WORSHIP

• Our worship service is aimed to blow you away. Don’t expect sentimental comfort. The world’s a tough place, and we want our liturgy to be an authentic response. • Engaging in public ritual is good for the soul. The ancient word liturgy means work of the people – and that’s what we’re doing: working together to create health and wholeness. Public engaged ritual grounds us and connects us. The liturgy also gives us psychic insulation against the darkness around us and within us. • Our liturgy is based on the structure of the ancient liturgy. We follow the order, the ordo, but freely interchange the parts. When the rhythm of the ancient structure requires sung or spoken words, our musicians have composed “patches” that we cut and paste onto the music. • Our only requirement is that the music we use is authentically great and heavy music – that it has that indefinable something, it swings, has gravitas. Robert Persig’s Quality. • Yes, we do still use the Psalms. The Book of Psalms is found in the Hebrew Bible, what we used to call the Old Testament. Psalms was Israel’s book of hymns, their Real Book. This is also some of the best and most influential poetry ever. Each week our musicians improvise the music for our Psalm. Then we’ll read a section back and forth, call and response, led by our reader. Then the musicians will close it out. We encourage you to open up to the poetry and music of these ancient verses. • We also read from the Bible every week. This is our holy book. But we aren’t literalists or fundamentalists. We read and listen critically and with a sixth sense. We’re trying to catch a glimpse of something beautiful and heavy, basic as air, and frail and human, the Trinitarian God. Usually we’ll read one story from the Hebrew Bible, recite a Psalm together, hear a new testament reading, and then a gospel. Most often we adhere to the revised common lectionary, which suggests the readings in a three year cycle. We like the lectionary for two reasons: it deflates the grandiose subjectivity of the preacher, and it links us to all the other Christian churches out there.