On dancing to that which you don't understand

Worship leaders at Emmaus. July 2014.

Ministry is filled with these moments of wondering how you got there – like, not in a million years, when I was in school or whatever, would I have conceived of standing in this place doing this thing.

So I found myself standing in a pulpit in Emmaus on Sunday morning getting my groove on - my beat dropped, so to speak.

When ‘us whites’ were training for the ministry we went through some of the embarrassing, egotistical nonsense that most people go through when they are forced to engage with something that they are not wishing to engage with. In this instance it was singing in an African language; we would all gather for morning worship and some person would strike up a Zulu/Xhosa/Sotho hymn or chorus and all the vernacular-speaking Africans would stand and begin to sway and groove and bend down and stand up and wiggle arms and point to the sky and then to the ground and then back to the sky and continued with what, to the untrained English ear, sounded like a drone; always somebody would be banging a hymnbook. Always there were loads of smiles and, if the song ran long enough, a lot of sweating.

You have to understand, this was a strange thing for us; most of us had not witnessed movement and song like this since our youth, when we formed a train and wove through the tables to Kylie’s ‘Do the Locomotion’ after a particularly rowdy wedding reception - this however, was the middle of the day, and these people were sober. (Not unlike Pentecost, come to think of it.)

Well, when English is your language (and the global lingua franca) and you don’t understand a word of what is going on, that just will not do. So some of us stood, still as statues, hands in pockets (if we stood at all) - a gentle, but not so subtle protest against this Godforsaken, unintelligible noise that presented itself as an assault against the senses.

You know, just as Jesus would have us do.

But then a strange thing began to happen: when I stopped protesting against the horrendous injustice of worship that was not in my style and in a language that I did not understand, (although the twenty three years under my belt in this country would suggest I had been afforded the time to learn) when I stopped all that, I kind of enjoyed what I was hearing and feeling.

There is something strange about this awkwardly big Irish body of mine: it loves a beat. I cannot be around a beat without at least one of my feet presenting itself as eager to be included in the rhythm. A foot starts bouncing, then the bottom half of the leg, then the upper half, then the hips then the torso – with a really good beat, the only part of my body I have control of is my head. Well, as much as I have control of this disproportionately large head of mine - and that's tenuous at best.

 

So on Sunday, while in the pulpit, my beat drops. The choir begins to sing Nkosi Yam. It starts gently enough, it always does, but then someone in the choir gets their groove on and begins to move forward, tiptoeing a little (you see, we’re only beginning to get our groove on). The choir then joins the move. Before you know it everyone is in on the act, moving forward to this central point and then out – waves of movement ebbing and flowing. Those who aren’t up front are thrusting hips backwards and forwards in the cheap seats.

And I’m in the pulpit, jiving. I think I look okay but I have seen video footage of myself dancing and so I know better.

But it stops me not at all.

Now this is the thing: I don’t understand a word of the song; they could be harmonising about the power of a particular washing detergent for all I know; I could be dancing along to a political anthem of a party not of my choosing and I’m doing it with glee on my face. (Like the time I was going nuts at a club in my early twenties to an awesome new song only to finally realise that I was the only guy getting ‘jiggy with it’ on a dance-floor full of women, and then realising the words to the song were, ‘It’s raining men’.)

But I’m trusting my church and its leaders.

What I have found is this: in worship, you don’t always have to know what is being said. You don’t always have to engage on a cognitive level. There is a scene in the movie While You Were Sleeping. The family are all enjoying Mass at Christmas. The old lady, Elsie, looking nonplussed and a little irritated, looks at the priest up front and remarks, ‘I like Mass better in Latin. It's nicer when you don't know what they're saying.’

Touché.

So I danced Sunday away and normally when repetition makes me want to lose the will to live I find myself thinking, ‘Yes I know, we’ve sung the chorus to Nkosi Yam forty seven times – and I haven’t got the words right yet - but let’s continue! We’re in touching distance of fifty!’

It’s bizarre to think of my attitude now compared to then. When I first worshipped in a traditionally black African church I watched these guys bending down, tiptoeing forward, and sometimes casting walking sticks to the heavens – a mass worship movement just a few wellingtons short of a full-on gumboot dance. I would look around incredulously, laughing to myself and thinking, ‘This is insane! Anybody else not noticing how ridiculous this looks?!’

Now I stand in the pulpit wishing the beat-bag was mine and longing for a whistle to blow. Bouncing around up and down and every now and then, by God’s good grace, actually matching the rhythmic swell of all the other worshippers around me.

You haven’t truly worshipped in this country until you have learned to love much of what you may never fully understand. For there is one thing this beautiful country will offer you over and over and over again and that is countless opportunities to simply let go.

On being profoundly profoundly deep

"And Jesus said unto a group of theologians, 'Who do you say that I am?'

And they replied, 'You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being,

the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our interpersonal relationship.'

And Jesus said: 'What'?"

I love that story. Possibly because it is borderline inappropriate – after all no one likes their Jesus looking like he’s a little slow to catch on. But I like it because it reminds us not to over-egg the pudding with the gospel.

There is a strong argument for keeping things simple.

A number of years ago, when I was a young minister in this church, I remember being quite beguiled by one of the ministers who had a widely celebrated command of the English language and was seen by some as being a bit of a spiritual guru.

He had this knack of saying something with all the angst of the point of his message visibly displayed - he would bend over slightly, curl his hands and his body into himself, much like I would imagine someone imitating ‘pain of new birth’ in an interpretive dance routine. And his points were often full of angst, so he was often in this position and he used words that were difficult to define, hard to pin down – words that left me back in Grade Five wanting to put up my hand to ask, ‘What on earth do you mean?” but feeling like the village idiot in doing so, yet holding to this gnawing suspicion that perhaps I’m not the only one who carried on straight when the speaker took a left turn. So while mid-fold, in an agonising last ditch attempt to get this Herculean point across, he exclaimed, ‘”This is meaningfully, meaningfully deep.” Another minister, close to retirement age himself and thus less beguiled by the wisdom of the elder, who to him was simply a peer – Guru? Please! He’s just Jimmy from back in Seminary, we almost failed Greek together! He would’ve if he hadn’t copied my notes… – and someone very close to me, let out an harrumph and repeated that phrase ‘meaningfully, meaningfully deep’ with such disdain I half suspected that he might just spit it out on the floor next to him.

 

That got me thinking: what is the difference between ‘meaningfully, meaningfully deep’ and say, ‘deeply, deeply meaningful’ or, ‘meaningfully meaningful’ and ‘deeply deep’? I mean, when is it appropriate for the language police to haul your sorry butt off to a holding cell for citing deliberate obfuscation of a fairly simple point or rampant abuse of an innocent, unsuspecting adverb? (And should I be hauled off for using ‘obfuscation’ when say ‘confusion’ would do?)

Because sometimes we as ministers do this, we make things unnecessarily confusing. I once quoted Homer in a sermon, which was not that unusual considering Classical Civilisations was my major at University, but it was met with some confusion. After the service one congregant remarked that he had heard of Homer and Bart, heck even Marge, but was not aware any of them had contributed to some kind of epic story called The Odyssey or The Iliad. And come to think of it, if I was quoting Homer, why wasn’t my quote, you know, funnier? (In this same sermon I meandered through an illustration about Alexander the Great leading my father to remark, ‘Well son, good point, but did it need to be six minutes long?’ leading to a frustrated, ‘Well dad, if people are going to get to the crux of the point, they need a working knowledge of the reasons leading to the Siege of Halicarnassus. Duh.’) The sermon just after this I felt compelled to use the words omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent all in the same prayer – not completely sure, at that time, what any of those words really meant; yip, I’m a slow learner.

And maybe this too is a lesson to any preacher, actually any leader: just because it is interesting to you, does not make it interesting to everybody.

I think there is a balance here. On one hand the gospel is very simple, its truth a glistening, honest, beautiful thing whose simplicity and earthy truthfulness sparkles so enticingly that anyone, even a child, can get a grip on it. But then your journey begins and questions come and simple things segue into more complex things and answers become more questions, and black and white fade to grey; and importantly language is stretched and pulled to breaking point, and words are sent around swirling to give some form to this mystery.

For God is mystery and sometimes words fail us entirely.

I have this habit of remembering things other ministers say; well not everything they say as ministers are by-and-large a rather talkative lot - but insightful things, things that are offered sometimes off-the-cuff and hit me as so profoundly (profoundly?) true that immediately my cerebellum fuses and those words stick in my brain like gum to the bottom of a primary school desk, immovable.

One minister said, “You know, I don’t care for simplicity on this side of complexity that is nothing to me, but simplicity on the other side of complexity, that is a remarkable thing.” A remarkable thing indeed; only I’m not one hundred percent sure what he means.

So I’ll give a shot at what I think it means: I think you can sit with questions. I think you can wonder through the existential maze and sit with a book that insists you open the Dictionary.com window to help you navigate your way through, yet you can still hold to a faith that is beautiful and true, joyous and adventurous, illuminating and inspiring, and by all accounts, quite simple.

That faith that anyone can hold to, even a child.

In some ways I am nowhere near where I used to be. In other ways I love Jesus just as much as I always have, and for exactly the same reasons: Jesus gives my life meaning, Jesus has always given my life meaning, is just that my definition of what meaning is has changed.

This is probably a warning; I see it in religious people. I see it in myself. Sometimes our words, our theology, our immense learning, these can become red herrings, making ourselves seem more important than we are or constructing a purpose beyond what is necessary. So much of what we read in academic circles really falls into the category: who cares? You will find that category after: what do you mean? And right before: who thinks this stuff up? These are all sub-categories under the broader major category: Huh?

I speak this as a lover of learning and one deeply committed to furthering tertiary studies, but you can ask any student, one of our greatest fears nibbling at the back of our minds is that nobody will read this advanced thinking beyond ourselves and maybe some ageing professor in a backwater college with an egg stain from the forties on his tie and sporting a wicked comb-over. And of course, our Supervisor who is paid to read it.

Of course all this learning does have its use – academia makes us better thinkers and we are perilously short of those; it is fruitful. Of course. But just find application for it and simplicity beyond it.

At another retreat, as ministers were sharing, one minister spoke of that particular frustration any preacher feels; he had spent the whole week analysing, praying through and preparing a text for Sunday. Never before had a text been excavated to such depth. He stood to preach believing he had unearthed this wonderful truth only to look up and find one guy sitting in the front pew, as fast asleep as a child after a bed-time reading – snoring lightly, pleasant look on his face; so sound asleep was he that, had he been laid on his side, he could have been cut- and-pasted into a mattress commercial. Ask any preacher - that is about as soul-destroying as it can get.

And so it goes.

So, the next time you are sitting in church and the preacher (possibly me) is boring you to death and you’re losing the will to live and you’re on a very dry descent into Dullsville please just remember one thing: you worship a God who is wonderfully, wonderfully loving and who calls you in turn to be lovingly, lovingly wonderful.

On peace being upon us all

Aya Sofya

I attended an Inter-Faith gathering on Friday night, which was interesting. We were an eclectic mix of the world’s religions: some Muslims, a Hindu-looking guy, a Buddhist – I presume, dressed as he was in flowing orange and looking very peaceful – a couple of Atheists, an Agnostic or two; it was difficult to know exactly where everyone stood on life, love and everything else as we weren’t sporting team colours or name-tags denoting our positions. We were however gathered loosely in religiously (or non)-affiliated clusters.

But as always, the conversation was stimulating. At one point Atilla, a Muslim friend of mine (some of my best friends are Muslim…), referred to the Prophet Mohammed as, ‘Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him’. I was responding to this and said Prophet Mohammed, and then I came unstuck: was it okay to say Mohammed alone without, you know, the added phrase? Would it be rude to just say Mohammed? Would it be like someone coming up to me and referring to my Saviour Jesus as ‘ol’ J.C.’? So, in the moment (forgive me, in robust inter-faith conversations, you’re working with fractions of a second to get your thought out) I said, ‘Mohammed, peace be upon him’. I was a little shocked that I said this. It sounded a bit too Islamic. 

I don’t know if I just had not noticed or if my confusing remark started a bit of an avalanche but then others started saying, ‘Peace be upon him,’ so much so that there seemed to be an awful lot of peace now flying around the room, and rather disconcertingly attaching itself to all sorts of different kinds of people. One man, until this moment a rather confident-seeming atheist, referred to Gandhi and then, like with me, hesitated wobbled and then said, ‘Peace be upon him.’ Actually he didn’t say that, he tried to say that but said instead, ‘May the peace of…’ and then rather trailed off, realising there was no good way for an atheist to end that particular sentence. And then I thought to myself: But Gandhi is a Hindu? He isn’t a prophet is he? A holy man for sure but… Is he a holy man or just ‘above average’ spiritually? He needs a miracle to be saint though, isn’t that right? Or is that just a Catholic thing? ... Who decides these things anyway?

And so it goes.

Then Atilla did a rather strange thing: he said ‘Jesus, peace be upon him’. Now one of the first, and rather surprising, things a newbie will learn in inter-faith dialogue is that Muslims hold Jesus in high esteem, as a prophet. So he too gets the phrase, ‘Peace be upon him.’ I found this rather offensive; I felt like saying to Atilla, ‘But Jesus is ours so stop making him sound so, I don’t know, Muslim-y. Just Jesus will be fine!’ Sporting an attitude the equivalent of a petulant child jumping up and down demanding a slow-to-arrive sweetie. I might have said this except the exceptionally smart Catholic had only minutes earlier reminded us Christians that Jesus was in fact not Christian but Jewish and that he had in fact not come to start a new religion; this is true, but unnerving. (As a colleague reminded me as I recounted this conversation, with Jesus not being Christian and John Wesley not being Methodist, it’s very hard for us Methodists to know exactly where we stand.) Inter-faith debates go like this. The ground begins to wobble beneath your feet and if you’re not careful you will lose your balance.

A few days later, while listening to Atilla present on Inter-Faith, he spoke of the prophets – and the prophets we have in common; his slide had the names of the prophets followed by an acronym, PBUTA. I wasn’t sure what that meant till I heard Atilla say, ‘Peace be upon them all’. I realised this was a catch-phrase for all prophets. I suppose religious reverence would soon give way to godless tedium if each prophet demanded a repeat of that phrase every time their name was used.

But I liked that: Peace be upon them all.

And maybe we just extend that a little bit: Peace be upon us all.

Or maybe we can just shorten it: Peace.

When Atilla was preparing to give his talk I said, ‘See you Monday.’ He said, ‘Hopefully’. I looked blankly at him, then blinked. ‘No, not hopefully, definitely. We’re on. It’s been advertised. People are coming. You’d better be there!’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I thought ‘hopefully’ was the correct English translation of ‘Inshallah’?’

‘No, I don’t think so. My Arabic is a little rusty but if ‘Inshallah’ means I could possibly make it but there’s a good chance something else might come up, then yes that is a good translation, otherwise not so much. Doesn’t ‘Inshallah’ mean ‘God-willing’?’

‘Okay then. See you Monday night, ‘Inshallah’.’

When Monday was finished I was saying goodbye to Atilla and his colleague Abdul, who lately has been everywhere Atilla is sporting always a smile, saying never a word. (He is a deeply helpful young man though silent as the grave.) I had neglected to give Atilla a gift for his presentation that evening and was arranging a coffee during the week to hand a gift over.

I said, ‘I’ll phone you mid-week and arrange to see you Thursday?’

Abdul looked at Atilla then looked at me and spoke only the second sentence I had ever heard him speak: ‘Hopefully,’ he said, sporting a smile so broad it made him float.