Embodied Human Beings and Our Gravitation Towards Ceremony and Ritual

By Cynthia R. Nielsen

As Thomas Howard observes in his layperson’s introductory booklet, The Liturgy Explained, in all of the major moments of our human experience—birth, marriage, and death—we humans gravitate toward ceremony to mark these special events.  Physicians and scientists, of course, can tell us a great deal about what occurs when a new life is formed or what happens to the body when one dies; however, this is only part of the story and fails to grasp the mystery and wonder that compels us to surround these occasions with ceremony, elaborate costumes, feasting and other distinctively ritualistic activities.  As Christians, we believe that our act of worshipping God is a participation in the highest mystery of all, the Trinitarian life of God, which also involves a participation in the vertical realm with the saints of all ages (“the communion of saints” of the Creed).  Howard goes on to point out that from the beginning Christian worship has always been structured, rather than whimsical.  “Hebrews and Christians have from the beginning given this act structure, not leaving it to the whim of the moment, nor to the rather thin resources furnished by spontaneity—although spontaneous bursts of praise are a lovely thing in their place:  it is just that the corporate worship of Hebrews and Christians was never, until the modern age, done in an off-the-cuff way” (p. 10).  Here one might appeal to a practice among jazz musicians to help illustrate Howard’s point.  In jazz, contrary to the common mis-understandings, one does not simply create melodic lines ex nihilo when, e.g., improvising a solo.  Rather, one pulls from a tradition of melodic phrases employed by the masters who came before—lines that have been proven over time and which still speak today, yet re-harmonized (hence, the goal is not mere repetition, but there is a clear continuity with the past that is unmistakable).  In addition, there is a clear structure in place in nearly every jazz standard, as well as a melody that is given, which is similar to the givenness we find in hymns and psalms in a liturgical context.  As Howard puts it, “[a]ll of us are familiar with the Christian use of hymns and psalms in worship, and in these we have ritual, that is, fixed, ‘second-hand’ words furnishing us with the very capacity which our own imaginations lack to say what we would like to say.  All hymns are ritualistic in this sense:  the words which somebody else has written, and which are ‘imposed’ on us, turn out, lo and behold, to set us free.  They help us to say what we wish we could say but cannot, left to our own spontaneous devices” (p. 10). 

Howard then distinguishes between ritual and ceremony.  Ritual in the strict sense refers to the words in the liturgy, whereas ceremony, “strictly speaking, refers to the actions of the liturgy” (pp. 10-11).  In other words, kneeling to pray, the gesturing of a priest or minister in a blessing or benediction, standing for the reading of Scripture—all these movements are packed with meaning and significance.  Since we accept the idea of meaningful actions and gestures in our common life under the sun—e.g. a kiss, a hug, a handshake—why should we exclude meaningful action or signify-ing movement in our worship of God and reduce our worship to a strictly verbal (and perhaps rational-ized) engagement?  Moreover, what does such a reduction mean for those who are mentally disabled, or for children who do not yet have the rational capacity to grasp a sermon directed at educated adults?  Do we simply exclude these individuals from our corporate worship—from participation in the “communion of saints”?   If, as Howard claims, the “liturgy is an enactment, in which the Church proclaims the whole Gospel drama,” and “[E]very celebration of the liturgy unfolds the entire drama of salvation,” not simply in words alone but in significant actions, then perhaps we should take a second look at what liturgy has to offer the Church today(p. 11). 

Comments

[Tim McGee]

The link from amazon says it is Katherine Howard, but if you look at the picture of the cover, you can Thomas written on it. Funny.

Thanks for bringing that book to my attention; I've been looking to find a small, accessible account of the liturgy.

[IndieFaith]

You quote,
"although spontaneous bursts of praise are a lovely thing in their place: it is just that the corporate worship of Hebrews and Christians was never, until the modern age, done in an off-the-cuff way."
I find that hard to mesh with the biblical text. Between the raw and chaotic holiness in the Pentateuch, David's shameful expressions of praise and Isaiah's paradoxical vision of worship in the Temple I would say that there is plenty of imagery that supports not only the tradition of liturgy but genre breaking expressions.
I am thinking the author is referring to post-biblical communities, but even here (without quick support to back me) up I would challenge that this is a modern phenomenon.

[nannykim]

I love , love , love these comments. It expresses exactly what I have been feeling. When I found a church that has the liturgy, I felt like I was really there for worship---we have been at this church for over a year and the blessings of worship have been so wonderful. Thank you for posting this!

[Cynthia R. Nielsen]

Dear Indiefaith,

Perhaps what Howard wants to communicate is that worship has always had some kind of structure and order such that chaos does not characterize our corporate worship of God. My point in bringing in the jazz illustration is to stress that structure and "improvisation" are not mutually exclusive, and this is what I take Howard to express as well.

Best wishes,
Cynthia

[IndieFaith]

I would agree that it is probably most often in the context of tradition (i.e. structure) that 'improvisation' happens. In that sense jazz is a great analogy and I see what you are saying.

[david clark]

"In jazz, contrary to the common mis-understandings, one does not simply create melodic lines ex nihilo when, e.g., improvising a solo. Rather, one pulls from a tradition of melodic phrases employed by the masters who came before—lines that have been proven over time and which still speak today, yet re-harmonized (hence, the goal is not mere repetition, but there is a clear continuity with the past that is unmistakable)."

There are reasons, and a whole history/tradition for doing everything we do in worship, even in the most spontaneous of the charismatic expressions. Can one still be a good jazz musician when you don't know what you are doing? When you don't know Duke Ellington or Miles Davis played and created? This was my experience as a high school trumpet player in the jazz band. I played the notes in front of me, and even the "improvised" solos were written out. It was actually pretty meaningless jazz. My experience in the evangelical church has been that it is meaningless jazz. Maybe we need the congregation to experience and engage with "Miles Davis."

[Cynthia R. Nielsen]

Hi David,

You bring up a great analogy, which I would expand in the following way.

One can be a good, even excellent jazz musician without knowing what one is doing if you define “know” as necessitating an understanding of the ins and outs of music theory. Many of the jazz greats had absolutely no formal knowledge of music theory and learned everything by ear. However, this understanding of know is pretty narrow. If one understands “know” more in terms of an intimate knowledge of a musician by getting to know the musician via music itself through hours of listening and picking out the lines by ear, then, of course, being and knowing become integrated and inseparable. If that is what you are suggesting—that the church today should get to know “Miles Davis” (i.e. saints, who by God’s grace, have blessed the Church and world)—then, yes, I agree. I don’t, however, find the evangelical church to be meaningless, as it was in large part by way of an evangelical church and evangelical Christians that God shaped me and drew me to himself.

Best wishes,
Cynthia

[Jeff Cain]

The history of liturgy, while interesting, does not by itself take in epistemological and ontological considerations. If we're thinking, along with the book's title, about embodied humans and "gravitation," certain fundamental issues need re-thinking and complication. The first would be the assumption that god has given us something, namely salvation, and that all subsequent thought is a response to this gift and must be ordered by it. The second concerns liturgy as an event. At its source, liturgy seems to be the recursive & endless performance and re-performance of salvation. This is especially so in fundamentalist evangelism, where the whole of theology stops with everyone being saved and re-saved every time there is a meeting of the faithful. These two concerns constitute what Deleuze would call an "image of thought," i.e. a mimetic representation of the response to the gift. The liturgy is also a way of asking god for even more gifts, of which the most important is god's physical presence. Transtubstantiation is the obvious example, and is itself a re-presentation and re-performance of the miracle of god incarnate, Jesus. Thus the question is not "what is liturgy?" as if there is some independent, free-standing, naturalized, massive liturgical object or force to which we are drawn or to which we "gravitate." The question is "how does liturgy work?"

[Cynthia R. Nielsen]

Hi Jeff,

My very brief essay is not meant to cover all relevant liturgical issues epistemological and ontological. Rather, my purpose is significantly more modest, viz., (1) to consider the ways in which signify-ing movement in the liturgy “speaks”, (2) to suggest that structure is not antithetical to freedom (hence, the jazz analogy), (3) to suggest that worship which does not make the sermon the centerpiece or the more or less sole means of grace allows for fuller participation of the congregants/parishioners (e.g., children, those with mental disabilities, etc.)—this by the way is not meant to downgrade the necessity of the word as an integral part of corporate worship. If you are looking for a more “philosophical” discussion of the Eucharist, see my recent posts on my blog, which focus on St. Thomas, Zwingli and Eucharistic presence (and absence): http://percaritatem.com/2007/12/31/part-ii-denys-turner-on-the-differences-between-st-thomas-and-zwingli-on-eucharistic-presence-and-absence/.

How would answer your question: how does liturgy work? -- a great question.

Best wishes,
Cynthia

[Jeff Cain]

Hi Cynthia--

I see now that my first couple of sentences could be read as implying that it was you who needed to re-think. My apologies--what I meant was that your essay forced some much-needed re-thinking and complication of the problem on my part! I've read the essay on your blog with great interest, especially in the way you frame absence/presence and the signifying spectrum (if that's the right word) of bodily presences/absences in the eucharist. I couldn't agree more with your conclusion that it seems to boil down to a "mystery that cannot be explained." It seems to me that the problem with the passage you quote from Turner is that he is constrained by the limits of structuralist semiotics. This is not to attack anyone, only to remark that frustration with the relative inflexibility of sign and signifier emerges in efforts to make semiotics do more than it possibly can do, i.e. simultaneously express partial absence and full presence (or the reverse).

My current thought is that liturgy might be susceptible of fruitful critique via the Deleuzean concept of "affect," which would prove more rewarding as an answer to the difficulties of liturgy and eucharist than does falling back on a paradoxical concatenation of sign / anti-sign or "mystery." Deleuzean affect, because it is not synchronic, exceeds the thresholds of traditional semiotics. Affects are becomings, as opposed to synchronic snapshots of meaning.

However, this would be a very long process. Here is a quick but I hope tantalizing stab at a first thought, leaning on the treatments of affect by Felicity Colman and Greg Seigworth, since they express it so much more pithily than can I: affect is locally produced but is trans-historical and trans-spatial. Affects involve bodily experience, and they offer an understanding of the effects or modifications of movement and time on individual bodies. Affects are not simply emotions or psychological states--they can become material (as in certain parts of the liturgy as it transpires). Affects are the harbingers of pure immanence, the way in which a localized body connects with ultimate abstraction, virtuality, even "soul." Affects, however, cannot be discerned where there is "an image of thought"--such as semiotics or the typically western representation of presence. And affect escapes binary categories like interior / exterior or absence / presence.

I would argue that liturgy works by affect rather than "meaning." A group of bodies gather locally and connect, thus creating and experiencing affects that involve them in pure immanence. But there is more to it, since affects occur as singularities or moments of intensity in the pure flow of space, time, etc. To be sure, there are separate kinds of affect in Deleuze and Guattari's books--here I've conflated some of their individual properties. And other Deleuzean concepts connect with applying affect to liturgy, most notably the "Body without Organs" and multiplicity.

Thanks again Cynthia for such a thought-provoking essay!

Best,

Jeff

[Cynthia R. Nielsen]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts via your studies of Deleuze and others. I haven’t read any of Deleuze’s work, so I am unable to engage you very deeply on this. I was, however, intrigued by what you said with regard to affect escaping binary categories—very interesting. If you happen to work up a brief article or essay on this topic as it relates to the liturgy, send it my way: crn at pobox.com.

Best wishes and thanks for furthering the conversation,

Cynthia

[Tim McGee]

Jeff,
On Deleuze and the liturgy: I too would enjoy reading anything you worked out on the topic. I am a bit skeptical though of the combination; given the centrality of the Eucharist in the liturgy, and the place of the Eucharist within Trinitarian theology, I'm not sure how one would avoid metaphysical confusion by placing that inside the contours of Deleuze's thought. Hart's book (Beauty of the Infinite) has made me cautious of looking towards Deleuze (and others) as offering a metaphysics hospitable to the Christian story. Thoughts?

[nannykim]

Interesting comments---whatever you believe about it --the Eucharist is a means of grace and God chooses to work in and through this to touch our hearts---do we really have to know all of the how? It is awesomely beautiful, and the glory of Christ and His work is powerful in our lives.

[david clark]

Cynthia,

"My experience in the evangelical church has been that it is meaningless jazz."

What I meant to express was that my own personal experience was meaningless, not that the evangelical church is meaningless. But even as I say this now, it is interesting how God was still intimately involved in my formation, even though I had shallow worship experiences and painful relationships. So maybe it ends up not being meaningless at all?

[Jeff Cain]

Thanks Cynthia, Nannykim, & Tim for the replies.

I am currently working on an essay that adapts Deleuzean concepts in order to visualize new facets of what is usually called the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. The CIT is admittedly an easier pitch to hit than are liturgies, since it is already academic. But one of the things that has driven the rise of Deleuze and Guattari is the astonishing flexibility of their work, and I've yet to see the issue or topic that does not take at least some benefit from a Deleuzean approach. That said, I do not think that "affect," the "Body without Organs," etc., tell or contain the whole story of the Eucharist or, indeed, of anything else. In the case of liturgies, what affect does is provide us a way to skirt the enlightenment / structuralist / semiotic versions of "meaning” in order to concentrate on knowledge as yet unthought. It is difficult to leave these more traditional concepts behind, because they have been drilled into us since pre-school. Nonetheless, they help to form the well-known edifice of the western metaphysics of presence, and this is what serves as an “image of thought,” a representation of all that is “meaningful.” However Deleuze, unlike some other thinkers of the late-20th and early 21st-century offers us, not nihilism, but access to something beyond the local: a plane of pure immanence. Affect, as I briefly and rather inadequately described it in my last post, is emerging as the main avenue to the celebration of pure immanence, i.e., life. I am not a professional theologian, but I daresay this celebration begins to approximate the basic ideas of liturgy?

For what it's worth, I've become comfortable with the idea of god as pure immanence, accessed by means of affect and perceived as one or another aspect of difference. I find it interesting that most Christianity works via a Trinitarian model. My no doubt blasphemous opinion is that the Trinity forms a paradigm that elides traditional taxonomic difference, because the incarnation of god leans toward a collapse of the binary opposition of God / human. As such, I find Jesus to be an amazingly intriguing and powerful figure, well worth study and celebration, if not (at least on my part) worship. I've just received my copy of Caputo's What Would Jesus Deconstruct, and I plan to read it today. I am looking forward eagerly to the upcoming "engagements" with the book. Perhaps the dialogue will address some of what we have been discussing.

Best,

Jeff

[Cynthia R. Nielsen]

Hi David,

Thanks for the clarification.

Hello Jeff,

As a Christian philosopher, I personally find the idea of a purely immanent god to be difficult to harmonize with orthodox Christianity (as set forth in the Creed and in Scripture), but I suppose I am not saying anything surprising by pointing that out: ). Also, after reading Jean-Luc Marion and Gadamer, I find myself more and more skeptical of a Heidegger or Heideggarian-influenced read of the history of metaphysics as a "metaphysics" of presence. With Gadamer, who had great respect for Heidegger, and who was in many ways quite influenced by Heidegger, I tend to think that Heidegger's critique involves a univocal understanding of metaphysics. E.g. I am not at all convinced that St. Thomas is guilty of onto-theology.

Thanks again for engaging this topic.

Cynthia

[Jeff Cain]

Hi Cynthia--

You're completely correct about univocity, especially the Heideggarian brand. Perhaps we find ourselves trying to invert one another's paradigms :-) But I do not think univocity and equivocity are really reciprocal. Univocity ala Deleuze has all its asymmetry intact.

I will leave it there, feeling very fortunate to have had such a patient and tolerant interlocutor as yourself. I think your last line is great! If St. Thomas had stopped to worry about post-structuralist bomb throwers accusing him of onto- theology not much Christianity would have happened.

We never did get around to Alfred North Whitehead, did we? Just a thought . . .

Gratefully,

Jeff