Radiate: Tristan Mason's Blog

Resources for Prayer & the Daily Offices

Welcome to the blog, friends from the 2011 Inner Journey spiritual disciplines retreat! What a great time. I loved spending a weekend in worship with you all. Below is the resource list I mentioned at the retreat for practicing prayer and the daily offices. Click on any title to view that book at Amazon. The [...]

A Couple Recent Stage Looks We Liked

(click the pics for larger versions) Especially if you aren’t used to working with lighting, it’s easy to default to traditional methods of changing the look of your stage. Don’t get me wrong; sometimes building a set, repainting walls, or working with huge yardages of fabric can be exactly the thing, and the result can [...]

Is It Really All In My Head?

I recently read an article by Vaughan Roberts in which Roberts relates the following encounter: Some years ago I was on a mission in London. After one of our meetings, another team member came to me and said: “Why don’t you hold out your hands when you sing?” I have nothing against that practice. There [...]

The Story Conference, Hope, Darkness… Stuff Like That

I recently attended Story Chicago (“a conference for the creative class”), which proved to be exceedingly thoughtful and helpful. Many conferences have the (stated or unstated) goal of providing resources, training, and networking for experts in a given field. That’s not a bad thing. But this conference was different. While I walked away with some [...]

Burnout Is Not the Martyrdom Jesus Meant

There has been an unseen burnout epidemic among pastors for years, and it’s finally getting noticed and discussed on a wider scale, spreading through the blogosphere and even making the New York Times. After reading some of the articles, I stopped to see what the Mayo Clinic had to say about burnout. They list a [...]

A Prayer for a Lenten Evening

March 31st, 2011

Thanks to Thomas à Kempis for this gem from The Imitation of Christ. It’s a perfect prayer for a Lenten evening.

Grant me Your grace, O most merciful Jesus, that it may be with me, and work with me, and remain with me to the very end. Grant that I may always desire and will that which is most acceptable and pleasing to You. Let Your will be mine. Let my will always follow Yours and agree perfectly with it. Let my will be one with Yours in willing and in not willing, and let me be unable to will or not will anything but what You will or do not will. Grant that I may die to all things in this world, and for Your sake love to be despised and unknown in this life. Give me above all desires the desire to rest in You, and in You let my heart have peace. You are true peace of heart. You alone are its rest. Without You all things are difficult and troubled. In this peace, the selfsame that is in You, the Most High, the everlasting Good, I will sleep and take my rest. Amen.

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Is It Really All In My Head?

February 15th, 2011

I recently read an article by Vaughan Roberts in which Roberts relates the following encounter:

Some years ago I was on a mission in London. After one of our meetings, another team member came to me and said: “Why don’t you hold out your hands when you sing?” I have nothing against that practice. There are examples of it in the Bible. It can express something physically of what you feel in your heart. But I could not see why it seemed to matter so much to my friend. So I asked him, “Why should I?” He replied: “Because if you hold out your hands, you’ll receive a blessing from God. He will come close to you and you’ll feel his presence with you”.

He was expressing the view of many: we meet with God as we sing praise to him, especially when we do so in a particular way. The role of musicians and ‘worship leaders’ is to facilitate that encounter. [...]

The Bible never teaches that a feeling can take us into the presence of God. If that had been possible, God would have sent us a musician rather than a saviour. Only Christ can take us into the Most Holy Place in heaven, where we have direct access to the Father through faith in him.

The very common view that ‘worship’ is essentially a time of singing through which we are drawn close to God has a number of harmful consequences….

Based on the rest of the article, I understand what Roberts is trying to say: It is not through music itself that we come closer to God; don’t mistake an emotional buzz for Him. What I think is entirely missing, though (from this article and many others), is a good explanation of how we actually do meet God and draw closer to Him in corporate worship. It’s not all just in my head, is it? Are my emotions playing a smoke-and-mirrors game that tricks me into thinking I worshiped?

Roberts certainly isn’t alone in pointing out the theological problems with thinking that music or specific actions with worship function as a sort of mediator of God’s presence. Plenty of authors past and present have said similar things, and they’re right: sometimes people unthinkingly exalt music to sacramental status and treat it as if it functioned like a means of grace. My friend and pastor, Phil, said it well when he quoted John Calvin: “Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.” If we don’t pay attention, we’ll start turning any good gift into an idol, and music is no exception.

But it would be awfully presumptive for us to assume that everyone who talks about experiencing God’s presence during worship thinks that the music itself is somehow making that happen. For those of us in churches that are largely nonliturgical, there is a sense in which our songs perform the function of liturgy. A good set of songs can take us on a corporate journey of praise, thanks, confession, repentance, forgiveness, and celebration. Passages like James 4:6-10 and Jeremiah 29:12-13 make it clear that God does indeed respond to us as we seek him in those ways. God doesn’t respond to our songs as such; he responds to the acts of worship that occur as we intend a song, making its words our words and its intentions our intentions.

I think it makes sense to say that singing functions not as a mediator or a sacrament, but as a concentrated setting for corporate spiritual practices. It is confession, or prayer, or praise, set to music. Singing—like every other spiritual practice—is not about manipulating God or hooking up to a special “worship grace spout” through which He pours Himself out to us. God does not require us to perform some action in order to experience His presence. He is always pouring Himself out to us, but we are seldom paying attention. It’s like Annie Dillard wrote: “You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”

Sure, worship singing functions vertically as praise to God and horizontally as encouragement to each other (as Roberts says in his article), but that is only part of the story. We should not ignore the fact that it also functions cohesively and inwardly. Cohesively, it acts like liturgy by allowing us to approach God together, with shared language and intentions. Inwardly, it acts by helping us “sit in the dark” and become undistracted enough to be aware of the presence and action of God that is already all around us.

Maybe Roberts is right in saying that worship is not a “time of singing through which we are drawn close to God,” but it fits with both scripture and experience to say that singing can be a time of worship during which we draw close to God—and He responds by drawing close to us as He promises.

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Beautiful Things video

December 9th, 2010

Those of you who have been following my Facebook or Twitter ravings probably already know how much I have been enjoying Gungor‘s new album, Beautiful Things. I’m not going to try to describe it to you, except to say that it is diverse, interesting, and worth your time… so go buy it. :)

We used the title track from this album behind a video we made recently. Our church just finished the series “Prodigal God” based on the book by Tim Keller. The final message in the series is both a celebration and an invitation: “Come to the Table”. It’s about how God rescued us and invited us to feast, just as the father did in Jesus’ parable. He redeems our failures, turning our dust and ashes into beautiful things—an infinitely costly, divine alchemy. It has always been that way; from the moment he formed Adam from dust to the Great Redemption Of All Things at the end of time, what our God touches is transformed. We showed this video just before we celebrated communion together.

Credit where credit is due: The sand artist footage is Mark Demel performing at Willow Creek; that footage is available here. The time-lapse flowers are courtesy of stopchiyski from this amazing youtube video. The music, as I said above, is “Beautiful Things” by Gungor. The main points of posting this are: 1) to get churches and creative arts folks thinking about creative ways to collage/reuse older material like we did with this sand painting footage, and 2) to convince you to go buy Gungor’s new album. :)

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The Watches of the Night

November 15th, 2010

Not too long ago, TED.com posted a talk by Jessa Gamble entitled “How to sleep”. The talk is only 4 minutes long and centers around the human body clock and sleep/waking cycles. Judging from the comments, it left many viewers intrigued but unsatisfied: How can we get more information about this? What is she suggesting as a solution? What are the implications of this for our lives and schedules?

I felt much the same way, but also I found the specific schedule she suggested fascinating… which I’ll explain after the video:

What strikes me about Gamble’s schedule is how similar it seems to the schedule of fixed-hour prayer, especially the practice of rising during “the watches of the night” in order to pray (if you’re not aware of this practice, I highly suggest reading up on the biblical basis and history of fixed-hour prayer; for starters, check out the Judaism & Early Church section of the Wikipedia Canonical Hours article). Just look over the table below, which shows the Greek Orthodox hours, and compare the highlighted sections to what Gamble said in her talk:

Name of service in Greek	Name of service in English	Time of service	Description/purpose
Hesperinos (Ἑσπερινός)	Vespers	At sunset	The beginning of the (liturgical) day. Meditating on Christ as the “Light.”
Apodeipnon (Ἀπόδειπνον) lit. “after-supper”	Compline	At bedtime	Meditating on our final falling asleep, i.e. our death.
Mesonyktikon (Μεσονυκτικόν)	Midnight Office	At midnight	Prayed in monasteries in the middle of the night.
Orthros (Ὂρθρος)	Matins or Orthros	At dawn	Prayer in the watches before dawn. Praising God at the rising of the sun.
Prōtē Hōra (Πρῶτη Ὣρα)	First Hour (Prime)	At ~7 AM	Meditating on the Creation, Banishment of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the appearance of Christ before Caiaphas.
Tritē Hōra (Τρίτη Ὣρα)	Third Hour (Terce)	At ~9 AM	Meditating on the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, which happened at this hour.
Hektē Hōra (Ἓκτη Ὣρα)	Sixth Hour (Sext)	At noon	Meditating on Christ’s crucifixion, which happened at this hour
Ennatē Hōra (Ἐννάτη Ὣρα)	Ninth Hour (None) *	At ~3 PM	Meditating on the death of Christ, which happened at this hour.

When I first heard about the practice of waking up in the middle of the night to pray, I thought, How in the world did monks do that? I’d be completely exhausted. It sounds kind of weird/ascetic/unhealthy. And then I watched that video. What if this practice actually far better matches our natural sleep patterns than our modern schedules do? I also found surprising the language Gamble employed when she describe the clarity people experienced upon waking. During the day our minds are pulled so many directions that undistracted prayer is extraordinarily difficult. What if this moment of clarity were experienced during prayer and silent listening? Could we finally pay attention to the “still, small voice” of God’s Spirit?

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The Story Conference, Hope, Darkness… Stuff Like That

October 10th, 2010

I recently attended Story Chicago (“a conference for the creative class”), which proved to be exceedingly thoughtful and helpful. Many conferences have the (stated or unstated) goal of providing resources, training, and networking for experts in a given field. That’s not a bad thing. But this conference was different. While I walked away with some great ideas and new methodology, that just wasn’t really the point. It seemed to me that this conference was itself constructed more like a story or work of art rather than an educational experience.

There were several threads which ran through the conference, but the one that was most transformational for me was this, stated most succinctly by author Andrew Klavan: “A storyteller who doesn’t have the integrity to face the depth of the world’s darkness will not have the authority to lead people to the Light.” Not only writers are storytellers, of course. All art—all good art, anyway—tells a story. A song, a painting, or a film can tell a story. The structure of a worship gathering can tell a story, as can the elements within it.

The irony is that while Christians possess the greatest story of all time, much of the art perpetrated by evangelicals over the past hundred years or so has been, well, bad. I’m not even talking about Precious Moments figurines and Thomas Kinkade paintings. Everyone loves to hate on that stuff, but that’s because it’s easy and relatively safe for us to take potshots at Precious Moments. It is harder to talk about our churches. It hits closer to home and upsets more people when we evaluate what we hear, see, and sing every Sunday and find it wanting.

Often this shows up in our willingness to speak about and represent the scent of yesterday’s decay, that area we have conquered, but not to face honestly our own continuing darkness and struggle. As Dan Allender said at Story, our lives are not linear. They do not run cleanly from death to life, from darkness to light. Until the revealing of the salvation yet to come (as Peter would say), we are messy saints indeed, wrestling and writhing in Paul’s Romans 7 agony of the in-between. Even in Romans 8, with all of its beautiful freedom from condemnation, Paul states that creation continues to groan with the pangs of childbirth, and it will do so until Jesus makes all things new.

Never should our art revel in darkness. At the same time, we cannot ignore it or dishonestly whitewash it. The world is messed up. Everyone knows it. Especially in the suburbs, we spend our lives trying to avoid that mess and provide safe, healthy environments for ourselves and our families, but some things are more important than safety. I’m not advocating that we all move to Darfur and listen to death metal. I’m just saying that I believe Klavan is right: Our art—our films, our stories, our songs, our sermons—must be honest about the continuing battle that rages in us and in the world. We have nothing to fear from the truth; God owns it.

A photograph of pure white is about as profound as a blank sheet of paper. A song with no dissonance is cloying. A story with no tension or conflict is tedious. Hope is beautiful precisely because we have not yet received what we long for (see Hebrews 11). Let’s not short-circuit hope in favor of safety. When we have the integrity to face the darkness honestly, we will have the authority to speak love and light into people’s lives—and be believable.

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