a summation of arguments past in part excerpted from a letter to JT, October 2022
Regarding the distinction between being a pastor and being a ritualist, my lucubration on the topic brought forth Psychotherapeutic Drama: rebranding ritual (January 2021). I believe that a great deal of the contemporary loss of sapience for “going to church” is the clerical confusion of the two distinct roles of pastor and ritualist. Conversation belongs to the pastoral role. The auditorium atmosphere excited by the westward position in the Eucharistic celebration invites conversation not prayer. Clergy and congregation talk to one another. The focus is on one another. This is to be expected. When one stands face to face with another one is inclined to look to the other. Where in all this is God? God may be in all places and in all times, but we are not disposed, not psychologically positioned, to “be” before God in all places and times. Thus we have need for an extraordinary space-time, a sacred space-time wherein the human is oriented both internally and externally to be overshadowed, subsumed, incorporated into the sacred. One may devoutly recite the confessions of sin and of faith standing face to face, but those confessions can depart from the pedestrian only when all face the same way, all kneel, all bow, before the one great symbol of our guilt and our redemption. The stance becomes “in Christ before God.” Here alone can all be, as it were, spiritually de-sign-ed, emptied of self-image, to enter into the profundities of being human, into the fallibilities of our existence and the possibilities of our nature. It needs be stressed, openness to the profundities at the base of reality does not simply happen in ordinary space-time. It requires a separation from the ordinary, its movements and rhythms. Spiritual exercise requires its own type of sensitivity, one studiedly expectant of the profundity within which we stand. One needs be made clam and focused to be aware of the in-spira-tion, the in-spirit-ation. One may recite prayers until the end of time. Unless one halts time and stands (or more appropriately, kneels) before Eternity, one remains both in the world and of the world, and the “world” cannot save man because the “world” here is the home of that comfortable and necessary component of our nature, the ego with its propensity to babble on about itself. Only the depths of us (the divine power dwelling within us) has the dynamic (the Spirit, the grace) to propel us forward, the illumination to reveal to us our faults and fallibilities, and for-ward-giving-ness to excite our realistic, our realizable, possibilities. One needs a rarified atmosphere—within and without–to feel, to discern, that depth within of God. God is the soul of us, not the ego. But God is not accessible to the ego. The Inner Sanctum is always behind the veil, always beyond the congregation. Only by falling into its other-worldliness, its extraordinariness, its aloneness, its silence can a congregation become a sacred assembly, a holy communion feeling the truth of its sin and its redemption, its apocalyptic (revelatory) power. It is the art of the ritualist, the administration of studied psychotherapy, that can affect this. That exercise is the re-member-ing of the assembled into a community through an enfolding into the mysterium of the sacred symbol. The pastor may give one on one counsel and comfort, advise and guidance, but such are preliminary to the spiritual exercise of the community as community. Clergy today do not provide either pastoral care or ritual therapy in adequate supply, but the understanding of the psychological essence and weight of ritual is most glaringly absent. It is my hope that my article on this topic gave some consideration to the issue.
I do note that the practice of reciting the offices (the prayers at morning, noon, evening, and night) “in Choir” (in seats set face to face) might argue the positioning invites, as in the westward position for the eucharist, conversation. The responsive nature of the recitation of psalms and sentences would seemingly support that. However, they that are accustomed to such practice will swiftly note that the focus is always upon the text before one, and the reflection to which it summons. One is not inclined to look at the person or persons opposite. Even in such places where “the Table prayers” (the prayers said before the altar) are the custom, the orator faces the cross, not them gathered. No one in the choir offices is carrying on a conversation or a dialogue with anyone other than the Spirit. The precentor or hebdomadary do not “preside” but form a part of “the choir.” They are not officers with whom one is given to converse. A polyphony of voices is the essence of this sacred recital, and that, in itself, underscores the polyphony of the spiritual, the multiple faces of the psyche, ever finding a new voice, a new harmonics, in which to speak, and so adds to the soul-focus and movement of this form of prayer.