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 During
my college days two Speech teachers tried to teach me "Oral
Interpretation." One demonstrated a lot — showing us how
a slight movement of the hands, a widened eye, or the inflection
of a syllable, could convey different meanings to an audience.
The other gave little attention to such matters, but
concentrated on the meaning of the material,
"syllable by syllable, nay letter by letter." His
philosophy was that if we fully understood what we were saying,
so that we made it our own and felt its emotions
we would then convey its message to the fullest extent of our
talents.
Hopefully,
I learned from both; but the latter seemed best suited to my
temperament. The first always reminded me of artificiality,
while the last seemed to encourage genuineness. The first was
easier to implant in the mind of the reader. He could put tiny
notes alongside his script, such as: raise voice here, or, stomp
foot. If the directions were carefully followed one could read
quite life-like, and impress the listeners. But there was no
mask upon the reader who had dug out the text and made it his
own. I am reminded of the two who read the twenty-third Psalm
publicly and were later critiqued. The first was told: "You
know the Psalm very well," but the latter was told,
"Apparently you know the Shepherd."
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These
things come to mind when I see brethren trying to make their
worship more "spiritual" by dimming the lights,
holding hands, humming softly or "setting the stage"
by other mood-makers. A mob can be worked to a frenzy by
rhythmic stomping, shouting in unison, or giving undivided
attention to an expert rabble-rouser. The same tactics, properly
adjusted, can cause others to think they have received a direct
operation of the Holy Spirit; and this is especially true if
they are programmed to expect such a thing.
No
doubt we have become tradition-bound to certain structured forms
of "worship" — publicly and otherwise. But there is
little in the growing efforts to "unstructure" that
will not be "structured unstructure" in a few years.
Most, if not all, that our free-wheeling "worshippers"
now practice, is old hat in denominationalism.
We
should not bind ourselves to human traditions, and changes in
the realm of judgment help to break the threads; but nothing
is better for genuine worship than genuineness. We will
"feel" it best, when we "do" it!
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