Where you at, Little Dawg? - today's edition

Today's check-in on the state of my faith walk

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At a gym where I was a member several years ago, I frequently ran into a guy I knew from a couple of other contexts. He’d come in with a group of guys. He was much smaller - shorter, and less buff, in fact, constantly striving to fend off chubbiness (he was a chef) - than the rest. They all talked trash and laughed a lot when they went through their training routine.

When the others were standing around him, coaching him through a particularly arduous rep of some exercise, these sinewy giants would stare at him and yell, “Where you at, Little Dawg?” They were checking in on his immediate mental and attitudinal state as he mustered the requisite perseverance to complete the motion.

The above vignette is from the first installment in this irregular series of check-ins on the state of my faith walk.

The use of this scene for that purpose is meant to convey the intensity required for me to authentically examine just where I am. Like the chef surrounded by the barking hulks, a discussion of what’s going on with me spiritually involves cutting off any escape routes, making myself look at the question at hand as if my very existence depended on it.

I don’t see that fooling with the question at all is worth the time if I don’t respect its demands.

I’ve stepped up to the plate in the congregation that has become my church home over the last few years. I was recently ordained as a deacon. That anybody was thinking of me for such a role deeply moved me. The function of that title was established by the disciples who had personally known Christ. The point was for the disciples to have Godly support for their evangelical work. That’s what my church’s deacons do for the elders. We take on functions that occur during the service: serving as ushers and giving the communion meditation, as well as activities such as taking communion to shut-ins and participating in community outreach.

I’m also leading a weekly discussion series on Where Prayer Becomes Real: How Honesty With God Transforms Your Soul by Kyle Strobel and John Coe in my Sunday school class. It’s been leading to some lively exchanges. We’re all finding it challenging in our various ways.

But I’d be jiving you if I didn’t acknowledge occasional moments of imposter syndrome. The deeper I go into the book, though, I come to see that that is exactly the level of truthfulness that indicates whether my prayer time - as well as my discussion-leading time - is worthwhile. It’s a fool’s errand to think you can clean up to approach God.

A review of how I got to my present juncture might be helpful for newer Precipice readers. A piece called “Church Shopping Again” that I wrote for Ordinary Times in 2022 handles that well:

I’ve only been what I’d consider an actual Christian for a decade at most. I had to feel my way through a process of sorting out a lifetime of head trips to get there.I was raised in the Presbyterian Church where my father had been a member since 1945. Our family was regular about attendance. I sang in the primary and junior choirs, went to Sunday school after the service, and was confirmed at age 14. My parents, particularly my dad, were comfortable with the approach the congregation took toward a life of faith. The minister was a mix of sociocultural preoccupations – this was the 1960s – and a genuine theological foundation rooted in southern Presbyterian thought. This fit well with our family’s lifestyle. We and our neighbors were typically middle class. There was cocktail hour before dinner, a Republican political affiliation, civic involvement (my father insisted I join the Boy Scouts when I turned 11), and an emphasis on manners and comportment. There was, however, room for the occasional dirty joke told in the company of close friends. My parents slowly and with visible discomfort relented on issues such as hair length, and, by the time I got to college, my drug use.

Let me back up, though.

Shortly after I’d been confirmed, my father took the minister to lunch and announced he was leaving the church. The final straw, he told him, was the PCUSA’s donation to Angela Davis’s defense fund. Fast forward to my college years and early adulthood. I dove with abandon into the full panoply of secular-yet-sporting-the-facade-of-spiritual-earnestness offerings available to a boomer coming of age: beat literature, eastern thought, rock music, and the aforementioned drugs.

The PCUSA was already setting in motion the seeds of its decline. I can honesty say that I rarely took away any insights from the minister’s sermons or Sunday school or my ninth-grade confirmation class. This was a Presbyterian church and I didn’t know a thing about John Knox, let alone Gilbert Tennant or J. Gresham Machen. No, the adults guiding my development never did close the sale.

So a number of things my current fellow congregants take for granted - real devotional living within the families, with the Bible and prayer other than before meals as a key element of how they grew up - is not something I can readily relate to. My church is also noteworthy in the sense that it’s a very thick community, with some families being able to trace their roots to the congregation’s founding, and much intermarriage among those families, all of it reinforcing the centrality of Christ-centeredness in daily life. This is my first time to be part of such an environment.

One thing I’m still trying to make my peace with is the music.

Even before making this church my home, I wrote a piece here in 2021 titled “I Never Feel Like Waving My Arms” in which I said this:

About that: I can’t stand contemporary praise music. It goes hand-in-hand with the rhythmic arm-waving that has become a staple of so many worship services. Many start with it, and it tends to go on and on. And on. I have done the Emmaus Walk and participated in some jail ministry, both profound experiences that had lasting impact. I felt a sense of brotherhood with those I shared those weekends with in the core of my heart. It’s inextinguishable to this day. But, in each case, when the house praise band got onstage, my reaction was, sheesh, again?

I elaborated in an installment of this Little-Dawg series:

The chord changes rarely explore anything beyond I, II, IV, V and relative minor in various combinations, all of which are formulaic to the point of utter predictability.

And the lyrics are utterly pedestrian, completely devoid of the theological depth and sense of the sublime relation between Creator and creature that’s made palpable in the works of William Cowper, Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley and Fanny Crosby.

And the repetition! I’ve discovered that this is the subject of discussion in a few forums online. Some defend it as effective in driving home the message. I’m sorry, but it sounds to me like a desperate attempt to stave off doubt. About the fourth time of repeating one of those lines and I’m thinking, Ive already run that information across my head, thank you very much.

I’m not alone in taking note of the repetition. I recently came across a cartoon somewhere on social media, in which two guys are talking. One asks the other what he does for a living. The response is “I write praise music choruses. I write praise music choruses. I write praise music choruses.”

I’m a musician. I take it seriously. After fifty-eight years of playing guitar, I’m still learning. Quartal harmonies. Voice leading. The Barry Harris method. My regular listening habits take in everything from Renaissance dance tunes to Bach to Debussy to Bird, Miles and Coltrane to Hank Williams to Quicksilver Messenger Service. The ability to make music is one of God’s greatest gifts to our species. There is so much one can do with the elegant logic of music theory. Even the best pop music, such as that crafted by the great Brill Building songwriters of the 1960s, explores what can be done within a framework of deliberate simplicity.

And with regard to lyrics, it would be nice to see someone bring the level of honesty and wit to contemporary praise music that such secular giants as Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, John Hiatt and Lyle Lovett have brought to their work. After all, we ought to bring the unvarnished truth of who we are to our approach of the eternal throne.

I recently came across a piece at a great Substack called The Narnian titled “The Tongue and the Canticle.” It’s about, as the subtitle says, “Recovering Liturgical English in an Age of Casual Worship.” The point is that our worship ought to reflect God’s splendor, grandeur and majesty. It traces the way devotional writing has developed from the earliest days through the Reformation and the Book of Common Prayer and on up to what Tolkien and Lewis had to say about the language we use to discuss or praise God:

The Reformers believed every people should worship God in a voice they comprehend – Article XXIV of the Articles of Religion flatly states that praying or administering sacraments in an unknown tongue is “plainly repugnant to the Word of God”.”

But crucially, “understood by the people” did not mean indistinguishable from common chatter. It meant the meaning should be clear – the mystery of the faith should shine through unhindered – not that the style should be pedestrian. John Calvin in Geneva likewise aimed for simplicity and clarity in worship, stripping away frivolous pomp. But Calvin also insisted on reverence. He wrote that when we come to God in prayer, “let the first rule be to have our hearts and minds framed as befits those who are entering into conversation with God.”​

We lay aside “carnal or earthly thoughts” that cling to us​.

In other words, we consciously shift registers: we remind ourselves we have an audience with the King. Calvin even uses a courtly analogy – if you had a private audience with a monarch, would you fiddle with your to-do list or speak carelessly?​

Certainly not. You would choose your words and actions with care. So too in worship: our outward speech and posture help frame an inward reverence.

The Reformers, then, gave us worship in our own languages, but they did not abandon the idea of a sacred register. Consider the King James Bible of 1611. It was written in English, for English speakers – yet the translators intentionally chose a slightly archaic, elevated style, even in their own day. In fact, the King James Version (and the contemporaneous Anglican liturgy) “was intended to be old-fashioned on the day it was published.”​

Phrases like “How great Thou art” and “hallowed be Thy name” were crafted to resonate with the reverent “thickness” of older forms​

This was not nostalgia. It was a conscious decision that holy things benefit from a venerable tone. There is, as one Anglican writer puts it, “nothing inherently valuable” about saying “Thou” instead of “You.” God understands every language, every dialect, even the inarticulate groan. Yet, over time, the Church found good reasons to be conservative in liturgical language​

First, because the very words of Scripture and the apostles are treasures – translating them too freely or into fleeting slang risks losing richness. It’s why to this day we still say “Amen” and “Alleluia” (Hebrew words) and “Kyrie eleison”(Greek for “Lord, have mercy”) in services across the world​. These words have traveled unchanged from Hebrew into Greek into Latin into English, like golden threads running through successive tapestries of worship.

Second, the Church has learned by long experience that familiar sacred words carry a weight of glory, meaning they have proven their fitness in speaking to the Holy One​

We inherit them the way a young knight might inherit his grandfather’s well-worn armor, trusting that these phrases, hallowed by use, can bear the weight of divine address. And third, preserving a sacral mode of speech links us to our forebears. It creates continuity – a rich network of connections, as if our words echo in the stone vaults of a cathedral, reverberating with the prayers of generations before​.

None of this was about elitism for the Reformers. Cranmer’s English prayers were intended for ploughmen and princes alike. The very name “Common Prayer” means it was prayer held in common, shared by all. The Reformers’ drive to translate worship was a drive to include more people, not fewer. And in our own day, when some say that the old liturgical English is too archaic for ordinary folks, it’s worth remembering that for centuries ordinary folks – with far less education than today – prayed and sung with those very words and found them to be a wellspring of understanding. A milkmaid in 17th-century England might not know how to read, yet she knew by heart the words “We have erred and strayed like lost sheep” and understood their truth in her soul. Reverent language was not a barrier, it was a bridge – a bridge between earth and heaven, between present and past, between a poor sinner and the Majesty on high.

There’s something I need to remember, though. For all this talk about bringing grandeur to expressions of devotion to God, the simple lesson of “more of Him, less of me” is also reinforced by simple acts of service to one’s fellow human beings. The kind of stuff I’ve done some of: working a food pantry, jail ministry. There’s only room for one true big shot in this universe, and I’m not him. I’m his fallible creature. I can be his hands and feet for people in my community who are in need, and it matters not what their tastes in music are. So serving on that level must be part of the mix.

I feel like I’m on more solid ground than I was the last time I wrote a piece for this series. The key, I think, is to remember that, yes, I know who Jesus Christ is, and that doesn’t change whether I’m showing up for life in a freshly pressed suit, or, as is far more likely, food stains on my ill-fitting jeans. Since I know the core truth of the matter, I can just proceed one footstep at a time.