Concerts

Did you know that classical musicians are adrenaline junkies? Underneath the neatly groomed exterior of a brass player--okay, neatly groomed might be an exaggeration--there is a daredevil who sits onstage in tails, holding a metal tube as several thousand people look on. As the rests click by and the strings saw away up front playing whatever it is that they're doing (mostly just filler material until the brass come in again) we sit in the back row thinking "in about ten seconds I need to somehow buzz into this metal tube and get a pitch to sound at exactly the right moment without any sort of impurity in the attack, and it has to be exactly in tune with whatever the strings are doing, and the tone needs to be powerful but beautiful, and to do this I'll have to mash my lips into the mouthpiece in a particular shape that, if it varies even by a nanometer, will produce the wrong note, and I need to do this in a way that somehow sounds effortless, and if I screw any of this up then some viola player will turn around and give me a dirty look and a snooty man in a bowtie will write mean things about me in tomorrow's paper.

It can be a stressful job.

I tried to convey the problem of performance nerves to my high-school aged students, and I don't think they believed me. Mostly they were giggling at the spit valves and developing ephemeral romances. Despite my concerns about their nerves, they did very well at their concert yesterday. A little stage fright does wonders for the general level of focus on the task at hand. Special thanks need to go out to:

Lux, who despite forgetting about the concert until an hour and a half before it started, managed to get himself down to Lima without a working vehicle or cell phone. He arrived with a tuba, but I fear that it was procured by illegal means.

Pax, who also did not have a working vehicle at the time. Congratulations, by the way, on your new Toyota Yaris.

Kylie, who watched a very VERY fussy James D Bear while everyone else was performing.

our friend David, who nailed all the horn solos in the Rossini

and J, who not only read down the piccolo solo in Stars and Stripes with no rehearsal and an unfamiliar instrument, but also sight-read the choral accompaniments in the concert.

I'm glad it's all over.

The most stressful part of the past 24 hours for me, though, was the Steven incident. We celebrated Steven's first birthday (and James' year and a half birthday) on Tuesday. We had cupcakes, candles, and a hat for the birthday bear. James thought this was great. This afternoon J texted me: I can't find Steven.

She knew he didn't come inside from the concert the night before, and presumed he'd been out in the car. But she looked there and didn't find them. Without letting on to James (who was completely oblivious to his absence) what she was doing, she searched all over the house for Steven.

Once I got the news, I went back to teaching and made a mental note that I'd have to help her look once I got home.

Just kidding, of course. I immediately ran out to the parking lot and looked under all the cars to see if he'd fallen out of the PT Cruiser the night before and spent the night outside. I also looked under all the pews in the sanctuary and dug through the lost and found box. (There were lots of sweaty boy's gym clothes in there. I think that some of the boys just "lose" their clothes when they reach a certain stink because they don't want to worry about bringing them home to launder them.)

As soon as I got home I searched the car, the laundry room, under the furniture, inside the furniture, and under his crib. When J came in I was digging through the kitchen garbage. (Sometimes James will throw things in there.) As I separated moldy avocado halves from the remains of old yogurt containers she glumly informed me that she'd already looked there.

He turned up in the garage. J had moved the stroller in there yesterday to make room for Lux's stolen tuba, and Steven was sitting on the little footbar where James will sometimes put him when he wants to go for a walk. He hardly even noticed when I brought him back inside. He even gave a look as if to say "What were you guys so worried about? I knew where he was the whole time."

I'm glad that stressful ordeal is over. Back to practicing Zarathustra calls.

An Open Letter To My Wife

Please come home.

Please.

You are just finishing the 2nd day of a weekend trip to North Carolina, and I truly do hope you are having a grand time visiting your best friend. You deserve the time off, and I'm glad that you went.

But please come back soon.

We knew that it would be hard to get James up at 5 AM to take you to the airport. He was in pretty good spirits Friday morning, all things considered. It caught up with him Friday afternoon. By the time we had dinner he was throwing flailing fits on the half hour. His shoes were soaked, which meant that we couldn't go outside. (cue fit) Steven Bear was also soaked, which meant that he needed to spend some quality time in the dryer. (cue more explosive fit) Also, we had pizza for supper. (cue fit) And the laundry basket was too heavy to drag up the stairs. (cue fit) And worst of all, there was no Mommy.

By this morning we were missing you badly. James sat on my lap and watched old videos of you playing with him on my phone for a half an hour. He's been taking out his frustration in less than constructive ways. He was digging in the bathroom trash this morning while I got changed for the day, and I found him pulling eggshells out of the kitchen trash later. (When I took them away, he gave me a look as if to say "you're going to throw away perfectly good eggshells?") I don't know how or when this happened, but there appears to be crayon scribbles on one of the lampshades. He's also decided to throw whatever he's holding into the kitchen sink whenever he gets in range. Steven ended up soaked again when I was holding him and trying to make coffee, and he tossed his binky in tonight when I was getting his bottle ready. (I'm hoping that the slurpy sounds I heard from the binky were from the hot and soapy water I used to clean the binky, and not the dirty dishwater in landed in.)

Things haven't been all bad, of course. We had a great time playing racquetball with Uncle Oliver this morning, and James even introduced himself to a young man who was trying to practice basketball. (James thought he shouldn't keep the ball all to himself.) We went to Nama's house and visited the cows, and played with cousin Hayden. We also found the sandbox, which was pretty much the only thing we were interested in out there. At one point, James filled up a plastic cup with sand, and then attempted to drink it. I don't think he got too much down. I ended up dunking him in the tub there, which is why he's sleeping in an oversized girls' onesie with a picture of a dog with flower.

So, everything is under control.

But please come back soon.

Ecclesiology Devos

When I was in graduate school, I began to indulge what I thought at the time was only a bad habit. I was living alone in a studio apartment in Chicago, a full time student, a working musician, a part-time library clerk, and a part time teaching assistant. I began to sleep in on Sunday mornings. I often wouldn’t get back from a concert or a late night shift until well after midnight on Saturday, and then I’d make myself a meager dinner and crawl into bed. I wanted to get up for church the next day. I knew that I ought to get up for church. I even liked the church that I was attending. But I didn’t really know anyone there very well, and for one of the few times in my week I had no official responsibilities. So, when my alarm went off at 7 AM, I’d turn it off and sleep in. Was that really so bad?

I’m one of the advisors for the senior class this year…though I should acknowledge that I am by far the lesser advisor, and that Kelly Wendlandt has, to the great advantage of the senior class, taken on the larger part of the responsibilities…and as I watch them stagger bleary-eyed into our homeroom at 8 in the morning, I worry about them a little bit. Next year they’ll be out on their own, most of them far from their home churches and the people who look for them on Sunday mornings. Knowing how hard it is already for them to get up in the morning and to take care of their responsibilities without prompting, it isn’t difficult at all to imagine that a good number of them will not be going to church with any regularity a few months into their freshman year.

I imagine it will look something like this: On their first Sunday on campus, they’ll get up, dress themselves well, and try a local church with which they have some preliminary connection. Perhaps they grew up in the same denomination, or a relative attends there. Over the next few weeks they’ll “church-shop.” (A loathsome term.) Then, as their Saturday nights get later and their dorm bed gets more comfortable, they’ll begin to realize that no one is going to wake them up and force them to go to church in morning. They can save themselves the trouble of getting dressed up and sitting with strangers they don’t know. They can save themselves the trouble of music they don’t like or polite conversations they aren’t interested in. They can even save some gas money, if they have a car, by staying parked on campus. And just like that, they’ll be where I was as a second year graduate student…without any sort of church home, without a pastor, without communion, and without the people of God.

Now, this is a rather glum picture, but we can do something about it. If you’re a parent of one of these students, you can always call on Sunday afternoons and ask how church went that morning. (A guilty conscience got me up on Sunday mornings very quickly when my at-the-time fiancée let me know her displeasure about my little venial sin of sleeping in.) I propose, however, that we can address the problem at a more foundational level. I believe that we ought to be engaging our students with the big questions of ecclesiology—what is “church?” What is “the church?” And why, especially if we’re saved by grace and not by works, does it matter so much if we go or not. I have four points around which we might begin to form an ecclesiology and address these questions.

The fancy classification for the ecclesiology you find among most American protestants is “contractual voluntarism.” Contractual voluntarism is a form of individualism emphasizing private choice. Individual people secure their Christian identity before joining the church by deciding for Christ in response to the gospel, thereby ensuring salvation and a place in heaven. Then, by a subsequent and entirely distinct act of the will, the individual joins a church somewhere, which to them is merely an aggregate of individual believers related to each other solely by virtue of their resolution to commit to Christ and that particular group. It follows, importantly, that relationships in this voluntarist structure are only important for the purpose of strengthening each member’s “relationship with the Lord.” To say it another way, going to church, for too many Christians, is something that is entirely unrelated to the act of becoming a Christian. That, in a nutshell, was what was wrong with my graduate school ecclesiology. Contractual voluntarism is an easy road to the church of the Holy Comforter.

Instead, church life must be seen as intrinsic to the Christian life. The Enlightenment told us that going to church and participating in organized religion was a social act, and in a way, that’s true. It’s also true that, as a social act, organized religion can be boring, hypocritical, repressive, injurious, and dull. In that respect, it’s just like any other social act by human beings. Intrinsic ecclesiology, however, insists that this particular social act, of Jews and Gentiles, male and female, rich and poor, all coming together around the common table of the risen Messiah, is the means by which the Holy Spirit is poured out over God’s creation. Good churchgoing doesn’t start with private individuals making authentic choices…it starts with the acknowledgement that whoever is there, and however they got there, that place has become is become the table of Jesus. Even though we may seem like the Elk’s club or the Spencerport bowling league, our gathering together is the visible and intrinsic movement of God on earth.

Secondly, a healthy ecclesiology must be eschatological at well as historical. What happened in the past is important. So are the things yet to come. I don’t mean by this that all of our church services ought to be about reading Revelation and fixating on the end times. Rather, the church must keep an eye on God’s ultimate future so as to model it in the present and in some ways to help build it up and bring it about. Now, there are enormous questions about what that future will look like, but the very act of raising those questions is a healthy start. What we ought not to do is live the life of the church wholly in reaction to the past, whether that be in reaction against it or in preservation of it.

Thirdly, the church must be materially situated in the present. Yes, the church exists somehow as a mystical manifestation of the body of Christ. Yes, within the life of the church we celebrate an ethereal and spiritual relation to the Christ. However, the church also exists in real people and in this real world, and it matters that we actually show up physically every week, because so much of our task requires it. Just by virtue of being the church, material work ought to be done, like feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, looking after those in need, and doing extraordinary art, music, and architecture to the glory and worship of God.

Lastly, and perhaps most controversially, I believe any useful ecclesiology must be improvisatory. Imagine for a moment that someone found the manuscript to a lost play by Shakespeare, but that the last part of the manuscript was not preserved. How would you go about setting and performing this play? You could read and perform the first four acts, but the last act would have to be improvised by the actors. How would you go about this sort of project? The material from the first four acts would have to be authoritative, of course. You’d carry over the same scenes and characters. You’d have to guess at the author’s intentions based on what had happened earlier in the play. Whatever you made up for the final act, if would have to have continuity with what came before, but it would be de facto partly your own creation. The church possesses the inspired word of God and two thousand years of spirit-led tradition, but we are the only ones who live and work and pray in the 21^st century. The terrifying and elating challenge of improvising our fifth act is to live in continuity with our scriptures and our traditions and to speak a relevant witness to our own living world. We may just write a masterpiece, and that’s worth getting out of bed for.