Handel:Bach::theater:church

Something hit me during the recorder interlude Sunday morning. This is the part of the service after the bellsound and call to worship, a piece of piano music, a short reading, and a hymn. There were a few announcements, and someone read a story for the children who clustered in front. Everybody had settled in, and Marlene's recorder playing was just loud enough to fill the little wooden building. A sweet moment.

Sometimes church is a lot like theater, and different churches clearly have their own brand and style of production. Big churches provide BIG experiences, and small churches stage less ambitious productions; their respective congregations seem to like it that way. Aside from big/small differences, there is the old high-church/low-church distinction, the recent traditional/megachurch conflict, and myriad other differences here in the mobile, multicultural land of religious entrepreneurism.

The aesthetic qualities of ancient rituals involving incense, stained glass, Latin language, and the special handling of bread, wine, and water create a distinct visual, aural, olfactory, and emotional experience. A thousand people packed into a modern auditorium with big sound and light systems makes for different production values and, not coincidentally, looks better on TV. So we have the old-school, high-church, mainline religious experience, and we have the new-school, low-church experience. Suit yourself. The options are out there, and some are more out-there than others.

I've tried different styles and had various levels of discomfort with most of them. There is a certain beauty, however, when it "works" - when the production values are polished enough to provoke a response. It's not unlike a good movie that causes a suspension of disbelief long enough to forget that you're watching actors speak their lines in front of a camera. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with theological beliefs, although, like a really good movie, ideas can enhance the experience. More often, as McLuhan said, the medium is the message.

The way it felt on Sunday was that, just for a moment, a bunch of people were fused. It was just as much 'art' as 'religion', but who said anything is separate from anything else, especially for unitarians. I bet most of us have had 'religious' experiences in museums, concert halls, libraries, gymnasiums, forests, mountains, or beaches, so I should just forget the distinction.

On the way home, I was still wondering about this phenomenon, not that it can ever be explained. "Let the mystery be," as Iris de Ment (or someone) put it. But the analogy of great composers came to mind. Bach wrote music for the church in Leipzig, and the rest of the world made it into concert music. Handel wrote music for the opera house, and mainstream Christianity adopted one of his oratorios (or something) for their main religious celebration. I guess my arguement, if I have one, is that every church IS a theater; maybe then every theater is a church.