What’s “worship” for?

I learned last month during my first Pilates classes that many of my muscles have atrophied.

There was nothing in my daily habits that prepared me for Pilates’ demands.  I have loading wheelchair muscles, carrying groceries muscles, and walking the dog muscles. But Pilates showed me that I don’t have a uniformly strong core–the muscles that I will need for the next 40 years of my life.

This morning I listened to the New Epiphany Revival from this past weekend’s UUA General Assembly, and a lightbulb went on about the purpose of this thing we most often call “worship.”

Worship is like Pilates.  It challenges the parts of us left unused by our daily habits.  It strengthens our core, so that we can fulfill our life’s purpose with energy and vitality.

Some of us spend most of our week reading and thinking, and we need lively worship, full of music and dancing, opportunities to use our heart rather than our minds.  Others of us haven’t had much quiet time, or much thinking time, and we come to worship with those needs.

A congregation’s worship services need balance.  As much as possible, worship planners consider the diverse needs of those who might attend, and create services that shift smoothly between various states of mind, body and heart.

This way of thinking about “worship” makes me realize again how much the word “worship” doesn’t work for me.  Even the etymological gymnastics of following its meaning to its root, “weorthscipe,” (ascribing worth) leaves me cold.

When I go to the Anchorage UU Fellowship on Sunday morning, I’m not there to ascribe worth to anyone or anything (though we may do that).  I’m there to stretch and strain and expand into the full range of human experience and expression.  I’m there to think and sing, to dance and mourn, to rage and lament, to celebrate, laugh and rejoice.

After Pilates class, for the rest of the day I have what I call “jelly belly.”  Any action that calls on my atrophied abdominal muscles gives me signals that those muscles are still there, and coming back to life.

What if, every Sunday afternoon, our souls felt like jelly?  What if, for days afterward, we felt signals that parts of ourselves were coming back to life?  And what good work might we do in the world, with all those resurrected soul muscles?

 

A hat tip to Iris DeMent

You ever had a bit of lag time on a life lesson?

This past Sunday I spoke at the Anchorage UU Fellowship’s 9 a.m. Forum.  I was talking generally about non-theistic spirituality, and the title of my talk was “Reason and Reverence, Meaning and Mystery.”

A few weeks back at our other service, a folk-singing member sang a song called, “Let the Mystery Be.”  It was light, a little bit funny, and sounded to me like a great intro to my Forum presentation.

And it was.  Three other musical members of the fellowship did a wonderful job, people laughed, and enjoyed the live music (which doesn’t usually happen at the Forum).

As the applause died down and I was resuming my seat on the daïs, John B. (another member) called out that the songwriter was Iris DeMent.

I made a flip comment, an easy joke about growing up in a fundamentalist bubble and knowing nothing about music, and moved on.  People laughed, of course, because joking about fundamentalists is a too-easy target in a largely humanist UU setting.

After the service John B. came up to me, and with an earnestness I noticed but didn’t understand, spoke to me again about Iris DeMent.  ”You were careful to credit everyone you quoted in your talk,” he said.

I was a little brain fried.  Happens when introverts play extroverts in public.  I didn’t get it.

But the intensity of his tone stayed with me, and when my brain-cramp relaxed, I began to think about what he said.

Yes, I did grow up in a fundamentalist bubble.  Yes, that does contribute to my musical ignorance.

But I don’t need to nurture that ignorance, and protect that bias.  Part of honoring the worth and dignity of every person is giving credit to musicians as much as ministers and theologians.

It took me a while, but consider the lesson learned.  Thank you, John.

LTLT #4: I Brought My Spirit to the Sea

“I Brought My Spirit to the Sea” is not on the list of hymns with which the Anchorage UU Fellowship is familiar, but it should be.

Our fellowship, like many UU congregations, has a large contingent of nature mystics.  If you ask what is sacred to them, their answer will be some variation on “being outside in nature.”

We are also an activist congregation, and the last verse of the hymn speaks to that sensibility.  It reminds us that we cannot spend all of our days in solitary contemplation.  We also need to rise “from bended knee to meet the asking years.”

I didn’t find an audio versions of the tune (Jacqui CM) online, so I brought my rudimentary keyboard skills to the task.  The tune is pleasant, and not difficult to play.  Its lilting style lends itself well to the hymn text.  My only quibble is that the last notes of the last line rise, making each verse seem to end with a question mark.

Unfamiliarity with the tune need not discourage congregations from singing this hymn.  Its meter is the aptly named “Common Meter” (the CM in the tune name), and better-known hymn tunes can be used instead of Jacqui.  The text, penned by UU minister Max Kapp, was inspired by time spent at Ferry Beach, a UU camp and conference center in Saco, Maine.  According to Between the Lines, Ferry Beach participants sing this hymn to the tune, “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes.”

Other Explorations of UU Singing

Here are others writing about the UU hymnal and other aspects of UU music.  I’ll update this post as I meet more explorers.

• Unitarian Hymnal Sing-along is among the first results of a Google search for most UU hymn titles.  Kathryn, the blogger, “attempts to sing a different song everyday from the Unitarian Universalist hymnal.”
• Jon Arterton provides a useful hymnal history and user’s manual in a talk simply called “Singing the Living Tradition,” presented at the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown, MA.

LTLT #3: The World Stands Out on Either Side

Some ideas do not come neatly packaged in words, sentences and paragraphs. They arrive in our minds as images, and we struggle to share what we have seen.

Poets frequently encounter this experience. They feel something so big, so deep, that it first forms in their minds as an image, then story, and finally words.

Such an experience must have prompted twenty-year-old Edna St. Vincent Millay to write “Renascence,” the poem that changed her life. Reading its 107 rhyming couplets and trying to glimpse the picture in the poet’s mind, the feeling in her soul, is almost painful.

For someone unfamiliar with Millay’s poem, the third hymn in the UU hymnal, “The World Stands Out on Either Side,” must seem strange indeed, if not incomprehensible.  First included in the 1964 hymnal, “Hymns for the Celebration of Life,” the hymn is made up of eight lines from the end of the poem (but not the final two couplets).

The selection committee for Singing the Living Tradition must have presumed deep familiarity with “Renascence” among Unitarian Universalists, in the same way that Christian churches presume deep familiarity with the biblical narrative.

This hymn is not easy.  Using it in a service would require a great deal of congregational education.  Perhaps a sermon that unpacks “Renascence” could be followed by singing the hymn several weeks in a row, allowing the images and ideas of the poem to sink from the head to the heart.