Summer hours continue. Daily Episcopalian will publish every other day this week.
By Donald Schell
I found the first time I saw Rick Fabian teach ‘the carol,’ the final danced congregational hymn at St. Gregory’s, a moment of revelation. It was 1978. Rick’s invitation was startlingly lean, unlike any liturgical invitation I’d ever heard a priest offer.
After an unapologetic declarative description of what we were about to do–“Carol is an old Anglo-French word for a danced hymn and we dance the carol at St. Gregory’s.”–he shifted to unvarnished imperative: “We’ll form a couple lines around the table. Put your right hand on the shoulder of the person near you, now follow as we walk round to space the lines comfortably. Good. Now look this way. Here we go – step to the right, left behind, right, left in front.”
So, after offering historical precedent, Rick used the imperative, the grammatical form of command, to guide us into doing something some had never done before. Never once did Rick say, ‘If you’re comfortable…’ Nor did he tell people it was all right for those who preferred to stand or sit outside the circle. Rick’s liturgical instructions were as direct as those in the psalms and Pauline epistles:
“Sing to the Lord a new song.”
“Clap your hands all you people.”
“Sing and dance to the Lord.”
“Shout praise to our God.”
“Greet one another with a holy kiss.”
I was ordained priest in 1972. Trial use formed my ear for how priests and deacons would guide a congregation trying something new. It was a time when people expected variations and new challenges to show up unexpectedly in the liturgy, but clergy were painfully aware that many did not welcome changes. I understood colleagues’ fear when making a challenging invitation. I felt it myself. Looking back, I think that “If you’re comfortable” and other apologetic language eased us past our own discomfort at asking people to do things we imagined they wouldn’t like. But perhaps our fears and assumptions actually contributed to congregational discontent and anxiety.
After watching Rick teach a whole congregation to dance in the liturgy, and seeing everyone join the dance, I began to encounter parishes in which priestly invitations beginning with “If you’re comfortable” and ending with instructions on how to opt out led to about one quarter of the congregation deciding not to take part. Deliberately changing my language and training myself to offer only simple explanation and direct, imperative instructions, I observed exactly what I’d seen with Rick’s carol instruction. Almost always, everyone took part. Occasionally someone would opt out for physical challenge and, checking in with those people later, they were fine with what we’d done. And very, very frequently people who danced, or spoke up in response to a sermon, or took another unexpected invitation would thank me afterwards for the new experience they’d had from joining in. And the thanks typically included – “You seemed so confident that we could do it, that I decided to just try.”
This many years later, I remember so many people offering their “just try’s” with gratitude. People heard the imperative as a simple invitation, and even grasped that there was room in it to be clumsy, uncertain, and yes, even uncomfortable on the way to learning. Some even said they felt the possibility of forgiveness if they made a mistake.
Framing a new or unfamiliar invitation with “If you’re comfortable” poses a conundrum. How would anyone know he or she would be comfortable doing something she or he had never done before? For most people it’s likely that the first time doing anything new would feel at least a little uncertain and so a bit uncomfortable. Holding up comfort as a standard for discernment suggests that what we are about to do is actually for those who’ve done it before and the few adventurous souls who somehow trust themselves to be comfortable doing something they’ve never done before. The quarter of the room that hangs back responds to our conditional invitation and concludes, “I’d better watch. Maybe next time.”
I knew we were up to something significant in our invitations to everyone to take part at St. Gregory’s when we introduced David Walker’s wonderful four-part setting of the Burial Office canticle, I am Resurrection and I am Life says the Lord for the whole congregation to sing, unaccompanied as we usually sang everything. The piece is beautiful, but it changes keys in ways that are surprising the first time you sing it, and each of the four parts (SATB) has a challenging moment or two. We didn’t sound at all good, but we braved our way through. After church that Sunday a former ‘non-singer’ said, with evident joy, “We’re really going to love that piece when we learn it.” She’d learned to live into discomfort for the sake of learning and knew there was rich reward for doing it. Over the next months the congregation came to love the piece, and for the past twenty-five years they’ve sung it wonderfully on Sundays in Eastertide and soulfully and joyfully at every funeral.
All right, but what about people who literally are not able to do the dance or simply can’t sing? What about the person in the wheelchair, or the person with a cane, or someone just recovering from surgery? Our experience was that people were very good at taking care of themselves. We knew we were on the right track was when Carrie Craig, then a seminarian at Church Divinity School of the Pacific applied for a field education placement at St. Gregory’s. Carrie uses a motorized wheelchair. She said, “with the level floor and lots of movement to negotiate and lead, this is where I’ll best learn what it’s going to take for me to function as a priest.”
A few years later, Lynn Baird, our clergy staff member who had Multiple Sclerosis would sit out the carol in one of the perimeter chairs, fully vested. Having Lynn sit out the dance made it even clearer that we weren’t demanding that people dance. The parishioner whose broken foot was in a cast, or someone just recovering from surgery would go sit with Lynn, and likely say, “I’ll be here with you for the next couple of weeks.” Taking the phrase “if you’re comfortable” out of our liturgical vocabulary had given the active verb “to comfort” new life.
I don’t know if it’s a straight cause and effect line in this language use of “Iif you’re comfortable,” but I notice that when people hold back from liturgical participation or want to criticize something, one thing we’re likely to hear is, “I’m just not comfortable [doing whatever it is we’re talking about].” Jesus’ Good News and the spiritual practices of the church shape us to live Good News, but like moving into any learning, practice invitations take us through discomfort, awkwardness, and disorientation to eventual flow, connections and freedom. Ah, freedom. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” maybe even freedom to move through discomfort.
The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is
President of All Saints Company.