Skip to Navigation | Skip to Content

Calvin Symposium on Worship

Drama:  Divine Reverberations by Linda Welker

The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship extends a particular welcome to the 2004 Symposium on Worship to Hungarian playwright and leader Visky András, who was instrumental in aiding the research work with Christians in Eastern Europe that is dramatized in Divine Reverberations.

. Read an interview with Visky András by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship

Divine ReverberationsIt is an honor for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship to be a sponsor of this performance. Divine Reverberations helps depict a part of the history of worship not told before and serves as a telling reminder that often the most poignant worship takes place in locations nearly forgotten in earthly centers of power.

We are very grateful to Beth Lantinga, who proposed this project and whose contagious enthusiasm helped bring it to fruition, and to Linda Welker and her students who have given so much careful attention to this project. It is this kind of risky, out-of-the box classroom work that may prove to be the most transforming kind of learning.

We also sense that these performances are part of the recipe for worship renewal in congregations. Part of what we are seeing is a genuinely “liturgical spirituality,” in which common worship leaves an unmistakable imprint on the piety of individual believers and serves as a kind of “source and summit” of Christian spirituality. While hymns and metrical psalms are forged in private moments of inspiration by their writers and composers, and while they may be whistled and sung privately in prisons and hospitals, at home and at work, they gain their force and staying power through corporate singing, most often in public worship. This is especially true in times when our individual reserves are depleted, and when we face persecution or hardship.

Anyone who seeks the long-term health of Christian congregations is wise to attend to what songs are sung in common. And one of the best ways to gain perspective on that task of musical stewardship is to learn from the many fascinating chapters in the history of congregational song, including this one. Does our worship today form us with a faith deep enough to withstand the darkest nights of the soul? Does our music point us away from ourselves to the beauty and faithfulness of the God who promises to be with us always?

We hope that one reverberation of this production will be the way that these kinds of questions linger with us as we leave.

- John Witvliet, for the staff of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship

Additional notes on Divine Reverberations, a result of the project "The Genevan Psalter and God's Faithfulness:  Testimonies from East Central Europe." 

Pictured are Ferenc and Julia Visky. As a young Reformed pastor living in Romania, he spent six hard years in a communist prison; his wife and seven children were sent to a labor camp. Psalm 115:1 became their guiding text when they married in 1947, "Not to us, O Lord, not to us but to your name be the glory because of your love and faithfulness." That love sustained them during those difficult years and to the present. The book of Psalms, embodied in the Genevan Psalter, has nourished Reformed Christians for centuries. This spiritual heritage has a special place in the hearts of Eastern European Reformed believers who have survived the harsh years of Communist repression and domination. Their stories testify to the influence of the Psalms in the ordinary and extraordinary details of their lives. Those stories are the basis of Divine Reverberations.

Ference Visky, in an interview summer 2003, tells of his love for the psalms that was nurtured at home when a young child, and sustained him through the six hard years of imprisonment in a Communist prison.

In a recent set of interviews with Reformed believers in Hungary, Romania, and the Ukraine, Beth Lantinga asked what the Psalms meant to them, she wrote:
Some of those interviewed were surprised that I would even ask whether the Psalter was important for them, because the answer was obvious—of course! They had been wrapped in the tapestry of faith into which the Genevan Psalter was woven—in some places obvious and clear, in others as a deep background color—but always present...

Beth Lantinga is a former teacher who is currently doing research on worship life in the Reformed churches in Eastern Europe; Linda Welker, Director of Divine Reverberations, accompanied her this past summer doing research for the drama.

Jolan KissThree generations of the Timar family in Nagyida, Slovakia, can trace their family’s musical heritage back five generations to eighty-nine-year-old Jolan Kiss, the matriarch of the family. Jolan knows 135 of the Genevan psalms, many learned from her grandmother, who could sing all of them by heart. Jolan’s daughter Maria knows nearly a hundred, and Maria’s daughter, a pastor in a Reformed congregation in Slovakia, shares their love for the heritage of the Genevan psalms. When we asked Jolan to sing some of her favorites, she didn’t hesitate a bit, singing several, including Psalm 90, the best-known psalm among Hungarian Reformed people. The music of God’s grace is like the dew, she says, very refreshing on a hot, hot day!

For more on these stories, see the article by Beth Lantinga in the December 2003 issue (#70) of Reformed Worship.

This project is a part of the Testimony Initiative of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship.  Two other projects in that Initiative are Laotian Faith and Worship and Calvin College and Seminary International Community’s Stories.