We're Gonna Kick That Football

A few days ago my son managed to do something I've never seen before.

He kicked his football from the other side of the yard, and it was caught by...a tree.  It looks close in that picture, but it's actually about 25 feet off the ground.

No problem!  Just use the other football to knock it down, right?

I had never seen a tree catch a kick before.  But now I've seen a tree catch a kick and intercept a pass.  I guess the beer truck can come for me now, because I've officially seen it all.

This dogwood in our front yard is now a bizarre fusion of two important recurring themes from the Peanuts comics.  It's the football-eating tree (an apocalpytic combination of the kite-eating tree and Lucy's pretending to hold the football for Charlie Brown, pulling it back at the last minute and watching Charlie Brown wind up flat on his back).

I wish I had video of the third ball.  Having caught two footballs in the tree, he changed tactics and used a soccer ball.  Standing directly under the two footballs, he threw up the soccer ball.  It hit the limb, and all three balls showered down on him.

It occurs to me that in peanuts Lucy and the kite-eating tree have something in common.  Both of them are crushers of the dreams of Charlie Brown.  Every time, he sets about kicking the football or flying his kite, Charlie Brown summons an eternally optimistic hope...and every time his hope is dashed.  He believes the very best.  He's going to kick that football.  He's going to get that kite in the air.  Bless his heart, it just never works out.

They almost took Charlie Brown away this year.  "They," of course, refers to the incarnate evil that is the antithesis of all things good.

I'm not sure why this bothered me so much.  After all, I have all the Charlie Brown movies on DVD at home, so it doesn't really matter to me if they air on broadcast television.  But word that Apple had bought them and was going to keep them off the airwaves had me in a bad place.  It just seemed...wrong.  How could we do Thanksgiving without the Peanuts special or...horrors...Christmas?!  OH THE HUMANITY!!!

Maybe it's just because I'm an old fogey.  We've always had Peanuts on TV this time of year, and taking it away is taking away a ritual I'm comfortable with.  It's nostalgia.  Maybe it's because I have an intense dislike of all things Apple and just can't square their ownership of the rights to a franchise I like so much.  Maybe it's because I'm somewhat drawn to Charlie Brown's melancholy--or how somehow at the end of each show somehow things turn around and despite his best effort to mess everything up, things turn out ok for the blockhead.

Or maybe it's because somewhere deep in my gut I feel like we need Peanuts.  Not for the feel-better ending, and not because it gives us someone to feel bad for to take our minds off our own struggles for a minute.  I feel like we need a little reminder that just like Charlie Brown, there is a wellspring of hope inside all of us.

I don't think there's one person who can honestly say everything has always gone their way.  But there are many who can say things didn't go their way...and in response they chose--they CHOSE--to believe in the best of people.  They trusted Lucy with the football once again.  They took off with the kite full of hope that this time--this time--they're gonna kick that football.

This is the triumph of the human spirit, or maybe the triumph of the indwelling Spirit. Unlike Charlie Brown, sometimes we are able to actually kick that ball or get our kite in the air.  And sometimes we wind up flat on our back with our kite stuck in a tree.  (Or, apparently, sometimes we mix up our metaphors and wind up with our football in a tree?).  But we can overcome, and we do, and we will.  We're gonna kick that football.

PS. Cooler heads prevailed, and PBS will indeed run the Peanuts specials. Whew.

It May Be Time to Check In

I've been enjoying the pictures of the sanctuary Joseph is putting on Facebook.  They're beautiful photos of natural morning light when he walks in before he turns the lights on.  (https://www.facebook.com/Joseph.D.McBrayer/posts/10109043496337711)  It really is lovely.  I'm not nearly as good at photography as Joseph is, but the other day I tried to take my own picture in the afternoon.

It took me a while to get even this not very good picture of the sanctuary.  Here's why:

It's because we actually have a lot of stuff in there right now to film parts of our services.  I've got stuff from filming musicians.  Joseph has stuff from filming the speaking parts.  There are some microphones and other equipment hanging out following our upgrades to the AV system.

I'd say this is unique to the pandemic, but I don't think it is.  I can't speak to how Oak Grove was prior to the pandemic, but I know where I came from we did a good job of hiding messes from public view in closets, offices, and even behind the rail in the sanctuary.

Much has already been written about how this phenomenon has manifested in social media.  What you see someone post on Facebook isn't necessarily so much an indication of their perfect life as it is (maybe) an indication of a perfect moment.  Even then...you don't know what's lurking just out of the frame.

Most of the time I see this framed as a reason not to feel too bad about yourself--not to compare yourself to the version of your friends you see online because it's not possible to keep up with this distorted view of their reality.  There's wisdom in that!  A lot of us could probably stand to cut ourselves a little more slack.  But in this very strange time, I'm even more worried about isolation and disconnection.

I had a friend who was not well at all.  A mutual friend asked me if I knew how she was doing, and my answer was, "Well, I saw her posting in her normal way on Facebook, so she must be doing ok."  She was not doing ok...losing her battle with cancer only a week or two later.  I assumed, based on what I was seeing online, that she was fine.  I assumed wrong.

So it's now more important than ever to reach out.  Pick up the phone (did you know you can actually use it to talk to people?)!  Be the hands and feet of Jesus, because so often we are the vehicles by which he makes good on his promise to be with us always.  You can send a text or an email, but remember digital media invites people to hide their messes away and present only the best view of themselves...you might not get the whole picture.

Success in a Time of Pandemic

Measuring success is hard.

In part that's because good metrics are elusive. Consider education. Most educators will tell you that standardized testing isn't an effective way to measure the progress of students. The ACT and SAT, once near the top of the list for admission and financial aid consideration for colleges, are moving down the list, with some colleges disregarding the exams entirely. I'm certainly not an authority on why this is, but I can confirm from my own experience that the ability to fill in the correct bubbles on an exam administered over a period of multiple hours or days may struggle to gauge accurately an individuals mastery over content. It is more a measure of how well an individual takes tests and problem-solves. As an example, I have a horrible memory for facts, but I'm quite good at reasoning. I test much better than my knowledge base really supports. But I know people who are just the opposite. Very knowledgeable and highly competent but less good at taking tests.  Maybe that's why a big part of any test-preparation service will focus on "test-taking strategies," which are more tricks to helping you perform better on a test than they are infusing you with the required knowledge.

Why, oh why is part of my mind filled with strategies to do better on a standardized test?  I could use that brain space for something more productive like memorizing lyrics to funk tunes from the 1970's.

Something is inherently lost in translation when you convert from the qualitative world to the quantitative. In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart attempted to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio.  He said, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." Still, William Goldberg argued that "In effect, 'I know it when I see it' can still be paraphrased and unpacked as: "I know it when I see it, and someone else will know it when they see it, but what they see and what they know may or may not be what I see and what I know."

We'll let the courts sort out the legalities and take instead the broader point: much of our world (including much of what we would very much like to measure) is subjective and simply defies numerical description. This has profound implication for, well, everything, but at the moment I'm thinking about the church and in particular church music. Riddle me this: in the context of church music, what does success look like?

That's not an easy question to answer even in normal times. Does it look like a choir perfectly in tune on Sunday morning? Does it look like a bell choir that can ring 16th notes evenly and gracefully (and even crescendo while slowing them down)? Can you measure success by the number of rear ends planted in the pews at concerts or the number of dollars they leave in the basket on the way out the door? The budget approved by the finance committee? The pay of the director? The number of staff people?

Some people might say yes. But I would argue those are all merely symptoms of something deeper and more important. Pretend for a moment you could go to a church lagging by all those metrics, snap your fingers, and instantly change them. 

Would the ministry be more successful after your finger snap? I'd argue no. Because in my mind (what I see and what I know) is that music ministry should be about community and connection and relationships. Don't get me wrong, I want my bell choir to play even 16th notes, and when I'm standing in front of them I will jump up and down and whine if they aren't! But successfully navigating measure 65 isn't a sign that we've achieved what we set out to achieve.  If it is, we didn't set our sights high enough.

Good thing, too, because back in March the world got turned on its head. The profound effects of the pandemic pervade all facets of daily life, but for the moment I just want to consider my corner of the store. If I measure success by butts in seats or donations or flawless performance, I began failing miserably on March 15, 2020 and I have yet to recover. Right now we have two options: we can gather together outside in smallish groups and sing the best we can in the open air (and the cold, and the dark), or we can record ourselves in our own homes with phones and sync all those videos together to try to make a choir.

I'd like to think we're actually getting pretty good at this, which is a testament to the determination of the singers more than anything else. Still, I think everyone would agree that in absolute musical terms each of these solutions leaves something to be desired. They pale in comparison to the music ministry each person pictured here signed up for.

But if our measure of success is instead community and connection and relationships...we are far from failing. We are forming lasting memories with each other. Struggling together and succeeding together.  We continue to answer the call to enliven services of worship by offering our voices in song even in these difficult circumstances.

This reminds me of a movie, We Are Marshall.  It begins with a tragic plane crash that killed 37 members of the Marshall Thundering Herd football time as well as five coaches, two trainers, and the athletic director. It's based on a true story. In fact one of my singers several years back was attending Marshall when it happened.

In the movie, the university president is inclined to suspend the football program, but is instead persuaded to reconsider. He hired Jack Lengyel, played by Matthew McConaughey who, with the help of one of the surviving coaches, sets about running a football team made of only 18 returning players and walk-ons from other sports.

They lost the first game, and the surviving coach wonders if this is really a way to honor the memory of those who were lost--or if it is instead destroying their legacy.  But in one of my favorite scenes in the movie, Lengyel makes the case that, at least right then, it isn't about winning.  It isn't even about how they play the game.  It just matters that they play.  It matters that they keep the program alive for the sake of the town and the school.

Start at about 45 second in...

I've never liked singing outside, and I've never been into virtual choirs. I never in a million years would have dreamed I'd be making 2-3 virtual choir pieces a week in addition to recording small groups to round out the worship experience.  A few months ago I had never edited a single video.  Now stitch together something like 75 videos every week. We have not given up. We will overcome all obstacles to answer our call to lead in worship.  And just as important, we will overcome all obstacles to be there for each other--to hold each other up just as we did before the pandemic and just as we will after it.

You can't measure it, I don't guess. You can't put a number on it or mark it with a number 2 pencil.  But I know it when I see it. I see it on each masked face on the grand lawn, and I see it on each face in a little square in the virtual choir. This absolutely is what success looks like in a time of pandemic.

This, Our Joyful Hymn of Praise

The first time I sang John Rutter's "For the Beauty of the Earth" was in about 4th grade.  We sang it at a choir camp I went to many years when I was in school.  I googled it, and the camp is still going on (and it actually started two years before I was born!).  Same camp director too, one of my heroes (literally...he once saved my life!).

I love this arrangement.  It's simple, and a lot of choral geeks turn their noses up at it.  The harmonic language isn't complex, nor is the rhythm.  The notes are easy to find (although to make them move lightly can be a challenge!).  I have some colleagues who would say there just isn't "a lot of beef there," and they are right.  But that's part of the charm for me.  The idea of lifting a hymn of praise to God in thanksgiving for all we have been given shouldn't be hard or severe.  It should roll of our tongues easily, as if we are making it up as we go along.

Others don't like the piece because it's overplayed.  That may be true.  But I love it so much I could listen to it every day...and twice on Sunday.  It's not just the lilt in the accompaniment.  It's the way the warmth of the piece builds from beginning to end along with the text.  What begins as a fairly simple and somewhat detached verse about the earth and the skies and the love around us moves through the joy of human love (brother, sister, parent, child) to the profound gift of God's Self to us and "Graces human and divine."

It's curious, too, that this piece, clearly a song of thanksgiving to God, does not include the word "thanks" even once.  The text by FS Pierpoint simply provides a list of things for which we are thankful and then says, "Lord of all, to thee we raise this our joyful hymn of praise."  That refrain is a little tweak of the original text, actually.  The original text is "Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise." That change, to me, is magic.  Because thanksgiving, at it's heart, should be a joyful act.  Too often we are driven to thanksgiving by a sense of obligation.  But the best thanksgiving really is a bubbling over of joy that can't be contained.

...

Two days ago I was at the store looking for some Halloween candy.  The Halloween seasonal aisle had been relocated to the front of the store in the discount bins, and Christmas merchandise had taken its place.  I know the appropriate time to decorate for Christmas is hotly debated, and especially in 2020 perhaps a little early holiday cheer could be helpful for us all.  But what if--what if we took a moment to give Thanksgiving its due? Not just as a holiday (though it's probably my favorite holiday)...as a way of life.

I worry that we have collectively forgotten what it means to be thankful at the deepest levels of our hearts, and it's evident in our gliding gracefully from the indulgence of Halloween to the saccharin of Christmas (moving from one sweet thing to the next, if you will).  We've forgotten the joy of thanksgiving, which I guess was inevitable when the holiday became more about food than anything else.

...

In my mind, thanksgiving is the last and most important step in healing.  Being thankful means that you have reconciled, but it means more than that.  It means you have begun to see the tapestry of life from enough distance that you can appreciate how the threads compliment each other and work together to weave a compelling story. I know I have healed when I look back on an experience or a relationship and see past the hurt and suffering to the ways it has brought me to who I am--and I begin to consider the ways I am better for it.

This conception of being thankful is something I return to from time to time.  I keep rediscovering it like a Journey album from high school.  Or like a piece of music, learned long ago and sung many times throughout the years in different churches with different friends along the way.  For those friends, for those experiences, for this journey...

...Lord of all, to thee we raise this our joyful hymn of praise.