Week 34: Progress made while at a conference

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	53,825
Words typed this week:	2000
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	2000
Days I managed to write this week:	4

Yes the word count this week is exactly 2000, no more, no less. This is complete and utter accident, a sentence that finished the section on normal URC worship quite neatly did it in exactly that many words and as it was 2000 I felt that I did not need to go any further and stopped.


I am well aware that no-one in the URC apart from me thinks there is any such thing as normal URC worship, yet having been involved with a variety of different congregations over the years, at least eleven I can think of, as well as visiting too many to count, on a one off basis, I find that when I am in worship I know what is going on when and why most of the time. It is a lot easier to follow than if I went into your average Anglican. I think part of this is we do not proclaim which faction of the denomination we belong to so clearly through worship. The hints rather are there but are more subtle than within Anglicanism, you actually have to read the hymns and listen to the sermon to get them.


I am debating where next. I think I might try and see what I can do about hymns. This is intriguing as I will need to rewrite one of the two papers I have presented. The big challenge is that while I can do stuff on hymns and sacraments, I have only a little on sermons which can probably be put into hymns, and nothing on prayers. I am go into a very different mode during prayers and it seems rude to me to be thinking about how to record them, maybe this week I need to really concentrate on liturgy of the Word and deal with sacraments separately. The fourth section would then be on other services.

Back After a Meeting on Exploring Reformed Spiritualities

View from my bedroom Window

I am back from a Meeting called Exploring Reformed Spiritualities. This was held at Westminster College Cambridge and organised by the United Reformed Church Retreat Network. Yes in any other denomination they would have the badge the spirituality network but lets be honest Reformed folk don't do spirituality at least it fits into the same taboo box as "evangelism" and " Christian Education", so to actually have a meeting discussing it was pretty risky. To give you some idea from the whole of the URC exactly 21 people signed up and at least three of those could not make the whole meeting.

The other thing is I have called it a "Meeting", there is really no other word for it. It was not a conference, there were papers given, exactly two in three days. It was not a retreat, maybe an "Exploration" would be better but it was an exploration of the spiritualities we ourselves owned, the spiritualities of Reformed Christians, done by getting a group of willing volunteers into a room and trying to encourage them to talk about it. Lets say this was not easy. About possibly abour four or five of us would have started this exploration for themselves prior to the meeting, the rest were made up of two groups: those who were URC members and spiritual directors and those who were intrigued by the title.

I was struck recently by a comment in a book I was reading which talking about sixteenth century Reformed Worship, where they said Zwingli was probably the finest musician of the the Reformer. Now regardless of how poor the competition was, the thing that is noticeable about worship in Zurich under Zwingli is the complete absence of music. Something that Calvin in Genevan does not do. David Martin talks about an ambiguity towards the aesthetic, but this is stronger, this is almost a deliberate turning away from the aesthetic, a denial of the passions of the self, a fear of them running in ways that you can't control. The Reformed God is wild, and our relationship to him/her is only ever talkable about in the most distance of language/form. To approach more closely is to invite escastasy that is beyond what we are capable of containing. We are a plain folk who talk about plain things not because the fire is not there, but because that is what we can talk about, the rest is beyond. To start to explore spirituality is therefore risky and difficult.

The leader was led by Mark Argent(I suspect that website is dated) and his style of leading it was very much about consensus and mutuality in decision process. In some ways I was prepared for it I think better than some as I had followed the development of group theory from Bion, it uses the group itself as a method to explore group dynamics.This knowledge gave me enough space to trust the process and to engage with it, but it was not a comfortable process for many/any who were there. The sessions people seemed at most at ease in were the two led by David Cornick and Sarah Moore. The delving into ourselves and trying to give voice to the visceral is not something the Reformed normally do readily, I suspect for the reason given above.

I in a sense did not have problems with getting in touch with them, they were all too evident on the surface. I simply had in someways been under prepared emotionally. Over a decade ago I did TLS at Westminster, I was both in an emotionally difficult place and I also was coping with a huge stressor at the time. A critical support during this time was Rev David A L Jenkins who was at the time the director of TLS. I think he was the one person I talked with at depth about the situation that was not intimately connected with it. That says a huge amount about the sense I felt of his trustworthiness. There were so many layers of distrust that I was struggling to handle, that the fact I openned to anyone is somewhat surprising. What I had not expected was that I must have "left" quite a bit of emotion behind from the conversations we had. That emotion was reconnected by my return to Westminster College.

I do not know whether the fact I went too deeply into silence in the first session was related to this. I suspect it was highly likely I would have done anyway after being quite tired before I set out and then having quite an involved journey. I am aware that many people don't think you can go "too deeply into silence". By "too deeply" I mean that I had entered the silence to the extent I could not participate or sustain a normal conversation for the rest of the evening. It may have sounded like tiredness, but the pull of silence was so strong I found that in order to participate in even the simplest of exchanges I had to make a deliberate effort to focus my attention within the physical. Silence had become a drug that distanced me from the present reality, I think technically it was disassociative. I tackled this the only way I could do at the time (I had left some of the tools for this grounding at home) and started drawing during sessions. The drawings were all based on irregular but repetitive shapes. The repetition being as important as the actual presentation. As a rule they were not abstract except the last which was actually the only one I was trying to represent something. However I think this meant I started to respond creatively to the situation.


At another level I was ever the ethnographer, my brain was connecting observation with theory and other situations. Some I shared, others I need to process more deeply. I wonder how much the acceptance of the approach initially depended on people not wanting to disagree and be isolated especially with a group that did not know each other and with the feeling that as Mark was leading that we should be open to his suggestions. How much some of the irritated response was down to personality and the preference for formal structure. Why no-one picked up Mark's suggestion of Lectio Divina, which is not actually totally alien to the Reformed tradition, as I believe that the very slow reading of the Bible where a single verse or verses were dwelt on was quite a popular religious practice amongst Welsh Chapels. Why was the reading of whole chapters of John's gospel so much appreciated as part of worship? Was it solely a dissent Reformed spirituality or did it have a dominant form. However I am pretty sure that when I come to write my own autoethnography it will be recognisably a Reformed Piety.

Another oddity was how easily I went to the pub with people. This is unusual for me, the only other group I can think of that I have naturally done it with is Pilgrim Adventure (now Journeyings) and there everyone did, partly to stay warm in an evening so as to be able to get to sleep in a tent. This time only a minority did and yet I was part of that minority. No idea but it happened almost by accident.

I think as you can see I have a lot of stuff to think about and digest, both at a personal level and also for thesis.

Week 33: Slow week but I have started the next chapter

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	51,825
Words typed this week:	1539
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	1539
Days I managed to write this week:	4

Well the new chapter has started for real this week. I have been drafting the opening scene. This is one of those times when re-creating a scene is very useful theoretically. I am beginning to be able to reflect on the forces and constraints that shape a given enactment of a liturgical practice. Admittedly the one I have chosen to portray is chose because I thought it was interesting in its own rights. However even the act of portrayal has had to be handled carefully. It is not enough that I portray it realistically, I have to watch that I leave individual's theological stance honest and not try to co-opt them to my own views, I perhaps tend to be on the high side for URC, but what is really interesting is that being high or low sacramentally makes a difference in the liturgy used but differences in wider management do not seem to stem from that dimension.

This coming week I am at Reformed Spirituality meeting a Westminster College which should be good. Partly because there is chance to engage with a paper by David Cornick but also because I am spotting that I am flagging and am aware that I have been writing almost continuously since October and that makes for a endurance week as I need to find the time to do quite a bit around writing. I will not stop writing this week, I also will try and take some books on worship/ritual/liturgy maybe even some from a Reformed understanding. My task for writing for next week is to write about a normal church service within the URC. It is an interesting task as the role is to also explore on what looks at the surface a very similar act of worship regardless of where you go, how the two congregation I went to nuanced it and the ways that they sort to shape it to their own ideas of what was going on.

Week 32: Third Appendix drafted

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	50,286
Words typed this week:	2185
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	0
Days I managed to write this week:	2

Right it looks as if I can't add up! The simple answer is that I have been working on an appendix this week and appendices are a bit different from other parts of my thesis. This one in particular I had to rebuild from my notes and my the other things I got while doing field work. I am not claiming that it is 100% accurate, working with my notes I can easily see points at which I have had to make intelligent guesses and then my field notes are not detailed closely written notes, but are things to make me recall what was going on.

I was trying to reconstruct the behaviour around Baptism within a single congregation. One congregation had very little activity at all around Baptism, I think that there were three or four baptisms in the whole time I was there; there were a few comments on when the minister was willing to baptise but as his policy was stricter than the congregation might have desired this was minor and that was it. In the other congregation there must have been around twenty baptisms, there was debate both in church meeting, in house group and privately. What is perhaps surprising is that theologically there probably was very little difference in the theology of the ministers, there was some in the congregations, one took paedobaptism as normal the other there was a strong element that did not.

Writing description like this, is actually pretty easy, you just need to spend time checking facts with your notes, going through the detail and so forth. The result is that even though I had only managed to write on two days, when it came to writing this up this weekend I did it pretty fluently. It can be very tedious. I spent a couple of hours going through service sheets to see if there was any mention of baptism on them. The rule seems to be not usually but there were a couple of exceptions. One of which was an important find because I had forgotten that the notice had actually been given.

What this really means is that I am writing the last of my three congregational-data based chapters, the one on worship. If you had asked me how much worship mattered for congregational identity I would have been semi sceptical about its role.  However as I have gone on them more and more it has become clear that actually congregations put a lot of effort into worship and into trying to influence how worship is received. People are not passive recipients but are actually engaged participants.

Anyway this week the challenge is to write the re-creation of a particular Baptismal service which to me seemed to step between two discourses that were active within this particular congregation. Also I have booked my train ticket to the Reformed Spirituality meeting at Westminster.

Week 31: Jubilee weekend spent on editing my thesis

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	50,286
Words typed this week:	0
Words lost this week:	4276
Total increase:	-4276
Days I managed to write this week:	4

Well when anyone asks me what I spent the queens Diamond Jubilee weekend doing, the answer will be hacking a chapter of my thesis into something approaching a decent form.

Which is why this is two days late and I have gone down in word count. It does not look good. I have however just sent off my chapter on Community after four days of pretty solid work on it. I sent it off not because it was finished but I realised my brain was going round in circles on the editing and there was a good chance that anything I did further would be detrimental to the chapter rather than improve it.

The words lost were probably twice what I have put in, as I have added quite a bit as well but when it comes to this sort of editing there is a very fine margin between adding words and taking them out. I suppose I could have looked at my word total on Sunday night (the time when I suspect it was highest) and counted that as words in but that still does not give a real feeling for it.

The major stuff missing at the moment is the emotional work that is there. Even as I write this I can see places where I should have put it in, but I also know I am incapable of doing so at present. My brain has got itself lost in the fog hanging around the trees of the thesis.

Any way I have created a wordle of this chapter and the right sort of words are coming out. So I guess I am getting somewhere close to where I want to be but I need to write a set of notes to myself on what I still need to do.

The rest of this week, I will probably only write three days but I hope to get on with the final appendix of the thesis. This one is about baptism as the next chapter is about worship. I am hoping that this chapter is easier to write as it is the one I have written a couple of papers on already as well. I also need to book my train ticket to Cambridge for the meeting in a couple of weeks time. However a discussion on Facebook has made me feel a lot more confident on how I handle the tradition, particularly Reformed Piety.