At the sound of the tone

I’m off this week. Enjoy the other internets. Lean in towards resurrection.

Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus, Diego Velasquez

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Happy Birthday, Church

We are not a tradition that typically references the liturgical year, so when Robby got up to provide our Communion Prayers and began with about a minute of French, there were few of us able to interpret the event.* Today is Pentecost Sunday. Bravo, Robby.

Pentecost is the end of the Easter season, and I love that we approached the table this morning not as fearful Maundy Thursday mourners,** but as the church in the Spirit, receiving Christ’s promise for the world. Just to prove I am really reading and not blogging, here is an excerpt from Laurence Stookey’s Calendar: Christ’s Time for the Church (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996). Stookey talks about the effects of consumerism and individualism on ecclesiology, and then reflects,

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Sing ye heavens, thou earth reply

I become self conscious sometimes about loving words and sounds and pictures so much. It seems foolish, when so much is at stake.

When I am reading Vonnegut or watching a Charlie Kaufman film, the absurdist sublimity of everything becoming so ridiculous assures me life is more hilariously beautiful than I thought. When I am reading O’Connor or watching a P.T. Anderson film, everything glows so tenderly flawed, so scarred and so loved by their creators that the grace of those words and scenes embraces me. I am going to shout. My eyes and ears and mouth are going to shout. But I am completely paralyzed by whatever might come next – by anticipation, by expectation, by readiness to celebrate whatever is going to happen. I cannot move, because this is not my scene or page or sound to make – I have to wait and see what is next.

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