The installation service is kind of a big deal. Lots of ceremony, after a fashion, though we get to infuse it with our own sense of style. Our denomination is evangelical with Presbyterian liturgical roots, and while our particular church is kind of the 4077th of the denomination, there is still a sense of decorum invoked. The installation service is the last step in a series of criteria that either had to be met or appealed in order to make the deal final. I don't know what John Knox was like, but it's important to remember that Calvin was a French lawyer.
The service itself seems like a cross between an ordination and a wedding. This man is accepting a particular call and making a commitment to a particular congregation. One of the most moving things I think I've ever seen happened while I was on retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, Thomas Merton's old stomping ground. I was there with a bunch of other evangelicals and we had the opportunity to see one of the brothers take his solemn vows, the ones that would bind him to the order and to that monastery for life.
The service was gorgeous, a full Mass with all the bells and whistles and everyone in a fancy robe. I think the abbot wore a funny hat. There were readings and liturgical responses and a homily. The novice -- that's what they're called -- was asked a series of questions. It was formality, of course, since the novitiate (which usually lasts 3 years) was designed to test his readiness for the monastic life. If he'd gotten this far, everyone already knew his answer to the questions. And then, at the end, he was officially welcomed into the community. At this, he rushed (actually it looked like he leaped) into the abbot's arms and was embraced warmly. I don't know about everyone else in the room, but a rowful of Protestants sat blubbering at the beauty of it all. It was as though he'd waited for this his whole life, and maybe he had. I've seen couples saying "I do" that didn't look that happy.
Among the Benedictine vows is that of stabilitas, or stability, which means that a monk is committed to a particular community for life. Dispensations are possible, but rare. A monk might be set on assignment or be part of an offshoot monastery. He might be released from his vow to pursue a different vocation or join a different order, or of course he might just walk away from his vow and monastic life in general. But the ideal is to stay in one place, to pray and work, to cultivate, whether in the monastery garden or the hard stony ground of the heart, a sense of deep connection.
In many liturgical traditions there are baptismal vows of some kind or another. While many of evangelicals eschew such things (especially the hypericonoclastic Church of Christ I hale from), it's a long-attested practice and I think there's some merit to it. Evangelicals, for the most part, seem more interested in securing intellectual assent to theological propositions -- we'll say we believe it with our whole heart but we almost always mean our head -- but the baptismal vows speak to something that I think goes beyond the vagaries of what I happen to be thinking at the moment or the metaphysical commitments I'm willing to sign off on.
The closest I actually come to such a vow is a pact with a friend that neither of us can leave the faith (in the final, for-real sense) without first hashing it out together over a 12-pack. And the person leaving has to buy. I seem to have lost contact with this person, however, which might put a damper on the effectiveness of our pact.
I once tried to embrace a variant of the vow of stabilitas, not by taking an actual vow, but in making an internal commitment to a particular congregation. Our church at the time was really struggling, and there were all manner of tempting reasons to get the hell out of Dodge, but I could also look back on my life and see a history of leaving. "All I know to do," sings Indigo Girls' Emily Saliers, "is go." And I thought maybe it was time to suck it up and stick things out. Right about that time, of course, elements of the universe aligned to deliver us to the church we're at now. There may not be a God, but somebody sure likes to fuck with me.
So much for stabilitas. I also have other ways of lashing myself to the mast, though predictably I have trouble with which mast. I like to hang myself on the horns of false dilemmas, to try to seek clarity by invoking questionable dichotomies. There's the tug of war between my writer self and my musician self. I'm not really a musician, I muse, hoping that this realization will bring clarity to my path, but the evidence betrays me: I can't go five minutes without tapping out some polyrhythm on the nearest flat surface. I can tell you the chord progression of the song playing in the background at Starbucks. I have guitar picks in my wallet. Three nights this week are devoted to rehearsals, not to mention Sunday morning or the installation service, and just last night I sat in with an a cappella group that happened to be short a tenor.
So I'm a musician. Then I'm not really a writer. I'm not published, for instance, and I'm not making any money writing. But I teach writing -- and I'm not getting up at 4 in the morning to play the guitar, now, am I? People send me their work to edit and wordsmith. I'm constantly evaluating the things that happen to me and the stuff that I read to see if it is fodder for a blog post or my dissertation. I chose my advisor on the basis of what I thought he could do for my writing.
Can you see, though, how choosing one or the other would lend a kind of clarity to the process of identity construction? It works in other areas, too. Maybe I'm not really an academic. I'm not sure I'm interested in tenure track. I don't really want to write for scholarly journals so much as I want to write creative non-fiction. I'm bored silly by departmental politics (who isn't?). But I've been known to have conversations with my profs that lose everyone else in the room. In fact, I once lost the prof -- my religious studies teacher said "I see your lips moving, but all I hear is 'blah blah blah'" (I was trying to use Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem as a metaphor for epistemological vulnerability). I am at home in the classroom, and if I'm also more insecure about being a teacher than some of the other hats I wear, that's probably par for the course.
Or I'm not really a worship leader. Here I can muster some evidence, but we'll get to the actual religious stuff later. As much as I resent being a Chris Tomlin cover band, as much as there are days -- including Sundays -- where I'd rather eat shards of glass than hear, let alone play, another evangelical worship song, it's in my blood. The harmonies and arrangements come to me instinctively, almost in my sleep. There's no way to say this without sounding hopelessly self-aggrandizing but there's a kind of magic that happens when I'm involved with the music. I know how to hold things together. I know how to pour myself out as an offering and move a congregation. I know how to get musicians and singers to bring something out of themselves they didn't know was there. It's almost something that happens to me rather than something that I'm doing consciously. There's a reason that I've been asked to lead worship for the installation service, and I'm honored and humbled by that.
This goes for the big-ticket items as well. Maybe I'm not a Christian, but that doesn't explain my tendency to think in Biblical metaphors or the reality that if I'm a musician, I'm undeniably a church musician. I've tried walking away but it never takes. I end up like Jonah, getting swallowed by some great fish or another. It gets old. I need Jesus just as much as anyone esle. On the other hand, I can't deny being a skeptic, either. This, too, is in my blood. I'm not surrendering my critical faculties for the sake of a cheap sense of peace. I'm not giving up my hermeneutic of suspicion to anyone, including Jesus -- and if he can't take it, what good is he?
It's dangerous to be premature about such things but I think I'm at a place in my journey where the task is no longer one of discovery so much as choice when it comes to identity. I am all of those things, and I either have to choose among them or choose not to. It's the classic existentialist good news/bad news: you get to choose who you are, but you have to choose. Right now I get to be all those things, and while there may come a time that's no longer the case, at the moment there aren't any external factors dictating such a choice or demanding one to be made. Which is why I keep trying to make them up. And why they're false.
Maybe I need this kind of diversity, on all those levels. Maybe I'd chafe at being pegged to one thing. Maybe I'm a tent-dweller, waiting for the pillar of fire to move. Maybe being lashed to the mast is itself the problem. Maybe this is part of that thin line between being me and being batshit crazy. I'm willing to go with that.
Besides, I don't have the money for a 12-pack.
4 comments:
You're a Renaissance Man. That's a good identity. Why does having these different roles make you feel unstable? They don't seem to indicate a lack of commitment, since you have become adept at all of them. Existentialism's a bitch, anyway, exhausting, as if you have to carve yourself out of the stone without using your eyes. Something like that.
Goedel? Ugh, math and logic. What is the incompleteness theorem? Do I even want to know? I challenge you to translate the theorem into a sketch for a Teletubbies episode.
And I now have Come, Thou Fount of Many Blessings playing in an endless loop in my brain.
That's exactly why I do that.
(I'll respond to the other stuff later, but I'm not sure about the episode sketch...)
The basic gist of the Incompleteness Theorem is that for any mathematical theory about real numbers, there will always be some unavoidable truth about real numbers that cannot be proven by the theory. I have no idea how to translate that to Teletubbies, but The Matrix comes close.
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