“Wordsmiths” are all those who care- fully consider the verbal imagery at play in our worship. These people on the team include not only preachers, but also those who may be writing liturgy, choosing liturgy from various resources, training those who read liturgy and scripture, as well as those who format the words we use on the page or the screen. (I know, if you are in a very small church you may be all of the above!) Have you ever considered the administrative assistant who puts the bulletin together as part of the worship team? She (or he) is! The way the words we say are presented on the page is also an art form. Any graphic designer will tell you that the way words look will affect the way we experience them. If you utilize projections in worship, this is espe- cially true. Media designers are both visual and verbal artists. (Well, they are also drama- tists, but we’ll get to that in a later article.) If you have responsibilities in any of these areas, this is your article. However, I want to suggest that all team members will benefit from studying each article together so that we keep gaining a holistic apprecia- tion for each component of this ritual art process.
Creating a Word Palette. Words are
visual. The verbal artist is also a visual artist. Our brains think in images. When you have a thought, you aren’t seeing words on a page in your imagination, right? The scene is played out in images. As you read a book or hear a story, your imagination is immediately translating concepts into concrete scenes. So the more concrete our verbal “imagery,” the more readily solidified into our sense memory are the concepts we proclaim. Does this make sense? (“Making sense” is even a term based on how we turn concepts into sensory experiences!)
When we are reading something, such as this article, we have time to pause, read a portion of it again, let it sink in. But in liturgy – a “real time” verbal art – our congregations don’t have that luxury. Words go by, gone from the air as soon as they are spoken or left behind on the written page as the liturgy progresses to the next thing. As a result, liturgy (and preaching) has to be concise. It is more like poetry than prose. It is more like carefully crafted film dialogue where every moment counts. What we create
WORSHIP ARTS • JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2010
for liturgy and preaching is a “palette” of symbolic, vivid, imagistic verbal expression.
Let’s play with an example created as a Call to Confession for Palm Sunday. Before I began to write, I imagined a palette of colors, so to speak, that came from the context of the story of Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem. The palette includes not just bright celebratory colors of the parade, but also the fact that participating in this parade is an incredible risk to Jesus and his followers. They know that this parade is flying in the face of the “powers that be.” At one gate of the city is Jesus proclaiming allegiance to “the name of the Lord” – to the kingdom of God’s justice – and at the opposite gate of the city is Herod’s entourage with the message of allegiance to the “kingdom of Herod” (the Roman empire). This is a palette that includes the murky, deep colors of fear and uncertainty. Standing at the gate and making a decision to march is the image that I settled on as a metaphor for our confession on this day. So the first lines became “Holy God, we stand at the gate, hesitant and uncertain. At times we are unwilling to answer your invitation, slow to take steps into the journey toward your reign. Forgive us, we pray…”
Creating Movement with Words. Verbal
arts are also about action. Movement. Trans- formation. If I had included all the historical information from the paragraph above in the beginning of the prayer, it would have been laborious in this prayer form – leave that for the art form called the sermon where images have time to be expanded and explored, opened and examined. Too much in-forma- tion in liturgy makes it didactic and static rather than facilitating trans-formation. Sometimes liturgy becomes a “mini-sermon,” one of my particular pet peeves. Think poetry. We simply introduce an image so that it can go somewhere – we stand at the gate – the threshold of every bold decision we’ve ever had to make as followers of Jesus – and then we get to the point. “Forgive us.” We do this because it is from that point that we can move and be moved. We petition God in no uncertain terms. “Help us… Grant us the courage to join you in the procession…”
Let’s take a look at the movement of the whole prayer.
As you read a book or hear a story, your imagination is immediately translating concepts into concrete
scenes. So the more concrete our verbal
“imagery,” the more readily solidified into our sense
memory are the concepts we proclaim.
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