Dear Friends in Christ,
Worship has always been important to us here at CTS. I am not sure it is a category we really understand anymore–a lot of people seem to think worship is just education, others (even worse) seem to think it is entertainment. But we have tried to make worship be about orientation of life: a life lived Godwards. I read this anonymous comment many years ago, and I have always hoped that our church would be one of those places the person was talking about:
I’ve been in many, many churches in my life, and a number of cathedrals, and very seldom do I ever really feel anything when I walk in. But you can feel it here [the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York], and you can sometimes feel it even in a tiny little country church, way out in the middle of nowhere. In very special cases, you walk in and, you don’t know why, but it seems to have something to do with the way the building was made, and the way people are when they worship there. Something is left behind by all that. As if the buildings were a vessel or container of something very powerful.
Some modern Christians act as if worship and worship styles are fairly trivial, especially when compared with important issues like social justice or personal morality or theological erudition. But that point of view has always seemed facile to me because it is our worship that forms us. It molds us into people who, because God is the center of the circle, therefore care about justice, morality, and careful, informed opinion. Slick, sentimental worship, for example, is likely to give us slick, sentimental Christians. Fussy, legalistic worship is liable to give us fussy, legalistic Christians. You get the point.
I was reading a book recently on Lutheran art by an art historian from Harvard. He was trying to explain why Lutherans kept art–statues and paintings, stained glass windows, even organs–when the other Reformation churches removed all these things as being idolatrous. The writer said that Martin Luther looked at the stripped down, white-washed churches of the Calvinists and the Zwinglians and he said to himself: “These people obviously do not believe in the Real Presence.” This is also why Lutherans kept the traditional Mass. Worship should be a time to enter the Divine Presence, this is what powerfully orients our lives so that we see things in a new way, from the perspective of God’s hopes and dreams for God’s children.
This is what we try to do at CTS. We have a very broad spectrum of worship here, with six settings of the Eucharist in our repertory, with music from jazz to Gregorian, with everything from Solemn High Mass to Youth services that rock the house. But in all of it, we are trying to provide a way for you to turn Godwards. In the experience of the Holy, we hope that you will find a new way to be human. A Way of life.
Yours in Christ,
–Pastor Bastien
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