Summer Seminar 2012 | Keeping Time/Life Passages
by Dorothy Bass
For a week in June 2012, a group of pastors, musicians, lay leaders, students, and faculty explored together a mystery that many people would rather ignore: the mystery of life in time. Pondering the passage of time opens big questions about the vast span of cosmic time and the temporary place of human beings within it, about the rhythms of the natural world and the seasons of our physical existence. Facing this mystery also challenges us to reflect on the changes time brings and to ask what past legacies and future promises frame our responses to the present moment. At the same time, considering time’s passage calls us back to our clocks, our desks, our computers, directing our attention to the everyday pressures that overwhelm many Americans in this rushed and wired society.
The Congregation Project’s summer seminar was based on two convictions. The first is that the worship, music, and other artistic expressions of the church, though themselves fleeting and temporal, can and do help contemporary people to find abundant life amid the uncertainties of time. Christian worship follows patterns that give shape to time, and it also interprets and lifts up in prayer such temporal passages as birth, maturation, marriage, and death. By embracing and shaping the flow of time in certain ways, Christian worship, music, and art provide opportunities to notice God’s presence and ask for God’s blessing. Those who plan, lead, and participate in the song and prayer of the church necessarily wrestle with questions of rhythm, tempo, pace, and change, both within worship and in relation to nature, society, and culture.
The second basic conviction was this: It is in congregations—local gatherings where people gather to worship God in specific contexts at particular moments in history—that the church’s wisdom about time actually takes on flesh. Congregations are the focal places where ancient resources, venturesome faith, and thoughtful contemporary creativity converge to give rise to worship, music, and art that glorify God and bear fruit for worshipers and their neighbors. Congregations are always making judgments about time and the changes time’s passage brings, and how they shape and share time is crucial to shaping the character of their life in and for the world. This influences how a community coheres, or not; it determines how people meet life’s passages, or not, and how they learn attentiveness to God, creation, and others, or not. Christian worship takes time: exactly sixty minutes in some places, beginning and ending with astonishing precision, and hours longer elsewhere. But Christian worship also—sometimes, by God’s gift and the Spirit’s presence—takes time and transforms it. In the process, those who worship God are sometimes transformed themselves.
Therefore projects developed by eight congregations were at the center of the week’s program, each chosen because it represented a thoughtful and visionary effort to address the theme of “Keeping Time / Life Passages.” Each congregation sent a musician, a pastor, and a lay leader (often a graphic artist) to participate in the seminar, which also included eight students and a handful of faculty members. [place list of congregations and their projects here or alongside this text, using links to more info as you think best] In discussing the projects, we sought together to articulate and deepen what each might offer in its own context, and also to ask what other congregations might learn from it and how this might be shared. Faculty members facilitated the discussions and offered perspectives from their fields of study, but each session also drew on the theological, artistic, and pastoral knowledge of other congregational teams. The result was a rich conjunction of different perspectives and forms of knowledge. It included the understanding of tempo and rhythm that resides in the hands and feet of a good organist, or in a pastor’s sixth sense about how much change a congregation can absorb in a limited period. It emerged in language—in scripture, hymn texts, literature, liturgical texts—that is, in the many words that clothe our experience of time with meaning, words that foster specific ways of responding to life’s passages and enable us to talk with one another about the things that matter most. Insight came through art, through prayer, through silence. From sources ancient and new, we sought the practical wisdom that might best serve each congregation in developing its project after it returned home.
The human need to live well amid time’s pressures is a real and urgent one. Naming this need with clarity and vigor and becoming adept in receiving and offering to others the gifts the church has to offer is likewise urgent. The projects and the conversation that developed around them manifested just such urgency. One congregational team wanted to help other congregations teach children the ecclesial arts in order to deepen their conscious and active participation in the liturgical year. One was laying plans to offer respite and renewal to time-stressed families in a busy urban neighborhood, while another was especially eager to develop worship that overcomes generational divisions.
Although the conversation was infused with confidence that congregations can embrace time and the changes it brings in ways that come as good news to this time-troubled world, it was also clear that worry about time was strong among participants, just as it is elsewhere in society. One congregation’s proposal included this moving lament: “As our days lose their boundaries, melting into each other without distinction, we lose the narrative thread of our lives and a sense of meaning in our relationships… . We suffer from an idolatry of occupation that confers worth on the basis of work, in the process excluding the unemployed, the retired, the working poor. We profess with our lips a grace that we don’t reflect in our lives.” This honest confession was accompanied by a yearning for renewal, a deep desire to find a better path.
While confident that practices of shaping time inherited from the past offer much help and hope in present circumstances, we also noted that renewal does not lie along the path of simple appropriation, for such practices are about far more than time. They are about God and about an entire way of life lived in response to God. In strengthening attention to the flow of the liturgical year, one congregation sought also to attend closely to creation’s seasons as part of a commitment to addressing environmental damage caused by human abuse. When the worship of the Triune God is our duty and desire, the field of play expands, and connections abound. For example, a need for rest might lead us to try to practice Sabbath more fully—but once we get started, we’ll discover that we’ve been drawn into love for God’s good creation and recruited as opponents to slavery in all its forms. The need to alter musical rhythms to accommodate a change in liturgical texts might appear at first to be a compositional challenge, but it will lead before long into questions of what it means to worship God in spirit and in truth. Moreover: when the worship of the Triune God is our duty and desire, everything that is predictable is sooner or later overturned. What we expected to meet at the end of life—death—now becomes the beginning of life in Christ, as each new Christian is baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection. And then, at our most crucial moments, ordered time eludes us completely. “In our encounters with the dying,” the Lake Chelan team wrote, “time collapses. The ‘distant’ future of our own death visits our present moment. Hope of future life in Christ becomes one with the present body of death.”
Throughout the seminar, we remembered the members, neighbors, and concerns of our own congregations and the different ways in which issues related to time affect them, and to be aware that such issues affect every congregation. We persistently attempted to
- Visualize the range of generations—the mixing of younger and older, the separation of younger and older, the beautiful cross-generational encounters, the disappointing generational imbalances.
- Remember those whose days are empty due to unemployment, bereavement, or disability.
- Remember those who labor too long and earn too little, within the congregation or for the benefit of your members, working at tough, low paid jobs that are hidden from view.
- Hold in prayer those who know that their lives are drawing to an end, and also those who do not have long to live but do not know that yet.
- Visualize the faces and voices of those who struggle with change in and around each parish, and also the faces and testimony of those who are ready to be thoughtful partners in engaging change.
- Remember and celebrate the moments when joy has in fact taken hold of our congregations—when a strong, grounded rest in God has settled in among them, surprising people with time out of time.
- Notice the moments when chronos, clock time, gives way to kairos, a fullness of time in communion with God.