Sermon as Story

I've been attending a wonderful storytelling class offered at Unity Church. Last week, Loren Niemi spent time with us on ghost stories and other stories of grief and loss. In the craft of telling, he was masterful in the use of long pauses between parts of the story. These I began to see as white space, which is the essence of good visual design of printed materials. This is just one lesson I learned from this series of gifted teachers and tellers.

Loren described how, in telling his stories, he longs to put his audience into a sort of trance in preparation. I said, perhaps a little flippantly, "that's called worship", and he agreed. While I hesitate to use the word 'trance', which has connotations of hypnotism or suspension of belief in our culture, the idea of being in an enhanced state of readiness, in a contemplative or meditative state does make sense to me. Good liturgy creates this enhanced state. This just puts more weight on the sermon to deliver an authentic and worthwhile message, one that begins to address people's needs for healing and wholeness. In this awareness, I am humbled by the possibility that the pulpit offers, and I become more respectful of those who listen to my words and engage in conversation with me.

A Weekend of Music

This weekend has brought the confluence of two major musical events in at Unity Church, offering an overwhelming amount of energy and activity.

The Arthur Foote Music Festival has been in planning for some time, and it came to wonderful fruition on Sunday, with both choirs, percussion, and strings, leading to powerful performances of Eric Whitacre's "Cloudburst" and Ben Allaway's "From This House To The World".

Through the efforts of Unity Church member Rick Heydinger, the Shades of Praise gospel choir was flown to St. Paul for a weekend of performances at various local churches.
The choir was fabulous and energized, and had even us arrhythmic and reserved types up moving and clapping. We hope these event will lead us into partnership with both historically black and white churches to work on common social concerns, to 'build the Beloved Community', to use M. L. King Jr's. language.

While one could play or listen to music in isolation as part of a personal spiritual practice, making and enjoying music together as part of a religious community has a tremendous power that goes far beyond the personal. We need to remember the importance of music in our various religious communities.

Backups

A friend of mine at school wrote a plaintive note to the school list asking for photos of her time at school, as her computer disk had crashed and she lost all her photos. When we were in New Orleans, we talked with Matt, the homeowner whose house we helped repair, and he noted one of his most painful losses was all his photes, which he had backed up to CD, but not stored offsite. I worry about my photos. And then I worry more about all the documents I create in ministry: sermons, articles, lesson plans, notes and other stuff I want to hang on to.

I'm beginning to make my acquaintance with Jungledisk, a front-end program for backing up to Amazon S3. S3, or Simple Storage Service, is a web-based data storage service, redundant, secure, industrial strength, but not designed for the ordinary user. Jungledisk acts like a disk drive that pushes your data to S3. You can copy things to and from this disk drive. You can also set it to back up your data periodically; I have it back up every four hours, and keep old copies up to 60 days. The service is relatively cheap: roughly $0.15 per gigabyte stored plus $0.10 per gigabyte transferred in; my backups for my home and work machines are costing me about $2 per month. Jungledisk is a $20 shareware app that you can try for free.

I'm not sure this is the ultimate solution. Jungledisk is a little crufty on the user interface. But I do know I am more comfortable knowing my stuff is 'out there', backed up remotely as well as locally.

Ceili Gets Nervous

Our dog Ceili has just watched Liz pack a bag for a weekend trip. This always upsets her. She sometimes is relieved to see her own bed and bowl as part of the luggage, but even then, she's never sure she is included until she is invited into the car.

Liz is visiting her friend Ruth, who is working on a program called Singing Meditation. This is a small group spiritual practice consisting of cycles of singing interspersed with times of silent meditation. Liz will help Ruth with a retreat this weekend, at St. Bede Monastery, but Liz's primary activity is working with Ruth on a book about this practice. Liz's website is here.