So. I was sent on a mission to check out the possibility of having a HipHopEMass at Trinity… And there was one two hours away, so yesterday after my very last class I hopped in the car and drove down to Richmond.

Not a huge fan of hip hop before this. Objectification of women, glorification of violence, greed, and anger (not that anger is a new thing in popular music) – not my thing, and that’s really all I knew of hip hop.

…I know something different, now.

It was very, very cool. Incredibly moving in many ways, but possibly the most moving was to hear the Gospel chanted (simplified Anglican chant, in case you’re wondering) with a backbeat that sounded like the most beautiful and appropriate soundtrack you could ever imagine. The DJ, the keyboard, the bass guitar, and the electric guitar, all going very softly in the background – subtle crescendos, totally in sync with the chant, so incredibly moving. It really heightened for me the actually passage of the Gospel reading.

Anyway, the Richmond Times-Dispatch wrote an article about it, if you’d like to see. The article is on the whole very good. My own beef is that at one point they called Fr. Tim’s pectoral cross (which seemed very normal to me – hell, I was wearing a pectoral cross, and I was in the congregation wearing a clergy shirt) a ‘crucifix medallion with bling’. I laughed really hard. A)not a crucifix. No dangling body of christ, no crucifix. B)I suppose you could call it bling, but it’s not so sensational as it sounds. The Church, Catholic and Orthodox, has been accumulating ‘bling’ since before the Scism, when Constantine made Christianity the state relgion of the Roman Empire. Ever since we haven’t lived universally in fear of our lives, we’ve been collecting shiny things to the Glory of God (and sometimes, not to the Glory of God).

Anyway, here’s the article. It has pictures and soundbytes, but the lab pc I’m on now won’t recognize them, so I can’t yet vouch for what they look like, or if I’m in them. I’ll comment on that one later, when I get home tonight.