Tuesday • 1/11/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday January 17.

Holy Restlessness (Part One of Three)

Much of what insulated me from the toxic secularism of modern biblical scholarship in graduate school were the texts of the first half millennium of the church’s life. I came to recognize that across the centuries and across our cultures I shared much more with the likes of Ignatius of Antioch (d. 117) and the anonymous writer to Diognetus (early 2nd century) and Clement of Alexandria (ca. early 3rd century) than I did with the modern secularists who had come to set the agenda for modern biblical studies. 

When, many years later, Robert Webber invited me to consider not just the ideas of those ancient church writers but also their worship and their prayers and their songs, I came to realize that they thought so well because they worshiped and prayed and sang so well.

When I realized how chanting brought “head and heart” together, I began to introducing chant to my students. We practiced the basics of plainsong chant in the “Sacred Stairwell,” and returning students tell me they continue to chant during their personal devotional time. Among my students, there’s an excitement in learning to worship using these practices of the early church. As one student exclaimed on Facebook recently, “Chanting the Nicene Creed in Greek! How I love New Testament Greek!” I appreciate taking something old and making it new.

We are a creative bunch, we worship folk. Not only can we take ancient traditions and re-introduce them in new settings, we can also take ideas, and sculpt, chisel, mold, paint, project, pen, imagine, build them into something no one ever dreamed before.

A Peasant Monk

Enter one 12th century French statesman-abbot, known only as Suger (1081?-1151), abbot of the monastery of Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris. Abbot Suger was a small man of small beginnings. Born in northern France, his peasant family handed him over at age ten to be raised by the local monastery. Suger felt orphaned, and came to think of the monastery as his true family. He latched on to the “upward-leading” theology of his monastery’s patron saint: St. Dionysius the Areopagite, one of the two converts Luke names from Paul’s ministry in Athens (Acts 17:34). 

In legend, Paul’s Athenian convert had brought the gospel to northern France. In reality, it had been a third century namesake who had done so. In legend, Paul’s Athenian convert had written several books of theology, with the theme of “God is light.” In reality, it had been a fifth or sixth century anonymous writer who had done so using Dionysius as a pen name. 

Regardless, “Saint Dionysius” (shortened to “Saint Denis”) was a voice from the ancient church who shaped Suger’s whole being: Saint Denis gave Suger an identity, an inspiration, and a mission. 

Though the pauper boy would eventually rise to become the monastery’s abbot, he was always conscious of his lowly origins: “I, the beggar, whom the strong hand of the Lord has lifted up from the dunghill.” 

Suger responded wholeheartedly to the generally “upward” lift of Dionysius’s theology, and especially to the theologian’s description of God as pure and creative light. 

Out of Darkness

By the year 1200, churches in the West had been accustomed for a thousand years to worshiping in the dark. First it was because of persecution. Before Constantine’s conversion, the church was – both metaphorically and literally – an underground movement. Churches had to meet in secret, sometimes in homes by night, often in catacombs by candlelight. After the Roman emperor’s conversion in the 4th century, the church moved above ground and experienced rapid – almost alarming – growth. The church’s success meant the building of larger and larger spaces for worship. Rather than private homes and small secret places, churches convened in large public spaces. But believers still worshiped in relative darkness because big buildings required strong thick walls to support the roof. Because windows would weaken the stability of the walls, windows were small and permitted very little light to enter the worship space. Thus, the bigger the building, the thicker the walls, and the tinier the windows. 

“There’s got to be a better way.” A voice from a different time and place might alert you to a biblical value that is missing from your own time and place.  The biblical value won’t leave you alone. There’s a gap between your reality and your vision. Great seeds of innovation often develop by rooting yourself in another reality – one that can give you a holy restlessness with what “is,” and the mental and spiritual space to imagine what “can be.” 

So it was with Abbot Suger. 

When, at the age of about 40, Suger was elected abbot of his monastery, he inherited a church building that was in ruins. For years he had meditated on the leading ideas of his theological hero, Dionysius. If, as the Bible teaches and as Dionysius had expounded, God is light and in him there is no darkness (1 John 1:5), why does our worship have to be done in the dark? And why in such a dismal and dilapidated building?

It seemed to Suger that a church ought to have a beauty and a loft to it that took us “from the material to the immaterial.”  Its interior should be filled with light so that the worship space would itself remind us that God is “the Father of the lights” and that his Son is “the first radiance” who reveals the Father to the world. 

Was there a way to rebuild the dim and deteriorating building? Could it be done in such a way that brought into worship the light and resplendence of which he had been reading?

Today, we’ve considered the way this peasant monk discovered a theology of light. Tomorrow we’ll explore the way an audacious imagination inspired by that theology of light led him to take risks that wound up revolutionizing worship in his day. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: "Louvre ext. 32" by Maryade is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0