Month: September 2008

dosha

yes that’s how we mallus say it. the lovely dosa was a part of our meal today. Kiarna was so quiet. enjoying the taste of a time past. It’s funny to think that a 3 year old has a past.

I had a version of kothu parota. twas yum.

And Luiza had bits of lots of things.

Thank God for the Sri Lankans. Another country brings a taste of home close.

Thanks Phil and Jenny.

There is no spoon

‘ You have to do the imaginative work. No one else can do it for you’

This line from Jonny Baker has stuck with me. It’s one of those kind of things that you wonder about but at the right time and in the right context it comes out with an articulation which gently becomes less muddy.

At the symposium deep calls to deep I went to a few workshops and this was the overiding question and need.

How do we apply it?

How do we practically do it?

These questions seem to pervade all existence. Mindless rumination and thought are considered a waste of time. And this was exactly how the totalitarian communist regimes worked. If it wasn’t ‘useful’ then it wasn’t worth anything.

This is something that science struggles with as well. A lot of money is thrown at ‘useful’ projects and there isn’t much into so called ‘pure’ science. But the simple fact what seemed like pointless rumination and metaphysics find themselves in our everyday computer chips and processes.

When it comes to church this need for ‘practicality’ is getting more and more true with the churches that i was involved with. The need for prepackaged solutions. No wonder our churches aren’t relating. We’re just importing everything from elsewhere ruining the spiritual give and take of our own people.

So Bangalorean Christians import their songs, their prayer books, their bible readings, their church models, and… it’s depressing isn’t it. Where’s the free thinking? Where’s the creativity? The churches are bursting with creative people. But they are shunned. Or asked to do something peripheral.

Isn’t there anyone who wants to do the imaginative work? Or wants it to be done?

Deep calls to deep

Passion, indifference, self pity, joy, relief, tension, tears, numbness, liveliness, crushed.

These were some of the emotions I went through on the extreme over the last few days. The event a symposium on worship. I’d volunteered and ended up doing PA.

I heard many great things from people like Graham Kendrick, Joel Edwards (director of the Evangelical Alliance), Mark Eary and Jonny Baker. And later went to a workshop by Jeremy Begbie. Loved it.

Joel Edwards said he was ‘…bored’ with the worship in churches. And he wondered if God was bored as well.

Graham Kendrick spoke about the genesis of the modern worship music movement and how it’s grown and where it’s come to and the huge challenges it faces and that it throws up.

Mark Eary was great. really loved what he said about technology and liturgy.

Jonny Baker spoke passionately (very understated-ly) about worship, the future, and ‘community is content’.

It was very interesting to see from my perspective that the 2 leaders from the charismatic renewal movement (Graham and Joel) seemed a bit tired and on the search for something new while the Anglicans (Mark and Jonny) were pointing the way forward. I’m biased.

But the whole event turned me inside out. I was hearing all these wonderful and beautiful things but it felt like all that I heard within me fell on no man’s land. I carried only the immediate intellectual joy of hearing what I heard. My soul felt and feels dead to recieve such things.

For the first time I didn’t even try to engage with the worship. As a critical person I had nothing to complain about the spirit or the execution of the services. But I was too tired. Too tired to engage. It was freeing. And frightening. Am I rejecting faith itself?

It is a black hole now. There is nothing for me to do. All my God given gifts seem rusted and unworkable. ‘Nothing’ and ‘I don’t know’ seems to be the only words that I can truly say.

What do you do?

Nothing.

What do you want to do?

I don’t know.

Maybe this is the horrible point of dying. Maybe this is reboot time. But will anything run… or load?