music that nourishes and sustains

January 28, 2016 by Paul Vasile in Congregational Song, Leadership

Music-making, especially singing within a spiritual community, is soul food. It shapes and integrates our experience and understanding of the Holy. It gives voice to our heartfelt praise and prayer. It connects us to other voices and bodies around us. It moves energy within a worship space. It engages our whole being - body, mind, breath, spirit. Words and tunes continue to sing in us even when we are not fully conscious of them.

But as I work with congregations around the country, I frequently see that the formative, generative, and enlivening potential of music is unrecognized or diminished. While congregations might be able to articulate a theology of worship (why they sing), their musical practices (how they sing) can be disconnected from, contradict, or subvert, their theology.

we are all meant to be mothers of God

December 23, 2015 by Paul Vasile in Congregational Song, Worship, Advent, Christmas

While Advent marks the beginning of the new liturgical year, I often experience it as a hinge, a transitional space that holds past and future in tension. It invites us to awareness and discernment, to notice where God is at work in our world and in our lives.

This year the tension has been especially strong. Violence and terror persist. The peace foretold by ancient prophets seems illusory in face of ongoing wars, economic instability, and political hubris. The justice that makes valleys low and rough places plain seems far off in face of oppressive, racist systems that scapegoat immigrants and devalue lives of color. And then add our personal challenges and pains, those of our families and friends. Sometimes it can be overwhelming.

the Holy One has chosen you

November 30, 2015 by Paul Vasile in Congregational Song, Worship

Last month, Not So Churchy, an emergent Presbyterian faith community where I share musical leadership, had its very first baptism. A trans woman in the community, who had begun her gender transition a few months prior, stepped into the baptismal waters and was marked as Christ's own. I had the privilege of being one of her sponsors, charged by the community to be a spiritual companion on the journey.

how much paper does a congregation need?

November 07, 2015 by Paul Vasile in Church, Congregational Song, Leadership, Worship

Earlier this year I served as a guest musician at Broadway Presbyterian Church, where their pastor, Rev. Chris Shelton, presented a summer sermon series exploring the context and themes of the New Testament. To begin, we invited the congregation to imagine a time before worship bulletins, before hymnals, even before the letters of Paul and the Gospels were written. We created a worship service that was paperless, participatory and poetic. And we used story telling, communal song and images as primary vehicles for the expression and transmission of faith, like the earliest followers of Jesus.

Mothering Christ

October 28, 2015 by Paul Vasile in Worship, Congregational Song, Church, Prayer

The writings of Julian of Norwich (c.1342– c.1416) have nourished my spiritual imagination since I first encountered them. Perhaps the best known of her words are from Showings, a series of visions that she received in the midst of a near-death experience.

“…but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’

Like many mystics, Julian’s experiences led her to name God in new and surprising ways. Months ago, I came across these striking passages from her Revelations of Divine Love and found them both challenging and insightful.

“The Second Person of the Trinity is our mother in nature, in our substantial making. In him we are grounded and rooted, and he is our mother by mercy in our sensuality, by taking flesh.”

“Thus our mother, Christ, in whom our parts are kept unseparated, works in us in various ways. For in our mother, Christ, we profit and increase, and in mercy he reforms and restores us, and by virtue of his passion, death, and resurrection joins us to our substance.