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.

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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.

We crave creativity but reject creative ideas

Actually this is so true, now that I have seen it laid out in this report of the research, I recognise that (as someone a lot of people would characterise as 'creative') I have spent a lot of time in my life either trying to get people to give a creative idea a chance or to at least let me give it a go to see if it could work. So I think that they're onto something here (and yes, when I've been able to try stuff out, it has often 'worked' and when it hasn't it has often generated newer and better ideas).

Revealing the existence and nature of a bias against creativity can help explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements, even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary. ... The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity.

Why we crave creativity but reject creative ideas

Strong Opinions, Weakly Held - Bob Sutton

Apparently the Palo Alto Institute for the future have been giving advice for helping people to develop attitudes for facing the future:
"to deal with an uncertain future and still move forward – they advise people to have “strong opinions, which are weakly held.”"
Basically strong opinions give us energy to develop arguments for them and to test them, weak opinions don't get our juices flowing -we don't care enough about them. The 'weakly held' bit is that we nevertheless need to be open to disconfirming evidence and to get past confirmation bias.

When I read that I felt that there was something here about religious or spiritual beliefs. On the basis of this argument, it would seem at first sight that having firm beliefs is a good thing as long as we also develop critical skills and reflective practice -or am I (a practical theologian with a brief for reflective practice) simply exhibiting confirmation bias?

See Strong Opinions, Weakly Held - Bob Sutton

Of course it would also indicate that we should respect and not vilify politicians who change their minds in the light of evidence see here. Interestingly, on another tack, I found a sentence in that last one that resonated strongly with me. I've noted the same in myself and others over the last few years: "... study after study documented in the book Drive (Dan Pink) – and find out that high stakes and increased pressure actually inhibit performance on tasks that are complex and creative." We need 'space' to think our best: retreats, time out, leisure, times for discursive non-directed chatting.

Paper money redesign

This is a good example of how noticing something simple and asking a basic question about whether something very familiar couldn't be 'done' differently can actually be quite revolutionary. Check it out here: US dollar redesign:
"... people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally. You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically. Therefore a vertical note makes more sense."
So simple you wonder why no-one thought of it before. Of course, you might know that 'they' did: there is often also a sense that a good idea occurs to a number of people independently because the conditions for 'having' the idea are more present at particular points in time. I 'invented' the supermarket trolley coin-return idea about 5 or so years before they began to appear at British supermarkets. I was just told by one of my managers at the time that it would never work, so didn't take it any further (trusting soul that I was)...

Heaven and virtual worlds

At university, a friend articulated the unattractiveness of Christian faith for him by saying that heaven seemed pretty boring. My riposte at the time was that if it was boring then it could hardly be heaven. In fact, since then I've come across some who argue that Hell would be very boring (perhaps it was CS Lewis in the Great Divorce?).

And I was reminded of this when I saw this article:
Why playing in the virtual world has an awful lot to teach children | Society | The Observer:
One of the paragraphs mentions an early virtual world which was a paeon to virtual plenty:

It was a utopia, and it was boring. Not only did people prefer virtual worlds in which there were brutally strict limits on available resources, and where vast amounts of effort had to be expended to obtain these resources; they were actually prepared to pay money to spend time in these scarce worlds.

And there is the difficulty really: a lot of imagery about heaven talks about rest and seems to paint a rather static picture (a carol sung at Christmas has the line: "Where like stars, His children crowned/All in White shall wait around" -like some waiting room? -No thanks).

Now I'll admit that the attractive thing about these kinds of traditional images is that if you are feeling that life is frantic, full of oughts and musts, full of oppression, poverty, pain, then images of rest are good. But there really does come a point where boredom presents itself in life after rest. It's a good job there are also images of feasting and of fellowship. I'd like to suggest too that the image of a heavenly Jerusalem, a city, seems to hint at a life with activity, creation, interchange. Is it too much to suggest that 'heaven' (and here I signal that I'm aware of the dangers of that word, especially post Tom Wright) would be a world of growth, development and expansion? Is that part of the deal underlying the notion of disciples being given responsibilities to rule? Because if so, then the lesson of the virtual world that we appear to need limits to push against, can be applied to the Eschaton. Work doesn't cease, but the curse of Genesis 3 is removed from it. I note too that much creativity thrives on dealing with limitations: managing to convey the effect with paint; managing to do something beautiful with a voice of only 12 tones (in Startrek Voyager there's an episode exploring just that issue when that limit is transgressed), managing to convey beauty and emotion with 17 words and a metre scheme ... it's the limits that drive the cleverness, the creativity, the charm ...

Heaven with limits? Of course: wouldn't we remain finite? Of course there are all sorts of caveats with this: there could be (are likely to be) things that we don't, perhaps can't, imagine which would make these questions and ideas seem laughable. And yet, we have to note that some of the ideas and imagery already do seem self-defeating and oxymoronic. Just remind ourselves that it's 'through a glass darkly' stuff; that all we can 'know' is that we will be recognisable, fulfilled, and together with God. Still, it's worth reflecting that we should be able to cross 'boring' off the list of possible attributes, though.

Creativity Style?

Reger Van Oech shares half a dozen of his own discoveries about his own creativity tendencies. I recognised a couple (and realised a couple almost certainly didn't apply) The whole articlette is here: Creative Think: What's Your Creativity Style?. And here's a couple of the ones I recognised:

2. If I'm mentally blocked in trying to solve a problem, it's usually because I'm in love with a particular idea — so much so that it prevents me from looking for alternatives. Only when I force myself to become detached from it and 'kiss it goodbye' do I find new answers. Letting go of a previously cherished idea can be one of life's great pleasures.

And part of number one:

I get my ideas ... when I'm away from the problem altogether. I rarely get them when I'm doing routine tasks that require some attention.

In fact, I recognise that I tend to do my best thinking (and praying) when I'm out walking (having a dog is quite a boon from that perspective). I suspect it's something about rhythm, nature, freewheeling thought and random things-noticed. I've omitted the bit about being under time pressures. I'm afraid that tends to make me revert to 'reptilian brain' and I can't get past whatever idea has lodged there already.
I'm pondering what creativity styles there might be and how we'd recgonise them ... thoughts anyone?

Way to Increase Creativity

Interestingly, the outcome of this is remarkably like Edward de Bono's suggestions to become more creative in thinking. An Easy Way to Increase Creativity: Scientific American: "what makes us more creative at times and less creative at others?
One answer is psychological distance. According to the construal level theory (CLT) of psychological distance, anything that we do not experience as occurring now, here, and to ourselves falls into the “psychologically distant” category. It’s also possible to induce a state of “psychological distance” simply by changing the way we think about a particular problem, such as attempting to take another person's perspective, or by thinking of the question as if it were unreal and unlikely."