How this Vespers service thought began (no, I won’t start with the 6th C.)
Posted on 30 Oct 2006
[this initial post will be long]To name how this idea for a monthly Vespers service came to be, must certainly acknowledge several dozen friends, family, mentors and teachers who encouraged and inspired myself and others through shit and thin. If you are reading this, you are most likely one of them. I have so wanted to quit music and my faith over the past ten years–I am both a coward and a warrior–or, something about God the unquenchable fire, manifest through many obstinate loved ones. As Dan Allender puts it, your passions will make a fool of you. I shall be a fool. Anyways, the story up to this point is wonderfully complicated and beautiful, but exists in my personal journal (remember those things?) and doesn’t need explicitly retold here. And, I am certain that pieces will unfold as I dialog the process further.
So a few months after SuJ’n and I witnessed Sigur Rós at The Paramount Theatre, another friend, Mark Mohrlang, and I decided that to wait another couple years to see them again would be tomfoolery. We picked Austin, TX as a tour stop and packed our bags. It was worth every penny. For those of you uninformed of said band, they create very big sounding music, sing in Hopelandic–which doesn’t actually exist–and don’t utter a single word between songs, nor do they ascribe to any faith system. Yet somehow, they are able to create the most beautiful, elevated music around, and I would argue, worship the living God every time they perform. This takes us to the issue of gifting and intent and the creativity of non-believers and the CCM call to arms, “why should the devil get all the good music?” A crap conversation really. Trent Reznor may certainly intend to destroy the system with every stroke of his narcissistic, bombastic pen, but he IS creative, which I believe is ultimately God’s realm. Now I’m not saying we should use NIN for corporate worship because it is creative, but what I am saying is that my notions of seeing God have been royally tweaked. I feel close to God when I listen to beautiful, haunting music. M83, Hans Zimmer, The Album Leaf, Sigur Rós, Boards of Canada, Brian Eno, Chopin… these are my weekly worship leaders. I don’t need a Jesus chorus quite like I used to.
I’ve decided that beauty and elevation are essential to artistic worship. (By now we’ve all properly de-constructed the notion that ‘worship’ is the 20-minute time of corporate singing that happens on Sunday, right? So allow me to name it ‘artistic worship’ here, and then shortcut back to ‘worship’ beyond here). Now, beauty and elevation are not synonymous with nice and joyful. I won’t claim that nice and joyful are bad things, they are just often used as cheap imitations of the real thing; they are the naive cousin-words that won’t allow death or sorrow to birth anything new or complicated. Of course, it isn’t this simple, and NO–I will not place a single mark on the Love-Fear Lifeline. [No time for this discussion now]
This past summer, my good friend Tara Ward from Late Tuesday was experiencing some post-album release depression (this is the horrible time right after a release when you realize that your artistic blood & tears haven’t changed the world as you hoped. Even successful, schlock bands experience this–I’m certain of it). We shared a cup of joe at the local coffeehouse and spoke of future music and perhaps collaborating on some electronic/sacred/post-pop/world/operatic stuff. [I’m sorry, your genre stepped in what?] I remember Tara blithely commenting about how worship always made more sense when it was melancholy, with longing. I jumped in: “Ya! And it should sound big, epic”. And why do worship lyrics have to be so bland, so least-common-denominator. Or worse: Jesus-is-my-boyfriend, or Jesus-broke-my-heart, or vapid God-is-good-all-the-time-shut-yer-trap-about-how-jakt-everything-is. So, the two of us brainstormed late into the night, walking the ways of the UW campus and getting excited about music again–particularly sacred music. (I should mention that my band, Mercir, had just released a less-than-well-received record months previous.) We dreamed up our ideal worship setting, which meant rethinking many assumptions we had.
Here is some of that brainstorm before I forget it:
- worship can’t be done in 15 minutes, more like 60
- worship can’t be immediately followed by greeting time or announcements (thank you Nicole)–in fact, no greeting time at all, this isn’t going to pretend to be church, we are here to bless the soul and encounter God through art. There is a reason why the very impersonal, Compline service at St. Mark’s is packed every single week
- worship must have an arc, a story, development, purpose, liturgy
- worship is better with candles and incense and ambiance; setting matters, a theater is better than a church building
- English is optional; Latin is not dead. In fact, French, Korean, Spanish, Japanese, Swahili, Russian–no language is off limits
- our generation is about to lose 95% of the hymns, that is no good
- God is big, why not make the music sound big
- God is intimate; be quiet, be gentle, listen
- a program with the order of the service should be printed on the finest parchment; aesthetic; a keepsake
- this worship service can’t exist to serve the purposes of a church or denomination; again, we do not replace church but augment it
- this service can’t happen weekly, monthly is the goal
- lots of Psalms
- lots of Scripture
- lots of prayer… for the world, for Seattle, for our neighbor, for our soul; repentance, forgiveness
- lots of silence (thank you Scott)
- no offering plates to pass–at most a box in the back like those blokes at Compline
- original material that sounds ancient; ancient material that sounds modern (thank you Joel)
- strings
- falsettos
- synthesizers
- reverb
- delay
- hand-picked musicians/vocalists/writers/engineers/designers. If you suck: you’re fired, Jesus still loves you
- Christ in all (hope, grief, pain, desire, beauty, rest, absence, presence, fear, delight…)
Ok, that is enough for one post. For now… this clip from Late Tuesday’s “To Not Be Let Down” is a taste of Latin that makes me weepy. And a taste of big electronica by my outift, Mercir: “Grace“.
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