still feel that the liturgy is foreign to them (p.73 paper, p.82 pdf)

It was good to see liturgy not only viewed and assessed as a textual or quasi textual affair, but with an eye on things like orality in culture. As an Anglican where the phrase 'lex orandi, lex credendi' is often trotted out, it was interesting to see some discussion of this in relation to the RCC and the historical origin of the phrase. The conclusion though seems to be what I have tended to take from it, that how we pray and what we believe are in dialogue and one informs the other. For Anglicans this tends to support the idea that our doctrine is actually in our prayer and so the prayer book is more definitive than doctrinal statements (that's poorly put but I hope you get the idea) and to generate an emphasis in theology on pastoral or practical theology.

The idea of presider or celebrant as mystagogue is helpful. The role is to lead people into mysteries such as the peace of God, the Lordship of Christ, vocation,  I'm going to be reflecting on that for some time to come.

Link-Love for this Review

Worship as Community Drama on Amazon
Pierre Hegy’s Website
Pierre Hegy on Twitter

Tag #WorshipAsCommunityDrama

I got this book as a review copy. There was no obligation, in receiving it, for me to be favourable in my review.

Call and Response: Litanies for Congregational Prayer — recommend?

Okay, so I have to admit that I'm a bit of a liturgy buff, I have a particular interest in liturgies for daily prayer and I'm also drawn to litanies and preces. I had to consciously rein myself back from overusing the latter in Book of Our Common Prayer. The scope of this book, then, grabbed my attention. Especially so because it promised, "Written with attention to beauty, theological resonance, and justice-mindedness," All good and often the first is ignored. So the question I approach it with is whether it does those things. I think this book fulfils that brief.

To be sure, it's hard to review a prayer or collection of them without a reasonable amount of time to actually pray them. So having 30 days means that what I am doing is more like first impressions and whether there are things that at first view I think will be enticing me into prayer or not and also whether I think I can mind's-eye them in congregational settings I'm familiar with. Actually praying them with a congregation in a substantial enough amount of usage is a different question. I'll do my best.

So what about contents? Well, I was impressed and excited by the introduction 'How liturgy saved my life'. A succinct and human-centred in-life rationale for using what she calls 'intentional liturgy'. Probably I tend to call it 'pre-written liturgy' nowadays, but I know what she means and it is difficult to find a term which also implies 'those of you who think you don't use liturgy are kidding yourselves -it's just that you don't write it down'. But this chapter in the book is one I think I shall try to encourage some people I'm in conversation with to read to help them to 'get' what I'm on about.

Then the "litanies". They're pretty varied and the contents pages breaks them into different section and there really is a wide selection of topics: humility; stillness; government; midwives; lament; 'terrorized city'! ; doing hard things; ordination; death; Advent; Lent and all sorts of other things. So I decided I would sample various ones that caught my interest.

Something to say was that I realised that my working definition of a litany is different to Fran's. I was expecting less variation on the response parts; for me that's the essential difference between a litany and preces; that in the former the responses tend to be more constant so the congregation can often respond without seeing the words. However, I do recognise that this is not necessarily how the dictionary puts it over. And I do like preces -my own work is full of them. And, in fact, as I read them in this book, several times I felt that chunks would fit well with some of the prayer forms in Book of Our Common Prayer. For example much of the Meekness litany would work in the last phase of the Lord's prayer pattern. I did wonder whether an assemblage of Fran's litanies could be constructed in the Lord's prayer pattern, maybe I'll give that a go

The litanies in Fran's book are often quite concept-dense in the ideas and reflections embedded in them. I would commend them for a meditative (slow) reading rather than racing through them. I also suspect that one-off usage will not do right by them: I suspect that using them several times in a period of days or weeks would enable the richness of the imagery and insight woven through them to unfurl within a soul.

Some of the forms had large sections of litanies in the sense of my normal working definition, and these were nice, though I suspect that with a congregation I might seek to expand on them a bit to get a sense of exploring meaning and of rhythm.

One use I imagined for them was in a prayer room or chapel where there are prayers posted to help. I also felt that this is one of the few e-books I have read that I might want to get as a hard copy; the easier to refer to when assembling acts of worship to lead.

Definitely worth getting as a resource for worship.

Call and Response: Litanies for Congregational Prayer — Fran Pratt: contemporary liturgy for the post-modern church.

Link-Love 

Call and Response on Amazon
Fran Pratt’s Website
Fran Pratt on Instagram
Fran Pratt on Facebook
Fran Pratt on Twitter

Tag: #CallAndResponse

Please note I got sight of this book as a 'for review' deal. I was under no obligation in receiving a copy to review it favourably.

Mental hygiene in an age of AI targeted advertising

A commenter to an article I just read, wrote:

Almost wondering if this is the onset of the death of democracy and its replacement by ad-campaigners who believe the voting public can be persuaded to go with anything provided enough fake propaganda is thrown at it. Is this modern democracy?

This triggered me to write something that I've been mulling over for a week or several in odd moments. So I replied

The ad campaigners don't believe; they know. 70 years of experience under their belts and now social media have handed them the tools to begin to really target advertising. It's still playing the odds but upping the likelihood of responses they hope for.  Our difficulty as populations subject to this is how to think about our own agency. We're too used to thinking of ourselves as in control and not sufficiently aware of subliminal and unconscious drivers. 'Of course, I'm not persuaded by advertising'. Well, maybe not directly but over time background opinions shift, we tend to mirror or move towards what we perceive 'people like us' are thinking/approving/accepting. It's a long game, but then the Murdoch press have being playing it for what? -30 or 40 years? Add to that the new toolbox from the people who take up the market slack from Cambridge Analytica. We all need to learn how to practice mental and emotional hygiene in a advertising age.

I think too that we need to find a way to talk in popular discourse about the fact that advertising does in fact change minds or influence opinion without making it sound like someone who does respond is an idiot and doesn't know their own mind. It's clear that statistically, advertising and targetting it does work but it's not 100%. Certain percentages of people are likely to follow up certain kinds of advertising and to be influenced by certain messages relayed and spun in certain ways. We need to find ways to enable people to be more aware of how this happens and to step up our out-smarting smarts. Many have got quite good at spotting 'crude' and direct sales pitches. We now need to get good at spotting and discounting the subtle.

Somewhere in all the comments in the Times article you can find the originals. Times is paywalled, but you can see a couple of articles a week free.

Chaplaincy -a diaconal ministry

A couple or so years ago, I found myself in conversation about the ministry of university chaplains saying that I felt my ministry was more expressing my diaconal orders than priestly. And I recently read a post about 'distinctive deacons' in the diocese of Europe which seemed here to offer an explanation of orders that supports what I found myself saying then:

 ... a deacon is something, not simply someone who does certain thingsDeacons are ordained to hold up before the Church and the world, diakonia, the distinctive ministry of Christ the Servant, as being central to all Christian ministry.

Some ask how a deacon is different from a priest; is a deacon not simply a junior priest? Well, no. A priest’s focus is on the parish community and sacrament. They are pastors/shepherds of the community, feeding them and leading them. The deacon’s focus is on outreach, service, and supporting the ministry of the faithful in the world. Eurobishop: Deacons make history in the Diocese in Europe: 

I'm not focussed on a parish community (though I do serve some), I don't preside at communion very often -it's not a major strand of being a chaplain to a university. I do tend to focus on outreach, serving the people and institution I'm placed with. I try to support the ministry of Christians (and others!) in the world of 'my' university and HE more widely. It's good to feel that my diaconal orders are still being 'used'.



On a separate note, Eurobishop's comment " a deacon is something, not simply someone who does certain things" is a widely shared trope of more Catholic theologies. And I do agree with the reasons I often see or hear it shared: it provides a respite from functionalism and activism with their implied works-based judgmentalism. I've always felt that we should notice that being and doing are integrated and that where the priority goes in thinking about them depends on what one is trying to consider. I note that the 'being' in that passage is justified in terms of functions. Which makes my point that we can't conceive of pure being without taking in what it is doing.  Can we just not work with that distinction? Rather let's consider such things as dynamic and relational: a deacon is in relation to the church and the world, typcially, in certain ways and those ways are definitive of a deacon's 'being' in some way such that diaconal actions are likely to result and in turn the diaconal being is consolidated and grows in the doing of the ministry. Let's refuse to put ministry and minister asunder except for the briefest of thought-experiments.

A 'secular' ritual -what can we learn?

I find myself thinking a lot in odd moments about rituals and the language of ceremony and how the churches often 'speak' gestural languages that are quite alien, that is, unintuitive, to our host cultures. So this article and in particular this paragraph got me thinking.

The bell-ringing tradition started in the US, and has become popular in the UK over the past five or six years. The idea is that, on your final day of treatment, you ring a bell to mark the occasion: sometimes, other patients and staff are there to watch you do it and you’re clapped and cheered. It’s a moment for a photo for the Instagram account, a moment to stop everything and acknowledge that you’ve been through something incredibly scary and pretty hellish but that now you’re at a turning point. Your life might continue as it was before, or it might be different, but this experience was so big that it needs to be marked in some way.

It seems great to have a ritual that can aknowledge, somewhat publicly, and in the presence of people who have helped and supported that a turning point has been reached.

And why a bell being rung? The best clue I could get was in this later line

there are some who will never be able to ring the bell because they’ll never be “clear” of cancer.

Clear as a bell -get it? The thing is, though, if this is the right etymology of the practice, then it does and does not help us in a search for intuitive ritual actions. It does not do so because the explanation for the symbolism is at one remove in that you have to know the English simile to 'get' it. But then, a number of people probably respond to the action without ever knowing that connection to the simile.

How do they read it? I wonder whether their reading might be something like my naive reading before I saw that line inferring the connection. I think I read it in the light of other bell ringings -particularly as in the article there is a photo of the kind of bell (along with the notice explaining the practice). So my connections: school bells to call us to play or to class. If this was the interpretive adjunct then we might read the bell as a change from one kind of time or activity to another -possibly from treatment time to the rest of life. This would be reinforced by the continued use of bells to mark time.

I also associated with a bell tolled at a funeral or a time of mourning. This seems less apposite. I suspect that this association is not unlikely but might be rejected because it is the opposite of what is being expressed. (Though the death of the cancer? -probably not: this would be a cause for rejoicing not mourning). Similarly the sound of bells at sea on buoys warning of shipwrecks or sandbanks.

The bell itself must act as a standing visual sign and perhaps a hopeful one. It potentially speaks of a hope for the future. People could look at it and hope for the day when they would ring it as an all clear.

The article itself, of course, is noticing that the symbolism and ritual doesn't work for everyone. And that is something to take note of too. When we are co-creating rituals particularly for people who may be in emotionally charged or vulnerable states, we might recognise that not all will find them cathartic or resonant (sorry for the pun in this context but it's the right sort of word). Some of them may find it off-putting as a result. And that's okay: as long as it is not compulsory. All may, some should, none must (attributed to Elizabeth I, I believe, in respect of oracular confession).

From: I didn’t ring a bell at the end of my cancer treatment. But I get those who do | Joanna Moorhead | Opinion | The Guardian:

A Good Look at Evil -a book review

I'm interested in the ontology of evil -or something like that. Partly because it seems to me that in popular culture we so often find dualism and the idea of 'goodies' and 'baddies' which hardly does justice to the reality that few of those who do evil actually think that's what they're doing and that it is impossible to do evil in an extended way unless one is able to construe it as 'right' or 'good' by some frame of reference. And Solzhenitsyn's quote about the battle between good and evil running through the heart of every human seems important here.

So with those things in mind it was quite intriguing to discover that the starting place for this examination of evil was with ones life story and our construction of one. The author (Abigail Rosenthal) makes the "claim that we live, or ought to live, corrigible nonfiction narratives ".  The core thesis of this book is, in the author's words; " to show conceptually and by many illustrations how the life of an evil-doer involves deliberate sabotage of the true story that inheres in a human life, which we must protect if we would protect our goodness."

At first sight I was a bit skeptical about this: is this not in danger of becoming hopelessly subjective in such a way as to, in effect, exonerate Eichmann (and others like him)? Is this a form of existentialism?

It is also intriguing that this book was originally finished in 1987 when it was rare to think about narrative as a philosophical tool or category. It does feel like the author was prescient! It is not a straight reprint, it has been reworked to some degree and new material brought into it, some of which is comment and work with materials not available at that point to do with Hannah Arendt and her arguments.

What helped me to get with the plot was in the first paragraph of chapter one. "Agents are good, then, insofar as they try to realise the ideal stories that belong to themselves, or to anyone affected by them" I think this made sense to me because, it seems to me, that our ideal stories are ones that are about fullness of life, good relationships, harmony, fulfilment of gifts and callings, and growing personal wholeness. And it is the 'anyone affected' that helps to anchor it in more than just a personal set of choices which could be arbitrary (shades of Nietzsche).

Definitely a proposition to engage with as Christians -we have a decidedly narrative foundation document ....

Links for more info

A Good Look at Evil on Amazon
Abigail Rosenthal’s Website
Abigail Rosenthal’s Blog
A Good Look at Evil video talk

Please tag your posts for this book as #AGoodLookAtEvil

I should point out this was a review copy but having it does not commit me to making favourable comment on it.

Abigail L. Rosenthal – Just another writer.

Mindfulness for revolutionaries

For me, as someone who leads mindfulness sessions is a modern unviversity, this article The mindfulness conspiracy | Life and style | The Guardian is interesting, provocative and challenging. However, perhaps not in the way the author (Ronald Purser ) would expect because I actually agree with him in most respects but one. I think that perhaps the heart of his critique can be seen in this paragraph

It is a fundamental tenet of neoliberal mindfulness, that the source of people’s problems is found in their heads. This has been accentuated by the pathologising and medicalisation of stress, which then requires a remedy and expert treatment – in the form of mindfulness interventions. The ideological message is that if you cannot alter the circumstances causing distress, you can change your reactions to your circumstances. In some ways, this can be helpful, since many things are not in our control. But to abandon all efforts to fix them seems excessive.

And the truth is that I agree that mindfulness can be used as a kind of shoring-up of individuals and distract attention from the arguably more insightful and humanly-beneficial work of analysing the structural reasons for distress and to reinforce the privatising and individualising of finding solutions to it that don't involve changing the 'system'. I don't think we should acquiesce in the idea that the real benefits of mindfulness should only be used by big business or its equivalents for their own own ends.

Well, I don't necessarily agree. I do agree that mindfulness can be and often is used as a kind of sticking plaster over a big wound that needs a more corporate treatment. So to be clear, I do believe that the kind of stress that university staff whom I host sessions for would be well served by changes in governmentally-driven regimes which marketise HE and starve it, in effect, of funding. In turn this means that staff are having to do more with less and face greater precarity in greater numbers than before. I'm not saying that there were not faults in the previous systems. Some reforms are helpful but those that are have been overwhelmed by those that are not.

So why do I continue to offer mindfulness within our university? Well, there are several reasons and I'll mention some here that address the critique that Ronald Purser helpfully offers in the article.

Probably the most pressing is that by doing so I think that I am helping people. The research and informal feedback indicate that doing this stuff genuinely does help people to cope. And while I do not think that mindfulness sessions are the ultimate or only thing that should be done, if it helps some people then its usefulness as a kind of first aid, let's say, justifies doing it. Where I would be remiss would be if I were colluding with the forces of market disciplinary ideology but in itself mindfulness is not this: I do point out to people in wider conversation that I believe the more important long-term work is to change the system to be more humane and not to dump its labour-related externalities on its own workers.

In fact, I think that mindfulness can help in this more 'revolutionary' work. The flip side of the critique of mindfulness as co-optable into marketisation prop is that it can assist those working to change things. If mindfulness can help develop resilience for profit, then it can help develop resilience for change-making. If mindfulness can help people to work more efficiently for someone else to profit, it can help people work more efficiently for change. If it helps greater clarity of thought and reaction for profit, it can do so for analysing root causes of distress and help conscientisation.

If we took the message to be, 'mindfulness is being used as a tool to pacify workers in inhumane working conditions, therefore we should stop people learning mindfulness techniques' then I would say we are missing the possibility that mindfulness could be part of wider strategies to change things. It can be part of a message which says, 'use your greater clarity and ability to gain space to not simply react to consider how to make the conditions better and not to need to work so hard to adjust yourselves to unreasonable and inhumane conditions: notice you are not at fault, but the system you are in is. Direct the anger you find to changing the conditions'.

So, I suppose that I am disagreeing with the very next bit of what Ronald Purser writes:

Mindfulness practices do not permit critique or debate of what might be unjust, culturally toxic or environmentally destructive. Rather, the mindful imperative to “accept things as they are” while practising “nonjudgmental, present moment awareness” acts as a social anesthesia, preserving the status quo.

Let's look at it a bit more closely. 'Do not permit critique' -I'd agree if it was 'in the usual format on offer by the mindfulness industry'. However, I would say that it is perfectly possible for a mindfulness group leader to have conversations about this and to have conversations about how mindfulness permits us to gain insights which can inform critique and can help us to gain a degree of resilience to take action on those insights. After all, if the problem is that people are being overworked, in effect, then asking them to take more action to resist or overturn things is going to require from them more than they may feel they can do: mindfulness techniques can be something that helps with that.

'Accept things as they are' -yes this can be co-opted into social anaesthesia. But only if it is tied to a conservative no-change vision of the way things are. This may be implicitly what wider society and media do but it is not inherent to mindfulness. Mindfulness can support those engaging in social, political and economic change and is not inherently conservative. In fact, by helping us to be more aware of our own reactions we can begin to be clearer about what is, in fact, our own baggage and our own capability and what needs wider and collective action. Ironically, many businesses want workers to be more creative and to think more widely -but then they may have to work to try to keep that within the bounds of their own enterprise. Creativity could cut both ways and come up with ways for working people to subvert the system. 

'Non judgmental present moment awareness' can lead/help us to be aware that actually it's not us, it really is 'them', that the 'promise/hope' of better life or conditions if we just endure this, work a bit harder etc is not serving us in the present and maybe never will; it can strip off those ideological illusions that keep us being well-oiled cogs in the profit-machine. The task is to provide alternative voices to assist the potential conscientisation that mindfulness can be the midwife for. Don't let the business leaders have all the best techniques for helping us to live a little better -let's harness them to socially transformative work.

Activists can burn out too. If these techniques can help those working for change, let's not write them off by only thinking about them as they work within the exploitative frame of mind. We can imagine differently: we can imagine groups of people better able to challenge injustice because they can identify and channel their rightful anger more effectively and learn to have space to properly care for each other by attending to the present experience of hearing the person in front of them and being present to them.

One things this article has done for me is to consider how best to redesign my support leaflets for mindfulness sessions to highlight the importance of not just individualising our responses to workplace stress. And perhaps I will open up conversations with the union activists in our place around this.