Candles in the dark
I do want to talk about Kairos more sometime when I can think more about it. Just a quick thought, stealing more from Standing at the Corner of East and Now from Frederica Mathewes-Green: Between the songs the lead singer urges listeners not to let the joy of the faith grow cold in their hearts. I hear several bands give messages like this between songs, which makes me wonder if cooling emotion is a recurrent problem. It doesn’t seem to be a concern that listeners will actually lose their faith, but rather that they’ll fail to experience a sufficiently vivid level of emotional engagement with it, that they may gradually grow numb or take it for granted. A liturgical church has an advantage over one where worship is relatively spontaneous, in that people powered by religious emotion simply do run out of steam. Where there is a liturgy you show up each week and merge into that stream, and allow the prayers to shape you. But where the test of successful worship is ho...
