April 25, 2013
Kibitzing
We’ve all experienced
going to the movies and being disturbed by people who are carrying on a
conversation at various times during the movie. The culprits are either
oblivious, or just don’t care that they are disturbing others. Glaring and
shushing them is seldom very effective…especially if they are adults. Much to
my chagrin the same thing happens in church. Fellowship and visiting continues
even though announcements have begun, pew partners engage in conversations
while congregational singing is going on, and my personal grievance is with
people kibitzing during communion. All of the elements for the communion time –
the song selection, prepared meditation, prayer, serving the emblems - are
designed to focus the worshipper’s attention on the Lord. Because of the
insensitivity of some, moments of meditation and reflection are often shattered
and stolen from worshippers. I think Paul’s instructions to the early church
concerning talking in tongues and orderly worship could be applicable to us
today. “If anyone speaks in a tongue,
two—or at the most three—should speak, one at a time, and someone must
interpret. If there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep
quiet in the church and speak to himself and God.” (1 Cor 14:27-28 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----In my youth I decided to laugh at this world as soon as I was finished crying about it. So far, I’ve gotten a chance to chuckle a few times. Its failures to serve everyone what they would like are due both to man’s incompetence as well as the shear complexity of any given situation. Pull a chair into an empty, windowless room; close the door; turn out the lights, and sit. Simple situation? Of course not. The situation includes one of the most complex elements of this physical universe - a human. Try to stop its mind or squelch its emotions. Like the gentle breeze tweaks your hairs and licks your cheeks while spring water trickles into your hands and flows unstoppably through your fingers to go on to wherever it goes, your emotions will circulate within you and your thoughts will drip, drip, drip in succession, finding whatever within you to make of the darkness. They might add the warmth of sunlight pressing upon your face and arms, right on down to where the dripping water wets your wrists. Or the chill of an overcast sky. Or whatever else. The complexity in the room cometh from you.
-----When I was four years old I lived nearly a quarter-mile from the railroad south bounding to Ridgway. In the dark of the night, in the still of everyone’s slumber, that distance was not too far to silence the footsteps of the battalion marching down those tracks to seize me! I listened carefully in anxiety, not quite fear, to the endless pounding of the boots against rail ties and the graveled, packed dirt between. Quiet! Quiet! Listen! Listen, can I really hear each boot pound the ground as that marched footfall crunched more than it crisply popped? And the next? Hear the next? Yes! Yes! I can! There are so many! They keep marching, marching, marching. But never arrive. Why?
-----It is interesting that a little boy’s mind would serve up “why” to be his thoughts’ caboose disappearing into the veil of sleep rustled by a dissipating slipstream of gently swirling and slightly anxious little eddies. It is interesting that it took this little boy several years to answer “why” and realize it was just the pound of pulsing blood heard by an ear pressed to a pillow which dropped the battalion’s marching steps onto his mind, stride by stride.
-----Then what of those pesky, croaking-frog secretion noises which rise up from the tummy of any poor soul trying to maintain ultimate silence? The hiccup, too, the cough, the sneeze, the boot heel knock upon the hardwood floor, the sniffle, and the throat cleared at the soft bustle of a room filled with complexities trying to achieve complete blackout and radio-silence unto the moment of Holy contemplation? Stretch the tolerance for such minor disturbances just a smidgeon, and it will cover also the hushed whispers of thoughts emerging wrapped in their own slipstreams of emotional import for delivery to the complexity seated in the next chair.
-----We are none Holy enough to maintain ultimate blackout. We are all complex enough to effervesce thought and feeling in continuous wispy breezes and inner springs, leaking expressions into the world around us. A spray here, a spout there, a squirt yonder emit from the pressures of pent up expressions escaping through pinholes of lost concentration. If for them a loving chuckle of forbearance darts through one’s own meditative communion images, then that complexity has come to experience and express what all meditation must ultimately seek.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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