Crete, August
2012
SLAM!
Right after the slam comes the sound of a dulcimer.
Of course a dulcimer. Somehow a dulcimer feels at this
moment exactly, cosmically, right.
Then, just for me, Joni Mitchell starts to sing,
The wind is
in from Africa, and last night I couldn’t sleep…
Maybe I missed the announcement about a beach concert? I’m
confused. Then I am yanked into wakefulness by the next
SLAM!
It all comes back. I am at the Orthodox Academy of Crete,
near the city of Chania on the fabled island of Crete. We non-Cretans aren’t
used to dealing with sea-breezes and shutters, and haven’t yet noticed that
those charming hooks embedded in the outside wall are there to keep the
shutters–
SLAM-SLAM!
Why on God’s green earth am I here again?
I open my eyes and look out the window. There, sparking like
all the diamonds in the world, lies the Sea of Crete. The early morning wind
has risen to a quiet roar, and I hope that it will blow away yesterday’s
stifling heat. Yesterday I tried to keep on working through the afternoon heat.
Big mistake. You don’t mess around with the late August sun when you’re in
Greece.
Both
the Central Committee and the Executive Committee of the World Council of
Churches are here for a week of meetings.
They are working through a crowded agenda, from theological
statements and position papers on moral and political issues through to Bible
study passages for the upcoming 10th Assembly of the World Council
of Churches in Busan, Korea in late October, 2013.
Maybe
it will be cooler in Korea.
I am now working as Worship
Consultant to the World Council of Churches. I have been sent to the WCC as a
missionary by the United Methodist Church, U.S.A., which has long supported
this position. Wendy and I moved to Geneva, Switzerland just over a year ago.
We got rid of some of our Stuff, put some into storage, and moved to
Switzerland, followed by shipping crates full of Useful in Switzerland Stuff.
Our arrival was timed perfectly: the middle of the summer
– les grandes vacances – during which northern Europeans visit southern
Europe, the southern Europeans visit Northern Europe, West goes tripping to
Asia, and Asians visit North America. It’s a bit like a Toronto street sale
where everyone else buys each other’s Stuff.
Les grandes vacances meant that there was no-one to ask about How You Do
Basic Things in Switzerland. A story for another blog.
A large part of my work with the
WCC involves working with both individuals and committees to plan, organize and
help lead worship services. Services of prayer of all kinds are a regular part
of life at the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva, and might be as small as two or
three gathered together in the chapel in the morning before a day of work
begins, or as large as 250-plus under a canopy for evening prayer here at the
Orthodox Academy of Crete.
My colleague, Rev. Sabine Udodesku,
and I have enlisted the help of some of the young adults who are here as
Stewards – volunteer interns sent by their churches to gain ecumenical
formation and experience. Besides being an invaluable help with all parts of a
sometimes very technical operation, with simultaneous language interpretation
in English, German, Spanish and French, they have spent several days together
in biblical and theological study before the arrival of the committee members.
Some of them were also willing to form a little choir to help with leading
congregational singing.
Yes, that’s Wendy, in the choir.
Within the calm demeanour and the singer’s stance is a woman singing a bit of
the melody with the two sopranos, helping the altos with their part, and
listening to the tenors to figure out where in the chorus they are losing their
part.
One of the many challenges of
cross-cultural and interdenominational prayer is balancing the commitments and
loyalties of the various groups represented. Why should we sing my song and not
someone else’s? What languages do you use? Why should this prayer, this
reading, this song be in this language and not another? For people used to having
their own language – English, for example – be the language of choice, singing,
reading and praying in many languages can be a profound and moving experience
of Pentecost. But Pentecost presents challenges. How do you make sure that
people understand? Even with the best will in the world, singing six verses of
a hymn in Tamil is a daunting experience to a non-Tamil.
And so you have to interpret, to
translate, to use gesture, to use visual, symbolic actions, all in order that
we all are communicate clearly. You must always remember that, even when you
think you have said something clearly, it is not always understood in the way
that you hoped.
And then, you must remember this:
there is no song that everyone knows. Songs that are widely known and
old-hat in one region are likely new item in another. A Korean congregation
will lovingly sing an early twentieth-century missionary hymn that dropped out
of use in England by the mid-forties. There is no common canon.
And how are you going to sing it?
What is your unspoken expectation of what will happen when we all sing the
hymn? Performance practice is not just a subject for musicology academics.
Where a North American Methodist group sings holding hands in a circle, a
Pentecostal Latin-American might want to dance. Where a group from Taizé might
sing a chant many times, a Reformed congregation stands in solemn song and
sings verse 1, verse 2, verse 3, Amen.
No one will feel completely at home
in an inter-confessional, intercultural service. There is no moment where we
can all relax together and just sing. Everything is new and strange to someone;
there will be something new to learn.
This all brings me back to the
picture above. The small group that you see is drawn from all around the world.
Five minutes after this picture was taken, everyone headed off to do other
duties at the Academy. In those five minutes, we tried to bind them together
into a group that would lead an Orthodox hymn in Armenian, a song in Korean, a
German chorale and a Latin-American praise chorus. An hour after this practice,
250-plus tired and hungry committee members will come from a day of meetings to
go to dinner at the very
Mediterranean hour of 9:00.
But first we will have a half-hour
of prayer together.
The service will try to balance
languages and church traditions, styles and theologies. We won’t get everything
right. Someone is sure to come up afterward to correct our pronunciation of
“Kyrie,” or tell us that the language we sang in was Catalan and not Spanish.
And we want them to. Because that’s how we learn from one another.
For all of us, leading worship in
this setting is scary, exhilarating, exhausting, sometimes painful, and always
hard to perform gracefully. Something like swimming in the Mediterranean across
the road from the Orthodox Academy of Crete.
Yes, I brought home some bruises.
