Words of wisdom from my eldest son:
"mum, some of the best worship times I've had are when things don't go quite as planned, you never know some of those compliments may have been true,and people may have got something out of it, maybe not quite what you intended but God has some funny ways sometimes..."
And posts from other bloggers such as Graham Peacock and Peter Banks along with questions raised here by my friend Helen about substance and depth in worship have got me thinking about the hour or so of time that some of us pour so much energy into every week. We call it worship, and I guess that that is what we turn up to do, hoping that others will join us and that what we have prepared will lift them and inspire them in some way, and hoping that somehow we have heard from God and that he is present with us in this time that we have dedicated and set apart....
I blogged yesterday about a service where I forgot some of the elements and feel that I waffled rather than facilitated, but I have to acknowledge that Paul is right, God uses our mess so many times, and Helen is right we need depth and substance more than we need perfection and empty though well produced ( sometimes) songs!
I can relate to Helen and Graham's experiences with worship songs, the feeling that there is somehow nothing in them or to them at times, and I have been there in the Spring Harvest Big Top struggling to understand what all the hype and excitement is about ( in fact we decided a few years ago not to go back). If I am honest I find that I worship best when I can loose myself in "wonder love and praise" and that may not be in church at all, it might be walking on a beach or climbing a hill, it might be watching a film when a phrase or a scene grabs me and transports me to another place, it might be listening to music; it often is.
I can clearly remember an amazing experience driving home from dropping my son Jon at Uni in Lancaster, traveling along the M62 in the dark, it was snowing and I was listening to the Bach Double, there was something about the dark and the snow combined with the music that made my car a holy place for a while. Other music/ driving experiences also stick in my mind; listening to the Killer "Human", and to Coldplay's "Fix You" have at other opened a window to worship...
Other times include sitting on the sea wall at Snettisham in Norfolk and watching the sun set over the Wash, listening to the birds and the sound of the waves on the shore, and recognising that the thing rising within me is worship and allowing that worship to flow ( yes if you were there I was the mad woman singing gibberish on the sea wall)... and experiencing silence in a room filled with people who were all waiting on God during a retreat. Sometimes it can be as simple as catching a smile on someones face...
So I am left with the question of how to capture something of those moments and translate them into the hour or so a week that we set aside ( and yes I lead more than one act of worship each week). I think that expectation has huge amounts to do with this, but it should not be an expectation that we place upon ourselves but rather an expectant seeking for God, the trouble with our set aside hour is that it is simply that, and if we start to prepare we might find that we need to prepare to prepare and get ourselves into the same mess as my friend the Archdruid Eileen did with a whole raft of pre- and post worship gatherings.
The answer I think is simple, and it is not new, we should live lives of worship, our eating sleeping and walking around lives should be offered to God in the same way that we offer our Sunday mornings/ Wednesday evenings to him. We should allow ourselves to be touched by those unexpected Holy Moments and we should treasure them, and dare I say it talk about them...
There is much talk about the spiritual age that we live in, and an acknowledgment that we need to make connections somehow, I truly think that freeing ourselves from the hour time slot and owning our innate spirituality and humanity might just be the way forward....
