Holy Communion...Blues?

First of all, go listen to this. Nothing about this post will makes sense without it. (Cue readers: "and that will be different how, exactly?"...)



You can see this little ten-minute piece is labeled "Holy Communion Blues." The recording was made in 1965 at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, not in a studio (clearly). The cathedral had invited a relatively popular local jazz pianist to bring his trio in for a special service of Holy Communion, complete with hymns and choral selections for which the trio would provide musical support. Additionally the trio played instrumental selections for other parts of the service, as here, while communion was being served.

The musician in question was relatively well-known locally, but not necessarily outside the San Francisco area aside from one hit, "Cast Your Fate to the Wind," recorded in 1962 mostly to fill out an album of covers of tunes from the film Black Orpheus. A second album followed, in collaboration with a Brazilian guitarist, in which bossa nova and other Brazilian influences started to make their mark on his music. Enduring popularity, however, came later in 1965, when the trio provided music for a Christmas special featuring characters from the popular comic strip Peanuts. Vince Guaraldi provided some tunes for seventeen later Peanuts specials as well as the feature film A Boy Named Charlie Brown, as well as continuing a non-Peanuts musical career until his death in 1976 (having just completed the recording for It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown earlier that day).

The Grace Cathedral service included all the expected elements of a high communion service (presided by a bishop, no less), with a choir of both men and boys for responses and hymns. Guaraldi's trio gives admirable support to those portions of the service, by turns swinging and grooving with the hymn tunes and liturgical responses without dominating or "taking over" the proceedings. More than most other commercial jazz projects, this communion service remained a service of worship (despite the unfortunate album title The Grace Cathedral Concert appended decades later), even when Guaraldi's trio played two numbers on their own.

I do own this CD and wear it out frequently, and did so before getting into the ministry. Since then (and even a little bit before) my favorite track has always been the one linked above, "Holy Communion Blues." It has remained a favorite even as the title has grown more and more vexing.

Holy Communion...Blues?

I come of that modern school of sacraments in which the sentence "This is the joyful feast of the people of God" sets the tone, very near the beginning of the sacrament, whether actually spoken or not. I'm not of the school in which the Lord's Supper (and that's the only thing you can call it) is basically a memorial service for the crucified Jesus.

And yet, I'm constantly brought to a halt whenever I run into this piece again. I can only stop whatever I'm doing (with the exception of driving, I guess) and listen, and I cannot stop from wandering off into the whole idea of holy communion blues. Seriously, if I could afford a jazz trio, or even just a solo pianist to be at our church for just one communion Sunday just to play this, I could die a happy preacher.

Quite likely the naming of this movement was not at all so intentional, as far as I know. It was played during communion, it was slow and reflective - not a swing or a stomp or a jump - so blues it is. (If anyone has any evidence to the contrary I'd love to see it. I think I'd actually feel better.) Still, that name stuck in my head for reasons I couldn't make out. Why did that juxtaposition of words so stay with me? Why, besides the understated effectiveness of the music itself, did that stick in my mind so much?

I may understand it better now.

As I've gone through all the lead-up to that surgery, with the anger and and frustration and despair that came with it, and now as I'm coming out on the other side, with emotions tending more toward sadness and melancholy, it makes more sense. It might make even more sense than Guaraldi (or whoever came up with that title) ever intended.

Every act of Holy Communion, or Eucharist or Lord's Supper, has some blues involved. It comes to the table with us.

The blues may come in the form of a broken body. Maybe it has suffered irreparable injury from outside, or uncurable disease from within. It may suffer from disease or from a cure worse than the disease. It may be moving inexorably towards final collapse or may simply be saddled with a chronic, non-fatal but ongoing condition. (I am coming to know this last well.) But so many of us come to the table with a broken body.

The blues may come in the form of a troubled, self-sabotaging mind. You, dear pastor, might never spot these challenges in the pews until it's too late: the housewife's ongoing but well-hidden depression, the former football star's deteriorating brain, the respected businessman's raging addiction, the retired schoolteacher's battle with dementia. So many of us come to the table with a troubled, self-sabotaging mind.

The blues may come in the form of old, encrusted burdens of sin and rebellion yet to be cast away. The communion hymn names two of the seeming heroes of the New Testament, Peter and Paul, each each confessing their unworthiness to be at the table - Peter for his denial, Paul (as Saul) for his persecution of the church. And yet the Host bids them come. Who knows what other past malfeasance goes unknown, its bearer unable to know or receive or accept that forgiveness yet waiting? Surely the blues may come in the form of old, encrusted burdens.

The blues may come to the table in more ways than I can possibly hope to name here - loss, grief, sorrow may be set off by so many tragedies of life. And there they all are, waiting at the table.

In the heavy evangelical church in which I was raised, much was made of making yourself "worthy" before coming to the table, even warning that "he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh damnation unto himself." (Yes, it was sounded in King James English, and yes, it always seemed to be males only who were at risk at this.) This was of course meant to root out some unconfessed sin in the communicant, maybe even with some sort of dramatic confession?

I suspect, though, that far more people fear themselves unworthy to come to the table for very different reasons, or perhaps simply afraid to come and to be seen in all their brokenness and sorrow. Even now I find myself wondering what bizarre sabotage my rerouted body will commit against me when I finally get behind the table for the first time post-surgery.

Thing is, though, we are all bringing some kind of blues with us. It's entirely possible the worst brokenness that comes to the table is the brokenness that has no clue how broken she or he is. But we're all broken in some way, and we're all called to that table anyway, and we're not somehow supposed to turn ourselves into superheroes by the time we get to the bread and the cup. That's not how it works. We don't turn ourselves into perfect little Christians to get ourselves invited to the table; we come, broken or grieving or troubled or afraid, and are welcomed and fed by the One who knows all those broken parts and sorrows and troubles and fears, as pathetic as they seem to us, and that One who calls us and feeds us calls us sister, brother, friend. And we come away from the table made whole - not that any one individual is "fixed," but that we are made whole - we are made one body, the Body of Christ, and we go out not as merely a bunch of broken bodies but as The Body.

And it would be a shame to miss that over cancer, or dementia, or trauma, or CTE, or depression, or even this weird thing in my abdomen.

Come to the table. Come singing whatever Holy Communion Blues weighs in your heart, but come. Christ bids you come, and the broken, fearful, troubled selves that make up the Body of Christ await your broken, fearful, troubled self.

Dear Pastor: Performance-culture fallout (also after John L. Bell)

Continuing to follow some of John L. Bell's points on why people don't sing (in church or much of anywhere), we come to his second reason, in a chapter titled "The fallout from a performance culture." While my earlier blog on similar issues didn't make that explicit claim, a couple of points I did include are related from or perhaps derivable from such a claim:

3) Singing, or perhaps singing with others, isn't "cool." This would the the wannabe-rockstar position, not wanting to share the stage with others. Not super common, but out there.

And:

4) "I don't sound like the person leading the song, so I shouldn't sing." A greater risk in more contemporary settings, where a single lead voice is more likely featured. Also a greater risk if the leader can't resist particular "soloistic" touches in leading the folk. I doubt it's intentional, in most cases, but it still can intimidate folks in the pews out of their comfort with singing.

As noted in the earlier blog, the first of these positions isn't necessarily all that common, but it does happen. If the singer in question is not "in the spotlight," so to speak, it's hard for that person to care enough to sing. This suggests a whole lot of other issues going on in that person's heart, mind, and soul, perhaps beyond the scope of this blog.

That other position, however, is pretty directly related to Bell's point. More precisely, it is a consequence of the importation of that performance culture into the church.

Protestantism in its various forms in the United States has run the gamut of attitudes about the song of the people, from almost a reverse-snobbery of glorifying the rough voice in certain frontier traditions to the near elimination of the song of the people in some more elite Protestant quarters. Different models of providing leadership and guidance to the singing congregation have come and gone, none perfect but some cerainly more effective than others. It isn't as if the focus on individual leaders is new; from "song leaders" to "ministers of music" to cantors borrowed from Jewish tradition, using an individual as leader of the congregation's song (or an ensemble in some cases, such as the paid quartets that sang almost everything in some emerging mainline traditions in the late nineteenth century) has a long history in this country.

In these cases there was and is always the risk of the soloist, often of professional status, intimidating the people in the pews by sheer force of voice, no matter how unintentionally. Being a leader of others in singing makes a peculiar set of demands that is not shared by more straightforward professional singing roles, and not all singers catch on to that. But to understand the particular dangers of which Bell seems to be speaking, it might be more useful to refine the word that Bell uses; perhaps instead of simply speaking of performance culture, it might be more precise to speak of "soloistic" performance culture.

Performance culture can be collaborative. Soloistic performance culture focuses on the "star," for lack of a better word. A "star" doesn't need to worry about whether others can keep up; what he or she does is the focus.

Good leaders, perhaps with some training, are sensitive to the need to lead in such a way that the people are not only able to follow, but are in fact encouraged to do so. This doesn't consist only in the call that "everybody sing!"; it also includes the leader providing a model for singing the song in question that makes it easier and more feasible for the congregation to learn and to sing (particularly in those style traditions where new songs are constantly feeding into the pipeline from Australia or wherever).

And when you're out in front with guitar in hand or behind the keyboard, and you've got a voice that can be soloistic, it can be awfully hard to remember that. And in the end, dear pastor, it may yet fall upon you to provide the corrective and to remind your leaders in whatever style or format that their job is to lead and not to star.

Hear me out here; is it possible that, just maybe, this (while killer for an arena show) doesn't necessarily help a large group of people sing together when they all know they can't sound like this?

Other people's heroes

(NOTE: repeating a disclaimer from the first edition of this re-repurposed blog: "Evangelicals should probably move on.")

I feel the need to begin with the acknowledgment that I was never all that impressed by The Message.

I'm not sure why. It's possible that the "contemporary language" Bible versions available in my youth, titles like Good News For Modern Man (not good news for women of any age, apparently) or The Living Bible (it is an eternal shame that nobody ran with the horror-movie possibilities of that title) soured me on the whole project. For whatever reason, at that young age the "contemporary" language felt more limiting to me than enlightening (but I was a total geek even then). If anything those early hip-language versions helped form in me one of the few cliché-like statements I consider myself to have invented: "you can't say 'contemporary' without automatically saying 'temporary'." For all the hoopla about it, in my few forays into The Message or occasions hearing it used from the pulpit, it never got out of that box. It's not as if I'm immune to the power of re-contextualizations of the scriptures -- I'm a big fan of Clarence Jordan's Cotton Patch translations/recontextualizations of most of the New Testament, but then those are a thing quite other, daring far more than Eugene Peterson's magnum opus.

The above disclaimer is probably not necessary, but is about as much as I thought about Eugene Peterson before this week's kefuffle on "Christian Twitter," in which Peterson first seemed to have declared himself o.k., if somewhat indifferent, with same-sex marriage, even allowing he'd officiate such a marriage if asked, then seemed to be under threat that his considerable arsenal of publications would be shut out from the largest "Christian" bookselling firm, only to (by the end of the week) retract, apparently, any sentiments that might have been expressed in the earlier interview about same-sex marriage. (You may speculate as you wish as to his motives for retraction; I have my opinion but no particular need to express it.)

(NOTE: let me be clear that I don't endorse Christianity Today just 'cuz I used a couple of links to them. I feel icky already.)

One can predict more or less the ebb and flow of the week's reactions on various social media. I have no interest in rehashing the evangelical side of that kerfuffle; I am not into banging my head against brick walls. But mainliners, I gotta talk to y'all. Mostly to the straight white folk among you. And mostly (not completely, but mostly) to the guys within that subset.

Can we please not get so hung up on seeking the approval of other people's heroes?

Apparently Eugene Peterson was actually ordained in the PC(USA), my denomination of affiliation and choice. That said, the arc of his career and writing make it pretty clear that in the current moment he's about as much PC(USA) as Donald Trump (which is to say, not). That's fine. He's made a life and a living in the evangelical pool, and might even be said to have some celebrity status in that particular stream of the church. As far as I can tell he's probably one of the less offensive members of that particular brand of celebrity, which is probably o.k. but doesn't really mean that folks in the mainline-progressive need to be clamoring for his approval.

To be honest, I'm kinda with this guy:

Would that we'd hear. (And yes, I'm an old straight white man.)

The mainline denominations have as members a number of LGBTQ+ persons who are the folks regularly getting kicked in the teeth by the evangelical wing of the church. I'll understand why a LGBTQ+ person would get excited by the initial Peterson reaction; maybe I'll get kicked in the teeth a little less. We are also home to persons of color who are getting told far too often to accept second-class citizenship by the world at large. We are home to immigrants or descendants of recent immigrants being scapegoated by this country's government. And yet rather than listening to those voices within the mainline (brothers and sisters in Christ all), we keep our ears cocked, it seems, for any sign of approval from an evangelical celebrity. 

Can we not, please?

Can we spend more of our energy listening to the voices of those getting dumped on rather than the ones doing the dumping?

Can we listen to the least of these, even if we run the risk of realizing that, just possibly, we might be the least of these too?

Can we worry about getting our own (shrinking but maybe a little less quickly shrinking) house in order, rather than worry what the doomsayers and vultures and vultures have to say about it?

Can we actually listen for the "sound of a sheer silence" instead of getting caught up in the yelling?

Maybe I'm naive or stupid, but I can't help but wonder if we mainline types (at least the straight white portion of us) would be better off if we didn't care so much what Eugene Peterson thinks, except to the degree that it harms our sisters and brothers in Christ. That's the thing to care about, not our puppy-dog need for approval.

In short, move on and listen to the folks who were really hurt in yet another round of crossfire.

He's made his bed, he may now lie in it.