You’re reading Tethered Letters, a (usually) monthly long-form letter on creative faith and faithful creativity. Everything I write is AI-free. Thanks for reading.
Hello loved ones,
It’s been a minute since my last letter. The season change from spring to summer and school to holidays was first stressful, then chaotic, then such a nice change of pace that I’ve been slacking off. Slacking, at least here, involves very little writing.
I worry sometimes, during breaks like this one, that my writing muscles will atrophy. I’ve always believed that the thing that makes someone a writer is that they actually do the deed regularly, religiously. The problem is that we’ve trained ourselves to associate a habit of writing with habitual sharing of that writing in public spaces. I like the external motivation to write as much as the next lazy writer, but almost a decade of sending regular missives out into the mirror dimension we call the web has really diminished such motivation’s value for me. But more than this, I think the social media age will officially end, and we’ll be left with the real world we’ve found it so convenient to sideline.
And then we’ll all have to relearn how to do it. Live, I mean. Live in a way that remains unread by far-off folks, as well-meaning as we all are. We’ll have to regain the resilience we gave up to give away our deepest thoughts cheaply in digital spaces. We’ll have to reform communities that exist through conversations and locality and shared experiences and differences of opinion, after years of founding them on shared likes and follows. And we’ll have to get used to not having an audience ready to receive our doctored-up stories about how we spend our days (definitely not in quiet desperation...)
I think about this sometimes when I get the nagging feeling I should be writing about this or that on Substack, but life is full and time is precious. I think: I’m practicing for the reality renaissance coming down the line. If I really want to be ahead of the culture curve, I better go water the garden.
Speaking of the garden, in the space between the end of the school year and today, the rhubarb and asparagus and strawberry seasons came and went. We planted out, with great trepidation and hope, six apple trees and six raspberry canes. We opened the pool and the kids leapt right in despite the 65-degree price tag. I smoked my pipe on the front porch. We listened to the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack on repeat, then Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, then Paul Simon’s Graceland. We thinned the over-excited peach tree.
At the beginning of May, Linnea and I went on a delightful three-day anniversary trip to Brown County. We found a secluded cabin where we spent a lot of our time just sitting on the porch sipping coffee, listening for migrating bird calls and reading the spring chapters of David Kline’s Great Possessions to one another. One evening we even heard a whippoorwill, a first for both of us.
We went on a few adventures while we were there, namely to Brown County State Park, where Linnea hunted for new birds to add to her life list and I hunted for new mushrooms to add to my belly. She had much more luck than I did. I found a fist-sized chicken of the woods, and that was it. I was a bit frustrated that someone had apparently swept through and harvested all the morels (as evidenced by the signs at the nature center advertising a parking lot sale for them at $60 a pound). But it was alright, I kept my eyes peeled and we had a great time regardless of the forage fail.
Then the following week I was picking up brush in our thin strip of a tree line at home when I came upon a four-inch pheasant back. I was so surprised I laughed out loud. And just a few Sundays ago a friend of mine spotted a five-pound cluster of chicken of the woods growing up out of a subterranean stump right next to our church parking lot. All that time spent scouring the underbrush hours from home, only for these beauties to pop out of nowhere in my own backyard.
It occurred to me that I ought to treat foraging a little bit more like bird watching: instead of stressing over the search, just keep your eyes and ears open for the surprise that comes to you.
Back when I was studying worship and music in Bible school (this would have been early 2010s), I was introduced to another student who wasn’t studying either of those things. After finding out I was a musician, she asked me what I thought the future of worship music was. Without hesitation, I said it was in “high-church liturgical forms.”
She was surprised at this. So I went on, with all the hubris of a theology major who’d just discovered an obscure theologian for the first time, to share about how unrooted and entertainment-oriented worship had become and blah blah tradition and have you heard of this thing called mystery?
I was going to a more liturgical church than I had ever gone to in my life, and riding that first intoxicating wave of high-church feeling. It was a potent drug to my traditionalist mindset toward church music, kind of a confirmation of the things I valued at the time (many of which I still do), and a repudiation of all the things I didn’t. And whilst mansplaining mystery wasn’t really my goal, there’s a sort of blindness that overtakes you when you’ve got a tiny bit of exciting information about something.
On one level, I was thrilled by what I was discovering in the church seasons and Cranmer’s Scripture-drenched collects. I wanted to show people the beauty and strength and fullness of these things. They offered a depth of experience and tradition that much of the popular musical worship of that time was lacking.
On another level, I was just being a jackass.1
Liturgical worship appealed to me at that precise moment because it made me feel like I was on the right side of history and it affirmed my existing biases. I was rightfully craving something deeper and more rooted than was on offer in the evangelical church, and liturgical forms fit the bill. But it is so seductively easy to look humble and feel holy merely by upholding someone else’s tradition as better than the tradition you are in. And it is also easy to believe that the one promising path you discover might be the one that leads you to mushroom-foraging glory (so to speak).
I recently read this take on liturgy that points to this problem, among others. I recommend you read the whole thing, but this is the part that really hit home:
“... Liturgy enthusiasts tend to be enamored with the power of liturgy for Christian faith formation. After all, they say, liturgy forms people in habits that are politically, culturally, and economically countercultural. Rich or poor, ugly or beautiful, we all eat together. People of every race and nationality come to the same table. We recite the historic creeds in one voice.
Certainly, these observations of what happens in liturgy are factually correct (and good and right). But they misunderstand worship as a means in the spiritual life. It is not a means. It is an end in itself.
The purpose of our lives is to worship God. Yet I see newly minted liturgy enthusiasts wanting to take that end and wield it as a means, a way to form better, cooler, more politically with-it Christians.”
That last sentence? That was me. Except I wasn’t all that interested in forming those kinds of Christians, I was just interested in looking better, cooler, and more with-it (politically and otherwise).
Before I went and studied music and worship at Bible school, I carried real biases against the worship styles of our mainline brothers and sisters because, I thought, they are stifling the Spirit and removing agency by using only the rote words of others. I went from that mindset to believing that liturgy is better because our modern words and methods of worship aren’t as good as the older traditions.
What I really meant by this was threefold:
I didn’t believe my words would reach God.
I didn’t trust the Spirit to act, let alone guide my prayers.
I wanted to rest on the structures of liturgy so I didn’t have to actually do what God asked of me.
I was just afraid.
I was striving to be something I thought God wanted me to be, instead of resting in Him and receiving His love and power. I was motivated by pride and anxiety, circling my skills and place as a musician in the church. And during a season when life was getting crazier by the day, I really wanted something solid. The liturgy bug got me right at that moment, when I was in the market for stability and purpose.
(^ what you look like to people when you’ve got the liturgy bug)
Looking back, I’m grateful. God uses even malformed visions of Him and His commands, even the structures we cling to a little too tightly. He used high church worship frameworks to anchor me in something broader than my own opinion, then showed me that even these wouldn’t be enough if I wasn’t anchored in Him.
By the time the first zeal had cooled, liturgy had become what it always was: a tool used in service of the real goal of God-shaped worship. The varied structures and philosophies I’ve tried on for size over the years are the same: what they are, and no more. We can learn something from everything (and everyone, for that matter). But we are also prone to wander, prone to place our trust in things and people, instead of the Best and Brightest Person available to us.
Fast-forward to today, and the proliferation of liturgy as method and means into almost every corner of evangelical life seems to have justified my prophetic pronouncement. And yet... here we are, still struggling to live holy lives, still asking where God is when we need Him, still fighting for control.
And this is exactly the point Matthew Burdette makes in his article:
“The structure of liturgy is, in the end, little more than the regulation of the ‘traffic pattern’ of the church’s life: It is the lines on the road, the yield signs, the traffic lights, the guardrails when we’re going around the bend, all of which we need. I don’t blame evangelicals for wanting these things. But if you come to the next town over, you’ll see that people still run red lights and roll through stop signs.”
In other words, all our forms won’t save us, despite our excitement over them. Only Jesus can do that. All our books of written prayers may give us words, but they won’t teach us to pray. Only praying will do that. All our liturgies won’t make every moment holy (with deep respect and admiration to all of us Rabbit Roomers roaming the earth). Only fixing our eyes on the Author and Finisher of our faith can do that.
I sense in the desire to prescribe and activate liturgy, or wisdom communities, or revival accompanied by miracles, or Berry-esque agrarianism a la growing all your own cabbages — a great and necessary longing for MORE. We want more than algorithms and alienation, more than AI and enshittification, more than politics, more than the wars of our fathers. We are yearning for God, and the world will not satisfy us.
Yet we keep coming back to a digital table loaded with bits and bytes masquerading as wisdom but untethered to any responsibility. We look for faux-relationships devoid of struggle, for churches devoid of obstacles (either because we only engage them online or because we’re not willing to fully commit ourselves to the local body we attend). We want spirituality and cosmic wonder and some kind of cloudy artistic Source out there, but we won’t take and eat the body and blood of the specific, incarnated Jesus Christ in a specific, embodied community of other broken people we might need to forgive.
So our scrolling grinds us down, and our timetables wear us out, and our ambition bears down upon us until we wonder whether it’s even worth trying anymore.
And in this jungle of stated ideals, bereft of practical outworking of those ideals, we solace ourselves with knowing the right things, and go on avoiding doing the right things. We feel as though by writing them out we have accomplished what we should be about. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve set forth a philosophy of something I find amazing and revelatory here on Substack, only to go back to life and fall into the same old habits.
I hear a lot these days about the failures of past generations of the Church to disciple people well, and that this is why the American church is in the state it’s in, and how we’re going to do better. But I don’t expect us to do better any more. I expect us to do what we can to the best of our knowledge and ability to uplift Jesus, and still botch a bunch of stuff up. Because whatever picture we wish to paint of our forefathers and mothers, that’s exactly what they did too.
What makes us think we’ll do better? What makes us think that using more liturgies will make us deeper Christians who are never deceived or polarized? What makes us think that after years of the Church striving to be like Christ and messing it up and still receiving the undeserved mercy and forgiveness of God that we would be the first generation to finally get it right? Also, what makes us think that the long-past generations we venerate actually did get it right, or that we have what it takes to return things to that spiritual status quo?
I just don’t have enough faith in myself or you all for that (as much as I love and admire all of you). We’ll maybe get some things right that our fathers and mothers didn’t, and we’ll definitely fail at things they did well, and the grace of God will continue to cover us and draw us to repentance and holiness and love. That’s the best we can hope for. And if that’s all we get from our generation’s pursuit of God, what a gift it will be! It’s all been a gift anyway, in every generation.
Sometimes I’m so obsessed with Solving Everything that I miss out on what’s right in front of me. I did this while foraging in Brown County. I was straining to identify the type of trees associated with the mushrooms I wanted to find, squinting at undergrowth, stressing over what I wasn’t seeing. I do this with other things in life sometimes, get so focused on doing things the best way possible with the highest impact and lowest monetary outlay that I freeze and don’t even try. Or, I just drift away into a warm bath of aspirations and hang out there, wishing for how things might someday be, yet persistently unhappy with how things are going.
In Wendell Berry’s essay “Leaving the Future Behind: A Letter to a Scientific Friend,” (from The Art of Loading Brush) he makes the case that our obsession with the future, whether we are seeking to make it better for the human race or fearing the heat death of the universe, is ultimately not doing anyone any good. He’s been around long enough to see “future-fear” fads like nuclear holocaust and overpopulation come and go without solving the continued threat of either. And he posits that the current fad, climate change, isn’t going to get us anywhere either. Why?
“Waste and pollution are everyday problems to which all of us contribute in daily and ordinary ways. To collect them under the heading of ‘climate change’ sensationalizes and enlarges them, assigns the remedies to governments and corporations, and to the future. To sell digital technology, as a solver of problems, as it was and is sold, abuses the future in order to abuse the present.
... Because the future is limitless, we can project without limit into it. It is limitless, to us, because we know nothing about it. Because we know nothing about it, we are free to talk endlessly about it. It is hard to imagine why we do this except to distract ourselves from the difficult things we do know about and ought urgently to be talking about. We give up the incarnate life of our living souls, in the only moment we are alive, in order to live in dreams and nightmares of the future of a world we have already diminished and made ill, in no small part by our often mistaken preparations for the future.”
Wisdom calls us to respect our limits and do our daily work. Wendell calls it a return to “provision,” which brings to mind the Lord’s Prayer: “Give us this day our daily bread...” Our word-slinging over future ideals and catastrophes offers an illusion of control, an avoidance mechanism that ends with us pining away after total comfort from all of our fears and total satisfaction of all of our desires — something akin to the soma-fueled stability of Huxley’s Brave New World. But to do this is to the stop participating in our lives at all.
And we feel the problem. Sit long enough within the capsule of future ideation and most of us start feeling what The Savage expressed to Mustapha Mond:
“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
The world is a vast place full of needs we cannot hope to meet. Heck, our local communities are vast, let alone the world. The soul of a single human being is vast. But we can always do one thing at a time faithfully, the difficult thing right in front of us that God is poking us about, that demands our attention. The vast kingdom of aspirations we call the internet distracts us from this faithful work and shapes our affections to crave empty futures. Even the good bits of it, like Substack, can do this.2 We have to proceed with caution.
These days, older and (marginally) wiser, I don’t lean so heavily on the liturgical calendar or written prayers in the worship services I plan at my church. We think about Advent and Lent and Eastertide in planning, but don’t insist on them. We’ll sometimes do a responsive Psalm, but not every Sunday. We have a form we use, adjusted to include some pieces of a more traditional worship liturgy, but it’s only a framework, not a law.
We try to think deeply about how we worship, and try to be as faithful as we can to what we believe God calls us to in His Word. This is probably a lot simpler for us than for most larger churches. When you only have 60-70 folks who all know each other, you get the blessing of learning to flex in the interest of unity. It’s amazing what comes from this: moments that I could never predict or plan, when the Spirit of God cracks open a heart or the exact right words are said that someone needed, or when a hymn that’s always left me cold brings someone else to tears before God.
The joy of surprise, like that of liturgy, is in specificity. The best surprises are those that are specifically calibrated to you: the gift from someone who knows exactly what you would like, who has an uncanny map of your brain in mind when they picked it for you. The mushroom that you were hoping to spot and couldn’t find, suddenly found in a specific place at a specific time where you specifically would be. The scarlet tanager or the indigo bunting that flashes across your vision without warning, leaving you in awe at your luck.3
Incidentally, this is why spirituality without religion is so disappointing in the end: because there’s nothing specific you can hang your hat on. There is not a specific Person who embodies all of the joy and beauty and truth that your heart desperately belongs for. You cannot have a relationship with vague cloud of Good Feelings. But you can have a relationship with the incarnated Christ. You can know God, because Jesus has revealed the Father fully. You can have the Holy Spirit within you, guiding you in every moment.
The surprise of the Gospel is just this, that Jesus came to save you, you reading this right now. That Jesus, God Himself, knows you personally and thoroughly, so thoroughly that He knows the mad thoughts spinning around your head when you wake and the exact griefs and joys that weigh on you when you rest that same head on the pillow at night. This, friends, is good news.
This is also what we celebrate when we join together to worship Him. We bring all of our cares and confessions and we lay them down at the foot of the cross. We lay them down for the love of God and the love of our neighbors, and we let go of our personal preferences and the specific things that have haunted us through our weeks, and we receive a common Word in a common cup during a common experience called life that we’re all struggling to get through, in a specific time and place with specific people. And the surprise then becomes that God meets us in our very specific commonness.
Our liturgies will not save us, nor will our grasping for control, nor will our weightless words on the internet. But our God does save us, He is saving us, and He will continue to do so.
June Favorites
Another shout-out to Paul Simon’s Graceland. Our family has been listening to it non-stop this summer and we all love it.
The Mockingbird’s Holy Spirit issue was just a total delight. Already loving the Law and Gospel issue.
Saw Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning and it is the best kind of exercise in escalation. A fitting end to a great series of movies. I’ve read that people think it’s too much, but I guess I thought that was the point??
Loved this article by Malcolm Guite about why he still smokes a pipe and enjoys a pint, despite the health risks associated with both.
I’ve written about it here before, but we’re just loving the new season of The Bear.
Since this means “donkey,” Linnea thought it appropriate and signed off on its usage in this context.
I recognize that our words have an impact on people here. But I also think the context in which we encounter those words determines how much impact they have. Even the meaningful ones, when spoken in the wash of words available online, don’t carry anywhere near the weight of a “word fitly spoken” (Proverbs 25:11) by a friend you actually spend embodied time with. And since we have only so many words to give, we need to make those local words a priority.
As far as postures for receiving the present go, I think Paul Simon said it pretty well in this interview on Graceland: “It’s not about being satisfied. It’s about being interested.”
Chris, this was beautiful. Oh, how our aspirations allude us, leaving us with empty promises, but the grace to still stand right here, on this sacred earth. Thank you.
Your talk of liturgy reminded me of all the "prayer books" I own. I've kind of been on a bender (ha!) of buying them the last couple of years, searching for the One to pray to in all of them...but the Spirit has gently convicted me lately. While the books and words are lovely and meaningful, and truly help, they pale in comparison to being alive in the Spirit all on one's own.
cheers to summer!
Dang. I'll have to re-read this one, and reserve comment until I do so. (Old) Uncle Rick.