Monday • 7/24/2023
We are taking a detour from the Daily Office readings this week. Instead, we are 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.
On Plato & Boxing: The Art of Living in Two Planes
In the “Heroes” episode of M*A*S*H’s 10th season, the show’s chaplain, Father Mulcahy, sits at the deathbed of one of his life-heroes, a retired boxer named “Gentleman” Joe Cavanaugh. As he comforts the dying boxer, Mulcahy recounts growing up as a scrawny, inner-city kid with big glasses who liked to read Plato. He loved Plato’s description of an “ideal plane,” which helped him imagine a better life: “rambling fields and trees. Sort of like the suburbs, only in the sky.”
One of Mulcahy’s challenges was that he was an easy target for the neighborhood bullies. It didn’t help that he never fought back—thinking fisticuffs were “not very … Platonic.”
Then one night when he was 12 his father took him to see “Gentleman” Joe in a boxing match. “Gentleman” Joe was punching his opponent at will. With the crowd yelling, “Put him away!” Joe had stopped punching and told the ref to stop the fight because the man had been hurt enough.
And I realized for the first time that it was possible to defend myself and still maintain my principles. If Plato had been a boxer, I suspect he’d have fought like you. That was when I made up my mind to keep one foot in the ideal plane and the other foot in the real world. I thought you might like to know that. And I just wanted to thank you.
Uncommon Match
Francis Mulcahy became an effective priest because he embraced his humanity. Now, the M*A*S*H scriptwriters never really allowed Father Mulcahy to have one foot “in the ideal world.” But they did show the way his keeping one foot “in the real world” lent power to his ministry: from rescuing orphans to performing orderly duties when the rest of the camp was sick, even to performing an emergency tracheotomy while under fire. All the while, he struggled with how useful his life was. Even with the scriptwriters’ muzzle, it always seemed to me, Father Mulcahy’s foot in the real world became a pointer to another plane of existence.
Recently, a slender, but elegant, art book brought Father Mulcahy to mind. It was Thomas S. Hibbs’ and Makoto Fujimura’s Rouault-Fujimura: Soliloquies. The book comprises three things that, like Mulcahy’s character, remind us of the two planes of existence.
First, the book catalogs an exhibition of paintings by Georges Rouault (1871-1958) and Fujimura (b. 1960) that appeared together in 2009 in New York City’s Dillon Gallery.
Second, Baylor University professor Thomas Hibb compares the incarnational techniques and the Godward vision of Rouault and Fujimura. With his bold lines reminiscent of stained glass, Rouault firmly places God’s incarnate Son in this world of fallen Eves, sad clowns, imperious kings, and self-righteous judges. Fujimura has adapted a Japanese medieval technique of refracting light to take up forms and themes of modern abstract art, but with this twist: his refractions of light in abstract form are pointers to the Author of light.
Third, Fujimura offers a personal testimony about how Rouault’s art saved him from existentialism’s “no exit,” and opened to him “a portal that peeks into ages past, and then, magically, invites us into a journey toward our future.”
This slim (63-page) art book resonated with me because a worship leader is a lot like an artist. Artists and worship leaders both seek to communicate truth in a largely intuitive way. I share with these two artists a vision of God’s transcendent glory, and I realize that in my own way I’m called to “paint” in “the real world.” What Fujimura seeks to do by bringing medieval colors to dance, I seek to do through well selected songs and well crafted prayers: “inviting the City of God into the hearts of the City of Man.”
Dual Realities
By far, the hardest part of “leading worship” is doing those two things at once. “Leading” means staying in time, maintaining pitch, working at chops. “Worshiping” means leaving time and entering God’s eternal “now,” where “a joyful noise” may or may not be a technically excellent noise. “Leading” calls for paying attention to what’s happening among the worshipers. “Worshiping” calls for paying attention to no one except the worshiped.
Sometimes I despair of doing both at once. But then hope comes as a heaven-sent gift. Regardless of how odd the form in which hope comes, I receive it. The television character Father Francis John Patrick Mulcahy, was one such gift.
Mulcahy, Rouault, and Fujimura—each in his own way—remind me it’s worth continuing to work at the craft of “leading” worship. It’s important to keep working at scales and charts. It’s important to look for tools that enhance the physicality of the worship experience for the people I serve. But I also need—and desperately so—whatever it takes to keep my worship foot and my leader foot in the right places.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+