Anniversary

I was baptized twenty years ago today. I was 29.

Answering Steph's questions

Here are my answers to Steph's interview questions:

1. What brought you to Sacred Harp singing?

Alan Lomax, the folk music collector. When I was 19 (30 years ago) I encountered a remastered LP of recordings he had made at an Alabama singing convention in 1959. The music intrigued me--4-part a cappella singing, the voices very backwoods Southern and unpretty, but extraordinarily dynamic and passionate. The songs they sang, when I could hear them through what I then perceived as chaotic performances but have since come to understand as well-thought-out polyphony that was hard to hear because I wasn't used to the voices producing it, often had haunting, memorable melodies that I came back to from year to year. A short time later I encountered the Word of Mouth Chorus, a New England group, singing songs from the Sacred Harp on a Nonesuch LP, and more began to click for me. Nearly twenty years passed--SH singing was just another very interesting but possibly defunct form of folk singing for me--until I stumbled across a discussion listserv in the pre-WWW early 1990s. I joined the list, eventually got a current copy of the Sacred Harp (the university here still only has a facsimile of the 1860 and a copy of the 1960 edition. There have been 1971, 1987 and 1991 editions since then,) and in 1996, partly as therapy for being suddenly and catastrophically unemployed, formed a Sacred Harp group here.

Steph's father- and mother-in-law both accepted my invitation to join it, but only Darrell stuck with it for the full four years we met. Arleen claims that she doesn't read music and claims she can't learn, which may be one of her few disingenuous positions, especially if *I* have learned to note-read quickly and to lead songs. It was only after meeting monthly here for 17 months that I attended my first out-of-town singing, a two-day singing school in St. Paul in February, 1998, and another 19 months before I began attending Minnesota's annual September convention, supplemented the following February and every February since 2000 by their adding a midwinter singing from the other version of the Sacred Harp, what is called the Cooper Book, after its original early-20th century editor. Not long after I began attending singings elsewhere, both in Minnesota and Wisconsin, I brought the local singing to an end. I couldn't drum up enough interest locally to have more than 4-5 people gather at a time, and only one other singer accompanied me to an out-of-town event before the group folded.

2. What book have you read lately that we all must read too?

For some reason this is a hard question for me. I just finished the first volume of James/Jan Morris's Pax Britannica trilogy, and enjoyed it greatly, but each to his taste--if the growth of the British Empire under Victoria interests you, by all means, read it. I probably ought to follow it with Niall Ferguson's more recent book Empire, which he starts earlier in time, and brings up to the present. He also relates the British Empire to the American empire we have grown up in. For "read this sometime, it's neat--" the field is pretty broad--everything from L. Frank Baum's second Oz book--I still weep at the denouement--to Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland from 1775.

3. You are invited to write an article for the Mennonite Church USA denomination publication, The Mennonite. You have free rein—no editorial meddling. What is your topic?

I know what I'd write--but describing it is difficult. Mennonite Church USA, like almost every other denomination or sect has submitted to corporate America's need for 24/7 staffing--submitted de facto, without discussion or affirmation. In my own case, this will be the 3rd consecutive Easter week--Thursday through Sunday--that I will miss all worship and fellowship with my local congregation because of my work schedule. It's been most of three years since I have shared in the Lord's Supper with other church members. Does my employer force me to be unchurched? If so, what should I do about it? As a Christian, should I willingly give up worship if my work schedule requires me to? Does worshipping together really matter? Am I still a member of my local congregation if I am 99% out of fellowship with it? What duty, what action, does the Church owe its members when faced with problems like this?

4. What first drew you to a Mennonite church?

Originally, the simple living polemic that was much more common twenty years ago--Doris Longacre's books especially; then, on actual contact with Mennonites, the church's peace stance. Even more than either of these, though, what kept me Mennonite was the opportunity, in a frontier congregation like ours, to explore and develop my gifts as a worship planner and leader, and my speaking gifts. What pushes me away from Mennonism is Mennonite passivity, passive-aggressive behavior, ethnic elitism and the denomination's inability to truly view other North American whites as possible mission targets, taking the easy and culturally imperialistic route of evangelizing people of color, both in North America and around the world, while leaving unchurched or under-churched North Americans of European ancestry for other denominations to reach out to dynamically.

5. What, in your opinion, is the maximum amount of television an American teenager should be allowed to watch per day in order to prevent their brain liquefying and dribbling out of their ear?

Oddly, I have a stat on this. I marked a program guide for a couple weeks in the early 1970s when I was a teenager myself. I read all the time, but still managed to watch between 20 and 27 hours of television in an ordinary week. What matters is the programming. And unless you're Emperor, "allowing" teenagers to watch or not watch television is not something we can really do, if they are to become independent thinkers, and are already church members in many cases. It depends on when you think parents's rules have to end.

The church in my head, part 2

C.M. Union, Alexander Gillet, 1781
LXVIII. LIGHT SHINING OUT OF DARKNESS.

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines
Of never-failing skill,
He treasures up his bright designs,
And works his sovereign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust him for his grace:
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,
Unfolding every hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err,
And scan his work in vain:
God is his own interpreter,
And he will make it plain.

William Cowper, 1779.

Wherever we end our days, in a church or temple or out of it, our early religious experiences never leave us. The present-day Roman Catholic is shaped by the years he spent as a Southern Baptist from the cradle to his thirties; the United Methodist is still very Mennonite in her outlook and how she relates to her congregation and church. The former Christian--and which sort of Christian makes a difference--becomes a different sort of Jew than someone born into an observant Jewish family, who was bat or bar mitvahed at 13, who collected pennies to plant a tree in Israel. Although I never joined the Worldwide Church of God, and indeed did not submit myself to baptism in any church until I was almost 30, I was exposed to WCG influences from a very early age until my late teens, and how I think about God and religion and church probably has more than a little coloring from that relationship with the WCG.

What I took away from the Worldwide Church of God and the Armstrongs--beside, ultimately, a distrust of most organized religion, no matter how mainstream and respectable--was a good grounding in the Bible, especially the Old Testament. The Armstrongs, because they had a number of controversial agenda to promote, freely distributed their Bible study materials throughout the English-speaking world. My grandmother filled two thick three-ring binders with them. She also filled several boxes of old Plain Truth magazines, the WCG's free monthly magazine. She also requested copies of each new volume of The Bible Story, an adaptation of the Old Testament written and illustrated by Basil Wolverton, a freelance artist/cartoonist who had been one of the main contributors to Mad magazine in the 1950s. She and I traveled together from Eden to Mesopotamia to Canaan to Egypt, then through Sinai back to Canaan again. So many of his illustrations float through my mind even now! The nailmarks from people's fingers on the doors of Noah's ark; the fall of Jericho; the sin of Achan--an image and a symbol that I reflect on almost daily; the Levite and his concubine; Job on his dunghill, and many others float in and out of my mind.

Whatever base we build on then is modified by successive layers of experience. At about the same time I had my extended direct contact as a mostly respectful observer of the Worldwide Church of God, I moved into another, overlapping religious experience that was significantly different from travelling with the WCG, one which served--over a long time--to deepen my own understanding of the believer's relationship with God and the church, and to help me form a personal understanding of providence and God's purpose.

During junior high school, Richard Ludden jr. and I were in advanced English classes together, social studies and American history. Our paths diverged beginning in 9th grade, in part because his father, Richard Ludden sr., taught the 9th grade advanced English class; so, because of the district rule that parents couldn't teach their own children, Richard was moved to Mrs. Diller's class. I had no way of knowing at the time that 15 years later, Mrs. Diller would become my sister-in-law--when I married Chris's sister Carolyn. Richard and I were part of a larger group of acquaintances and friends who spent junior high and high school together, and in a few cases, went through college together.

Richard Ludden sr. was also the chess club sponsor, and my best friend, Dan Rebik, was a budding grandmaster--seriously. He didn't end up one, but that's another story. In any case, I hung out at chess club after school all three years, got to know Mr. Ludden before having him as a teacher, joked around a lot with him, and piqued his interest over time. At some point in 9th grade--if any of my journals from those years survived I might be able to pinpoint when more effectively--I started dropping in at the Ludden house after school and on the weekends.

We lived in Sherwood Park, a wooded floodplain neighborhood on the Cedar River in Waterloo, Iowa, and Luddens lived straight south on Hackett Road from us about a 5 minute walk. Hackett ended at the river, and the Ludden home was just south of the streetcar viaduct, where the bluff starts. It made a pleasant walk past open fields where cattle grazed, then the passage through a 55-year-old concrete portal to observe a better life than I lived in Sherwood Park.

More anon....

The church in my head, Part 1

7s. D. Cedar, ca. 1853 (by Thomas Hastings)

People of the living God,
I have sought the world around;
Paths of sin and sorrow trod,
Peace and comfort nowhere found:
Now to you my spirit turns—
Turns a fugitive unblest;
Brethren, where your altar burns,
Oh, receive me into rest.

Lonely I no longer roam
Like the cloud, the wind, the wave;
Where you dwell shall be my home,
Where you die shall be my grave;
Mine the God Whom you adore;
Your Redeemer shall be mine;
Earth can fill my soul no more—
Every idol I resign.

Tell me not of gain and loss,
Ease, enjoyment, pomp, and pow’r;
Welcome poverty and cross,
Shame, reproach, affliction’s hour.
“Follow Me”—I know Thy voice;
Jesus, Lord, Thy steps I see;
Now I take Thy yoke by choice,
Light Thy burden now to me.

James Montgomery, d. 1854

When I first began attending Christian worship weekly as an adult between 18 and 19 years ago, I had spent many years in religious tourism. My grandmother had a twenty or thirty year relationship with the Radio-- later Worldwide-- Church of God, and when she was in her early 80s and a congregation of the WCG was finally meeting in our town, she began attending and before long, out of curiosity, I began attending with her. I was about 15, it was winter, and we rode to worship on Saturday mornings in Dick Schmidt's big pickup truck. Grandma rode in front; I rode in back, with Susan Schmidt, who was about my age, not ugly, in a miniskirt, under the topper, on a bench, with no heat. She didn't like WCG, and before long was permitted not to go, but I remember well how awkward it felt in the back end of a pickup with her. We didn't huddle together for warmth! We barely even conversed during the half hour trip each Saturday morning.

We met for worship in a junior high auditorium about 12 miles from my grandmother's neighborhood. It was, in fact, in the junior high my daughter now attends, and when I sit in that auditorium now, it's to listen to the 8th grade band perform. Saturday mornings in 1972 were very different! At that time, we would arrive, walk into the overheated building, hang up our coats and enter the "sanctuary." Stationed at each doorway would be one of the deacons, handing out hymnals, which were paperback, and well-thumbed. All the hymns were psalm paraphrases. For me, this was all right--even in 1972 I was extremely old-fashioned, and although unchurched, already had a strong distaste for what we now call Contemporary Christian Music. So "Glorious things of thee are spoken" set to Haydn's Austrian Hymn (also the tune to "Deutschland ueber Alles--") and other musical intersections like that were just fine with me. With 160 people singing together in a school auditorium with just a piano accompanying, we sounded pretty good!

The down side of worship was the abysmally limited liturgy. WCG congregations were commuter churches, meeting in rented facilities in vastly-separated locales. We met in Cedar Falls, Iowa: our pastor and family drove down from Stewartville, Minnesota, about two hours or more north of us, near Rochester. People from as far north as the Minnesota line and as far west as Steamboat Rock gathered in Cedar Falls on Saturday mornings, later in the Main Street School gymnasium, later yet in the Masonic Temple basement in Waterloo, and after that--about nine months later--I found other things to do on Saturdays and quit attending. But I had stayed the course remarkably faithfully, even for a nerdy, intellectual high school boy.

Because the Worldwide Church of God was in large part the creation of Herbert W. Armstrong and his sons, and because the Armstrongs were radio preachers, talk and study was really what church was all about to the WCG. We might have sung energetically to open worship, between the sermonette and the sermon, and to close worship, but in the mind of the planners the main event was the preaching. This was why the sermonette lasted 30 minutes on average, and the sermon lasted 90. Seriously. And why, if old enough (and I was) attendees were expected to bring a notebook and take notes. Unfortunately, this requirement to take notes and reflect on what was being said were what led inevitably to my decision not to join, and eventually to drift politely away. The preaching, week in, week out was so deathly ordinary, so incredibly dull, that my notes quickly became exercises in sarcasm. No one saw them but me, so I was safe to lampoon errors of fact the pastor and associate pastor made, to question lines of reasoning, to do everything a thinking teenager does when questioning authority. Every new preachment found me undermining it silently in my notes.

I was quiet, respectful, loved to sit with my grandmother and other old ladies, loved the singing, enjoyed the handshaking and fellowshipping with adults, attended even when my grandmother had begun to drift herself and started staying away from worship--when she attended, I would often nudge her awake before she toppled forward off her chair asleep, although I sometimes would wait until the last moment, just to see if her head dropping would jerk her awake again. It usually did. I borrowed Bible aids from the traveling church library, I made a point of cultivating warm acquaintance with a number of adults, I got to be a pretty welcome youth to the adults. It wasn't a hard task. Their own teenagers seemed to abhor being there, and were almost uniformly sullen during church. Because I was a teenager myself, I once had to listen to the same lecture from the pastor about shaping up and being more attentive during worship, but there was no way that applied to me. I was aberrant, so I fit right in, at least superficially, with the adults who came voluntarily.

But when the time came that my mother was dropping me off and picking me up from the Masonic Temple and Grandma was skipping church most Saturdays, my passion for dutiful attendance began to fade, and I started skipping some weeks myself, until I finally quit attending altogether. I never went back, although people in the congregation and the pastor continued to ask after me and on the rare occasions we saw one another would hope I'd come back. The WCG underwent enormous changes in the decades that followed, and has actually become a denomination--or a group of denominations, large and small--more than a rather boring cult. I respect it for the changes and growth that have occurred, but I am where I am, and it is not where the Worldwide Church of God is. My journey continued, and even now continues--which I will chronicle bit by bit, so as to get from 1973 to 2005 eventually!

First days, last days

PSALM 6

C. M. Adieu, 1818
Complaint in sickness.

In anger, Lord, rebuke me not;
Withdraw the dreadful storm;
Nor let thy fury grow so hot
Against a feeble worm.

My soul's bowed down with heavy cares,
My flesh with pain oppressed;
My couch is witness to my tears,
My tears forbid my rest.

Sorrow and pain wear out my days,
I waste the night with cries,
Counting the minutes as they pass,
Till the slow morning rise.

Shall I be still tormented more?
Mine eye consumed with grief?
How long, my God, how long before
Thine hand afford relief?

He hears when dust and ashes speak,
He pities all our groans;
He saves us for his mercy's sake,
And heals our broken bones.

The virtue of his sovereign word
Restores our fainting breath;
For silent graves praise not the Lord,
Nor is he known in death.

Isaac Watts, Psalms of David, 1719

For the Church, this Sunday begins a new year, and so it does for me. I begin these pages with one of the Penitential Psalms. Why? Because "we're a long time travelling here below, To lay this body down--" and how better to begin the journey of another year than with a prayer for relief from pain and sorrow, from the burden of our humanity? The tune is one of Stephen Jenks's, given to you to better remember the words. But substitute whatever hymn tune you like to which you can sing it. Go here for more choices:
http://www.geocities.com/mlmoore_99.geo/sitemap.html

This week I will begin to outline my interior landscape for you. Pray with me that some good will come of the exercise!