APRIL 2024
CENTENARY UNITED METHODIST CHURCH
Resisting Resurrection?
I
cannot tell you why, but I love forming and re-forming things. I love discovering new ways of interpreting the seemingly ordinary. I love hacking the status quo, turning it upside down, and running full-speed-ahead toward new paradigms. But if I'm honest, I also have habits, routines, and quirks that are anything but cutting-edge, far from fresh, mostly mired in the muck of being an ordinary human! Perhaps that's where humanity finds itself in these days of Eastertide. While Easter has called us into an new Resurrection reality, the post-Resurrection stories in scripture remind us that we humans - wired for comfort, predictability, sameness - are quite unskilled at recognizing and ushering in new ways of being, even when they stand directly before us. Modern-day mystic, psychotherapist, and Thomas Merton protégé, James Finley, explains it like this: "...in the momentum of the day's demands, we're skimming over the depths of our own life. We're suffering from depth deprivation. What's regrettable is that God's unexplainable oneness with us is hidden in the depths over which we're skimming." Moments of beauty and awe often shake us out of our complacency and propel us toward these depths that Finley describes. And as our program year continues - as the Chancel Choir sings Poulenc's Gloria and shares a program with the Piedmont Wind Symphony in late April, and as our children race this month toward completing a successful year of Creative Arts Experience (CAE) - we are reminded that music and art are often conduits for those depth-inducing experiences. This Eastertide, may we, practitioners and lovers of music and art, move deeper into our own lives, finding the fullness of life into which we Easter people are called.
- Jonathan Emmons, Director of Music Ministries