Metamorphosis and Contraction - 1

Year - About 1997

Time - 6:00 AM
Brothers and sisters filter into the living room. Each slips in silently, and takes a seat. Some sit in the comfortable couches, others in reasonably comfortable floor-level chairs. As each person sits, they close their eyes and begin a centering meditation. The room is utterly quiet.

After about 20 minutes, a brother reads the first line of the 23rd Psalm, but not verbatim. He changes the words a little bit so that it is not a declaration to an audience, but rather a prayer praising the Shepherd. There are a few sighs and a little more silence. A sister across the room reads another line. She carries on in the same vein of prayer, deepening it if she can, but praying something to which she can relate. After a half hour or so, they have finished the Psalm. Most of the people in the room have contributed a line or two to the prayer, and everyone feels refreshed. They have told the Lord how wonderful a Shepherd He is, and thanked Him for His eternal care.

One by one brothers and sisters file back out. Hardly a word was said outside of the few lines of actual prayer.

Time - 7:00 PM
Brothers and sisters file into a different living room. Everyone is talking. Some of them are carrying their dinners, and eating as they take any old seat that will work. The atmosphere is positively raucous. By 7:45, everyone figures out that no one else is coming, and most of the people are done with dinner, so it must be time to start. The stories of how the kids acted up today, and how much work was just like yesterday end, and everyone gets down to business.

They pick up songbooks. Someone calls out #52. You are usually not allowed to call out song numbers, but this is not a "meeting". This is a "song-learning meeting." Everyone has come together for the express purpose of learning new songs to use during regular meetings. During a regular meeting, the person who wants to start a song is responsible to start it by singing it, and someone else (anyone else) is responsible to call out the song number as soon as they figure it out. Usually, 90% of the people in the room can sing the song by heart, anyway, so this works most of the time.

Tonight, though, everyone is here to learn songs, and #52 is going to be the first one. Two people know the song, so they teach it to everyone else. Special attention is paid to the first line of each verse. If you learn the first line of each verse, you can usually sing the whole song, because the rest of the lines flow one after the other. There's a lot of laughter, and there are a lot of mistakes. Somebody tries to teach the harmony (they never learn), and after a few solid failures they go back to singing the song straight again.

At about 9:00 everyone is tired, and with 4 new songs under their belts, they go home (or out for coffee, but that is another story.)

Time - 3:00 PM on a Saturday.
3 brothers and 2 sisters get together out at a park while the kids play.

The date of the next "big meeting" has been announced, and it is 6 weeks away. The theme will be the Son of God accepting the mission the Father has appointed to Him just before the first Word of creation is spoken. There are 5 groups, and each group is going to have 30 minutes of the meeting to share something about that moment before time.

They brainstorm for a while about what they will do for their 30 minutes. Skits are popular. Songs are pretty cool (even more so because if it is a good song, everyone will sing it for the next year.) They could take a scripture, and turn it into a dramatic reading. They could put together a responsive reading for everyone to do. They could serve a meal that would relate somehow. They could mix and mingle existing songs, and create a kind of a song-skit. They could focus on the treasure for which the Son was willing to die, and make a kind of a treasure hunt. They could act the whole thing out using Weebles (Weebles wobble but they don't say No.)

Eventually, things get a little silly, and have to be brought back on topic. After an hour or two they have a plan, and everyone knows what to do next, and when they will meet again. They go home, and over the next week do their parts to get ready for the "big meeting."

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I suspect that not everyone reading this would be comfortable calling those little meetings church. That's OK, I am not comfortable under the steeple where I currently meet either. ;-)

I could keep listing simple, quick little meetings like that for pages. In a 3 month cycle we might do anywhere from 24 to 80 meetings. It depended what we were trying to accomplish. In the church I currently attend, we will do 36 meetings in those same 3 months. 36. Exactly. {{{Shiver!}}} Oh well.

I like variety. A lot. I think nature proves that God is partial to variety as well, but that's just me.

None of that is the subject of this post. (Though with just a little niggling, it could be the subject of numerous posts another day.)

The subject of this post is a painful phone call I had with a dear brother the other day. He knows whence I have come, and he had read this blog. He is not impressed.

I cannot say I blame him.

I left that church in 1998. Being in it changed me forever, and so has leaving it.

I cannot capture in a blog post the difference between the way that listening to a sermon stirs the heart, and the way that sharing from the Spirit freely with brothers and sisters stirs the heart. I could not capture the difference for my brother on the phone, either. He and I could not get on the same wavelength during that call. I am learning Romanian, and I would have done better to try to speak Romanian to him, than to try to explain why I am now meeting in a steeple church.

He had preached for a number of years, before he laid that burden down. He is shooting higher now, much higher. He knows that I too once shot for the same target as he, and what he reads from me here is very different from the things I was writing 8 years ago.

He was obviously disappointed.

The awful truth is that I do not know whether I have metamorphosized forward, or whether I have let go of the plow and am looking back. I don't know whether I have been damaged and have given up, or whether I have been broken and am finally moving toward the real goal in humility. I know I have been crippled, but is it the crippling of Jacob/Israel or the crippling of a million other children of the Lord who never grow again.

This is why I like "Thomas Covenant, The Chronicles of the Unbeliever" so much better than the "Lord of the Rings". I'm not Frodo. I am headed somewhere, but I don't know whether it's to the Crack of Doom to save the world, or just to some deserted, rocky beach somewhere to wander into the ocean. I'm just Thomas Covenant, a scared leper in a world he does not understand.

That phone call has been on my heart for two weeks now, and I have no answer for that brother. I think it highly likely that I will post a few times on the perspectives that oppose themselves in my head.

Hopefully, in following posts I will move beyond existential whinings. Thanks for bearing with me.

:-)