Calvin to Hold Psalm Festival

September 12, 2005 == MEDIA ADVISORY

Calvin College will present a unique way to experience the book of Psalms on
Saturday, October 15.

Starting at 5 pm that day the college will offer a chance to experience all
150 of the Old Testament's psalms through readings, songs, visual arts and more
as part of its first-ever Psalm Festival.

The event is expected to last eight to ten hours!

Calvin's Laura Smit is chairing the committee that has spent the past year
getting ready for the event.

She says she hopes that Calvin's event on October 15 will help those who
participate experience the Psalms in new ways and will deepen their
appreciation for what she thinks has been a critical book of the Bible for the
church throughout the ages.

"The Psalms are the prayer book of the church," she says, "and if we are to be
people of prayer, we need to learn the psalms. More specifically, we need to
learn how to pray the psalms."

Smit adds that singing the psalms, which will happen with some regularity at
Calvin's Psalm Festival, also is an essential part of Calvin's Reformed
tradition in worship.

And she believes the marathon nature of the Psalm Festival adds an important
extra dimension to the study, one that would not be present so significantly
were Calvin to stretch out its study of the Psalms over a longer period of
time, say weeks or months.

"When we consider any other book of the Bible, we probably all see that
context matters," she says. "We see that a passage should never be studied
without some attention being paid to what comes before and what comes after.
But with the psalms we are often inclined to treat them as self-contained
little units, rather than understanding the coherent sweep of the psalter as a
whole. Spending the night with the psalms is a way to experience that
totality, and many psalms that are confusing or troubling when read alone are
suddenly illuminated when prayed in context."

To get ready for the event Calvin's organizing committee sponsored a contest
intended to bring to the evening new songs, poems, videos, dances and images.

Says Smit: "Throughout Christian history, people have made the psalms their
own by setting them to music or paraphrasing them in contemporary language. We
wanted to continue that tradition, so we sponsored a contest for new psalm
settings in various art forms. The Psalm Festival will include new poetry,
film, dance, visual art and music."

Smit notes that the logistics for the Festival are "rather daunting" since the
event includes a multitude of participants, including musical groups such as
Capella, Campus Choir, Meistersingers, Lyric Singers and chapel bands as well
as dramatic reading teams, solo readers and dance groups.

Smit says simply: "We'll begin at 5 o'clock and keep going until we're
finished."

She notes that the Calvin dining halls are going to make arrangement to allow
on-campus students to get dinner a little early that night, so that they won't
have to choose between food and psalms. And there will be three breaks
throughout the evening when there will be water, coffee and snacks available in
the Chapel Undercroft.

"There's no obligation to come for the entire event," she says. "Even though
many people are looking forward to being there from beginning to end, we
recognize that some people will be coming and going throughout the night."

For more see http://www.calvin.edu/faith/worship/psalm_fest/index.htm
   
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Received on Mon Sep 12 14:11:22 2005