Went to an Advent and Carol service last night. It was highly liturgical, mainly choral music performed by a choir, rather than carols made accessible to a congregation. Delayed by a car accident on the way, we arrived just as the choir, complete with candles, had begun their introit. So we waited with the warmly welcoming door stewards, complete with torches as in the old cinema days, till the first hymn was being sung, during which we were able to slip in without disturbing the carefully choreographed theatre of light and darkness, sound and movement, words and music.
But we didn't have an order of service did we? All distributed before we arrived. And the service was intended to move without interruption so no announcements of hymns and numbers. In the absence of anyone looking upon us with compassion and sharing their Order of Service we were compelled to sneak looks over shoulders, glance sideways at other opened hymnbooks, play guessing games with the words to deduce the hymn we were supposed to be singing before the hymn ended, and while the rest of the congregation sung securely on. But in fact of the four hymns sung I only knew one anyway – and I thought I knew "hunners ae hymns".
All of which drove me to an inner reciting of the unhelpful and non-liturgical response, "It's worship Jim, but not as we know it". We did feel a bit left out. The unfamiliar place, sounds, content of the service made it feel alien, uncomfortable, almost like a different religion. That isn't an over-reaction – it's an attempt to find in our experience a parallel to a number of other people's experience when they come to our country and look for fellowship and welcome, and some reminders of home in Christian churches.
A week or so earlier at my own local church I'd had a greatly uplifting conversation with an African couple trying to get their heads round, and their hearts into, a form of worship which, compared to worship as they know it, lacked passion, colour, movement and sheer in your face God inspired emotion. They spoke so movingly of their sense of the strangeness of things, of wondering where the connection points are between worship as they knew it and worship as they now encountered it amongst people of another culture, country and Christian tradition. And all of that makes me wonder what it now means to say there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, because we are all one….. Yes I believe it. But how does that actually work? How in a globalised world can the Church, the Body of Jesus Christ embody forth that underlying unity that while expressed in almost endless diversity, nevertheless retains the face of our Lord recognisable to us all.
At that point I want to think about love, welcome, hospitality, and grace. Take grace for example. Our theology of grace as God's initiative of welcoming love, can surely guide us in our response to the strangers amongst us, and could be a model for Christians who are strangers amongst those of us who, for them, are "the others". I mean initiative that reaches out in friendship. The grace that goes before, that speaks first, that dissolves cultural and emotional barriers by an open and vulnerable acceptance, that enables us to look generously on other people's ways of telling God of their love and worship, or which looks with understanding and a willingness to accommodate the hesitations and confusion of those not familiar with our own ways. Grace which looks the other in the eye, smiles to convey the face of welcome, and looks on the other as a Charis, a gift of presence from God.
All of this connects with some of my planned advent reading. I'd already decided to read several novels located in cultures other than the one I know best, and from perspectives not only different, but possibly hostile to that worldview with which I have grown up. Given the journey of the Magi, the slaughter of the innocents, and the flight to Egypt, the Advent story opens many windows on a world where difference and otherness too easily degenerate into fear, violence and hatred. So as a way of critically exploring and enhancing my own openness, I'll be reading stories that view the world differently, and try to appreciate the difficulties and opportunities of encounter in a world uneasy with otherness. The four novels are:
A Thousand Splendid Suns,by Khaled Hosseini
The Islamist, by Ed Hussain
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
The Road Home, Rose Tremain
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