Copyright: © 2001 Paul F. Bosch.
This document may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes with credit to the author and mention of the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ as the source.

The Scene: A lovely Spring day in a city park. A young woman enters, wheeling a pink- cheeked baby in a stroller. A second woman enters, and pauses to peer into the stroller.

Passerby to woman with stroller: "My, what a beautiful baby you have!"

Young mother: "This is nothing. You should see his picture!"

Of course that little drama is apocryphal. Nobody prefers a photo to the Real Thing; nobody prefers "virtual reality" to what you might call "real" reality.

Or do we?

North Americans by the thousands tuned in last Summer to TV's Survivor, and made it the surprise hit of the season; I blush to admit I was among those addicted to watching it. And apparently its successor, Survivor 2, is topping the charts this Spring as well.

So listen to essayist Herbert Muschamp in a recent issue of the New York Times (Sunday, January 21, 2001):

"Fewer and fewer things are not television. The dwindling list includes music, dance, theatre, opera, movies and architecture. All six of these holdouts against post-civilization can be seen struggling for their lives at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The arts complex itself is a grand artistic synthesis --an opera, or Gesamtkunstwerk, in Wagner's term of pre-electronic communications. Nightly, it stages a meta-performance by artists, audiences and the physical settings that allow contact between them in public space..."

Muschamp left out a seventh "pre-electronic holdout against post-civilization" in his list: Christian worship. Worship is itself a grand synthesis of art- forms, fully as much as any of the six in Muschamp's list. Christian worship, too, is a Gesamtkunstwerk, a "meta-performance" where all the arts converge. It was my own discovery of this reality --a full five years after I was ordained!-- that changed my life, that gave me my vocation. Where does Christian faith converge with all the arts? Precisely at 11:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, in Christian worship. Here is where the arts give a living voice --no, living voices!-- to the Word; where the Gospel Word, in all its vibrant forms, engages people, pastor(s), other worship leaders, lectors, greeters, acolytes, musicians, choir, within a physical setting that allows them to connect.

Long ago, Soren Kierkegaard reminded us of the seductions of a life-style content to observe life, rather than participate in it. For many North Americans, his warning has apparently fallen on deaf ears. And it's Kierkegaard's warning that prompts my sometimes-strident polemics, in these pages, against our (chiefly Western, chiefly First-World) infatuation with the seductions of "high tech" in Christian worship: electric candles, electronic organs, public address systems, overhead projectors, wall-to-wall carpeting. (Sure, I'll confess: I'm a Luddite; see Essay 10, above. I'm struggling, as I write this, to master the idiosyncrasies of a new computer.) But my personal crusade --"Rage against the machine"?-- is inspired by a fear that Western Christians are insulating themselves against the truly authentic, and capitulating to the phoney, the "plastic," the second-hand, the "virtual."

Christian worship is a Gesamtkunstwerk: a grand synthesis of living --that is, vibrantly live-- art-forms. Worship is supremely a "pre-electronic holdout against post-civilization," and that's one of its glories. And if, with those six others on Muschamp's list, Christian worship today is also "struggling for its life," then it's our Western culture, our society that needs reforming, not our worship.

Item: On a visit to Florida's Disneyworld some years ago, my wife and children and I were first amused and, on further reflection, dismayed to discover firsthand the seductions Kierkegaard warned us of. With, it seemed, hundreds of other visitors, we were waiting in a long queue to enter an exhibit featuring a Disney favourite: a musical ensemble made up of life-sized "animatronic" puppet bears, presumably "playing" Dixieland music and actually lip-synching the lyrics to their songs. The verisimilitude, we were assured, was nothing less than amazing!

Now, at Disneyworld, and other theme parks like it, crowd control is a serious issue. Not infrequently, Disney provides live performers at the gateways to many of the exhibits, to entertain --and distract!-- crowds waiting endlessly in queue to enter. By a curious irony on this particular day, we were at this very minute being entertained by --You guessed it!-- a live Dixieland band: five energetic old men, with banjos and guitars and fiddles, wearing straw hats, bow ties, and garters on their shirt-sleeves! Here we were, waiting, it seemed like hours, to hear a set of puppets "playing" Dixieland and listening meanwhile, distractedly, to a live musical group playing real Dixieland, with real virtuosity! Really playing!

Item: In the year when Pope John Paul II visited Toronto, this story was told: An old woman in a nursing home is determined to go downtown to see the Pope during his motorcade through the city's streets. Understandably, her friends and family try to dissuade her. "There'll be huge crowds downtown; you're not as vigorous as you used to be; you'll have to spend a lot of time on your feet, walking and standing to watch. And besides, it'll all be televised. You can see the Pope much better on TV."

"Yes," she replies, "But he can't see me."

Indeed.