background music | Church effects?

I've been involved, am involved, in curating worship which involves multi-media elements and often self-directed interactions with materials, prompts and stations. One of the things that regularly accompanies worship like this is background music. We generally try to pick stuff we think is calm, supportive of the activities and with the right sort of ethos. So, it's interesting to read that background music has become something of an industry and that there has been quite a bit of consumer research given over to it.

Music, even when you are barely aware of it, can be surprisingly powerful. Over recent decades, researchers have found that it can affect how much time we think has passed while waiting in a queue, how co-operative shoppers are with sales staff, and even how sweet or bitter food tastes. One study found that shoppers’ preference for French or German wine shifted according to which of the respective countries’ traditional music was playing from a nearby set of
speakers.

I want to be able to find some of this research at some point because I'd be interested to know if it contains clues that would help us to choose background music for worship occasions or even to be generally present in church spaces that experience visitors. Quite a lot of church buildings like cathedrals seem now to have background music being played. Sometimes it is live because the organist and/or choir are practising. Sometimes it is 'piped' music and usually that is sacred music -choral, instrumental etc. I don't think I've heard music in a church building in those kinds of circumstances which is, for example, ambient electronica, for example. I find myself wondering how that might be 'received'.

In effect playing 'sacred music' (dislike the term: other music can be God-disclosing, and 'sacred' music can be theofugic in effect sometimes) is a branding decision, in terms of the article -whether deliberate or unconscious. But what if we did the sonic branding in ways that deliberately and carefully didn't play to stereotypes? Perhaps there are cathedrals or other open-to-the-public church spaces that don't just play 'sacred music'? (I'm aware that there are some that also play contemporary Christian music -which is usually MOR folk-rock, by and large).

But there's some interesting stuff by Moby and others that could be thought about. Some 'new age' and meditation music ... ?

Inside the booming business of background music | News | The Guardian:

Naming the Unnameable by Dr. Matthew Fox | Homebound Publications

I got hold of this book because I often find Matthew Fox's writings intriguing and stimulating. I read them not expecting to agree with everything but because I think he points his finger on things that we need to pay attention to. The challenge for me is to work out, sometimes, why I'm not at ease with some of the things he says and to work out how to deal with the issue he raises in a way that I find consistent with my own starting points.

This book is no exception.

I love the project of thinking about our namings of God. Not least because I think it is something that the Lord's prayer implicitly calls us to do -'hallowing the name' implies identifying what kinds of ways we might find to attempt to name God. That point also brings us to the matter of the difficulties with the project of naming God anyway -which the start of the book helpfully outlines, so at that level it is a useful and brief primer in the spiritual help and danger of naming God, noting the limits of language and human imagination faced with an infinite and very different being.

This book has a similar effect on me. I want to affirm some things but one thing bugs me. What I find I can't quite embrace is where some of the namings seem to equate God to creation in some way. The first point I ran into this was in the naming of God as the "planetary mind field". I find this difficult because of my own work on corporisations (principalities, powers, angels, dominions etc): these I identify as emergent 'properties' ("entities" might be better) of human and other communities under certain conditions. What Fox seems to be naming, in this case, is actually potentially a corporisation. This is very much a being of creation. It may be a being which could be a residing place for God's nearer presence (much like an angel in the Hebrew scriptures) but it is not itself God.

I have similar issues with naming God as evolution and the mind of the universe. I sense that there is potential in this to honour the panentheistic intent and also the transcendent dimension, but that work seems not to have been done and leaves open the potential for evolution to be deified with the kind of difficulties CS Lewis dramatises in that conceptualisation in That Hideous Strength -where identifying evolution with deity ends up justifying eugenics. I think some kind of wrestling with issues of providence needs to be undertaken in this respect to give an account of immanence which doesn't drift into eugenics, in effect. While I agree that so much of evolution needs to be understood with a symbiotic and synergistic content, yet there are theodicy issues. This bit of the book tends to come over a bit too simplistic-'new-age' in feel.

It is one of the difficulties for me that I keep bumping into when I read Fox. I applaud the desire to honour and recognise the immanent God, I warm to a panentheistic perspective but I do wish that he could find a way to conceptualise these things that doesn't keep falling over into identifying God with created things. Or at least that's how it keeps coming over to me: panentheism tips over into pantheism which is a very different thing and has a set of problematics all of its own.

I hope this comes over as 'friendly' criticism. I really do warm to much of Fox's project, but I also quite understand why some people have a real problem with it, and because they don't 'get' the heart of the project, they bluster off at it. For the record I think Fox is right in affirming the joyous, loving, justice-making delight in creation and Spirit and the life-affirming fundamental stance which resonates with the best of the early Charismatic movement and of, for example, Hasidic Jewish spirituality. I think he is right in wanting to strengthen spirituality to support us in struggle against ecocidal trajectories, policies and lifestyles.

I was interested to note that Deepak Chopra is quoted several times, in a way that seems to take him as authoritative. I guess I'm not necessarily convinced of that. I think I'd have liked to have seen some of these namings argued rather than having Chopra and medieval Christians quoted as if beyond questioning. Don't get me wrong; I'm happy to learn from Aquinas, Eckhart and others and I will be happy to find that Deepak Chopra may have a way of saying something that is helpful and productive of insight -but I don't take their word for it; particularly when the conceptualising of the relationship between God and creation seems hazy and perhaps even unhelpfully blurred.

So I'd say that there were some bits of this that I found helpful and inspiringly put. There were other bits that didn't work so well and might even be cause for concern.


I should say, I got an e-copy of this book as part of a review package which asked that I read the book and post a review on my blog in exchange for a free copy. There is no obligation or pressure for me to publish a review which is anything other than my own response and evaluation.

Naming the Unnameable on Amazon
Naming the Unnameable Website
Matthew Fox Website
Fox Institute of Creation Spirituality Website

Please tag your posts for this book as #NamingTheUnnameable

Naming the Unnameable by Dr. Matthew Fox | Homebound Publications

Hallowe'en and dodgy Christian responses

Fundamentally, Halloween is a humorous reversal. We take bad, frightening or horrific things and treat them as if they’re good because it’s a funny thing to do. That’s not a step into genuine darkness at all. It relies completely on a shared moral compass.

I think maybe he has a point. He, in this case, is David Mitchell. I have a small series of confessions in relation to this. One is that I find David Mitchell's tv personality too remniscent of public school bullies for my taste -but perhaps that has no bearing here unless I fail to spot it in my reactions below (hence the warning to you). Another confession is that I used to be one of the people he's taking aim it in the referenced article. A further confession is that I've changed my mind about Hallowe'en. In fact I do think we need to pay attention to the underlying social psychology that Mr Mitchell draws our attention to and respond, as churches, 'smarter not harder'.

I used to make the argument that to celebrate the symbols of evil is to soften ourselves up for accepting evils and I used the analogy of dressing up as SS officers for fun as perhaps helping us to understand the dangers of such an approach. (Interestingly Mitchell along with comedy partner Webb, did a comedy sketch on just the theme of SS officers wondering whether they were, in fact, the baddies -actually a very clever piece of work). I'm not now convinced by that analogy or that the argument applies.

What I have become convinced by is that there is a social need for times when we look things that scare us in face, feel the fear and learn to put it in its place, maybe even laugh at it. There is something psychologically healthy about that approach. And we Christians ought to be helping this to happen for the health of society. So my challenge (to myself as much as anyone) is to think through how we could celebrate Hallowe'en and find ways to do so as Christians. In the first wave of response, in dark ages Europe, having services of remembering the dead, lighting candles etc was part of it. Our challenge now is to step up to affirming the psychologically healthy aspects of hallowe'en dressing up etc and to connect it to Christian spirituality in a positive way which also allows us to critique things that are unhelpful, unhealthful or genuinely dangerous.

CofE and four-day week | what's our response?

"Those who have called for the introduction of a four-day week include the Green party and Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress". I'm interested in the issue and would love to add the Church of England to that list. Having been reviewing a standard-ish clergy Common Tenure statement of particulars (close to being a 'contract of employment' without actually being one), I'm struct by the expectations on hours -and indeed the way that benefits are divvied up when it comes to housing and stipend etc. It used to be the case that clergy were paid in order not to take other work (so the myth goes -but I do wonder). I wonder how much a kind of feeling we ought not to be seen as lazy and workshy has formed attitudes. But it is this last matter that is precisely the point.



The pressures on many clergy to work to extinction is high, and it's precisely the enjoyment (at first), fulfilment etc that drive it and then the sense of duty that keeps you there when the fulfilment fades and enjoyment has become a distant memory. 'There' in this case is working 60 hour plus weeks.



So what's our theology of work when it comes to clergy, and indeed, other church employment issues. Especially given that in actual day-to-day psychology, the institution is running on a sense of lack rather than of provision, works rather than grace.



I'm thinking about how to surface the issue into CofE debate. Thoughts? I wonder whether diocesan synod and passing it from there to General Synod?



‘Miserable staff don't make money’: the firms that have switched to a four-day week | Money | The Guardian: