Thursday • 1/13/2022

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 Three of Three)

In the first two installments of this three part series on “Holy Restlessness,” we have looked at the life of the medieval peasant monk who became Abbot of the Cathedral of St. Denis near Paris. We’ve noted the way his discovery of a “theology of light” gave him a holy discontentment with the dark and gloomy spaces in which Christians worshiped up until his day. We saw the way his audacious imagination inspired by that theology of light led him to take risks that wound up reimagining how churches could be refashioned in such a way as to bathe worship in light. 

In today’s final episode, we learn valuable lessons from Suger about the creative use of available resources and about how to exercise innovative wisdom.

Use of “The Available”

Part of Abbot Suger’s remarkable success lay in the fact that he did not so much scrap the Romanesque architecture that the Western churches had been using for nearly a thousand years before him, as much as he creatively adapted it. Moreover, to the extent he could, he used materials he found at hand. He did so fabulously. At first he thought he would have to import stone for the building. However, as he was later to write:

Through a gift of God a new quarry, yielding very strong stone, was discovered such as in quality and quantity had never been found in these regions. There arrived a skillful crowd of masons, stonecutters, sculptors and other workmen, so that – thus and otherwise – Divinity relieved us of our fears. 

Searching the local woods for building materials, he believed God personally led him to the exact timbers he needed to support the church building’s ceiling.  He saw God’s provision locally at every step of the construction process.

As Gothic architecture spread across Europe, it had a number of common features. But each region gave it its own signature, depending on local materials and tastes. French used fine white limestone because it was available, English used coarse limestone and red sandstone for the same reason; Germans and Dutch and Belgians and Poles built from brick because stone was unavailable locally.  Taking advantage of resources at hand made cathedral building realistic and achievable far beyond Suger’s monastery north of Paris. 

Innovative Wisdom

Innovation happens when you inhabit a world that gives you a holy restlessness that sparks an audacious imagination. Innovation happens when you have the authority to effect a change, and the discernment to recognize what you can actually pull off. And finally, innovation happens when you creatively use the resources that are available to you. 

It is not innovative to force round pegs into square holes. It is not innovative to throw out an entire repertoire and bring in something that will feel like “strange fire.” It is innovative to ask: “At this moment, what is missing that people would appreciate as ‘value added’?” And, more importantly, what do we have the resources to do well?” 

An ancient voice persuaded Abbot Suger that worship could be enhanced, and more, reflect the character of God, if the worship happened in a place filled with light and lofty space. Suger’s ideas permanently changed the way worship spaces are created. Even if not “Gothic cathedral” in style, church designs continue to echo those concepts.

As we sense in ourselves a “holy restlessness” we may discover that it is not the latest, newest thing that will add value to our ministry, but something older. It might be as simple as introducing an ancient practice, like chanting; or it may be as profound as taking an idea, like “God is light”, and transforming forever the worshiping world.

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Pixabay License