Singing bowl in worship
Last week I bought myself a singing bowl and I have been a little like a kid with a new toy ever since. What on earth is that? I hear some of you saying. Oh, Oh now she has really gone off the rails, I hear others comment, that’s a Buddhist thing.
Singing bowls are becoming increasingly popular as a tool in Christian worship. Some use them as a call to worship, either for personal or group prayer, others as a way to calm and centre their spirits and others as a healing tool. The resonance of the singing bowl’s tone really vibrates into my soul and certainly catches my attention with its soothing sound.
In this article, Singing Bowls: A Wordless Call to Worship, the author gives a good look at the history, uses and how to make a bowl sing. I particularly enjoyed this vivid description of use in a service.
the cantor steps away from the mic and stands quietly for a full minute. Then she moves slowly but confidently to the front of the assembly where all can see her. She is joined by another music minister who stands next to her holding a small golden bowl. They wait again there, slowly making eye contact with as many people in the assembly as they can. Then without a word, they both raise their arms in a giant sweep beginning from the side of their legs and slightly forward to just above their shoulders, all the while maintaining eye contact and a gentle smile. The assembly stands. The cantor lowers her arms while the music minister raises the golden bowl higher for the whole assembly to see. In his other hand he holds a short wooden stick. After another thirty seconds of silence, he brings the stick to rest at the side of the bowl in preparation to strike it. He waits another thirty seconds before he strikes the bowl. A pure clean piercing bell tone sounds throughout the room. After a few heart beats, he strikes it again and finally a third time. He slowly lowers the stick as he lets the bowl resonate and the sound drift away. When the tone is almost inaudible, the cantor begins a cappella, “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.” The assembly easily picks up the song on the second phrase since it has been their gathering song for all the Sundays of Lent for the last couple years. The choir adds harmonies while a Celtic drum gives a steady downbeat. Every other refrain the golden bowl is struck again on the first down beat, offering its own unique voice to the choir.
Learning to be creative and unafraid to use new tools and techniques is an important part of worship both in our personal and community faith observances. The singing bowl is certainly something worth experimenting with. And if you are already using a singing bowl I would love to hear about the creative ways you use it and how it has enriched your faith.
Here is a helpful youtube video on how to play a singing bowl. I found it very useful.
The prayer above was inspired by reading Thomas Keating’s welcome prayer which I incorporated into a post yesterday. I am getting ready for strategic planning meetings with the MSA team next week and plan to use this to open our sessions. Welcoming God into our meetings is a way of reminding ourselves of the God who is always present and waiting to be noticed. We appreciate your prayers as we plan events and strategies for the next few years.
Early in the week, in response to my reflections and thoughts on resting in the moment, a friend sent me a copy of the Welcoming Prayer by Father Thomas Keating.
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
I welcome everything that comes to me today because I know that it is for my healing.
I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations, and conditions.
I let go of my desire for power and control.
I let go of my desire for affection, esteem, approval and pleasure,
I let go of my desire for survival and security.
I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person or myself.
I open to the love and presence of God and God’s action within.
Amen.
In Open Mind, Open Heart Thomas Keating, says that “If you can embrace the painful feeling, whatever it is, as if it were God, you are uniting yourself with God, because anything that has reality has God as its foundation.” He says, “I welcome everything that comes to me today because I know it’s for my healing.” (99) If you believe God is good then verbally welcoming the emotion God is giving you helps you recognize that it is there for your own good.
Merton’s prayer was developed by Mary Mrozowski of Contemplative Outreach into a spiritual exercise to help practitioners of centering prayer extend the effects of letting go into daily life by continually consenting to God moment by moment. The Welcoming Prayer is used to deepen one’s relationship with God by consenting to God’s healing presence and action in the ordinary activities of daily life. This is not a practice that I have used much but as I entered into the process this week I realized how helpful it can be for ongoing spiritual health.
Mary recognized that “the most difficult thing for us is to let go”. Even twenty minutes of centering prayer twice a day may not be enough. The welcoming practice gives us something for the other twenty-three hours of the day, “a method of how to let go into the activities of your daily life, to let go of emotions, feelings, commentaries, and thoughts that control us.”
When we let go of our emotions, feelings, and commentaries on them, Mary Mrozowski said, “they are changed by God, by the spirit that dwells within us.” Even more important, we ourselves are transformed over time, so that the energy we have previously expended on clinging to our own programs and protecting our false-self system is freed up to be used for God’s work.
Welcoming Prayer Method
1. Focus
Focus on the precise feelings, physical pains or other such sensations you are experiencing. Gently become aware of your body and your interior state. Identify your feelings. Even if a feeling is somewhat nonspecific, like anxiety about unknown concerns, you will still experience subtle physical sensations that you notice if you look for them.
Allow the feeling to sink in and really feel it. Don’t try to escape it or fight it. Stay with this process until you connect to the feeling on a physical level. Notice your body, how you are tense or anxious or hot or fidgety or lethargic. As with meditation, you are just observing the feeling, not trying to alter it.
2. Welcome
Saying “welcome, welcome, welcome” three times is one way to welcome the Holy Spirit in the feeling. Become aware of the specifics of your negative feelings – feelings and emotions, not problems and physical hardships. Welcome that “this too shall pass.” We are not welcoming illness or injustice but rather the feelings these evoke. This kind of welcome enables us to begin to deal with realities, to become more mature and in harmony with life.
Another way to welcome the feeling is to name it and say to yourself something like “welcome fear,” “welcome anger,” or “welcome” whatever other feeling you may have. By welcoming your physical and emotional reactions to events and situations in daily life you are surrendering to God’s presence and God’s action within your life.
Once you open to your inner experience, without indulging or feeding your reactive ego, your response to the outer world will be much clearer and more decisive. You can begin responding from a state of awareness instead of automatically ego reacting.
3. Let Go
“Let go and let God” handle life including this particular situation. Some people prefer “I cast my burden on the Christ within” or “relax and release.”
Mary Mrozowski’s version uses a fixed statement, though you may like to focus on the one that seems to apply the best:
I let go of my desire for power and control.
I let go of my desire for affection, esteem, approval and pleasure,
I let go of my desire for survival and security.
I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person or myself.
These are phrases describing your intention to totally surrender to God’s will in the situation. Turn the feeling or emotion over to God and let it go. Many find to their surprise that, after going through the Welcoming Prayer process, the feeling has completely dissipated. If you experience resistance from your reactive ego at any stage or the feeling has not completely dissipated, then try going through the process again starting at the top.
During your daily time of meditation you can reinforce the letting go – it is a truly liberating practice.
For more information on use of the welcoming prayer and of centering prayer:
bustedhalo.com – Commentary on Welcoming Prayer.
St Catherine’s Monastery
As I continue to reflect on the phrase: Rest in the Moment, I realized that this is not something that comes to us naturally. We need guides to lead our journey. Thinking about this reminded me of this post from a couple of years ago which I thought you might enjoy revisiting. Make sure you listen to the song – using photos from last year’s Celtic retreat, which I added at the end.
Several years ago Tom and I had the privilege of visiting St Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai desert. This is one of the oldest working monasteries in existence, and monastic life in the area dates back to the 4th century. Evidently at one point there were something like 3,000 hermits living in the hills around the site. However the history, of St Catherine’s monastery goes much further back than that. Tradition has it that St Catherine’s monastery sits at the base of Mt Sinai. Many believe that is also the site for Moses’s encounter with God in the midst of the burning bush.
I was thinking about this over the weekend and wondering what it must have been like for the Israelites to live out in the desert. It had never struck me before that God did not send them out without a well seasoned guide. Moses had lived out in the desert before, and if tradition is correct then he brought them back to the same part of the desert that he was familiar with. Maybe he even brought them back to the home that he had lived in for all those years, the place where he raised his family, the place where he know how to live without allowing the desert to consume him.
Moses would have known how to find water, how to track the animals and how to provide shelter. Not only did Moses provide guidance and leadership for them, but God also provided a pillar of cloud to guide them through the day and a pillar of fire to light the night. Talk about overkill, but a people who were not used to desert life probably needed a lot of help in finding their way.
As I thought about this I was reminded of the Australian explorers who ventured into the desert interior of my country. Some of them took aboriginal guides with them, native peoples who knew how to recognize the tracks of animals and signs that water was close. These explorers survived. Others, like Burke and Wills, took no aboriginal guides. They perished in the wilderness.
God does not send us out into the desert to die either. We are not without lots of well seasoned guides either. It is reassuring to know that thousands have walked out into the desert, led by God, before us and not only survived but thrived and grown in intimacy with God as a result of their experiences.
My own guides are many and varied. There are those I know only by the stories I have read – people like Moses and Aaron who not only guided the Israelites so many thousands of years ago but who continue to inspire and direct us. Others like the Celtic saint Patrick, Elizabeth Fry, and modern day saints like Mother Teresa, have guided not just my life but all our lives in wilderness times. For most of us there are other lesser known guides too, like our parents, pastors and friends who have walked both beside and ahead of us through the desert places.
Who are your Moses figures who have wandered in the desert ahead of you and established a home for you? Who are the ones you can rely on to find water, food and shelter for you in desert places? Take some time to give thanks to God for them today.
The best place to find rest is in the desert. This is one of the thoughts that occurred to me as I contemplated yesterday’s phrase: Rest in the moment.
It is in the seemingly dry and barren places that the distractions drop away and we are able to relax (unless of course we are dying of thirst but that is another story). It is in the wilderness, that we grow and learn to follow God rather than our own desires. Here we are not subject to the enslavement of busy work that sometimes overwhelms us with its burdens like Egypt did to the Israelites. Nor do we carry the responsibility of fruitful living where the demands of sowing, growing, and harvesting can be just as consuming, as it was for the Israelites once they entered the promised land.
In the wilderness we learn to let go and trust in God or we perish. And letting go makes room for new life. Mary Mrozowski, one of the founders of Contemplative Outreach tells us:
to welcome and to let go is one of the most radically loving, faith-filled gestures we can make in each moment of each day. It is an open-hearted embrace of all that is in ourselves and in the world.
What do you think?
When I was in Denver a couple of weeks ago, Jennifer Herrick gave me the photo above. It is made completely of the words rest in the moment. It has been a wonderful inspiration for me as I contemplated life and faith this week.
These last couple of months have been rough ones for me. Many of you know that several weeks ago the building on our property on Camano Island was vandalized, and in spite of the sense of God’s presence with us in the discernment process we are going through, I still struggle with questions of what if? when? and how?
As well as that I have faced some challenges in my personal life. I have developed arthritis in my foot which has made two of my greatest pleasures – walking and gardening – impossible. Whether it is for a season or forever I do not know.
What I am learning, in the midst of these challenges is to let go, rest and enjoy the gifts of each moment. Paul’s words in Philippians come to mind.
I have learned how to be content with whatever I have. I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little. For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength. (Phil 4:11-13 NLT)
To rest in the moment, find our contentment in God and fully savour the depth of revelation of God each moment holds, we must learn to let go and be content no matter what our circumstances. Sometimes it is a letting go of things that we love to do or people that we care about. Sometimes it is a letting go of hopes for the future. Sometimes it is just a letting go of busyness and fast paced lifestyles. Whatever it might be, we will never learn to rest fully in the presence of God unless we can relinquish our desire to be in control of our lives.
What is Your Response?
Sit quietly with your eyes closed and your hands clasped gently in your lap. Take some deep breaths in and out and relax yourself into the presence of God. Read through Paul’s words several times or take time to contemplate the prayer and photo above. Savour the wonder of God’s warm embrace. What distracts your attention from being fully attentive to God? What resentments and frustrations surface? Where have you tried to control your life and so clouded your enjoyment of God in this present moment? How is God asking you to respond?
As I think of what it means to rest in each moment, I am reminded of Ann Voskamp’s words in her important book One Thousand Gifts:
Life is too urgent to be lived fast, too important to be consumed in a blur of activity, too precious to not take notice of the God moments, the God love that bursts out in an unexpected hugs and unanticipated beauty.
We love to be able to move fast, map out our lives and feel we are in control. Then we get sick, lose our job, our spouse dies. We lose control and in grasping to secure the reigns of our lives again we find we can never put them back together in the way they were before. We get angry, blame God, long for the things that are no longer possible, become resentful. In the process we often miss the God moments all around us.
What is your response?
Listen to the song below. While you do so look around you. What sounds, sights, fragrances that you don’t usually notice catch your attention? What new aspects of God do they reveal to you? In what ways do they encourage you to rest more fully in each moment.
Imagine if the local church became the place in culture to experience creativity, beauty and transcendence.
This compelling statement at the beginning of J.Scott McElroy’s new book Creative Church Handbook: Reclaiming the Power of the Arts in Your Congregation, really caught my attention. This probably does not surprise you as I am convinced that the stirring of imagination and creativity within all of us is an essential tool to help us move forward into God’s creative future. My own awakening of creativity over the last ten years has strengthened my faith in amazing ways so it has been a delight to read through this book and explore new and exciting ways to incorporate art and dance into the church.
This book is a wonderful place to start in exploring creativity within the church both as an expression during worship services as well as for outreach into the community. I was impressed at the breadth of Scott’s exploration of creativity and the thoroughness with which he details ways to use arts, music, and dance in a variety of ways.
My favourite chapter, however is his exploration of how to use creative arts beyond the church walls. He gives interesting examples of arts in use to reach out to the homeless, for healing therapy and to help connect businesses in the community to name just a few possibilities.
This book is a great resource for both novices and those already well seasoned in the use of arts in the church – a wonderful creative tool that will stir your imagination and that of your congregation in important ways.
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