Arts and Music at Redeemer

Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, Kenmore invites you to a Choral Evensong service on Saturday, September 13 at 7:30 PM to celebrate the Feast of Hildegard of Bingen. The music for this evening will consist of music by Hildegard and pieces composed using her texts, to be performed by the women of the Redeemer Choir and violinist Laurie Kempen under the direction of Sheila Bristow.

Map and driving directions

Listen to Hildegard’s music at Last.fm

About Hildegard of Bingen (from Wikipedia):

Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 17 September 1179), also known as Blessed Hildegard and Saint Hildegard, was a German abbess, artist, author, counselor, linguist, naturalist, scientist, philosopher, physician, herbalist, poet, activist, visionary, and composer. Elected a magistra in 1136, she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165.

She is the first composer with an extant biography. One of her works, the Ordo Virtutum, has been called the first form, and possibly the origin, of opera.

She wrote theological, botanical, and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, poems, and the first surviving morality play, while supervising brilliant miniature illuminations.

Attention in recent decades to women of the medieval church has led to a great deal of popular interest in Hildegard, particularly of her music. Approximately eighty compositions have survived, which is one of the largest repertoires among medieval composers.

Hildegard communicated with popes such as Eugene III and Anastasius IV, statesmen such as Abbot Suger, German emperors such as Frederick I Barbarossa, and other notable figures such as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.

Many abbots and abbesses asked her for prayers and opinions on various matters. She traveled widely during her four preaching tours, the only woman to have done so during the Middle Ages.

Saturday December 8th, 7:30 PM

This meditative service of readings and music provides a time of reflection and renewal during the season of Advent. Solo and choral music provided by the Church of the Redeemer Choir, mezzo soprano Melissa Plagemann, and violinist Stephen Cresswell.

The service will be followed by a dessert reception.

On the night of the Great Vigil, I read a short story that I wrote about Israel’s deliverance through the Red Sea.

In honor of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, this story is free to read and adapt under a Creative Commons license.

- Wade

Download the PDF file here

Listen to the audio of the reading here

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Karl Oles presented a creative interpretation of the Creation story on the night of the Great Vigil.

Download the PDF file here

Listen to Karl’s reading here

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The idea of “faith as performance” comes to the fore in a very blatant way during Holy Week.

On Passion Sunday we reenacted the Passion of our Lord, taking the parts of Pilate, the Pharisees, the crowds, and Christ himself during the liturgy.

Then during the Great Vigil on the following Saturday, several of us presented the night’s readings through creative interpretations: music, fiction, spoken word, and dance. (I’ll post a couple of the pieces here over the next few days.)

Stanley Hauerwas addressed faith as performance in this interview on Homiletics online:

HOMILETICS: Your recent book on Bonhoeffer, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence — I thought “performing” was an interesting word. Faith as performance.

HAUERWAS: That was very intentional. One of the things that liberal democratic society has encouraged Christians to believe about what they believe is that what it means to be a Christian is primarily belief![laughter]. So you hold to these 26 absurd propositions before breakfast, you know.

This is a deep misunderstanding about how Christianity works. Of course we believe that God is God and we are not and that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit but that this is not a set of propositions — but is rather embedded in a community of practices that make those beliefs themselves work and give us a community by which we are shaped. Religious belief is not just some kind of primitive metaphysics, but in fact it is a performance just like you’d perform Lear. What people think Christianity is, is that it’s like the text of Lear, rather than the actual production of Lear. It has to be performed for you to understand what Lear is — a drama. You can read it, but unfortunately Christians so often want to make Christianity a text rather than a performance.

- Wade

Saturday evening’s Choral Evensong will be a 7:30 PM service with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, celebrating the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple.

• Choral Processional : Allunde Alluya (Traditional)
• Choral Introit: We Have Waited in Silence (Sheila Bristow)
• Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament: When Candles Are Lighted
• Choral Psalm 122 Anglican Chant (James Turle)
• Choral Canticle: Nunc Dimittis (Charles Villers Stanford)
• Canticle: Magnificat (Hymnal 437)
• Benediction: A Song of Judith (Michael Sitton)

Story written for the April 15, 2006 Easter Vigil liturgy at Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Kenmore, WA.

“Ararat”
by Wade Rockett

I, the mountain Ararat, one of the highest upon the Earth; to the small crawling things: grace and peace be upon you, and glory and honor to our Shaper above, whose triple peaks shine like the sun, and whose slopes endure forever. Amen.

You have asked me to tell what I remember of the Great Flood. I was there, of course, although I was new then. We, the highest, were all new: formed in ancient darkness beneath the deep waters, we rose at the Shaper’s call to break the surface with a crash and a roar, sending wet spray skyward from our slopes. We became land, hills, mountains, valleys, canyons, rocks, boulders, the Shaper’s love made manifest in hard stone, glowing gems, veins of hidden gold.

We are stone and stone is strong; but water – the first-made of Creation – is stronger still. Water erodes, dissolves, cracks, breaks mountains into gravel and sweeps the pieces into the sea. It was the Shaper’s mercy that brought forth dry land from the waters of creation. It was the Shaper’s wrath that would now plunge the land, and all that lived upon it, back into the deeps.

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Saturday, November 25th - Choral Evensong, Christ the King Eve

• 7:30 PM choral Evensong and Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament
• Christ’s mystical presence in the bread of Holy Communion is a focal point for evening psalms, music, readings, prayers, and a time of silent meditation