On the Road to Emmaus » autobiography

Liturgical Explorations – A Prefatory Autobiographical Rumination – (Part 4 – The Last)

Richard — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 07:18:32 +0000

In the course of this now lengthy “autobiographical rumination,” I have traced bits of my personal history and it seems to me that several patterns have emerged:

Observation 1 — A progression of immersion and incorporation of the major streams of Christian tradition, beginning with the evangelical tradition (the Word-centered life) I grew up in, to the charismatic (the Spirit-empowered life), holiness (the virtuous life), contemplative (the prayer-filled life) and finally a rediscovery of the my native evangelical heritage.

Observation 2 — An initial period of excessive myopia and unrighteous judgment towards others on the basis of my new-found discoveries (i.e., judgment towards people who did not “move in the gifts of the Spirit,” or people who didn’t define holiness the way I did).

Observation 3 — An increasing sense of freedom and wholeness and a deepened experience of God and maturity in God as I synthesized the traditions in my life and practice.

I find it ironic that each new phase, though bringing new depth to my life, was also accompanied by new (re-awakened) struggles with insecurity and its cohort pride, fear and judgment. It seems as though each time I launched into something that was both new to me and uncommon amidst my peers it both produced in me a personal feeling of precariousness and isolation and also a ground of uniqueness upon which to stabilize feelings of superiority and the authority to judge others.

It is with excitement over observation number three and sobriety over observation number two that I will begin to share my most recent progression related to observation number one. I have stated earlier that I have been desiring to share some of my experiences over the past year related to “discovering” the richness of the Church’s liturgical traditions. The autobiographical preface was divulged in order to give you a sense of the excitement I am feeling as my life unfolds. My enjoyment in experiencing some of the Church’s historical worship does not of course come in a vacuum, but is for my a logical step in the progression I have been describing, as follows:

(tradition) Evangelical Charismatic Holiness Contemplative Evangelical Sacramental

(age) [0-15] [16-18] [18-19] [19-20] [20-25] [26…]

(year) 1981-1996 1997-1999 1999-2000 2000-2001 2001-2006 2007…

[Of course, I did not formulate these names or concepts myself. Stumbling across Richard Foster’s book Streams of Living Water, in which he describes the six major streams of Christian tradition, has been the interpretive lens I have been utilizing.]

None of this progressive unfolding was planned, but as I have been reflecting on it in the past few weeks my anticipation is budding. Learning about this process has given a unique sense of history to my life so that in this way (amongst other ways as well) I feel like my life is moving somewhere. Additionally, and mysteriously, I feel as though the goal is unknown to me. When I was sixteen and enthusiastically reveling in new experiences of gifts of the Holy Spirit and spontaneous worship I had no idea that at twenty-six years old I would be enthusiastically reveling in new experiences of the Holy Spirit through the sacraments and liturgical worship. Some might immediately point at this as a regression, from being “spirit-filled,” to acquiescing to the “traditions of men [sic].” What is thoroughly hilarious to me is that I do not perceive any of the traditions I’ve experienced in this journey to be contradictory. Neither do I understand myself reaching a higher level of spiritual experience by participating in each new tradition. Rather, the excitement for me comes in the synthetic integration of the traditions in an entire life lived before and out of God. Furthermore, because right now I mostly see merely the components of this synthesis, I do not know what the final result, the synthesized whole, will look like. To me this is thrilling and I am looking forward to the fresh and startling newness that God will ironically work in my life through what is remarkably old.

This raps up my “Prefatory Autobiographical Rumination” in which I hoped to contextualize my liturgical reveling. At this point I’ll just trace out some of the ways I’d like to do this over the comings months. Know that this is of course an outline and by no means represents a comprehensive list, an specific sequence of treatment, or even a fixed plan. Expect changes on the way. With that said I plan to:

1) Give some introductory comments regarding the concept of the Christian Year and the way it sanctifies time by punctuating and defining the rhythms of our lives by the major redemptive works of God in the Messiah: Incarnation, Life, Death, Resurrection, Ascension, Outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
2) Address significant days and seasons of the church year as they come along
3) Provide prayers that correspond to the time of the year. Some of these will be written by others, but I would also like to try my hand at writing some of my own.
4) A discussion of the Great Thanksgiving – a prayer that dates to the second century which is still in essence prayed at the high point of a liturgical service – the Holy Communion.
5) Reflections on praying the Daily Office from the Book of Common Prayer
6) Reflections on the weekly recitation of the entire book of Psalms, a practice which has long been practiced in monastic communities, (Martin Luther being one who did it for decades) and I’ve taken up for the past few months.

Liturgical Explorations – A Prefatory Autobiographical Rumination (Part 3)

Richard — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 07:41:18 +0000

About a year later, ( the most startling thing happened. Through some well meaning but misguided teaching from a few friends at school, I had grown in a somewhat anti-intellectual mindset. I learned to not trust the “wisdom of the world” (understood by me as anything intellectual). Though required to take Bible classes at school I loathed them. I could not find any redemptive value in text-critical study, the Documentary-hypothesis theory, historical-grammatical exegesis, etc. I desperately desired a more pietistic approach to Scripture in which we used it devotionally. At that time, I listened to a lot of sermons-on-tape by a certain preacher. I was mystified by statements he would make about how much he loves to read commentaries for fun, in airplanes, on vacation, etc. It seemed impossible to me that someone “on fire for God” would study the Word in the manner that He did. As puzzled as I was, I decided to do a little experiment. I bought some commentaries, read them and journaled phrases directly from the commentaries into my notebook. I then took those phrases into my quiet time and began to sing, pray and worship God using the Scriptures and the little phrases I had “stolen.”

To my surprise, the more I took ideas from the commentaries and from theology classes into my prayer time, the more my experience of intimacy with God increased and intensified. Phrases that I would have labeled “stale” or “stuffy” wound up moving my heart. Themes I perceived to be “unnecessary” or “distracting,” over time began to tenderize my heart in affection for God. After not very long, I was sold. I changed my major from a Bachelor of Music in Music Composition to a Bachelor of Arts with two majors, one in music (since I already had the credits) and one in Bible. Since then, I have given myself to the diligent study of the Scripture, line-by-line, phrase-by-phrase– not divorced from a heart-felt piety, but right in the fiery center of it. Here I recaptured the passion of my youth and as if for the first time discovered the Evangelical tradition, with its emphasis on the centrality of the Word of God. As peculiar as it seems, though having my origins in Evangelical churches, it took me passage through the Charismatic, Holiness and Contemplative traditions before I unearthed the treasures of that in which I grew up.

One more installment coming…

Liturgical Explorations – A Prefatory Autobiographical Rumination (Part 2)

Richard — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 07:48:40 +0000

(continuing from the last entry…)

Several years later, I enrolled at Houghton College, a Christian (Wesleyan) college in Western New York. During the first week of classes, we had nightly services which were a vestigial form of revival services. On the first evening, the preacher gave a strong call for repentance and total commitment to Christ. I had always loved God and perceived myself to be more committed to God than most of my friends and the people in my youth group, but that night comparing myself to others was woefully insufficient. I wanted to give myself entirely, exhaustively and exclusively to God. When I went forward for the altar call, the Spirit of God gripped me as I knelt there weeping. Through that entire year, I thrust myself into the passages of Scripture that call for repentance, complete abandonment and radical discipleship (e.g., Gospel of Luke, Galatians, minor prophets) as well as the writings of Charles Finney and Leonard Ravenhill. This was my first exposure to the Holiness tradition. Here I learned the thrill of offering myself fully to God. I began to discover a dimension of freedom, from sin and compromise, to love God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength. I cannot claim to have fully attained it then, but it became a burning vision for me. It was something I refused to live without fighting for.

Unfortunately, I fell into some of the snares that lurk around Holiness tradition as well (NB: The terminology “lurk around” is very specific. These snares attempt to capture people zealous for holiness, but are not inherent to the Holiness tradition. They can, however, be a danger if one does not have maturity, balance or wise counsel. I had none of them). I acquired a form of legalism where I gauged holiness by a list of do’s and don’ts and my emotional well-being rode on how well I measured up to it. I lived in constant shame and regret, never believing that I was ever good enough or doing enough for God. I also began to see my form of commitment to Jesus as the standard for everyone else, regardless of their calling and the season of their life. I was again empowered by unrighteous judgment, not over worship styles, but concerning whether I perceived people to be fully devoted to God.

A positive lesson I learned however was the priority of prayer in a believer’s life. I started to hold prayer meetings, for better or for worse, modeled as closely as I could to Charles Finney’s “formula for revival.” Finney taught that one must focus prayer meetings on sin, repentance and judgment. People ought to center their hearts on the horrible state of the church and arouse corresponding deep feelings. Oddly enough, (said tongue-in-cheek) I found very few people interested in attending such meetings. It grieved me even more that people would rather watch TV or play card games than come to my “groaning prayer meetings.” In retrospect, it was probably the grace of God saving them from my goofy distortions of holiness teaching in the Bible.

That summer, while I was home on school break, I devoted the entire three months to learn everything I could about prayer. Charles Finney taught that revival (which I defined as people turning to God out of compromise and into holiness) only happens when people pray. However, in my experience people did not go to prayer meetings. Therefore, I gave myself to learning everything possible, so I would be able to get people to come to prayer meetings and see revival come, specifically to Houghton College, but also to America as a whole. Being a college student with limited financial means, I searched on the Internet for any free resources on prayer I could find. I stumbled upon a website with streaming videos from a prayer conference. The preacher spoke of enjoying prayer rooted in knowing God as the one who loves us even as we work through all our issues of struggle, sin, weakness and immaturity. This was definitely a new idea for me, and one that I did not like. Prayer had to be serious, weighty and cranky (as I perceived Finney to be teaching). It couldn’t be joyful. Furthermore, I thought the speaker was overdoing the “love thing.” “What about sin?” I kept wondering, “Isn’t that important?”

Consequently, the message rather bugged me, but it was free of charge and there were a bunch more on the same website, so I kept listening. After a couple of messages on loosely the same subject, I just broke down crying in front of the computer screen as two shocking realizations hit me: first, that I was called to prayer as my primary occupation and ministry for my entire life; second, that God actually loved me; not the ideal me, not the super-sanctified-image me, but He actually loved actual me. Years of pressure to be more holy than I was and shame for not measuring up to the ultra-high standards I placed on myself (which cannot solely attributed to the teachings of Finney but surely were aided by the perfectionistic mores of my community of origin) came crashing out from a place within me I did not know existed. This all took me as quite a surprise and my heart quickly transitioned from being annoyed and offended to being overwhelmed by the love of God. I was reasonably bewildered by the whole experience and wasn’t sure what had happened. All I knew was that it was God, I really liked it and I wanted more of it.

This was a somewhat shocking introduction to the Contemplative tradition, with its emphasis on deep heart-felt intimacy with the Lord and devotional prayer. Over the course of the next couple of years, I gave myself to studying and meditating on the attributes of God, specifically the relational ones: his love, gladness, mercy, kindness, etc. I spent more time in solitude and quietness not seeking as much to get something from God, but simply to know Him more. In this place, I discovered a dimension of freedom in that I found liberation from a defiled conscience when I came before God through understanding his heart towards me and the person ramifications of the atonement. Holiness was still a vital part of my life, but I began to learn that God’s heart towards me and the atonement, not my personal performance were the basis of my position before God and my relationship with Him. Understanding the love and forgiveness of God just a little bit, lifted enough weight off my heart so that I actually began to enjoy being with God again, similar to my high school days, but now it was deeper, more grounded and more God-centered.

To be continued…

Liturgical Explorations – A Prefatory Autobiographical Rumination (Part 1)

Richard — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 07:54:23 +0000

I have already asserted my desirous intention to share an aspect of my life in God that is quite current, that is, my recent experiential investigations into the rich liturgical tradition of the Church. To begin this ongoing series of accounting and reflection, the contextual situation of my present experience is quite in order. Though I certainly did not plan my current near obsession with the Church’s liturgical tradition, it does come as a logical step in what will soon seem like an apparent progression. To explicate the context and logic of this phase in my life it will be fitting to embark on some autobiographical rumination (albeit, vastly filtered and condensed).

Recently, I have become fond of saying that I have always been “saved.” By that, I am referring to the entire lack in my consciousness of any time I was not a Christian. Although I had repeated experiences in which I “asked Jesus into my heart” from a very young age, in retrospect, they hardly seem like conversion experiences. What was I being converted from? Youthful ignorance? The “selfishness” of a three year old who has no other means of survival than to draw from those around them? The condemnation of an infant with little to no capacity for moral reasoning? While I certainly value and recognize the need for complete allegiance to the lordship of Jesus, I also truly believe that people can be raised Christian. At each expansion of my ability for moral reasoning I was taught and lead by my parents and church leaders to give my heart to God. Of course, this is not excluding the misfortunes of teen years (which I term the Dark Night of Life), nor the ongoing engagement of sanctification. Nevertheless, I maintain that from my earliest memory, I had a conscious, voluntary, heart-felt and growing faith in God. Having set the conception of my spiritual life over twenty-six years ago, I will share portions of my pilgrimage that bear relevance to where I would like to lead this discussion. In doing so, I hope to highlight distinct phases of my life where I discovered and began to value and incorporate aspects of the major streams of Christian tradition.

I was always an odd child, in more ways than one, and in such I remember having an odd fascination with the Bible. My favorite book during childhood was the “Picture Bible,” which essentially was an abridged form of the Bible set as a five hundred page comic-book. When I matured slightly my favorite book became a Bible handbook my parents gave me as a Christmas present. It went through the Bible summarizing each section, explaining the history and background with pictures, timelines, diagrams, etc. I would often get captivated by certain topics, like the Tabernacle, or the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and make “books” about them on construction paper, writing about them, making charts and pictures, much like my Bible handbook. During trips to the library during grade school, my best friend (he being Jewish) and I would find the only few books on the Bible in the school library and check them out. I remember at that time, my grandfather calling me the family’s “young Bible scholar.”

Alas, my youthful zeal for the Word of God dwindled over time. Growing up, schoolwork came rather easily for me and likewise, repeating memorized Bible information was never difficult. As I entered high school, the combination of being both intellectually astute for my age and sincere in my love for God garnered me a reputation of being one of the “more spiritual” members of my youth group, despite unspoken inconsistencies and struggles in my walk with God. It was at this point in my life when I became a serious classical musician and devoted most of my time to musical pursuits, whether that be practicing my instruments, writing music, singing, participating and/or directing ensembles, etc. I grew increasingly bitter and judgmental, as I perceived that the traditional forms of music were the best and only way one should worship. It is amazing that I had such carnal confidence to judge others despite the fact that my own personal life was entirely devoid of vitality in the Scriptures and prayer. My overall boredom with God and spirituality (except for when there was the style of music I liked), lack of private religion and growing struggles with sin only added to the weight of shame and condemnation that energized my judgmentalism in the first place.

Sometime during the tenth grade, on Sunday nights, my parents introduced me to a Methodist church that was experiencing a renewal/revival of sorts, of which they had already been attending intermittently. The church’s style was markedly more expressive and passionate than the variety of staid spirituality with which I had grown up. The music was neither classical nor traditional in genre. I can honestly say I hated it. I thought everyone was crazy and could not understand what was going on. I never really wanted to go, but my parents kept taking me every other week or so. What I remember next is that a couple of months later I completely loved it. I wish I could have retain some of the intervening memories for that would have made this narrative more engaging. I discovered a dimension of freedom in worship that I had not known before. I found it liberating to express my heart to God with all the multifarious emotions it possesses. This was my first exposure to the Charismatic tradition, one of the great streams within the Christian faith. I learned much in those days about the importance of worship and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. We are not as the popular adage goes, “to seek the giver, not the gifts.” Paul exhorts us to “earnestly desire spiritual gives” (1 Cor 14:1), to zealously yearn for them. In addition, the passion and excitement from the worship services and preaching gave me the impetus to begin personal Bible study and prayer (though not always consistently). None of these points were emphasized in my churches growing up and I thank God for what I have learned from the Charismatic tradition.

To be continued…

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