Pursuant to our Advent purposes we’ve continued to try out high church services, or, as the Presbyterians call it, Traditional worship. It’s been kind of nice to do the same denomination three weeks in a row, since things begin to look a little familiar (though even today when they read verses from the New Testament I confusedly poured over the program trying to see how I missed the “Old Testament Lesson”—but that’s apparently a Roman-Catholic/Episcopalian thing.)
The first of these was easily our favorite of any church thus far. It was in the city just north of us in this large, beautiful building. One of the cool things about this church was that they had brochures in the pew explaining the scenes and symbology and history of the stained glass windows and other art work like statues and banners around the sanctuary. Some of the earliest ones, which had decidedly art nouveau characteristics such as flowery patterning and an antique color palette, were bought from Louis Tiffany in New York in the first decade of the 1900s. Obviously this community has been well off for a while. Many of the later windows were donated but, interestingly, their style was more classical and therefore made them look older than they were. The pastor gave a fine speech, alluding to figure from Augustine to Auden, about the mixture of trial and triumph that typifies the life of faith and ought to inform our celebration of Christmas. The weird thing about this church is that none of the maybe two-hundred attendees sat in any of the front five or six rows of pews. It gave the effect that they were either afraid of being splashed with holiness from the altar, or that the faithful had been raptured from those rows and nobody happened to notice.
At the next church the pastor doubled as the youth leader and the kids’ choir director, which made it seem like he was doing everything. It had been some years since I’d been in a church when they had a little “children’s church” segment of the service, or, as I have long thought of it, “Children’s Exploitation Theater.” I’m sure the goal is to model to parents how to teach their kids and to give the kids a sense that they have a real place in the main service, but there’s also that sense of romanticized youth where the leader repeats the cute little answers to his or her theological questions and the audience laughs and thinks how wonderful is the world of the child. Of course, even if you’re a cynic it is still very funny, and even if you’re a cynic it serves to remind you what it means to “be ye like little children.” The kids came back later in the service to sing a song which, much to our surprise, did not sound like a bunch of street urchins singing for alms but actually showed signs of training and practice.
Today’s church brought in a brass band and had a pretty quality choir sing a number of cantata-type pieces. They also had a kids’ choir, but they sounded like you expect kids to sound. The funny thing here was how no one was sure whether it was okay to clap after any of the musical pieces, though they were all so impressed that they very much wanted to.
Presbyterians around here seem to value a highly-crafted sermon delivered in a voice in imitation of Abe Lincoln. The ministers get up in their pulpits and speak slowly and soberly, full of the gravitas of their position. Often they compose their sermons with an eye to a combination of narrative and poetry that, though appreciated, can often sound merely antiquated as opposed to truly lofty. No doubt it is difficult to be truly lofty these days of increasing irony. That is to say, the idea of a high style seems to rely on a notion of something grander than the individual, something universal, even transcendent. Even those of us who believe in the transcendent feel less comfortable making claims about its nature, and therefore the “lower” style of informal speech often suits us, since it has more the tincture of personal opinion, belief, and experience. Furthermore, one needs to feel that a high style has its own merit and use it as such if it is to come off properly; its authority cannot come merely from its “sounding old.”
I’m finding it interesting to note how unsatisfying the familiar evangelical-type “contemporary” worship has been for me lately. I’m not prepared to make any prescriptive claims about the natures of the two, but at least for the moment, when we’re churchless and far from friends, traditional liturgies connect us to something larger than the people in the building, i.e., the tradition of worship, whereas evangelical services seem to work best when one feels a part of that community. Moreover, traditional liturgies do not base worship on feeling in the same way; rather, they emphasize participation as a kind of minimal virtue, as good enough if you don’t feel you can do more. And now, having written that, I smirk at myself, for it is humbling—as I think it ought always be—to realize how much one has changed.
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