Daily Episcopalian

By Donald Schell

Hanging thirty feet above the ground, I was only half way up the rope. My mind and every muscle in my body pulled up, up to the cliff top. From up there my son and five other pilgrim friends cheered me on. We were climbing this braided leather cord to see Debra Damo, the oldest church and monastery in Ethiopia.

I’d done vertical rappel in a ropes course. This was different - harder because climbing this line was all shoulder and arm work, and harder still because the monastery and church are at 8000 feet altitude,. My whole upper body ached for oxygen. Up on top an old monk and his young helpers drew up the safety line’s slack. They were ready to brace themselves and catch my weight if I slipped, but slipping would turn me into a pendulum weight banging against the cliff. Hand over hand, I pulled my way to the top. And I made it up.

If I’d had any breath left, the view across the mesas and gorges to Eritrea would have had been breathtaking, and yes, the thousand-year-old chapel of a fifteen hundred year old monastery was well worth the climb. But that braided leather line lingers in memory as powerfully as anything we saw at the top. Clinging to it, I looked up to the cliff edge and the sky’s intense blue, felt the rope in my hands, swayed with it, and smelled its long-handled age. Muscle memories fix a wild mixture of fear and excitement, elation and exhaustion. So now a month later, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve told myself that something was ‘hanging by a thread.’

- The future of the Anglican Communion hangs by a thread.
- The U.S. economy hangs by a thread.
- With new work of teaching, consulting, and leading workshops, my priestly vocation hangs by a thread.

Just as the three strands of interwoven flesh - animals’ skins - made a lifeline and a way of ascent, the sixth century Syrian monks who built Debra Damo, despite their fierce asceticism, confidently wove Pleasure, Desire, and Gratitude into a line sturdy enough to carry us up into God’s embrace. Most Christians of that time braided this same line.

In our consumerist culture, and especially in the present financial crisis (which we suspect was brought on by greedy desires and the pleasures and power that money can buy) it won’t be easy to renew the crucial strands of our life line. But who is trying? For a single sermon commending pleasure or desire, we’ve probably heard twenty urging us to give or share because we ‘should be grateful.’ We’re in the grip of fearful Christian thinking from those bitter centuries that came to mistrust pleasure and desire.

The 14th century the Black Plague swept across Europe leaving in its wake a crippling mistrust of human flesh, largely focused in misogyny (why would men sin without a temptress?). As the Western church forced parish priests to put away their wives and live in celibacy, priests and patrons had artisan stone carvers carve the seductive temptress Eve and the horrors of a decaying woman’s body in the grave. Even then, though, there were other voices like Dame Julian of Norwich, who heard Jesus the Word saying that if there was any good thing he could have done to increase her pleasure and delight that he’d have gladly done it.

A few centuries later, Protestant reformers and the Catholic Inquisition furthered Christian mistrust of pleasure and desire. There are many such voices of warning, and a brief piece in the Café can’t re-weave the cord of pleasure, desire, and gratitude, but I can ask us to do the work. I’ll offer some accidental reflections on pleasure and desire and on gratitude, the third line, which makes it possible to braid a single, strong line.

1. Pleasure

“Thou Lord didst make all for thy pleasure,
Did give us food for all our days.”

Some readers will recognize this pair of lines from Francis Bland Tucker’s wonderful 1939 hymn, “Father we thank thee who hast planted.” The English text was brand-new in the 1940 Hymnal and people loved it, so it was kept for the 1989 Hymnal. I like to think that singing congregations’ delight in God’s pleasure contributed to the hymn’s success.

Tucker’s hymn paraphrases the Eucharistic Prayer from the Didache, a Jewish-Christian document from the late first or early second century (so, around 100 A.D.). Leonel Mitchell and Michael Merriman, two friends with many good years of liturgical teaching and practice between them, helped distill my question about who the Didache taught was experiencing pleasure. Lee looked back at the Greek to observe that in the original text God’s creation of all is ‘for his Name’s sake’ while God gave US food and drink ‘for our pleasure.’ And Michael recalled ancient Jewish blessings prayers (and some texts from the Psalms) that thank God for wine that ‘makes our hearts glad.’

Tucker’s neat synthesis for the hymn obscures something the Didache prayer emphasizes, that God gives food for OUR pleasure, so that it’s our pleasure that moves us to give thanks for God’s good gifts to us from the vast world of God’s creation.

My old congregation altered Tucker’s text to synthesize these ideas like this -
“Thou, Lord, didst make all for OUR pleasure.”

And then from pleasure in God’s gifts of food and life, we come to receive and enjoy God’s gift of Christ our true bread, and our pleasure at both moves us to offer awestruck thanks.

As an ex-Presbyterian, I’m tickled (maybe ought to be humbled) to hear my Puritan forebears fearlessly affirming their pleasure in God and creation. Eric Liddell, the ‘flying Scotsman’ who ran in the 1924 Olympics before going to China as a Presbyterian missionary famously said, ‘When I run, I feel God’s pleasure.’ And Liddell was simply echoing graceful wisdom from The Westminster Catechism of 1647, that Presbyterian voice from Cromwell’s England bold teaching that ‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.’

Our pleasure delights God. Both giving us our daily bread and giving us Christ the bread eternal please God because both ordinary bread and Christ our living bread delight and pleasure us. We’re all of us the prodigal welcomed home to a Great Feast in OUR honor and for our pleasure. Receiving God’s vast blessings with pleasure moves us (makes us want or desire) to offer God our thanks. We’re in bolder and more paradoxical territory than ‘It is right to give God thanks and praise.’

2. Desire

‘Whoever does not dance, does not understand what is coming to pass.’- The Acts of John

Gospel scholar Joachim Jeremias in his Unknown Sayings of Jesus, argues that Jesus spoke this challenge in his lifetime. Naturally enough, early Christian liturgies did include congregational dance. The fourth century Easter Troparion—“Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life.”—describes and celebrates Christians’ stomping dance to celebrate Christ’s Resurrection.

But some pastors and theologians feared that the pleasure and desire of dance tipped too easily toward sinful thoughts and whatever else might follow. In fact, like them, we find it hard to receive our bodies and our bodies’ irrational desires gratefully, so after only a few centuries, dance lost its place in Christian worship except in Ethiopia where it remained part of ordinary congregational life. Thank God that Anglican worship in other parts of Africa includes a renewal of drumming and congregational dance.

But speaking my gratitude skips a step. Like many other Episcopalians, I grew up in another church community, one where all dance was reckoned sinful. As it happens, my parents weren’t peddling the line, “we don’t dance.” For them dancing wasn’t a taboo. They admitted they didn’t dance because they’d never learned how and were afraid to begin. They didn’t dance, but they’d rejected their church’s moralism. These two faithful Christians joked about the undifferentiated morass of “don’ts” they’d grown up with in Christian Endeavour – not just no smoking and drinking, and no dancing (because dancing ‘led to other things’), but also no playing cards (not even Old Maid), and no movies or physical labor on Sunday. We didn’t go to movies on Sunday to avoid offending weaker sisters or brothers. My dad was a physician. My parents said they didn’t smoke because of the health risk.

1960. I wince to think of Fridays in junior high school gym class. Friday gym period was a sock hope. Once the girls were in place, their gym teacher would put a 45 record on the turntable, our cue as guys to pad across the polished floor in our socks and ask a girl to dance. ‘I don’t dance’ was not an excuse. ‘You’re here to learn.’ I always crossed the floor as slowly as I could. One day on the other side, I found that fate left the girl who was universally reckoned most desirable of our whole class standing alone against the wall. I approached her cautiously and asked, barely speaking, “May I have this dance.” She grimaced and said, “With you? You’ve got to be kidding.” The gym girls gym teacher insisted she had dance with me. I didn’t die, though I felt like I might.

An intellectual pal who was easy to talk with and only happened to be a girl classmate suggested I put some music on at home and try ‘just wiggling’ in front of a full length mirror. I tried. Even with no one watching, I couldn’t cut loose and wiggle my hips. Sunday School had frozen my hip joints, spine and shoulders. Though I felt stupid, I knew condemning words like ‘profane’ and ‘lewd,’ lay in wait for me if I let the music move my body. I wanted to dance, and I wished my body could hear, but the music drenched my cells in adrenaline for flight.

I first got what I wanted in a high school visit to an Episcopal Church. Hearing the Christian call to prayer, “The Lord be with you,” unlocked my hips and I knelt. My body in that small way was expressing something that mattered to me. The joy at bending knee and hip for prayer was so exhilarating that I refused to hold myself back, so went forward to kneel at the rail to receive communion, even though I wasn’t confirmed and knew I was breaking the rules to receive. This was an altar call I welcomed joyfully.

Finally had desire unlocked what was frozen. Desire hadn’t let me rest, and in the end it moved me to a path I’m still pursuing. Gregory of Nyssa in his Commentary on the Song of Songs says that we are most like God in our infinite desire.

3. Gratitude

‘Give thanks in all things.’
- I Thessalonians 5:18,

In college I discovered folk dancing. Learning each new dance, I still felt like the tin woodman with un-oiled joints, but after several rote repetitions of the stiff-jointed angular movements, music and repetition unlocked my joints, movement flowed. I was dancing. I loved that breakthrough moment when I could feel real dance beginning. Gratitude came with the promise of freedom. For the next dozen years, circle and line dances from around the world offered me a place I could move with music.

When I married Ellen I wanted to live deeper into that freedom and really dance with her. Some shuffling memory from junior high school plus a little bounce from folk dancing at least got us the dance floor. For me, a crowded dance floor felt best. Less visible. One day about eight years after we were married, Ellen and I were at an Episcopal Social Ministries Benefit Tea Dance at San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Hotel. A couples’ elegant ease with big stand style dancing captivated us. They weren’t showy, but they moved together as we wanted to, so when the band took a break, I asked where they’d learned to dance. ‘We teach’ they said. I wrote down time and address and the next Sunday we started ballroom dancing lessons. For three years we hardly missed a week. Week by week for three years, we danced our way to deeper understanding and love. Learning to dance together was as deep as any conversation we’d ever had.

There’s the three braid strand - pleasure, desire, and gratitude. I started this reflection with pleasure. Braiding, each is equally essential. I might have told other stories if I’d begun with desire or gratitude, but once braiding has begun, each is line is important in turn, and as Christians of the first centuries knew, together they carry us to Life.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company.

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Donald Schell

Comments (16)

I've been wondering why liturgical dance is done so seldom. Any ideas?

Posted by E H Culver | March 16, 2009 9:50 AM

I don't know; perhaps because it might "lead to other things" - like charismatic stuff.... (Although I've long contended that Anglocatholic liturgy is how Episcopalians "do" Pentecolstalism.)

Marshall Scott

Posted by mscottsail | March 16, 2009 10:54 AM

Marshall and E. H.
At least as I've seen it in Malawi, the liveliest African Anglo-Catholic liturgy also feels very pentecostal. There was a steady pulse to the liturgy that congregation moved, not always dancing but steadily on the edge of it, and when it comes to Prayers of the People, everyone prayed at once, full normal voice, interecessions in Chichewa (the local language, so not speaking in tongues) but feeling of several hundred people praying steadily, all at once for their own needs and the needs of others for six or seven minutes was ecstatic and spirit-filled.

Posted by Donald Schell | March 16, 2009 12:08 PM

Donald,

As a drummer, I’m especially grateful for this piece. I love how you have identified pleasure as an opening for creation and also portrayed the fear that often precedes the deep pleasure of collaborative activities such as dance and music.

I’ve found that the right drumming, often something simple and hypnotic, unlocks people. In the case of other musicians, the right drumming brings forth a pleasure that allows all kinds of ideas to alight on their instruments. The right drummer makes the other players smile. It’s as if they’ve been given back their instruments after a long, frustrating break.

And in the case of listeners, the right drumming unlocks their whole bodies, so that the music can enter them fully, lavishly. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to play a simple drum beat and look out upon an audience moving together, becoming one giant body, feeling the pleasure of their connection to each other and the music. I sometimes say to myself, “If only they knew how I envy them for their power, making it so fun to do this!”

Having enjoyed the feeling of connection to other worshippers through singing and dancing, I can imagine God looking upon our own shared pleasures with similar feelings of appreciative longing.

Posted by Jacob Slichter | March 16, 2009 7:53 PM

Jake,

How wonderful to see your response beginning 'as a drummer.'

We've talked about the rhythm and pulse that moves beneath the liturgy, the riverbed that carries a congregation and their prayer, and feeling it, that rhythm and pulse, this thing the people are making, but also this Spirit that they/we are riding like the steady current of a river - sometimes white water, sometimes quieter, deep water, but the same current never stopping, always carrying us seaward.

I'm guessing that your experience as drummer isn't just what happens with the rhythm of a single song, but also the connection you you feel (and maybe some in the crowd at a concert feel too) between the rhythmic shape of each piece and the pulsing, heartbeat and breath-shaped rhythm of the whole concert, the breath and spirit of the crowd as the music and their desire and pleasure in the blessing of it makes them one.

Your drumming lives into some larger whole at the same time that your drumming helps shape that larger whole. My word-weaving isn't going to get all the way where I'd like to get with this, but intuitively I sense that the very human strands of desire, pleasure, and gratitude and God's work of making us holy and reconciling us into one humanity in Christ is already stirring in every work of art and every joyful human assembly.

I'm intrigued at watching the words fail when the feeling and intuition are so strong and clear. I can't articulate neat and clean connections, but know you're describing something as an artist and performer that's got nothing to do with 'aesthetic appreciation' and everything to do with knowing you're in the presence of God's Spirit.

Posted by Donald Schell | March 16, 2009 11:41 PM

I know from braiding hair that a french braid starts with very little hair and weaves in more and more strands until the whole head of hair is one braid. With everything hanging "by a thread" as you say, perhaps this is the only way to weave more strength into certain things, like our economy, rather than the 3 strands.

But I love your 3 strands as it pertains to spiritual expression; I was so grateful to read that one is pleasure. Even better that the others are desire and gratitude. I can always stand the reminder that these 3 things are of God. Thank you.

Posted by gtwhipple | March 17, 2009 1:32 AM

As you point out in your piece, part of what we’re doing as we sing or move together is to listening, not only to things such as melody, harmony, rhythm, and tempo, but listening to our desire and recognizing that it has a collective form and expression. I think what you’re talking about here is something powerful, our waking up to the thing that underlies these desires, which is the presence and desire of God.

Thus, I can think back on several different experiences—the thrill of dancing around the altar at St Gregory’s Easter Vigil, where hundreds of voices and moving bodies swirl in a giant, colorful, and wonderfully chaotic mass; the rush of clapping hands and singing along with the choir at Holy Tabernacle Church of God in Christ in Dorchester where the entire congregation seems to clap as one giant person overflowing with joy and praise; the awe of sitting among a large crowd and listening to speakers such as Carlos Fuentes and Desmond Tutu and feeling specific moments of mass revelation flash across the audience like ripples over water—and see, hear, and feel God not only in the music and in the words but in the desire that brings us together in the first place.

Posted by Jacob Slichter | March 17, 2009 8:04 AM

E.H. and Marshall, I want to circle back to the question and observation you contributed at the beginning of this:

"I've been wondering why liturgical dance is done so seldom. Any ideas?" - E. H.

'perhaps because it might "lead to other things"' -Marhsall

Historically, the answer to why congregational dance got suppressed (and why Augustine might have been happy to see congregational music suppressed as well) is that we, Christian theologians, Christian leaders, good Christian folk, are afraid of feeling/affect/and possible stirrings of sexuality. But can we be human without engaging or awakening desire? How we live with and act on God gives us in our spirit/body living selves is a dilemma. Turning away from the body part of our selves (too often in Christian history, the 'solution') is a worse dilemma.

Posted by Donald Schell | March 17, 2009 3:02 PM

Some of us just don't like it -- different strokes. We like silence and stillness - as in Be still and know that I AM God. YMMV

Posted by Ann Fontaine | March 18, 2009 10:13 AM

Dear Donald -

I've struggled with your post since I first read it, and I can only admit that I *still* don't know what to say without it sounding like a rant.

The ideas of "desire" and "pleasure" need to be balanced with denial and acsesis. There is no feast without a fast - and equally, no fast without a feast.

The problem in our American church is we are too focused on the feasting. Other churches have focused too much on the fasting. We need to come to a balance - both sides are equally unhealthy on their own.

Your leather braid was a ton of work to climb before their was beauty - and the church's law of chastity and fasting (symbolised in my read by the monks) was making it possible for you to climb... We all have to struggle - not just lay back and enjoy: that apple tastes good until you realise you were just supposed to look.

To accentuate one side (feast over fast or vice versa) seems to deny the "already/not yet" divide. We're already/not yet in the kingdom, already/not yet in the judgement. Feast/Fast...

Again, sorry: I can't quite find a way to say it that doesn't sound like a rant.

Much love,

Huw

Posted by Huw Richardson | March 18, 2009 9:59 PM

Huw, it doesn't sound like a rant. What I know from every artist I've ever known as a parishioner is that the desire and pleasure to create demands the discipline of learning one's craft, and then the act of creating nearly always carries the pain of vision remaining beyond the reach of what was created. When Gregory of Nyssa says we're most like God in our infinite desire (in his commentary on the Song of Songs) he is talking about pleasure and desire, but also about the desire that drives the Word to become incarnate and suffer death for our sake. What I hear consumerist culture and advertising pushing is satiety, something that will finally satisfy our desire. Gregory turned Origen on his head on this one - our biggest desire, desire for God (and the pleasure of responding to God's desire for us) is deeply unsettling and (as Bianca da Siena's poem/hymn suggests) is 'more and more desiring ever.'

Posted by Donald Schell | March 19, 2009 10:09 PM

THE PSALM OF THEN
By Nicholas Samaras

Then, the Lord heard me in the wilderness of my soul.
Then, the lost place of me became clear.
Then, I recognized distraction for what it is.
Then, I was freed from the desert of diversion.
Then, I was moved to the green oasis within me.
Then, the still voice of the Lord was as the depth of water.
Then, I could cease the constant music in my head.
Then, I could move beyond myself and the noise of myself.
Then, I could hear the smallness of my own voice.
Then, the still voice of the Lord was as the depth of water.
Then, the lost place of me became clear as cascade.
Then, I could hear the bass of my name.
Then, I could hear the Lord in the wilderness of my soul.
Then, stillness and stilllness and stillnesss san

Posted by Ann Fontaine | March 20, 2009 12:39 PM

Ann, thanks for the introduction to Nicholas Samaras whose work I did not know. It fits and may also catch what Huw felt was missing in my original piece. I bought a book of his poems, and meantime found a couple more poems on-line including this one:

Anaphora
by Nicholas Samaras

Let the path beat me down.
Let the weather and no covering beat me down.
Let the sun be my undoing.
Let Ksenofondos Monastery shrink behind me, until I lose all
bearing.
Let me lose the road to where I lose all hope.
Let this path diverge unto my ruin, and beat me down.
Let all the elements of the earth beat me down.
Let the manuscript of my sins beat me down.
Let God thunder and kingdom come to beat me down.
Let me uncover my shame and give over my life.
Let me repent until repentance breaks me.
Let this path beat me down.
Let me learn the word for water is the same as the word for
forgiveness.
Let the path beat me down, as I lie on its body and give up
everything.
Let me let go of the bag I own, the book, the pen, the dry bottle.
Let me own none of it.
Let me own nothing of myself.
Let the dust of my footsteps be tracked over by the wolves.
Let me die on these rocks, and my body be discovered in days.
Let my hands be found bloody with climbing the scree.
Let the oblique ascension of stars slant over my body.
Let the solemn silence of night be my liturgy.
Let God thunder and beat me down.
Where is the monastic, and where the scribe?
Where is the wise to beat me down?
Let the path beat me down.
Let the path lead me to my other self.
Let the smell of water waken what I walked for.
Let my face be transformed.
Let my face be transfigured from my life.
Let the world be beaten down as I wobble up again.
Let me go back to my family changed.
Let the path beat me down.
Let this path beat me down.
Let the path break me as I come,
to be this broken, this blessed.

[and for Western readers who don't know the word, "Anaphora," his title is the alternate Greek name for a Eucharistic Prayer. It means 'offering' or 'offering up,' so as a name for the Eucharist/Greek Thanksgiving focuses on the offering implicit in all our Thanksgiving.]

Posted by Donald Schell | March 22, 2009 12:09 AM

Thanks Donald -- a good poem for today's lessons too. The healing power of fully entering into brokenness.

Posted by Ann Fontaine | March 22, 2009 8:17 AM

Ann and Donald - Thanks: you both heard in my rant what I was trying to say!

Nicholas Samaras' Anaphora reminds me of Donnes "Batter my heart".

Posted by Huw Richardson | March 22, 2009 3:25 PM

Forgive the double post, but I thought to join the poetry posting! Here's the Donne poem:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Posted by Huw Richardson | March 22, 2009 3:34 PM

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