Intro: Been thinking about worship quite a lot since Deep Impact 2012. Partly because i realised it reminds me of spring harvest 20 odd years ago. Partly because it challenged me in an unexpected way. These thoughts are rawish & unexplored. probably containing badly made points so feel free to ignore them. They come with a little experience of standing in pews, worship services and events, and some of organising and leading worship in a few contexts.

what is worship?
worship is time spent noticing God.
It can be done privately or corporately
Private worship it can include personal bible study and prayer times.
Corporately it can include liturgical action such as praising, thanking, invoking, confessing, proclaiming, interceding, and blessing

Worship within an congregational setting is not a private event.
Obvious right? If you gather with a group of other people, the relationship is public.

I do wonder about the individualism of worship. Particularly within songs, songs which refer to ‘I’ or ‘me’ and my relationship to a God. This can be helpful in songs of intimacy and praise, hymns and prayers of lament and confession.
Does this creates a false understanding of the privacy and intimacy of that moment. If I consider that during a public time it is actually a safe environment to have one on one time with God, how does that regard and speak of the others within the church?
The oft quoted ‘where two and three and gathered’ provokes the question about how God deals with each person within that. this questions has some momentum when each member of that group could be worshiping privately and individually while part of the whole.

Privacy
When we gather for worship, we gather.

We.

We bring our experiences, reflections, happiness and sadness and join together. That joining to notice God can mean different thing to different people but we do things together. Inherent in this is a public notice and reaction. If i do something in a congregation there is an expectation that people will notice and and expectation of a reaction. a smile, a nod, a frown, perhaps a stolen moment of commentary. That is part of a group coming to notice God. The reality that we can notice God in each other.

When David danced in front of God. He did it publicly, literally in front of everyone, (leading the soldiers back from battle). And others started joining in. The story goes that one of his wives looked out the window and saw him and was shocked, catching him later and asking about his actions.

When we join together, we are public. We are deliberately not private. Our gatherings are hopefully advertised, inviting people into churches to be with us. We look for critical engagement with those who have not joined with us.

Privacy is a hot topic with the CCTV, interweb, human rights and personal safety issues involved in the discussion. But privacy in a large gathered group is much harder to contend with. What does this mean for those whose job it is to lead a group in worship. it means our outlook and focus should be on the appropriateness of action within our gatherings for our culture, for how each action helps us notice god, & how we can notice God in a way which causes us to think & play.

Social Media
It would be easy to point to Social Media as something which disrupts our ability to notice God. It is endless and constant in the demands it makes our our time and our skills. With blogs to read (yes, Irony), RSS feeds to check, twitter to update, Facebook to update, thinks to re-tweet, like and comment on. Taking time to notice God seems entirely counter cultural.

For years Christianity especially has dealt in social media. First Communion Cards, Footprints book markers, entire shops of books and things to communicate publicly. With the advent of mass recording, Conferences & Festivals have recorded talks and concerts and sold them to those present and those absent, right up to and including dedicated radio and TV stations across the UK.

The problem comes with the speed of current social media. Twitter expects updates within seconds of each other. Facebook, within minutes. With this speed comes a lack of control. Anyone can say anything, picture anything, and have shared it with millions of people within seconds. This is no possibility of editing the message.

This immediacy gives rise to fear. The real risk of a negative getting out is realistic. Yet social media has the ability to bring those absent physically, into worship. Enabling for joining in and enriching our noticing God. It allows for those opting out of the worship to engage with those within in. It allows for dialogue.

Public worship invites comment and social media provides one of the main ways currently to comment. As a force with the ability to instantly allow for the engagement of a large group of people, it is unbeatable. As a aid to our efforts to notice God in a corporate spaces it is a tool which feels under used, with this great possibilities

not just to get 2 christmases, oh no. he is the religious leader who looks most like Sant, therefore if he gives up his christmas and gives presents to all the children of the world, then i can take a day and celebrate christmas with him.

Thanks Santa, i mean Cyril.

As I listened I started to wonder why young people haven’t caught onto yoga as a spiritual discipline. Why when you hit 20′s and beyond does yoga start to become something accessible and open to you. What are the barriers to this experience. Why do young people not respond to it? Are young people spiritual in a specifically adolescent way? Is it cultural norms rather than spiritual norms which close the door?

As I thought about this I wondered about young people.
I believe young people, like every person is inherently spiritual. Has a curiosity about spiritual things and develops ways of being/ acting/ understandings which reflect this.
Yet one main stream spiritual activity, which has dual benefits, and seeming agnostic view of religion, seems not to hit the spot.

What does hit the spot. What is the language of this spot and where does it exist/ can it accessed. My suspicion is that it is a foreign country, they do things differently there,(as someone once remarked.) I wonder what it looks like, what it sounds like, what it feels like?

Could it be online.
I wonder.

The World Questions Centre made this their questions of 2011

James Flynn has defined “shorthand abstractions” (or “SHA’s”) as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates (“market”, “placebo”, “random sample,” “naturalistic fallacy,” are a few of his examples). His idea is that the abstraction is available as a single cognitive chunk which can be used as an element in thinking and debate.

The Edge Question 2011

WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY’S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?

The term ‘scientific”is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA. A “scientific concept” may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or “in a phrase”) but has broad application to understanding the world.

The list of people who answer the questions are quite staggering.
The list of concepts runs to 17 pages and also are quite staggering.

the ones which i particularly liked were
Terrance Sejnowski – Powers of 10 also see Carl Page – Powers of 10
Gerd Gigerenzer – Risk literacy
Carlo Rovelli – The Uselessness of Certainty
Evgeny Morozov – Einstellung Effect

an entertaining and thought provoking way to spend an evening!
you should visit

Graciousness is a quality of mind that does not separate truth and beauty. Talk of truth always makes it sound as if truth were the cardinal virtue. yet without beauty, truth becomes blind and can be turned into a blunt and heartless imperative. When we hold beauty and truth together, truth will always have a sense of compassion and gentleness. Sometimes the so-called facts of a situation actually tell us little or nothing about the heart of an experience. Only in the light of beauty can we come to see what is really present. This is true also of the way in which we view our own life. If we were to describe our life strictly in terms of its factual truth, most of its interesting, complex, and surprising dimensions would remain unmentioned. The gracious eye can find the corners where growth and healing are at work even when we feel weak and limited. It is no wonder that Jesus said; the gentle shall inherit the earth.

From Divine Beauty, The Invisible Embrace, by John O’Donohue.

I have been thinking about fishing lately. In particular is fishing the only place where contemporary society practices waiting in a good way.
Patience, Awareness, stillness, the ability to stop,

I think deep snow is probably the only time where large sections of society generally stop and wait well together.
(I think the beauty of covering everything in snow makes the waiting something that can be done well.)
John O’Donohue talks about how we live on the threshold of things.
He talks of waiting as being one of the keys to making it over some of the thresholds.
In many way this depth, or this entering into speaks of place.
it speaks of where you are.

I get that, I like that.

I think the waiting is key.
I doubt I am good at it. I think i may work on it.

solas2010 was class
you should have been there.

great music, speakers, weather, activities, and fun for all the family.
it was great to be a part of something like this.
where sourcing affordable, local produce, sold at affordable prices, (£2 for an organic venison burger. nice!) was as important as getting the right band. Where giving the festival the right feel & vibe was more important than having a pub.

It was a delight and joy. I still can’t quite believe how well everything went. Someone gave me feedback based on turning Solas from a 4star festival into a 5star. Trust me, a 4star rating is deserved and accurate. It really was good. You should have been there.

thanks to lots of people I worked directly with including,
Dominic,
Hoggy & Gordon @GBR,
Ben & E&MS crew,
Bill,
Sam,
Martin & Dave,
Jonny @Wiston
and the solas directors.

Here’s to many more.

PS Becoming a Solas Saint would be very helpful. please consider helping Solas to grow and develop the conversation between Arts, Justice & Faith, http://www.solasfestival.co.uk/give.php

Loved the full extract from “Marilynne Robinson: Can science solve life’s mysteries?” in saturdays Guardian. I love stuff like this.

(small quote)
It will be a great day in the history of science if we sometime discover a damp shadow elsewhere in the universe where a fungus has sprouted. The mere fossil trace of life in its simplest form would be the crowning achievement of generations of brilliant and diligent labour. And here we are, a gaudy efflorescence of consciousness, staggeringly improbable in light of everything we know about the reality that contains us. There are physicists and philosophers who would correct me. They would say, if there are an infinite number of universes, as in theory there could be, then creatures like us would be very likely to emerge at some time in one of them. But to say this is only to state the fact of our improbability in other terms.

::[[read the rest of it here]]::

the fact they are from Yale University’s Terry Lectures is even more exciting.
The Terry lectures are given by a world leading thinker into the topics of science and theology. You can find 2008′s terry lectures in itunesU from Terry Eagleton. and they are well worth finding and downloading as he speaks immense sense theologically.

Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Terry Lectures) by M Robinson, 176pp, Yale,

Changes.
They come in some unexpected places.

You came to take us
All things go, all things go
To recreate us
All things grow, all things grow
We had our mindset
(I made a lot of mistakes)
All things know, all things know
(I made a lot of mistakes)
You had to find it
(I made a lot of mistakes)
All things go, all things go
(I made a lot of mistakes)

No matter where I search, it seems the internet can never answer the question.