Wednesday, February 21, 2007

thoughts on u2charist

Thoughts on u2charist

The words “let there be light” were spoken, I suppose, in a language known only within the Trinity, to the persons of it. Certainly it was not one we know. Indeed all our services are, in a sense, acts of translation, as attending last Sunday’s u2charist at All Saints reminded me. The familiar words of the liturgy were poured into a new form, set between recorded songs of U2 presented through the medium of laptop and projection screen. A multimedia presentation, if you will, that you could sing along to if you were familiar with the words or could read them off the screen.

(If you were in L.A. I suppose you would recruit Michael Been to produce video images to fit with songs of The Call.)

In my hands this afternoon at our staff meeting, I held “The Mexican Album” by the Santa Cruz River Band, a group of Tucson musicians. The cover art of the CD included a definition of heritage, something passed on through generations, which is something this band works to transmit, bringing forward to a new generation what was passed on to them by the ancestors. The new form is quite old. I suppose if you were planning an inculturated Eucharist in Tucson, you might well call on these musicians – as well as the Redhouse family.

Someday, soon perhaps, we will see a celtic/native-american Mass of Our Mother Earth, blending worship once written in Greek or Hebrew or Latin or English with Native American and Irish sources, to celebrate God’s Word and God’s Presence located here in this context.

U2charist speaks to a context of a passing on of generations. Not every young person has heard of them, but those who have enjoy them right along with their fathers and mothers and cousins. Songs some of which I remember from the 1980s are fresh in context.

We are too far north for a mariachi mass – I mused as I walked with the dog this afternoon – I wonder what we would make of it locally – a jazz mass? our 9 o’clock contemporary service? I suppose every service though is in some sense a translation, a recontextualizing. Taking hymns from the 13th to the 19th century – and before and after – using them to present in the 21st a message that is after all without time’s constraint.

JRL+