Sublimation?

Everything runs together. Do you know I’ve had to listen to liturgical songs because of you? But this time it wasn’t the Eucharistic ones. I don’t know what I’m talking about. So far. And then more. So it is. So I hope in the eschaton.

Reverent Drumming

There is Middle Eastern drumming that you can use for worship because it doesn’t sound like belly dancing:

The reason I’m mentioning this is just to show something with a drum that still has a sense of reverence and God’s heavenly otherness while also connoting a kind of intimacy that isn’t the same as love ballads. It’s clearly possible, because the Old Testament mentions percussion instruments in worship. Whatever music we write now for worshipping God, I think should aim for at least these things.

A lot of what I hear about God, whether in music or in words, makes God out to be something that demands only as much respect as a product of my imagination – and if it’s a product of my imagination, I am God over it. This is a problem that we have to remedy by talking about God according to what his revelation emphasizes about him.

Enough is Enough

Come now, am I not American because I have critical words to say about America? Then how is it that people can say I’m less Chinese for saying critical things about China?

I’m thoroughly sick and tired of being irrationally judged this way.

Finally, pick a better day than the Fourth of July to make accusations like this, whether they’re implicit or explicit, even online. Good night.

Uncool, Unbeholden

The Church is despised in the eyes of society for not paying honour to its idols. Get over it: the early Church was despised for the same when she refused to offer adoration to the Caesar of many lands, when she refused to mould the Kingdom of God to the kingdom of this world, when she proclaimed a God who became a man and was despised and flogged and crucified. Ecce homo! Ecce homines qui eum sequuntur!

And the despised way of truth has nothing to do with finger puppet triviality or saccharine songs (in lyrics and music both) or irrational fideism or contrived ‘revivals’. These, after all, are only stupid excesses that are rightly held in dishonour. No, behold the power of consuming fire from heaven that isn’t tamed into revivalistic sentimentality but burning as a gladsome but fearsome light; behold the Body and Blood of Christ taken, through faith, in the Eucharist as angels shield their eyes from the intensely holy sight; behold the Spirit-led Church described by Dionysius:

[The Christians] showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains.

I’m convinced that the Church, who has the Holy Spirit, and through him Christ, needs no manipulation to be added to the holy and inspired word and sacraments and discipline that it has received from God, but we need only this instruction in the Lord. Then we, pondering nothing earthly-minded, with fear and trembling, may prostrate ourselves before the Lord of Hosts without regard for what is perishing, hoping instead for the lovely city promised to us.

Art in Church

A meeting-house (church building) is not a lecture hall but a place set apart for the purpose of God meeting his people in worship. So why do so many of them look like a lecture hall?

Whither gone are the frescoes, the mosaics and the stained glass windows picturing things that edify? I walk into most meeting-houses and feel something missing in this Gnostic iconoclasm. We, followers of Christ, aren’t Muhammadans: we adore a God who became flesh, the eternal Word who dwelt among us as a man and even now sits in heaven as a man. We believe in the redemption of things visible as well as invisible.

I’m so glad at least that at CFC I have a cross to look at when we pray. Still, I always wonder about the possibility of a dome with a Christos Pantokrator (Christ Almighty) image at the very top, because God tells us to lift up our hearts and hands to him in supplication (Lam 3.40–66). No one will imagine that this is more than seeing in part, but we long for the coming of our Redeemer to make his Bride whole, just as the bride longs for the groom to come in the Song of Songs. And we cry out:

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace.

For this is the way that God has poured out his power upon the earth until the Last Day.

We await the blessedness of the heavens to be brought to earth in Christ with his return as we eat his meal, and we behold the glory of the Only-Begotten before its coming. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed in spite of the blackness of our sinful hearts and lips; like a coal, Christ’s Body touches our lips and makes them speak. May we see in anticipation pictures of cherubim and seraphim covering their faces before the fiery love and holiness of the living God.

Pictures aren’t just for the illiterate – though, to be honest, many of us are much less literate than we think. They represent the biblical language before our eyes for the day when we see the real thing. In so doing, church art teaches us, not by logic merely but by beauty, what the standard of beauty is.