Finished Year B of the College for Congregational Development - got a certificate to show for it and even a teeshirt!
The back of the teeshirt mimics and laments the psalms we recited in Morning and Evening Prayer - psalms we said "antiphonally": verses alternate between the two halves of the room, but each verse is also divided in two (by the asterisk), in whose middle there is a pause of, they told us, about three heart beats. This means there's a longer gap between the two parts of each verse than between the end of one verse and the start of the next, intoned by other people.
This is an ancient practice, and one I have long loved. A long time ago I taught students how to do it, telling them to think of it like a pendulum, with a slowing and change of direction at the end of each swing, a breathlike suspension in the middle of each verse, before it gathers speed for the next. I must have had a way of letting them know how long to pause because I don't remember the anxiety we all felt here at CCD, not wanting to be the first to break the silence! Or maybe I'm remembering the times I spent in Benedictine monasteries where monks accustomed to this practice (they do it seven times a day!) made the pauses feel completely organic. I relished each one, like a draught of cool clear water, and remembered that here too.
At one point today (maybe it was even during Morning Prayer) we were asked to reflect if there were things we'd done during our week together which might be of use in a wider context, and I thought of - antiphonal chanting. How valuable it would be, I thought, if people had the experience of being in this patterned rhythm together with others, including silence, and especially if they knew from it that every verse of scripture (maybe any verse!) has more in it than its words. It is but a container for deeper knowledge or presence we can't articulate, the opening of a door to this vaster sustaining reality. Might this stop us in our tracks at the moment of judgment, condemnation?
It occurs to me now that this thought was consonant with the aspect of "Episcopal identity" I gravitated toward during an exercise earlier in the week (see the array of twelve in the second image here) when asked what we thought our distinctive gift to the wider society might be. I picked
Loving the questions and helping others love the questions about God, the spiritual life and life itself.
Discussing that with the two others who gathered there I found myself making a similar point: our society pushes us into rigid, premature and polarizing identifications (answers), estranging us from the deeper transformative mysteries of our lives and interrelatedness (questions).
Obviously, engaging more people in antiphonal psalm recitation isn't the way to do this! (I'm not sure everyone at CCD is a fan either - witness the teeshirt.) But other things like periodic retreats, or weekly sabbaths, maybe even structured collective experiences of breathing together in silence, might be. Thank you, CCD!
