A SUNDAY MEDITATION

Sometimes in a day things seem to add up, to make a point. Of course, many days are not like this. They seem to go first this way and then that, randomly. But occasionally what comes one’s way in a day seems, well, directional. For me, this past Sunday was a such a day. It was as if everywhere I turned the same sermon was being preached, in four different ways, in worship, in something I read in the Times, in a movie, and in a book I had long neglected. Walk with me through the day.

WORSHIP

It begins with worship, an ordinary worship service. By ordinary, I do not mean it lacked excellence. It did not. It included a summer choir singing the gospel-tinged tune, “Sing and Shout Praises!” It included Mark Reneau and Dongho Lee on the hoedown-sounding Scherzo from Dvořák’s Sonatina for Piano and Violin in G major. It included a fine reflection by Tim Barton on the stories of Elijah at the cave (I Kings 19:9-18) and Peter walking on water (Matthew 14:22-33). It included the ancient liturgy as passed down to us in the Book of Common Prayer. I mean “ordinary” in the original sense of the word as that which is ordered, numbered, sequential—what we do week after week. Ordinary, ordinal, ordained. But, as often happens to me and perhaps to you, in the middle of the ordinary, I was struck for a moment with how extraordinary this all it, what we do in worship.

What came to mind in the moment was the expression in Psalm 22:4 that the Lord “is enthroned on the praises of Israel.” God, the psalmist seems to be saying, is manifested in the praises of God’s people. The imagery in the verse seems to be of a temple. The word usually translated “holy” could be read as “a holy place.” Indeed, the ancient Greek translation, the Septuagint, so reads it: “You are seated in a holy place [hagios], the praise of Israel.” The holy place—the sanctuary—is the praise of the people. The words of worship construct a temple, and in that temple, in our words or on our words, God is visible, manifested.

Which is, this temple-making, the high calling of the human race. What makes humans extraordinary among our fellow creatures is that we have grasped this relationship to what is beyond us. We humans disagree about how to name it, that which is beyond. We have various religions, theologies, ways of worship. Or none at all. But however we name it, we grasp that our essential role as humans is to give voice on behalf of all creation to the transcendent. The transcendent—truth, beauty, goodness, love, God—is manifest in our words. Or, perhaps, just beyond our words, but without our words the reality of the transcendent would not be present in the same way. Transcendence is enthroned in our praises.

And because we see this—the face of God—in our worship, we also see each other. We are a motley crew on Sunday morning at St Paul’s church in Bellingham. We are jaded academics, young families, people from the mission down the street, cradle Episcopalians, and more than a few who are fleeing the fundamentalism of our religious past. We come in a variety of sexualities. We have lately moved out of the sanctuary while it is being remodeled to accommodate a new pipe organ. We are for the moment worshiping in the Great Hall, a high-ceilinged space where we ordinarily take our coffee after the service. Worshiping in the Great Hall changes who we are. Everything is closer together. We sit on folding chairs. Or some, in the back, around tables. Compared to the sanctuary, it seems intimate. We like it, and we don’t. We can’t wait to get back in the sanctuary and meet our new organ; we love our new digs. Regardless, at the end of this, we will be different as a congregation. We will know each other better.

THE TIMES

We worship, and then we part. As it happens, after worship I came upon a piece in the New York Times by Jesse McKinley, “America Is Atomizing: A Nation of Them and Them and Them.” “Atomizing.” He means that America is splitting into smaller and smaller tribes. At one point, he uses the word “pixelated,” which seems just right to me. By dint of phones and social media and the way the algorithms employed by the media companies fission us into groups of the likeminded, we lose our sense of the whole, of the companionship of our fellow citizens. Atomization has consequences:

Poll after poll has found Americans less likely to know their neighbors, to trust other people, to have faith in the modern family. America is the only country where a majority of people think their fellow citizens are “morally bad,” according to Pew. 

We are encouraged to think this way about our fellow citizens by those who have made it their business to split us apart, those who make political hay or money or both by setting neighbor against neighbor. Our coming together in worship, across political and social boundaries, pushes back against atomization. Worship is a political act.

But how to stay together? As many of us know, churches are also atomizing into smaller and smaller groups. Unity is not easy, whether ecclesiastical or political. 

MOVIE

And then, a movie. We had booked for early afternoon a seat at our local movie house for a showing of the 2025 movie, “Rebel with a Clause,” directed by Brandt Johnson and starring Ellen Jovin. The movie is popular in our town. It regularly sells out the theater. 

The movie follows Ellen Jovin from state to state, city to city. In each place, she sets up a small table, places on the table Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and The Chicago Manual of Style, and hangs on the table a sign inviting people to come with grammar questions. And come they do. The conversations range across grammar topics: gerunds, punctuation, pronunciation (not actually grammar, as she patiently explains), hyphens (she hates them), “lay” and “lie,” and so forth. What makes it work is Ellen Jovin’s unfailing good humor and her sense that language should hold us together, not separate us. In her own way, she constructs a grammar of neighborly conversation.

Occasionally, someone will come to the Grammar Table spoiling for a fight. Grammar is famous for dividing people into orthodoxies. Oxford comma or not? Split an infinitive or no? End a sentence with a preposition? Use “they” as a singular? Jovin in every case gracefully talks the self-righteous off their grade school correctness. At the end of the movie she makes a plea not just for grammatical grace but for the value of public conversations, face-to-face conversations. Churches could learn from her.

LEWIS

Which brought me last to the book I had long neglected, C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces (1956). All that had gone before in my day had preached, one way or another, the doctrine of the value of face-to-face relationships: worship in the Great Hall, the Times article on the atomization of American culture, and Ellen Jovin’s quixotic project to talk grammar in the public square. As I thought about this, what came to mind was the title that Lewis gave to his last novel: Till We Have Faces. It has always suggested to me the Apostle Paul’s comment in 1 Corinthians 13:12: “Now we see by means of a mirror, [as if] in a riddle; then face-to-face.” Perhaps, I thought, there is wisdom there, in Lewis’s book. 

And so I pulled it off the shelf. Those of you who have read the book, as I now have, will know that in the book Lewis does not have the Apostle Paul in mind but Psyche. The story is Lewis’s telling of the Psyche myth that comes down to us in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. Unlike Apuleius, Lewis tells the story from the point of view of the older sister in the myth, Orual, in his telling, not Psyche herself. The book, as Lewis styles it, is Orual’s complaint against the gods, who have set before her—before all of us—what it is impossible for mere humans to do. Like Job, she wants a hearing.

Here I would like to slow down. Till We Have Faces is Lewis at his best. As few others could have done, he inhabits the pagan world he imagines for Psyche and her sisters. He finds truth in ancient religion. He does not, except perhaps at the very end, Christianize it. This is not Narnia. There is no Aslan. If he parodies anything, it is Enlightenment rationalism embodied in the teaching of a Greek schoolmaster, who everyone calls “the Fox.” I would like to give what Lewis does with the Psyche myth its due, but not now, at the end of this piece. Here I want only to make a single point, a point somewhat at odds with what Lewis is doing in the novel.

Lewis’s idea throughout his writings is that human life this side of eternity is merely a shadow of what it one day will be. Near the end of the novel, when Orual, the older sister, sees Psyche, her younger sister in her heavenly form, she exclaims:

. . . All that had then but flashed out in a glance or a gesture, all that one meant most when one spoke her name, was now wholly present, not to be gathered up from hints nor in shreds, not some of it in one moment and some in another. Goddess? I had never seen a real woman before. (306)

The idea is that true human life is not to be found here on earth but beyond earth, in another dimension, when we take on divinity. In his famous sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis says,

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. (The Essential Lewis, edited by Lyle W. Dorsett, p. 369)

These are stirring thoughts—thoughts I’ve quoted many times in my own sermons. But they are more Plato than the Bible. What they lack is an appreciation for human life as human life. For human faces as they appear now, on earth. Human life is not beautiful because some day we will be gods; human life is beautiful because it is human. In the Christian story, we do not ascend to heaven, but God comes down to earth.

Indeed, Lewis knows this. What makes Tell We Have Faces memorable is not so much the shenanigans at the end, when Orual is transported into heaven, but Orual herself, the pagan queen, a figure unlike any other in the Lewis oeuvre. She is brilliant and cruel, a warrior and a worrier, a survivor of parental abuse and an abuser of others. She is Orual, someone you might both wish to know and fear to meet. At the end, the pagan priest who has preserved her writings, says of her,

This book was all written by Queen Orual of Glome, who was the most wise, just, valiant, fortunate and merciful of all the princes known in our parts of the world.

She, Orual, has a face. She comes alive on the page. She lives as well as she could in the place where she was planted. 

With that, let me touch back to the place where this began: with worship. Worship is about having faces. The face of God, enthroned on our praises, and the faces across the aisle. It’s not “till we have faces,” but seeing the faces we have.

Clay