Common Prayer: It's the latest trend

           If there's one thing I find frustrating in worship circles it is reinvented wheels. I am an Anglo-Catholic snob, where I worship there are six candles on the alter, we go through the whole of the Nicene creed, liberal amounts of incense anoint the congregation, and I would not have it any other way. My heart grieves when I listen to the panicked clergy of our day, dismayed by the dwindling numbers in the pews, begin to contemplate incorporating Hip-Hop into their liturgy. So when I heard that the coolest Evangelicals in the New Monasticism movement (it's what all the kids are talking about these days) are remaking the Book of Common Prayer, I got quite excited.
           I first heard of the New Monasticism about two years ago when a friend of mine passed me a copy of Shane Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical. The book is, essentially, his biography of faith chronicling his time in seminary, travelling to Calcutta to work with Mother Teresa, and then joining a Christian Peacemaker Team on tour in Iraq. It is a refreshing read that I would recommend to frustrated Generation X Christians who are looking for models of how to be the Church in these post-modern times.
           The latest model that the New Monastics have pulled together is Common Praise: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, the end result of a collaboration of Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Enuma Okoro, and Shane Claiborne, plus scores of priests, nuns, pastors, and other faithful. In this volume we have the pleasure of witnessing a great return, a return to the ideals of collective worship, of what it means to practice the unity of the Church. Far more than a mere devotional, the book as 365 days of prayer laid out, stringing together a combination of prayers, devotionals, and hymns that span denominational lines from Serbia Orthodox to Anabaptist. Also noting feast and saint days, marking the anniversaries of murders committed by officers of the Salvadoran military, and noting the birthday of Dorothy Day, the book connects the dots between the many facets of the Christian tradition while being grounded in a vision of what the Kingdom of God looks like, and what it doesn't.
           To commemorate the launch of the book Claiborne and company had organized 150 Common Praise Parties taking place across the continent where the book was put into practice, in masse, for the first time. At the end of the CPPs Wilson-Hartgrove thanks us via youtube and leaves us with the image of baton of praise being passed on east to west as the sun travels, so that the whole of time and space are covered by our prays without cease. This is something that I fear is lost on my generation of Anglicans, that the ideal behind the BCP is that we, as a global communion, are praying the psalms with and for each other. By the practice of the daily offices we are conquering the earthly boundaries of space and time and achieving a unity that goes beyond worldly divisions.
           What I love in this is how my stereotypes of Evangelicals are shattered. For long time coming I have rallied against the profound individualism that I ascribed to the bible-thumbing, wailing and flaying, anti-liturgical know-it-alls, who, for all the world, seem stuck on sin rather than our deliverance from it. But I am a repenting snob, who sees in this movement a hungering to recover the idea of us: the Church, the mystical body of Christ in which the individual Christian is magnified beyond the limits that our secular-consumer culture maintains.
            I think there is a great lesson for us High-Church folk to take note of in this, that as we proceed into the 21st century we must return to the root of ourselves. The phrase that the New Monastics use to express this returning is "our ancient future," that was we are hurtled into a time that is propelled by the idea of salvation by technology innovation we must come back to the rituals that bind us to eternity, the space outside of time. It is there that we can meet each other, in prayer and unity.

Zombies and Devils Walk Amongst Us

        I have a few bad habits that I greatly enjoy. I drink too much coffee, I spend too much time on the internet, I go out of my way to find mind numbing movies to watch, and after my third beer and I start looking around the crowd to see who I can bum a smoke off of. All of this I will eventually repent of once I get a steady exercise routine established, but until that day let me tell you about what I thought of Diary of the Dead!

       Now I have been a reluctant fan of George Romero's work for some time now. I say reluctant as at first I had to get out of the zombie-fan closet, but that doesn't seem to be an issue these days any more where we're all far more interested in investigating the profane that exploring holy mysteries. But once one gets past the Hollywood gore that furnishes Romero's handiwork, there is some pretty-cutting social commentary.

       The ones that stick out in mind are Dawn of the Dead, which is a commentary on consumerism that is played out as we watch survivors of the Zombie apocalypse seek refuge in a shopping mall. Land of the Dead critiques classism as John Leguizamo plays the struggling Latino punk who tries to work his way into the last surviving condominium on the planet, protected in the centre of the sanctuary that survivors have constructed to repel the zombie hoards, and Day of the Dead has this scientist-knowledge seeker vs. military authority them to it.

       Diary of the Dead is, I think, Romero's most cutting film to date but, sadly, also his most dystopian. The film is an examination of the contemporary chaos that the individual finds himself within in this maelstrom of media, where the individual has so many sources of truths available. News channels, blogs, youtube, facebook, etc., it is an overwhelming experience to just filter this mess into a coherent narrative. It is also a film that comes out after six years of war, and reflects the struggle to find solid ground in a political landscape where "the first death is truth."

       Our heroes in the movie are film students who are remaking a "The Mummy's Revenge" type-flick when news of the zombie outbreak hits them. Jason, the main hero, takes it upon himself to document the events after so that "who's ever left at the end" will have some sort of record as to what happened. What's interesting in this is his efforts to show the truth, or rather, create his own narrative within the maelstrom, which is contrasted with the mainstream media's effort to hide/edit that the outbreak is happening. Here Romero is highlighting the tension that’s happening in our society with being engaged in this “arm's length war.”

       There are other tangents I could go on with, mostly about what happens to the National Guard when young men with guns are left without a centralized authority to answer to (I'll let you draw your own conclusions), but what I really want to address is the near end of the movie. Jason has been tragically bitten by a zombie and his girlfriend must now, alas, shoot him in the head so as to save them all from his inevitable zombie fate. Now what I find fascinating here is the prayer that she utters just before he gets it between the eyes: "Saint Michael the archangel, defend us in battle..."

       I think there's something that's very important that's herald in Romero's choosing this particular prayer, partly because it is a prayer that's fallen out of circulation since Vatican II (which some friends of mine think has left the Church's left flank exposed in the ongoing spiritual warfare) but mostly because it is the prayer for strength against the Devil. The whole enchilada:

Saint Michael the Archangel,

defend us in battle;

be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.

May God rebuke him, we humbly pray:

and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host,

by the power of God,

thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits

who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.

Amen.

  

      I find this prayer appropriate for the film as it is unique in that it takes the notion of Evil incarnate head on, and if we take that as a given, then Evil can be reputed and repented. Because the film is about the snares of the World, the thousand lurking ideologies that dilute, confuse, and separate us from our experience of the Truth, it neatly summaries what the devil ultimately wants: he wants derision, he wants confusion, and most of all he wants us to be separate from each other.

      Part of the challenge for the modern day man that Romero is eluding to in the film is this intangibility of evil and truth, and that if we do not have these things then we have no accountability for the wrongs in our society and hence we are left on our own, zombie and survivor alike.

      This much is reflected in the Psalms where we have prayers for the unification of the righteous, and “see how the wicked are in derision.” Hence the role of the Church is to provide a cohesive force where people can be united in righteousness, to stand FOR something in the World. The film ends with the question is the human race worth saving. The answer is we already have been, saved that is, we just need to put that answer into practice.

It's a Throny World Out There

        I was on a break from work, walking up Johnson St. Working at a Sally-Anne shelter I sometimes marvel at the contrast between my work environment and the trendy boutiques that line the sides of Johnson. I was in that state on this break, it’s after 5 on a Sunday, and you can more or less murder in the street for want of watchful eyes. Then my eyes fall into one of these store windows, to behold thirty people in one of these trendy stores, there hands clasped in nameste.
        Now I'm picky about most things. I'm a beer snob, food snob, coffee snob, etc., but I'm especially snobbish when it comes to those things that pertain to the care of the soul. These are not half-way matters. I believe that function fallows form, and that the soul correspondences to the boundaries we set upon it - so - when I see a large group of young woman practicing mediation in a retail chain store my alarm bells start ringing.
        That said: Hats off to Lulu lemon man. They've done it. They’ve achieved the level of product integration that ad men have wet dreams of. Lulu Lemon is no longer just a store, it’s a temple. A place of practice for those who are looking to be spiritual - not religious. This is exactly the type of pseudo-spirituality that Naomi Kelin warned us of when she heralded the dangerous of “lifestyle branding” in No Logo. The commodity is not the clothes, it’s the community.  
        Kevin Robert has realized this, and he’s taking it to the next level. He’s the marketing guru who has devised the formula to win over your soul (I mean this in a very real way). His book, Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, argues that brands need a special mixture of Intimacy, Sensuality, and Mystery to gather the love and respect of the consumer.
        I cannot over emphasis the immense perversion that is taking place here. Immense because he is ultimately arguing that Cheerios will provide the same sustenance as the Church. Robert’s wants the next generation of ad men to construct symphonies of lies, stories he calls them, stories to give the consumer a place within the mythology of the commodity, a community of belonging.
        As Christians we have the same practice in the World, we tell stories, stories that Jesus told us and that we tell other people. We have a narrative that instructs us on how to live in the World and it is from these gospels, and the practice of the sacraments, we step into the Lord’s peace. And it’s a far safer and securer peace than anything an ad man can come up with.
        Marshall McCullen knew that. After pioneering the field of media studies, the parable that McCullen was fond of using was likening advertising to Edgar Allan Poe’s story A Descent into the Maelstrom; where a man lashes himself to a heavy chest as he is sucked up into a hurricane. McCullen, who was a devout Catholic, argued that as the maelstrom of advertising grows around us we too need to be fastened to something so that we will not be blown helter skelter by the winds of market fancy. This is one thing that makes me grateful for my faith with men like Robert at work, in that it shelters me from these winds, as it binds me to the World.

Worship in the Bathroom

        Something strange is happening in the bathrooms of hipsters. I noticed it about 5 years ago when I first moved out to the west coast, I went to use the lavatory of a friend of mine to discover that he had transformed it into a vestry. The bathroom was decked out in kitch Jesus rejects. Sacred heart there, last supper here, crosses of all manner: wooden to florescent, and other velvet renderings of our saviour. At the time I took it with a shrug “Well this is...different,” but I have since had the experience repeated often enough now that I feel safe calling this a trend, and a trend that I believe foreshadows deeper rumblings of the soul than any American Apparel hoodie can speak to.
        Allan Watts, in an essay entitled Murder in the Kitchen, spoke of how there are two rooms in our North American society where we acknowledge our humanness: the kitchen and the bathroom. He contrasted that with the living room, a space that exists purely for presentation, the space where we deny our existence as animals. As one friend of mine put it: No one farts in the living room. And if they do they are scared for life.
        I think Watts is on bone in this description, and I believe that there is something quite profound in the growing religious iconography of washrooms. The bathroom is a space that we deny in our daily lives, it is a space that is for the body, and in our culture the bulk of our existence is spent in our heads. This creates an “anything goes” opportunity in the washroom. Indeed I think we can look upon this as some sort of cultural barometer, where the subconscious of a generation is being revealed.
        And what is being revealed? What does this speak to? I believe that it does simultaneously speak of the hunger for God, as well as the fear of God. Here the broken God is shown in the most crass, low-brow form of art that Value Village has to offer, yet hung in the most intimate setting of the home. There is the typical critical-distance that is maintained in this post-modern generation, where the action is meant to be ironic, but why Christ and why so often?
         We could just take this at face value and say that it is the ironic posing that we have become accustomed to in an age that lives in fear of sincerity, but I do not think so. I think something is sending shoots out into the counter-culture that has grown weary of defying and defining everything. And this could very well be the only safe expression of the Holy Spirit that hipsters can come up with.