Today's Church in America - Part Two
Presented by Phyllis Tickle

Calvary Episcopal Church
Memphis, Tennessee
January 26, 2003
This talk also available in audio

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There are two or three things here on spirituality that I want to add: There are approximately twelve or fifteen factors that affected the pulling of spirituality out and letting that be the thing we engaged first. Let me at least suggest to you a couple of things that did matter.

First of all, the coming of the civil rights movement opens up into mainstream American worship African-American theology and African-American praxis. It is now possible for the first time for there to be intercourse on a Sunday between those two ways of looking at the world. They differ most completely in the fact that the African-American indigenous worship in this country does not and did not (does more now than it did because we’ve corrupted it) separate the world of the body from the world of the spirit. It was a totally holistic Christianity—there was no separation between the life of the mind, the life of the body, the life of the vocation, the life of the job, and the life of the spirit. It was all one continuous flow that came in and deeply affected white American Christianity. Part of what we're having in spirituality now comes directly from that.

The next thing which is vaguer and harder to get at comes from the end of the 1970s, straight forward, when there is a huge shift in music. Now, when I get here, I get nervous. For one thing, I'm tone deaf, badly tone deaf. For another thing, I'm about to hit some sacred cows, and they moo so badly.

Sacred music as we know it from the get-go was based on the fact that human beings had no access to gorgeous music except in their homes if two or three folk gathered around a piano or a violin and played. If they had megabucks they could go to a concert in a concert hall and really hear good music performed. The poor man's solution was to hear music in church. So it was a performance art, even by those who couldn't perform. It was not a participatory thing. Its uplift had to do with the fact that it was the one part—here's the sacred cow—of the religious experience, that did not depend on rationalism. It was the one part of the worship experience that spoke without the chatterer, that spoke to the spirit. It was all the spirituality there was.

What happened? Well, what happened was the Walkman. And every kid you know is tuned to stuff a heck of a lot better than he'll ever hear in church; it is more professionally performed. There's no question about it. Ever kid for four blocks can buy something much better than what he's ever going to hear in church, short of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and a few others we could pick.

In addition to having high quality music, he's now got music he can participate in. And if you drive down the street, you'll see him participating, right? You know? What the church failed to do was accommodate to that shift. It still tried to perform, and we still do.

I was talking to a 29 year-old book seller at the cathedral book store in Cincinnati not long ago who heard me on this rant and said, "You know what? My music all ends on a down. It all ends by bringing me back where I am. The problem with traditional church music is that it keeps wanting to end up here on a high. I don't need that high anymore, and I don't believe it."

Think about what he's saying. I don't need that high, and I don't believe it. What I need is to be brought back with my spirituality into this world. I don't need to be transcendent. I need to be where I am. It's an interesting thing. He also then went on a rant about how patronizing older folk were when they tried to fix the music by bringing in a rock band or something. That wasn't the solution either. It was a fundamental need to understand.

The point for us is not that we should change our music program, but that what was happening is that music became the first language of the spirit. The ability to get at music increased and spread, the ability to talk in spirituality rather than in English increased. If you actually look at your young people today, what is it that binds them together as a community? It's their music, isn't it?

The Buddhist talk about the chatterer. The chatterer is that thing in your head that speaks English. It is that thing you can't turn off very easily. It is the first thing that has to go when one is meditating. It is also the first thing that goes when you listen to music. It cuts off, and a different lexicon, a different rhetoric, a different way of understanding and being checks in. You cannot overestimate our having pulled spirituality out of the cable first. You cannot overestimate the fact that from 1975 on, we have had access to excellent music by every Tom, Dick, and Harry, Alice, and Jane on the streets. It changed greatly the context—the ability to have affinity on a nonverbal level. This has been very important.

The next thing that happened that I want to throw up here is the Internet. The Internet is the possession of every kid. We very often tell ourselves something by how we name things. We talk about reality as being on this side of the screen. The other side of the screen we call virtual reality. This one on the front of the screen is geographic. It is four-dimensional. It is physical. But this one on the other side of the screen is what is called non-locative geography; that is to say it has escaped all of the dimensions of time and space, or at least space, anyway. It functions as a different reality.

For those of us over 35, it's almost impossible to understand or to perceive what it is for those under 35 to move easily and comfortably in two distinct forms of reality. This one does not have a physical body; this one does not have height or depth; but this one is also real.

The point here is that if you're accustomed to moving in non-locative geography all the time, then you have a working metaphor for understanding the world of the spirit, because it, too, is non-locative. For young people 35 and under, spirituality isn't nearly as strange for them, because they have the experience of moving in that which is non-locative. Therefore, why would they not recognize it as extant?

It's a great change in the psychology of how we approach religion. We pulled spirituality out and worried it to death simply because we could; that is to say, there were holes in the story.

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