Taste and see

Ever since Vespers on Wednesday night, I have been thinking about how sense-deprived the worship was in my fellowship as I was growing up. The theme at Vespers was
"The sense of taste." Matt Hearn did a wonderful job of turning our thinking to that topic, and of making us hungry.

Neither was our worship physical in any way. In my early years in our fellowship, we did sit down after standing (but we only stood up for singing). We did not rise for the reading of the Bible.

We did bow our heads for prayer( a very few knelt--mostly old men). There were no prayer rails on our pews--we didn't even know what they were.

We did partake of communion every Sunday--but it was profane to even get close to thinking that the bread Became Christ's body and the wine his blood. And oh, yes the "wine" was always Welch's grape juice and the bread was always a flat, tasteless cracker.

There were no candles even though "light" is heavily featured as a metaphor in the Bible.

There was no incense. Rather than spices, our church smelled of well-oiled pews and floors and musty songbooks and Bibles.

The only "art" in the auditorium was the "painting" over the baptistry. Rarely was it art in any of the churches in our fellowship. There were certainly no crosses nor icons.

So worship and its surroundings were very plain, unadorned and sense-deprived.

However, things are looking up in some of the churches in our fellowship. We do now stand for the reading of the sacred Word. We clap and move to praise songs. And in churches which have Vespers and Taize services, one sees candles. On Power Point, all kinds of "real" art and icons can be shown.

In our aforementioned Vespers service last week, one of the stations was a table of fruit and cheese and crackers for good communal sharing--and wine in the partaking of communion.We have also experimented with the dipping of bread into wine for partaking.

Thankfully, we are beginning to realize that the worship of God is a wholistic experience encompassing the mind, the body, and the senses.