Preamble
Does ritual need to be rebranded? No, and Yes. It does not require a new name, but it does require a new understanding by them in the sanctuary, chancel, and pew, and by them that wag their heads and run at the very thought of anything that might reek of church. Of these last, there are multitudes. Why there are multitudes is a question they inside the church need ask seriously, and answer seriously, remembering one normally will relate to that which is shown to be relevant. I have felt obliged to italicize above because the norm for humanity seems to be regressing. Access to education and information have not made the masses more intelligent or sapient. Many ingest without digesting. Many more simply peck at bits and pieces like birds and regurgitate whatsoever they have swallowed. Further, there is the regrettable ignorance of them charged to lead the ritual enactments of the church. I am certain most are of the best intentions and selfless about them. Good intentions do not constitute professionalism. If one is charged with the “cure of souls” one needs to be competent in that arena. Spiritual malpractice is not a spurious notion.
Terminology
There are two terms which require special annotation before they are encountered in this text: archetype and symbol. Both reference subliminal levels within the psyche. The archetypes, in a sense, constitute the internal grammar, while the symbols are its words.
The archetypes are architectural blueprints of the all-integrating “Self” which abides as the foundational power of the psyche. They are the formatting schemata for psychic integration built up throughout evolution by the species out of the experiences, expectations, and idealizations of the species. Their roots may well reside in life before the emergence of self-consciousness and humankind, and thus be intimately tied to the evolution of consciousness itself. As psychic architectural blueprints or platforms for organization, they are universals. However, the purpose of the archetypes is particular, to assist the individual in the journey toward wholeness (a universality) by standing as the nuclei about which may coalesce the individual’s unique experiences in healthful manner. The archetypes exist to fully activate and animate the individual as not merely a being-in-the-world, but as responsibly so, as being-for-the-world. Varied civilizations and their cults may give the great archetypes varied names and expressions but the formatting within those designations is the same. The Christian vision of the Christ or of Christ-hood is an archetype of the holistic man set out by man’s core integrating voice, the all-creative and integrating power, be that understood as the indwelling creative presence or grace.
The symbol is something more than a sign. A sign tells us something. A symbol opens us to something—a memory, an emotion, an insight. It moves us in some way, to some degree. A picture of a dog may signify the animal. A picture of a dog may also act as a symbol and lead us to something more than simply an awareness of the animal. It may open something about the emotional valuation or understanding of dog-ness. It may connect to notions of fidelity, gentleness, bravery, ferocity, fear, playfulness, curiosity, even love.
Etymologically, our word symbol comes from the ancient Greek wherein it first stood for a type of counterfoil travel ticket, a two-part instrument of which the first part provided for the transport of goods or persons, and the second acted as reference receipt of the transport. The word still denotes something capable of moving us someplace, some definite place, we now are not. By surrendering oneself to and entering the symbol one passes a threshold, enters a “new place”, a place where novelty and creativity can brew. In this sense, the symbol is always a fertile ground for an enhanced experience of life, the evolution of life, the maturation of life. The symbol opens to an inexhaustible surplus of meaning because it touches upon the unspeakable wells of power seminally resident within life.
Like the archetype, the symbol is experiential, but not knowable. Knowledge cannot enter a symbol without destroying it, without pinning it to a table, eviscerating it, dissecting it. It is by the purest trust resident at the base of psyche, “by faith alone”, that the eyes close to reason and surrender into the sublime. The symbol is not analyzed but allowed to impact and envelop the self, and it therein allows the self to be absorbed by it. It carries the sensations of unity, transcendence, and lost-ness that we often express as the aesthetic experience, but unlike the aesthetic, this psychic “moment” is something that resides and haunts, and thus, not so much enwraps as centres and empowers. It is an exuberance not of exhilaration but transformation.
The task of theology is to step away from the symbol, to under-stand it, to ex-plain it. This is a human reaction to the un-conceptualized, a part of our psychic physics—the need to take things apart, see their parts, restructure them. But this surgery can be an exercise toward vitality only in so far as it is transitory, only in so far as it is a momentary flexing of reason before that out of which reason arises. Thus, theology needs always bow to the faith it tries to explain, to that living, evolving relationship between God and his church, a relationship rehearsed in the symbol-laden rituals of church which reinforce the church and energize it for the embrace of the world.
Psychotherapeutic drama and our ritual nature
Psychotherapeutic drama involves using theatrical techniques and interactions to open the unconscious wells and promote channels for behavioural change. In terms of modern psychology, it is a rather new entity. In terms of the life of the species, it is ancient. We need look back beyond the Dionysian cultic enactments, the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Theater may there be said to take recognizable form as art, but its roots reach deeper, historically and psychologically. From earliest times we have record of humans gathered to tell dramatic tales, engage in dramatic song and dance. Such exercises fostered the times and ages of maturation (conception, birth, puberty, adulthood, marriage, death), and they nourished the psyche to healthily deal with them. In anthropology they fall under the category of rituals. Whatsoever the name, it is the application of dramatic techniques as the mode of “ministering” healing and health (θεραπευω, therapeuo) to soul (ψυχή, psyche). Drama begins with re-enacting the movements of the divine, the numinous and awesome forces, at once fascinating and terrifying, that surround us, precede us, penetrate us, empower us.
Is man social because he is propelled by the dramatic in and of the world of his experience and its internalization in subliminal understandings that give rise to a need to be-with-other, to be community, and to thus communicate, to speak to others? Is man theatrical and ritualistic because he is an evolved social animal? Those questions may be debated. It cannot be debated that humanity is given to the theatrical, dramatic, symbolic, minimally at least aware of the subliminal, and to some degree inclined to be communicative.
The theatrical, the dramatic, captures us because it addresses forces within and seeks to stimulate an internal dialogue with them. We continue to visit the early Greek dramatists because so often in their works we are encountered by the architype of primal authority, the force within/without that demands we hear, acknowledge, obey, follow. In them we rehearse the primal demand to be responsible in this world, as this world, for this world. Thus, for Freud the Oedipus/Electra Complex, the need to deal with primal authority, was the first test of integration into personhood and world.
Despite the trove of worthy plays, novels, and poems we continuously pour out, the masses seem shrived of the depths such works are wont to summon. We live in the age of the new penny dreadful, and for them that cannot arise to that level of literacy, the world of reality television and the glut of computerized waste and wantonness. In this ersatz world the depth rituals, the rituals that pry open the depths of the psyche, are not items fondly embraced or looked upon. The masses think of ritual as something done in a church or other place of worship. We, however, are immersed in rituals. We, as self-conscious and social animals, as beings psychically propelled into community, could not operate without rituals. We have formulae for the table. Dishes, glasses, and cutlery have assigned places. Courses follow a prescribed order. Indeed, we do not merely eat, we dine, at least some of us some of the time. We have likewise accepted formats for writing or texting one to another. We love messages of congratulations for the great occasions in our lives, best wishes for birthdays, promotions, farewells, retirements. We are uplifted with notes of condolence and sympathy. We treat others to a coffee, a dinner, a trip to the cinema to convey the value given a connective bond. We send flowers, chocolates, gifts to signal affection. We “dress-up” for special occasions to underscore their importance. We open doors, pull out chairs, shake hands, salute—all to signal something not easily or succinctly verbalized. We are buoyed in subliminal community-making and community-confirming messaging. While subliminal, it is none the less the socially sanctioned language of socialization and personalization. We do not give it conscious thought. We flourish, sometimes wither, by its effects. We are in goodly part made by its effects. Even that latte with one’s name inscribed upon the cup, the calling out of one’s name in the anonymity of the café are rituals of affirmation: in the nameless mass, the nameless swirl of life, one has a name, a value; and for that ritual affidation of self we are prepared to pay a rather dear price for a beverage of rather modest cost. Ritual is not dead and gone in modern life. The profound most rituals are, however, in peril, ignored, and cozened by several historical forces.
Ritual and religion
It is of note that the ancient Greek term for therapy referred not only to the administration of healing but also to the rendering of divine service. Health and holiness were not as divorced as they have come to be in the modern West. It is not surprizing then that religion was once the epicentre for administering the most potent psychic therapies for personalization and socialization. The community gathered to be imbued in the depths of its reality and rehearsed in the powers latent within that reality. The archetypes of psychic integration, the symbols of religious language, the rites of introspection, faith and hope, the semantics of our immersion one into another and this world—all these were plied within the extraordinary time and space provided within the compass and breadth of religious action. Religion was the ground wherein stood the species to understand its depths, uncover its unconscious wells, and provide itself the space, and fortitude, and nourishment to grow, mature, open outward as society, community, world, to become truly, comprehensively and embracingly “earthlings”, precisely that which the language of Christianity terms a “communion of saints (whole persons)”.
Confessedly, an over wrought, self-promoting sacerdotalism has contributed to the ignorance of depth ritual, and the loss of an appreciation of its inherent and essential value. There came to be the mentality that the person appointed to minister the healing words and actions needed to do no more than to say the words and perform the action; God would supply the rest. The effect of such attitude all but crushed ritual in the early reformation churches. The literalism and fundamentalism born out of that reaction, that protestation, have further reduced ritual in action and word to impotency and practical incomprehensibility. The symbolic, the subliminal, the semiotic cannot be made literal. That is the fundamental truth of all things “religious”. The sacred—be it narrative, dogma, action, architecture or any other art form converted, elevated, consecrated into use to manifest the wells of creativity resident in world and in self (“grace”)—is not an item of ordinary time and space, and cannot be treated as such without destroying its power, its potentiality, its creativity, its giftedness for well-being (“salvation”), for healing (“fore-giveness”, “redemption”). [For a more detailed consideration of the symbol, Cf: The Serpent and the Symbol, (January 2106).]
Literalism is not the only ill effect of ministerial conceit and anopia. Leadership of any type is prone to self-aggrandizement and bureaucratic isolation. Once organizational power becomes vested in a person or group of persons, there is a tendency to control or eliminate any competition. The rise of “holy orders”, of specialized ministry, caused a gradual demotion of the common folk, the laity, and of the so-called lesser ministries—the “minor orders” of acolytes, lectors, catechists, porters (more recently named sidespersons, ushers), choristers, musicians, dancers, as well as the concrete artisans, the architects, painters, weavers, metal-smiths and sundry other creators of sacred iconic things and spaces the psychotherapy of ritual churns into its practice. This diminishing of the “minor ministries” may in some degree be the cause of the rise of the self-lionizing beadle, the hierophantic manqué, the sundry other lost personalities who need a role by which to define themselves. Such people provide a buffer for the sacerdotal person. Any critique of them is easily dismissed on pastoral and caring grounds for the “good work” they do, or simply the pastoral need to have some “body” do something. It is a woeful situation.
Such dysfunctionality has contributed—in part—to our present apathy, our inappetence for the depths of the subliminal within us. Spiritually, the masses, disorientated and disenfranchised by the very persons charged with their health, have turned to the spiritual and intellectual equivalent of subsisting on scraps. Any elevation of emotion is accepted as a substantial transcendence. A sensational rush from a pill or pop video is all that is required to transcend, to “arise”, to con-form (“worship”) to an “on high”. For the more astute, the aesthetic experience is considered a sufficiently personalizing transcendence despite its lack of communicity. Spiritual malnourishment has reached alarming proportions. Unlike our ancient antecessors we no longer rehearse the archetypes of our psychic integrating power, the symbols of personalization and community-making, the semiotics of our uninicity with the rest of nature. Therefore, those great and deep powers of meaningfulness which we as a species are summoned to activate as the nuclei of growth toward health and wholeness, those powers ultimately of faith and hope in self, in other, in world, are atrophied, suffocated under the weight given to a deluded sense of individuality and its propensity toward superficiality and instant gratification. In this is aroused within not health, not wholeness, but anxiety, self-deception, and both spiritual laxity and intellectual shallowness. The accentuation of this fallacious individuality is itself a laxity, both psychologically and morally. It is an artificial “oneness”. Defrauded in its quest for a solitary oneness, a solitary wholeness, the psyche of the rigorously confessed “individual” cares not to be challenged by those rituals that posit the terrestrial, cosmic, other-oriented nature of our life. It is a dis-ease that erodes the very grounds of rectification, obliterates ideas of the need for change (“repentance”) and therein scuttles the possibilities for good health (“salvation”).
The Divine peculiarity in Christian symbol language
There is no need to fear a symbolic language. Mathematics is a completely symbolic language. The more precise any science, the more symbolic is its language. All religious language is symbolic, not because religion is a science, but because it addresses an organized field of knowledge, although one which is empirically amorphous. This field is the subliminal world below the conscious world of daily life whose items are sensed, apprehended, or felt to be distinct from the everyday flow of experiences and the world-engaging ego they address and seek to organize. William James first located it outside the stream of (self)-consciousness as it references the powers that animate, question, propel the everyday ego into personhood and world. These powers seem to have a life of their own, and in a sense, they do. They are the psychic powers behind ego, id, superego, and the everyday. They have many names, but in Christian terminology they may be summarily rendered: God, soul, grace, or being translated into something more attuned to traditional philosophy: potential, the existential actualization, and the dynamic that binds them together, or something hopefully more comprehensible to the twenty-first century secular Western mind: pure creativity, incarnate creativity, and creative dynamic.
Let us be clear and honest. The term God and its adjuncts of soul and grace are not de-finable terms. We cannot put a “finite” limit upon them or the understanding of them. Thus, everyone seemingly has his own notions about them. Because few can agree about the “definition” of them and the items that logically might flow from such intellectual confinement, religions, their bureaucrats, and their adherents have fought, and sadly, continue to fight, wars over them. They cannot be defined because they are holophrastic terms. They reference items that do not have “a” meaning, but which both indicate and radiate meaningfulness. They reference the light and the life(force) in which life is seen and lived, evaluated and invigorated. We speak of them as illuminating, enlightening, elucidating, as lustral, as non-material brilliancies. We speak of them as a headwater, a font, a well of meaningfulness. The very use of water and light metaphors tells us of their amorphous, hyaline nature, their fundamental meaningfulness in which life, its truth, goodness and beauty, are buoyed and made visible. The exercise which follows aims to set out terminological indicatives, to plot out the functionality of these foundational all-meaning (meaning-ful) notions, these categories of life-defining organization.
The term God indicates pure creativity. It references a power transcendent of all thought and definition. For that reason theology speaks of God in terms of analogy, and mysticism in terms of the poetics of the heart. In some manner then, God can only be spoken of as experienced, as a transcending creative power detected in self or in world. Internally this pure creative force is the apprehended aspect of self that stirs the individual forward into maturity and care for the world about oneself. Externally, it may be encountered as an aspect of nature or in a work of art, and the experience is then spoken of as the aesthetically transcendental. The experience may be had also in the encountering of another, a person whose life is revelatory of creativity in its fearlessness, openness to novelty, capacity for opening new venues and pathways (“fore-giveness”). The prime exemplar of such personhood is for Christianity its revelatory initiator and apex, Jesus as God’s Christ, that is, as the divine plenipotentiary re-present-ative. Therefore, for Christians Jesus as the Christ is the incarnate-God, God-for-us, the true image of the unimaginable Creator. His appearance among us is to initiate the realization of the sovereignty of God, the “kingdom” of creative life ever caringly open to the new, or in practical terms, to make each and all partakers of his divine re-present-ative role to the end that this life be truly happy (“blessed”) for each and all, that “as it is in heaven” so shall it be on earth.
In both the notion of pure creativity and in the experience of it within self and world, there is also the apprehension of its inherent dynamic. Nothing stops it, can stop it. It is a zest in the fabric of being, of life. Internally, that dynamic, experienced as distinct from the psychic self, distinct from the normal flow of consciousness, is commonly called grace, or the spirit of God dwelling within, divine illumination, etc. The sense of purposefulness it arouses, the sense of hope it suffuses into the psyche, inspires both confidence in the course of the world, and a feeling of a universal purposefulness, an order to reality, an endpoint, a teleology, a forward pull in life, something Aristotle would classify as a “final causality”. That dynamic of creativity ever persisting and yet detectable within and without is in Christianity encoded in the notion of the Holy Spirit.
This Holy Spirit completes, fulfills, activates, propels the inexplicable power of creativity and constantly transforms it in its experientiality. Thus, Christianity speaks of the Divine, the Whole, The Holy One, as triune in nature, a trinity, a social commune known only in its ever-actualizing creativity and its inherent dynamic that acts as the bonding agent of both the creative essence and its the existential aspects. It speaks of three loci of activity understood to be one creative power variably viewed, one power whose functions are variably “appropriated” or symbolically assigned according to the creative action, one being who by being inwardly discerned as the power of self-actualization, integration, and personalization is analogically spoken of and to as a person, a locus and a focus of world-meaningfulness and hominization. On this one doctrine of the triune nature of the divine hangs all Christian understanding and dogma. It is the Christian divine peculiarity—an internally triune One. This notion of the divine resolves the philosophical issue of the divine as either transcending all, or immanent in all, or merely the dynamic of all. It is, however, more than an intellectual tour de force; it is an elemental psychic archetype come to light, or in religious terminology: the revelation of “glory” (substantiality) come into its “hour” or the “fulness of time”.
The sacred icons of God, soul and grace are not default positions to be taken as literally substantive entities, and—most assuredly—they cannot be preached as if they are. They are not empiric items of time-space categorization. They are powers that give forth time-space, its comprehensibility, its palpability, its empiric reality. They are sacred icons of immeasurable archetypal power in need of being expressed and celebrated by realistic ritual action. Such action is always within the confines of a created, crafted, art-ificed time-space. Being archetypal and symbolic they are above the everyday and common to which they give direction and meaning and thus, there is in their presentation and celebration no room for the everyday and common. They are ritualized, dramatized, precisely because they deal with the essence of life, the meaningfulness teeming within life out of which life draws its meaning, its existential reality, its actuality. It is, thus, a fearsome thing to be charged with that revelation, that birthing. The world around us exhibits how massively churches have failed to reveal the truth of God, the creativity at our root, and the mechanisms of creative growth and maturation—analytical reflection, confessional self-honesty, self-understanding, self-trust and love, comprehensive and worldly hope.
To them that might object that the above series of indicatives involve anthropomorphism, the human cannot speak of the unspeakable within or without, the undefinable power that speaks to define all things, the “transcendental ego”, or the Jungian “Self”, except as person or personal. Man does not speak to himself, does not understand himself except as that which he is ever called forward to be—a person. The eagle, the falcon, the lion or some other potent animal may have once been the icon of the divine, but even within those iconic masks, the beast was rational, volitional, and in some sense moral, even if that principle of action was itself amoral or trans-moral. Humanity’s divinities are always humanoid in nature if only because we know no other nature.
To them that object the above exercise at indicatives denigrates traditional theology and the faith of the church, that is decidedly not the intention. Neither is it, assuredly, the result. This exercise is no more than looking to that modern soul-science, psych-ology, that somehow escaped the church, for that which Augustine termed fides quaerens intelletum [faith seeking understanding]. Nor is there any desire to replace the inherited terms of the sacred symbol language. The task undertaken is to provide a translation of them for the uninitiated, and perhaps a ground for reflection for the initiated who may have lost a sapience for their depth meaning. It must be acknowledged the terms Christianity has inherited are Hebraisms translated into the notions of ancient Greek philosophy, particularly the terminology of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus. That translation of a Hebrew visionary vocabulary into metaphysical and epistemological terms was not an easy feat. It is workable only to the extent it is understood to itself be a translation of an oriental vision into a Western logic. We do not luxuriate in an age where either such ancient vision or philosophy have force. Christianity, if it is to be relevant, if it is to be heard, must find a new voice. A language whose words are not understood is not a functional language. For both catechetics and mystagogy, for both lectern and pulpit, a new voice is needed. When the Apostle Peter first spoke it was to a gathering of varied Semitic peoples. Peter’s Galilean accentuated Aramaic may have been understandable, but the point of the tale is that the church’s first outreach was done such that each who heard the word heard it “in his own tongue”. If the divine creative force behind Peter’s initial success in comprehensibility was active then, cannot it be allowed to act again? Can it not be freed of bureaucratic isolationism, untethered from lexiconic consecration? Where has gone the notion that it is a good thing to “sing unto the Lord a new song” if no new words, no new terms, no new insights are allowed? Must the language of religion, the explanation of its sacred vocabulary, the elucidation of its notions be forever stultified, fossilized, lapidified? Must we ever be confined to a singular translation? Where is that time Jesus foretold when true worship will be in spirit and truth? The church’s preaching must start translating its treasured codes into the something comprehensible to a new world, a world increasingly disinterested and dismissive of “church” muchly because of its very incomprehensibility, pastoral recalcitrance, and ignorance regarding the application of the archetypal and symbolic as psychic curatives. The sacred terms of ritual and dogma will be irrelevant to all but future cultural anthropologists if there comes to be none to hear them or understand them. Simply because the chosen few understand them does not create a world saturated (“baptized”) into the message of the gospel. Is the church about a pseudo-monasticism or about a mission?
As the counsellor or analyst must create a safe space, a “hallowed” space and time for the objective viewing of the depths of self, the acknowledgement of self (“confession”), so too the ritualist must do for the community. As with analysis, the drama of ritual has its distinctive mechanisms and analytic language. These are none other than the great human psychic archetypes and their religiously coded renderings in the iconic symbols of words and actions, times and spaces. The times and spaces given over to the words and actions cannot be undervalued. They constitute the physical atmosphere within which therapy is applied. The sacred experience is always an enclosed experience, an extraordinary experience, and thus there is always need of a sacred grove, an adytum, temple, sanctuary, holy of holies, a safe, a special, place for the revelation of the unspeakable, undefinable, unconfinable. Discounting the sacredness of the space set aside for therapy voids its usefulness, “desecrates” it, just as naming, enunciating, the sacred outside the sacred time and space is a literally a sacrilege, a breaking of faith, of a confidence, of a thing reserved, a taking of “the Lord’s name in vain”.
Last, and the reason for all the above, we cannot be naïve about the unexamined life. It is a sub-human life. Self-consciousness and conscience (integrated knowing) exist to summon self reflection, and self reflection is simply Narcissism if it moves not to the consideration of the reasons for one’s thoughts, hopes, desires, fears, actions, and the potential below, above, and within them for integral personal and personalizing growth. Again, such potential within for the actualization of environmental integration is in the language of Christianity called “grace”, and “holiness”. There is no “holy” outside of community, outside of the singular world of confessed divine creativity, love, preservation, redemption. Thus also, God is referenced, not only as the singular whole, the “all holy”, but as communal in nature, as essentially social in orientation, and therefore, as giving of self–into creation and its perfection. It is an iconic referent. It is an analogical referent. Man arises to the fulness of humanity only in giving self outward—to the potentiality of self, to the ever renewing and emergent self, to the other of immediate encounter, to the other that is the singular world of every encounter. Holiness is always an embracive, selfless, prudent and tempered carelessness, an honest and concerned presence for the other, the world, for reality. It is realistic love. That is the psychic and moral essence of the Christian message encoded in the doctrine of a divine commune. That divine com-unity reads in the language of a patriarchal culture: father, son and holy (whole-making) spirit, or in the more modern terms: parent, child and bond of love, or according to the psychological analysis of Augustine: mens, notitia, amor [mind, self-knowledge, self-love, or alternately as self-knowing, understanding, and will], or as under a Jungian umbra: the primal thrust for integration (“Self”), the ever-evolving existential form (self), and the conjoining bond of positivity between them (self-love). [Cf: Occidental Ides, Part 20: Transcending the Kantian Synthesis?, endnote ii (March 2015).]
Excursus: Augustine looked to the rational mind of man as the highest manifest of the creative thrust. For Augustine it is here that man is “in the likeness” of God. By analogy, therefore, he presents the internal dynamic of the divine One as perfect mind—in perfect self-understanding—bonded together in the perfect love of the perfect and perfectly understood self. It is an analogy of the potentiality of man carried to superlative degree. The fully integrated rational being is the analog of God. As fully integrated the divine may be spoken of as the three aspects of rationality (knowledge, understanding, will) in constant union. Each aspect is seen as distinct, perfect, and therefore, personal and in personal, complete, and endless community one with another (perichoresis), “three yet one.”
This is not an anthropomorphism. It is merely an anthropomorphic analogy, a way of talking about something by reference to something else. Augustine was neither naïve nor philosophically unsophisticated. He did not envision three “people” sitting upon one celestial throne. He was cognizant that he was speaking in symbols to elucidate the eternal and internal dynamic of reality. He, like any theologian worthy of the name, knew “God” was beyond any analogy, positive or negative. The symbols he employed were merely gateways into understanding the indescribable power that precedes us, penetrates us, and pulls us forward. He knew the understanding he attempted to stimulate needed ever to understand its own inability to capture this profundity. Here understanding needed something beyond the everyday world-sorting powers of reason and the flow of the everyday world-dealing ego. It needed an “illumination”, “revelation”, “grace” that it might make that leap of will to rise above reason’s limits and trust in the pure creativity at our roots. Understanding needed to know it had a boundary, and that man needed to trust in his inner thrust, a thrust that was not simply personal but cosmic. Understanding’s boundary was an inner cosmic voice, faith.
No anthropomorphic analogy can be taken as something concrete. Here is where fall the objections of Xenophanes, Feuerbach, and their rather emotional twentieth century epigonic disciples. They contend God is merely a projection of man raised to the superlative. Their error resides in the word “merely”. They fail to see or appreciate that psyche, whether it be informed by Christian or any other symbol language, yearns to understand itself, its creativity, and the creativity out of which its world emerges. They batter about vain questions. Is it materiality that gives rise to psyche (immateriality)? Is psyche simply an epiphenomenon of materiality, a degree of material complexity? Is psyche pre-eminent epistemologically because it gives order to the material world, and if so, is the epistemological fallaciously elevated to the metaphysical? Is life biogenic or psychogenic? Does psyche make matter, or does matter make psyche? Centuries of Western philosophy are consumed in those questions. Unless we manage to transcend time, there is no definitive answer available to us. It is the chicken and egg question on a grander scale.
Whitehead proposed a solution–in a temporal eternality creator and the created are in a constant process of making one another, affecting one another, perfecting one another. This is not new, for Hebraic religious vision captured this notion millennia before, albeit less philosophically. In the Hebrew vision there is no division of reality into body and soul, material and non-material. The Creator and creation are in a constant state of being together, affecting one another in grace and prayer. In the Christian interpretation, this is world seen as salvation history, as creative kenosis and within that incarnation. From the chaos and void over which the Spirit of God hovered before creation began to the enfolding of God and creation at the end of time, God and world are in the Spirited, living, whole-making dialogue of the Creative and Incarnate Word.
Philosophy and its logic need god as a prime cause, an unmoved and first mover, a formal cause, a final cause. But this is the mathematical mind within logic. It is about equations, syllogisms, and packaging everything on one side or the other of an equals mark. It is the mind-set that gives rise to deficient notions. It is the mind-set that gives us Deism. Therein god is merely the Manufacturer of a world that runs like a perpetual motion machine wherein creativity, novelty, variation, chance, even moments of chaos cannot be, because they break the rules mechanistic reason has made. It is a world-vision contrary to the heart of Newton, Darwin, and Heisenberg, and yet it claims to be founded upon their analyses. This world-vision forgets that reason is an organizing and practical mechanism for navigating daily life, not revealing the meaningfulness of life or our highest facility of living well one with another. If all is but determined and prescribed, we ought to scuttle all notions of the quanta that make the cosmos, the variance that makes the biosphere, the love and hate that make this sometime joyous, sometime heinous, reality that is our history.
What at heart says Augustine and every other “light in their several generations”? Creativity has been set free. It is free. That is creation. What names, what symbols, does one apply to that dynamic? How shall it be described keeping in mind no word can contain it as it, in-itself, contains all? Augustine found, in the symbols of his faith, words. They but reference those archetypes of self that address the need of primal authority (order) inspiring the integrity of self, and ultimately summoning to find that integrity in the other, in that giving away of self: love. All else is finding the cultic tradition of symbols to open that insight, that illumination within self, and rehearse it, reinforce it. And it must be emphasized, those symbols are more real than words. Reason makes words as tools to navigate the world with others. Psyche churns out symbols to open life to its depths, its roots, its agility for order, and finding meaning and purpose. The symbol denotes the real; words merely point to transient items upon the surface of reality whose depths defy reason.
Ritual and the Christian compass
There is confusion among clergy and laity alike. They muddle together the ideas of being pastoral and being a ritualist, and in that notional ataxia both roles are functionally inspissated. The pastor is called to guide, to counsel, to deal with the individual as individual. The ritualist is called to serve the community as community, to reveal the common creative thrust of being, the depth forces of creativity, of psyche/soul, of ultimate psyche/soul both within and without out of which all unfolds in understanding, comprehension, and therein existential actuality. The work of the ritualist begins where that of the pastor ends. The great rituals presuppose a life of self-reflection and prayer. They are the arena wherein communal maturation evolves out of the spiritual grounding fostered in the individual. Ritual is, therefore, subsequent to the pastoral addressing of the forces of ego/id/superego, individual analysis, and confession. In this sense, depth ritual is akin to mystagogy that builds upon a solid basis in catechetics. Ritual builds upon the solid basis of prayerful self-understanding. This is the very reason the catechumens in the ancient church were ushered out of the church when the sacred-most rituals were applied. They were not sufficiently self-sufficient in their understanding of self as Christian.
Christian ritual is about the holy, the whole, and so it is of its very essence communal, community revealing, community building, community empowering. Thus, the ritual of the Eucharist or Holy Communion is both the primary action of the church and the base of all its ritual enactments. To facilitate the emergence of a holistic world community, a living “holy communion”, a “communion of saints”, the ritualist needs to create a locus of action, a “theatre”, a stage of encounter. This must be the locus of an extraordinary time and space away from the everyday world, its language, its dress, its sounds, its actions. It is the world of symbols, of sacred time and space. It constitutes an embryonic environment, a type of womb wherein the truth of life can safely gestate. It must be safe from defilement and contamination from the outside, the everyday world. To breach that sacred confinement would be a sin against both “heaven and earth”, that is, the fulness of meaningfulness and the medium of its receptivity.
If the cleric, the minister, the church are not in their actions being true to the theatrical, dramatic, and symbolic aspects of humanity, not merely acknowledging them but working to attune them ever more soundly, to perfect them, then all that is done is a trivializing of potential, and a dereliction of duty. Integration of psyche does not happen if a few pages of script are well read or acted. It cannot, therefore, be said here is the Body of Christ unless it be manifest to all engaged in the ritual that the Body is the reality-animating power into whose identity all are summoned, or as said Augustine to the communicant: Body of Christ behold thy self. The idea of the Body is the archetypical reality around which all individual experiences and realities are called to cohere as the community of divine re-presentative power. It is the prime symbol of the unboundedly creative community, the community empowered with undying (“risen”) purpose. It is, therefore, at best, an academic distraction to get lost in arguments that attempt to define the consecrated bread and wine in terms of Aristotelean metaphysics. The “real presence” of the Christ in the eucharistic ritual of the church is not about philosophy or its terminology regarding nature, substance, accidents, co-substantiality. Before the mystery of the Body such considerations are a silliness, or as Aquinas at the end of his career confessed—straw. The Christ risen into God is present only in the actualization of the Body for the world and its well-being. Indeed, it is exactly such presence that defines the Christ, and Christ-hood. Christ-hood is always creative action in the world for the world. How that impacts the existence of bread and wine set apart in sacred ritual is, as Aquinas notes, where reason fails, and faith appears.
In like manner, it cannot be said the Christ died for our sins and leave it there as an incomprehensible factoid of history. Jesus died; that is the historical fact. That he was the Christ of God and that his death constituted the propitiation of sin are items of faith. They are items of a symbol statement about a spiritual insight. God is therein encountered as the divine giving away of self—as creation, as kenosis (self-emptying) into life even to the point of death on a cross, and as the spirit of indefectible life (“eternal life”) for the well-being of all (“redemption”, “salvation”). That which is illuminated in this self-sacrificial notion of God is the human soul and its capacity for both sin and salvation. If it be true revelation and illumination, a response is mandated. “Christ died for our sins” becomes then not a declarative in the past tense, but the proclamation of the Christian understanding of the essential sociality of our humanity. The Christian vocation is, therefore, to embrace—with gratitude for the grace to so do–not merely one’s own sins and offences against self and other and world, the darkness within, the capacity of all such within, but the shared and co-owned dysfunctionality of the species throughout its history and the destructive and carbonous effects it has fused into history, world, reality. Only in acknowledging sin, the destructive isolationist negativity, the anti-social, anti-world individualism, the mad egoism resident in each and all that its healing can begin. As partakers in Christ-hood, as Christians, like the Christ, the full compass of moral ill needs to be allowed (suffered) to “pass”, to die, in the trust this death will not be destruction but liberation.
There may be many sins in this world, but there is only one sinfulness, and it is ours. Our singular sinfulness is our history. Time begins with the sin of man. History begins in the sin of man. This we need face with understanding, comprehend it, and turn it (re-pent it and con-vert it) into positivity for life, which of its nature is always a “newness” of life, a “resurrection”, a pulse of life hidden within God, the unimaginable source of life. As something hidden, for temporal man it is always an ideal, a dynamic of promise that opens the way to transformation. In this the church, the Body in its temporality, and the world itself, stand on the boundary between cross and resurrection, sin and holiness, mortality and eternality, history and a “new” heaven and earth. The boundary is erased in the Christ, but Christ-hood for us is a continuing venture of life. Here is the ambivalence of Luther’s “at once sinner and saved”. This boundary-line position is, therefore, one of decision: surrender to the depth of “Self” in sure faith in the curative capacity of creativity, and in that into hope and realistic love, or remain forever nailed to cross, to sin, and to mortality, to the past.
The pathological reality of social negativity, of sin, means healing will involve patently painful honesty about the woundedness in the soul of each and the soul of the world. It will reveal the terrifying and horrid depths out of which we as a species have concocted our notions of hell. Hell arises out of a world misaligned, a world whose pulse is contrary to the inclusivity of the creative thrust. It is the manifest of the frustration resident in the desire to ignore the truth, the absolutely social nature of self, other and world to momentarily satiate some solitary basal pleasure. It is only in acknowledging hell as ours that there dawns the potential to, like the crucified Christ, “arise” from it, above it. The “resurrection” moment is always a “dawn” moment, always the beginning of the new, the renewal. Yet, before any curative action can be discerned and applied, the woundedness must be seen, understood, embraced, and suffered.
Excursus: The resurrection moment is for the conscious mind always a dawn moment, a coming to light moment. As the women who went to the tomb discovered, it has occurred before our consciousness of it arrives there. In this it is a graced moment. It is a moment of those powers outside the flow of everyday awareness “going before us”, preparing for us the scope of the new. It is soul (psyche) filled with curative creativity anticipating its own integrative action. Psyche’s roots reach deeper than humanity and its rational mind. Thus, psyche responds to the world, and moves man before man is conscious, self-conscious, of that momentum and begins to apply reason to concretize things experienced in time and space. Psyche fractures the concrete to make the future open–to variance, to creativity, to novelty, for the endurance of, not facts, but life.
The brain, we know, begins to prepare for action before we are conscious of it, self-conscious of it, because psyche is older than the brain that moves, the consciousness that captures the move. It does not mean we are not free, but deeper than the consciousness of self. Thus, they that are long bonded in love begin to be alike, of one heart and soul. Thus, also those great saints of Christendom that have surrendered self and its desires can authentically say, albeit with some surprise, it is not I but Christ within. They “know” that which others believe. They know the resurrection moment.
We need keep in mind that Christian ritual deals not with God. It places man before God in service, divine service. Christian ritual deals with the Christ, his purpose and his power, the exposure of the depth of sin and the revelation of salvation. Divine service is, thus, always informed of the repentance of sin and thanksgiving for salvation.
In the great myths it is invariably a disruption in the primordial world that begins human history. There occurs an act of defiance. Be it the rebellion of the Titans or the subversive act in Eden, the falling apart of the organic order is the originating “sin”. In the Judeo-Christian mythology, history begins in a sin. The golden age is ended, and humanity’s time begins. Humanity emerges out of the womb of the safe and whole, the world of the Holy. Humanity dis-covers itself opposite the Holy. That discovery is disjunctive of all reality. The child of God has been born. Expelled from the primal shelter, it must struggle and find a new and enduring shelter—love.
We find in all the foundational myths the psyche projects back its emergence, its catastrophic expulsion from the innocency of the instinctual and not-knowing. The unity of being has been torn apart. The organic whole, the creator and creature, the mother and child, are no longer one. “Me” appears as “not you”. In pre-time and pre-space, the “before” time and history, the iconic earthlings knew each other not simply as “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh” but in a total unity with God and world, in a virginal womb of a paradise. Once the internal harmonics of that unity are questioned, once the word “like” is asked in that fated enquiry, differentiations within the harmonics become distinctions. “Me” and “not-me” appear. It is only a “me” who needs time and history, a grid on which to graph one’s own position within the flow of experience. Distinction creates opposition. “My” satisfaction replaces the organic harmony, and reality must fall to, must be made in the likeness of “my” desires. To this end, “not-me” can be handled, used as a tool. Creativity becomes manipulation. Pride and greed gestate. Humanity is born at a price—peace both within and without. Struggle begins. Anxiety begins. Morality begins. My pleasure and my pain become good and evil. The world that was paradise vanishes, and the curtain rises on the history of sin.
This dramatic action is, however, set within a greater play. The curtain also rises on the revelation of love, the ability to rise above pleasure and pain, good and evil, and give of self creatively for other. It is God who will be both Revelation and Love. Thus, in the rupture of the whole begins not only the history of man, the history of sin, but the history of love, the history of salvation.
There is a more profound mystery within this symbol-laden drama. While sin is our temporality, our history, it arises out of creation, out of the temporality created by the Creative Word. Thus, in the potent symbols of faith, it is only resolved in the finality of the Creative Word “risen” back into God and surrendering all to God at the ultimate moment of decision. It is only in the temporal and historical death of the Christ, and the acceptance of that death by God in the resurrection and by man in trust, in faith, that sin is absolved. In the death of the Christ human history is ended because it is a moment naked, without question, and without a “me” for “my spirit” is itself handed back. Into that death, at once of God-in-his-Christ, time, history, and sin, each and all, being free, are called to die—in him, with him and into him. It is from this death, at once singular and universal, that there is initiated the “new heaven and earth”. It reads more as a pleroma, God being all in all. Looking to Augustine we may translate that as an analogy for human integrity: by graciousness, self-awareness is converted into self-creating, and in that not simply a potentiality but action, not simply hope but that primal shelter re-discovered and transcended, love—an “existence” fully integrated in self and world, an “all in all”.
The psyche: aspects and symbols
To appreciate the depths of the ritual re-enactments of sin and salvation we need look to the structure of the psyche for whose cure the sacred actions take place.
The id, the base drive for being and satisfaction is an aspect of psyche older than the species. While sin begins time and history, hell precedes both. It is there because the id, that blind burning for satiation and life, reveals hell as its natural consequence. Hell burns because desire burns, and id is raw desire, anti-social, and therein doomed to frustration.
The id reveals itself also in the snake symbol. In Genesis, the snake is made the tempter of humanity, and the cause of its fall into history and time. Scripture presumes the snake is the ruler of hell, the world of the unrepentant id. It is of note that the base and ancient most part of the brain is named the reptilian brain. It is concerned with basic needs—food, reproduction, the awareness of when to flee or fight. It sits at the top of the spinal cord. If one separates the rest of the human brain from this structure, one looks upon a form that resembles a snake. The snake did not become the potent symbol it has become because of something snakes do,[i] but because we inwardly know ourselves and our evolution. The snake form is a part of our pre-human heritage. It is embedded in us as both physical structure and as a symbol of the thrust for survival and pleasure out of which we have emerged. This internal “form”, like many of our most potent symbols, is apprehended by the inner eye, the psyche, which has embedded within it, not only our individual past, but the past of the species, the evolution of life, and the emergence of the species. It is not, as seemingly it was for Augustine, a phallic symbol denoting a baseness to the sexual drive, but, as Aquinas deciphered, something more primitive, more encompassing.
The snake symbol, the reptilian at our base intelligence, wants its own way. It is anti-social, a pulse contrary to humanity’s truth. If not curtailed it would destroy “the world”. It is thus we have the myths of those great world-illuminators, civilizers, and cult-ivators, Indra and Apollo, who defeat the great snakes, Vritra and Python, before they can destroy reality. Yet, the snake signifies a part of our origin, and so we have also the myths of the snake as world-incubator and world-completer, Ophion and Ouroboros. In counterbalance to this struggling earthliness at our root are the myths of the “high” or sky gods. The most potent, the most holy, is always a god of the heights, an atmospheric [vapour-globe] being. Only the one who fully encompasses and enwraps the world can control it. It is a vision not of individual desires and needs, but of control. The high god transcends in the very capacity for the total integration of life, for the environmental integrity of the cosmos. Thus, this God is the Pantocrator, the all-ruler, the one in whom, or in whose rule, cosmos resides an integral whole. Interestingly, in Christianity, this title is given not the Father, but the Son as God’s Christ. It is he who rules creation in the Spirit of the Father for the Father, the revelation of the Father, the glory (substantiality) of the Father.[ii]
Embarking from Freud’s parsing of the psyche, we may proceed as follows. Id is blind desire; its creation is hell. Ego is desire focused, considered, and individualized; its creation is a society. Superego is desire contained and socialized; its creation is the thrust for world well-being. Above them stands the Christ archetype, the surrender of desire. It is because the Christ surrenders all desire, and abandons self to the pure will of creativity, which is self-giving without desire, he ascends not to a worldly paradise, but to heaven, to the uncreated and creative centre free of time and space, and of all things therein contained—individuality, materiality, history, and sin. He becomes, says Paul, the life-giving spirit hidden in God, opening to all a share in the Christhood he has initiated, creating the Body manifest in time as a thrust for salvation, but subsisting outside of time (in God) as salvation itself, as a “new” reality. Here we return to the beginning. The creeds confess this Christ has as his very essence, his psyche, the divine Creative Word which caused creation, and therefore time and history. It is in his work that sin appears. Therefore, the Creative Word alone can rectify time and history and sin. It is the Word’s entrance into time and history as historical, as man, which turn them, “convert” them, and return them to the Godhead in which it resides. It is the Christ and, by faith and adoption, the partakers in his Christ-hood who open a corrective (redemptive) ideal and dynamic to humanity. The Apostle Paul says of the Christ: he cared not for himself but gave himself away for the sake of all. Therefore, in the end, according to sacred writ, the Creative Word, the very Word in which all is created, surrenders the last vestige of self, ceases to speak the creating word, and rests silent in God into whose hands the fulfilled (“sanctified”) creation is returned. The circle of creation is completed, “It is consummated”. The gyrating dynamic of creation is resolved, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit”. All is in all again. In this the Christ archetype assumes both the world-nester symbol (Ophion) and the world-completer symbol (Ouroboros). The mythic, the great religious symbols always tend to be circular. Because they touch upon meaning-fullness, they open to us, reveal to us, the breadth of their compass, the beginning and end, the Alpha and Omega. They form the mandala, a momentary glimpse into completeness, integrity. Thus, sacred symbols always want for an enclosed space, an inner sanctum, a sheltered place away from the world—be that a physical space or spiritual (sacred) space.
Excursus: There is one unresolvable issue concerning sin and salvation the ritual action of church does not directly address—the endurance of hell. If all can be spoken of as ultimately being resolved in God, what is to be made of hell enduring in the reality of a “new” creation? Does it along with its residents vanish? Is there an annihilation of the unrepentant evil? Can the creative Word sent to redeem, restore, and save all creation be thwarted? Does the Christ defeat evil or merely establish a truce with it? We reach with such questions the fundamental incomprehensibility of evil—moral and physical. We may, by grace and faith, be able to tolerate the notion of evil as a temporal manifest of liberty and evolution, but the notion of all sin and evil and their consequences being resolved, absolved, and healed is both too awesome and terrifying for any creature to venture a reply. One might find within the compassion and the understanding of psyche and history to forgive someone near and dear, but what of the villains who have wantonly wrought evil and ill upon countless souls, that have slaughtered millions, thoughtlessly contaminated the earth, stirred up hate and violence, famine and war? Could we forgive and absolve them were they to repent? Could we embrace them? Yet we have been taught to pray: “forgive us our sins as we forgive them that sin against us”. The prayer is not about the individual, but “us”—humanity. It is a challenge—in deed—for any who would take up the mantle of the Christ who dies for the sins of all.
The great symbols and archetypes of soul, of psyche, cannot be spoken of as if they are historical events or concrete items. They may have evolved out of our shared history, possibly even out of the history that precedes us as a species, but they exist as fields of meaning of our common life, as organizational categories of psychic vitality demanding to be heard, felt, seen, ever revealed, adored (loved) and worshipped (conformed to). They are, as the ancient philosophers would say, the form, the essence, of being human, leading not only to psychic maturation, integration into sociality and world, but in that process to biologic evolution. [Cf: Sheldrake, Bohm in The Question of Immortality (July 2020).] In rehearsing the sacramental (the whole making) word and action, in meditating (focusing the mind) as community, and participating by word and action in the unfolding of the ritual within its ritual space and time the community enter the power of the archetypical and symbolic. The allowance of that power, the “bowing” to that power, allows it berth and birth.
The need for ritual as the extraordinary is writ into the very scriptures of Christianity. The first gatherings to remember, rehearse, and reinforce the call to share in the Christhood of Jesus were within the context of a shared meal, the agape feast. It was a communal supper to which each contributed a share. During that supper bread and wine were blessed and shared in thanksgiving (ευχαριστω, eucharisto) for the power released into reality in the life of Jesus as God’s sovereign re-presentative, his Christ. Things became too ordinary. Communal sharing was apparently not equitable. Neither the decorum of the table nor temperance regarding consumption were universally observed. The ritual act of remembrance and the sharing of the blessed bread and wine were removed to their own place and time—sacred time-space. They were ritualized–and properly so. The first places for such action were homes or homes especially converted. Once Christianity was allowed its freedom, the form and format of the official meeting hall of the empire, the basilica, were adapted for the action. The holy table was set upon the elevated end of the hall, the place where in civil basilicas sat the magistrates. People and officers of the ritual took up places around it. The space carried forward the dignity and decorum expected in a magisterial setting. The structures that followed, the Romanesque, Gothic, Neo-classical, Baroque, Rococo each tried to create a space that spoke of the extraordinary action for which it was set apart.
The aim was precisely to enchant, startle, inspire, to state that here fallen earth, failing earth and its earthlings, could safely confess their confounding finitude and embrace something more: a hope, a greater vision than that of the diurnal world outside the doors, outside this sacred time-space rich in its panoply of ornament and ornamentation. Here humanity could be free to feel something of the power it is summoned by within, something of the power it is called to be. Here is the time-space–as community—to step away from the world and summon forth the potentials to make that world a better reality. Here is the time-space to celebrate the capacity for such action, for “the power that worketh in us”. Here is sacred space and sacred time. It is to be noted that here is also, in part, the locus of confusion about being in the world as opposed to being of the world. Ritual is always about separation from the world of everyday experience, but it is a momentary stepping back to prepare the community for the world. In scripture Jesus is wont to remove himself from the crowds to refocus and refresh his spiritual and physical capacities for the continuance of his work for the well-being of the world. In like manner, he is accustomed to taking the disciples away from the crowds, to Caesarea Philippi, Tabor, the upper room, Gethsemane, Olivet. He leads them there precisely to prepare them to minister to the world. Why would the teacher instruct the disciples to saturate (“baptize”) the world in divine creativity if the world is something from which to withdraw, or worse, to denounce?
Paul learnt the agape feast (the communal sharing) properly follows the anamnesis (the ritual act of remembering and giving thanks). It becomes the sign of the worldly unfolding of the “holy communion” into community. It is existence building on its revealed essence, its communally acknowledged and embraced essence. It is faith, trust, acted out, given out. It is the sacred infiltrating, permeating, incarnating into the world and making the secular and ordinary ever incrementally the sacred, the consecrated, the set-aside-for something more. It is a process of continual transformation until that moment beyond time-space wherein the “Holy” is all and all. That—it must be stressed–is a “prophetic” statement. The climactic moment, the revealing (“apocalypse”) moment, is not about the end of the world or the end of time. It is about an ideal, an ever-dawning (“resurrection”) moment wherein the spirit of love moves and transforms. It is about accepting every “now” is the moment pregnant with meaningfulness and positivity of potential. In scriptural terminology it is the critical time (καιρός, kairos), the “hour” of potential revelation and glory (full substantiality), and therein of life-affirming decision, Life-confessing proclamation. Thus, the last action of sacred scriptures is a command, the cry of the soul to its Soul, the self to its “Self”: Come! [Cf: on Eschaton and Kenosis, (April 2013).]
Choreographic and other directions
There is no need to repeat that which has been given in varied letters and articles herein published. In these have been addressed appropriate understanding, training, words, actions, spaces, and objects to set the sacred stage for that which ought to unfold. The reader is, therefore, directed to the following archived under January 2012: on Divine Service and Sacred Choreography 1; on Divine Service and Sacred Choreography 2; on the Ritual Reading of Sacred Texts; on Liturgy as spiritual exercise and the ills of heterodoxy 1; on Liturgy as spiritual exercise and the ills of heterodoxy 2; on Liturgy; on the use of scriptures; and archived under March 2018, to: Spirituality, Part 7: A Survey of Proposed Pathways, subsection: The future of Eucharist.
There are several items either not addressed in the above or which merit further annotation.
Regarding art and architecture, it does well to note that the sacred space and the sacred items of ritual must reflect the fact they are not common, but the common elevated to serve the reverential and illuminative nature of ritual. Yet, it is perhaps true that the most accessible aspects of the therapeutic application are the setting and the sound, the architecture and the music. Both appeal immediately to something in the human more primitive than words, the aesthetic of the physical environment.
In this regard, the contemporary trend to take Gothic, Romanesque, and other highly decorated structures and paint every surface within them white is questionable. Such action renders the once rich atmosphere of sacred grove or sacred cave into an auditorium. The sense of mystery is erased, white-washed. If it is done for budgetary reasons it is unfortunate. If it is done because there prevails the idea that communal immersion into mystery needs be superceded by something more conducive to light and lively conversation, it is a misconception and an eldritch effort. While interiors in the Neo-classical, Baroque and like styles tend to be bright, they are usually overlayed with gilding and ornament. They present not a sacred cave but a paradise. This paradise is also too often desecrated, and its rich ornamentation painted over or hidden behind that which one can only describe as an enthusiasm for house plants and crafts. The décor of the sacred space needs to be inspiring and capable of enwrapping the community in spiritual wonder and intimacy. An enthusiasm to decorate does not qualify one to decorate, and certainly not to create a sacred space for the communal immersion—and the chief liturgical officer of the congregation cannot indulge the unqualified here or in any other aspect of the sacred ritual time-space or action. If one thinks to hire a professional decorating company, it must understand well the meaning of church ritual and its role in the cure of souls. The sacred space is neither a family home nor a department store. One would do well to look to the Eastern churches and their strict expectations of both artist and art. Both must radiate a life of faith, prayer, dedication, and a deep understanding of the church’s vision. Perhaps, there is here the issue exposed. The churches of the West no longer understand their ritual function. They want their sacred spaces to be community centres with the feel of the familial. Thus, in some places even the sanctuary appears a maze of kitsch. One is reminded of the saccharine devotionalism found in some homes—a macedoine of pots, vases, plants, ex voto pictures, medals, and memorabilia. Even my grandmother who relished the cute and cluttered would be horrified.
There is a related issue that deserves pre-emptive action. Some parishioners take it upon themselves to gift all manner of things, and expect them to be used and appreciated. They forget the building is not their private property, and that while they may think a statue, painting, banner, prayer-desk, chair, candelabra, or a set of robes is “just what the church needs”, they are invariably wrong, and the congregation is left to find a way of telling them they are wrong, but thank you very much. One church was surprised with the gift of a communion table. It was contrary in style to the architecture, and too large for the space. The rector did nothing about it, and today the ministers in the sanctuary still need to step lightly to get around it. There needs to be in place parochial or regional legislation to halt the unsolicited liturgical gift. It is easier to decline something on the grounds that accepting it would be contrary to church policy than to be forced into finding a diplomatic and pastoral escape.
While Eucharist remains always the nucleus of Christian ritual action, there is value in musically rich services such as those of lessons and carols. These have usually been reserved for Advent and Christmastide, yet there is no paucity of music or lessons for other times and seasons. Such services open the doors to many who are not inclined to church, but do enjoy the music. Such services provide a safe introduction of the scattered to the fold. It is a rich opportunity waiting to be mined.
Music need not be chant or traditional church music, but it must be appropriate to the therapeutic reason for ritual action. Polka vespers, jazz eucharists, and rock’n evensongs are merely amateur hour gone awry. Pop music and Broadway musicals may provide some moving tunes, but there is nothing from the hand of Katy Perry, Disney, Lerner and Loewe, et al. that qualifies as “liturgical”. Somewhere in the 1960s someone decided “Hey there Georgie girl” would serve nicely as an entrance processional for an “inner-city eucharist”. It was not, not then, not now. The assembly is gathered for the revelation of the sacred not for an hour of “clubbing”. If a newly married couple want to dance down the aisle to “Celebration”, or if a couple want to celebrate their anniversary by doing their beloved cha-cha routine in the chancel “for Jesus” the answer is “No!” followed by a serious explanation why. The minister who is the chief liturgical officer of the congregation is responsible for educating the congregants regarding the purpose and meaning of church ritual. The minister who says yes to inappropriate word, action, music, movement on the so-called pastoral grounds that “it will make them happy and coming back” is akin to the physician who prescribes opioids to the depressed patient on the grounds that “it will make them happy and coming back”. The minister who thinks thus misunderstands religion and her/his function within it. In the situation above, both minister and physician deserve to be charged and convicted of professional stupidity, professional laxity, and the gravamen—malpractice. Their licenses need to be revoked. Ritual is to evoke from the depths of us the potent-most forces and mysteries of life in the symbol-laden language, sound, and forms of the faith. Again and again it must be asked: is not the distinction between the pastoral and the liturgical patent? One informs the other, but they cannot be confused without confounding both.
Yet, it must also be acknowledged that things divine, things graced, things potent with life generating power and meaning can occur, be made to occur, in any place or situation. Saint Mary is particularly fond of “appearing” in fields and caves and therein exciting a good deal of transformative action. However, heaven cannot be expected to do the work of earth. There is a distinction between grace and freedom, and the history of dogma is plump with arguments about where the one ends, and the other begins. This is not the time to wade into that quagmire, and thus, it may be reliably assumed that while the set course is always the most certain and safe, there are times when an astute administrator of the liturgy or any other therapeutic action may discretely ease the rules and allow a degree of spontaneity. Carving things into stone is best reserved to tombstones. [Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 14: Renaissance and Reformation, endnote i (May 2014).]
Dance has not played a commanding part in the major modern religions despite dance being central to the ritual gatherings of countless peoples. Hindu temples have long used the ritual rhythms of dance. The mysticism of Islam looks to the trance inducing dance of the Dervishes. The Shakers and others who in large party rejected traditional Christian ritual found in dance a means of focus and psychic release. Rhythm and facility of movement are not absent, nor should they be absent, in modern church ritualizations. Processions and other paced movements, incensings, gesticulations of hands for the varied prayer positions, signings with cross, bowing, kneeling and arising, genuflecting—are all accepted rhythmical movements. There is as well the undercurrent of rhythm injected into ritual by music and song. Dance of itself is of value if treated with professionalism. As such it requires of them that perform and them that choreograph it training, and dedication, and prayerfulness. Experiments in this arena in the Western church in recent times have been for the very great part horrid examples of fervour without either talent or temperament. Too often are congregations besieged by something resembling the mad seeking to channel Isadora Duncan. David before the Ark they are not. Once, at an Easter Vigil, a cleric in billowing alb whipped out from under his robe a tambourine and began spinning about the sanctuary as the choir sang the song of Miriam after the crossing of the sea. The rector quietly said to me; “When he asks for a head on a platter, it will be his”. Neither the cleric’s dance nor the rector’s commentary during the ritual state were appropriate. Confessedly, both were comedic. As with all things in the ritual state, if ordinary time-space end at ritual’s door, so too ought ego and self-delusions about abilities and charisms. The innovators of liturgical ritual need always remember the insane consistently think themselves more creative than they are.
The movements of the congregants is an issue that requires control and dignity. Bowing, genuflecting, signing, and processions are all of value. There needs to be a unity of movement to reinforce the unity of the sacred assembly. That requires leadership, communal understanding of the role of ritual, and being well rehearsed in the action. Leaving things to chance or street-customs is not an option. One need only look to the ritual failure and farce that has become the exchange of Christ’s peace. The howdy-hi, running about like chickens, and hand batting that passes for dignity and decorum within the sacred time-space is a travesty against sapiens in the species’ name. Where is the simple and dignified “and with thy spirit” or the simple ritual embrace and bow of the ancient kiss?
There are some things I simply cannot see appropriate to liturgical ritual—pantomiming of readings and prayers, clowning clowns, balloons. Such items may be applicable for a Sunday school liturgy, but the communal ritual aims to open the depths of the self, not release the inner child.
All word and action in ritual demands dignity and decorum. Dignity belongs to the very profundity of the language of the sacred and psychic. Propriety of form and decorum are requisite of any action or word meant to expose and express the profound—especially so when the items expressed and exposed are meant for the revelation of the fundamental-most powers of world and self, and the enfoldment of each and all into their essential communality. Control, dignity, and decorum are the traits of a servant of the ritual psychotherapy of sacred drama. As a servant the person acting or reading or preaching is hidden in the action, becoming merely the instrument of its conveyance, a masked entity for the sake of the sacred. They that would lead, or assist must humbly and obediently know themselves servants, sacred instruments. Their roles, not they, are set aside for the use of the “holy” as much as are the holy table, chalice, and cross. Individual personalities and personhoods are submersed below that of the Body which they are called to serve. This truth encompasses all assembled, but especially so them in sanctuary and chancel. Therein is allowed the encounter with the sacred free of the filter of “personality”. It allows both the numinous and terrifying aspects of the spiritual powers within and without us to be encountered directly. The opposites of this control, dignity, and decorum are visibility, artificiality, and theatricality. They are the traits of the performer. The performer can be most easily detected by the need to be a celebrity, to have “billing”, to be seen as the star of the “show”. This is not ritual. This is not psychotherapeutic drama. This is entertainment. Given the content and context of the task, it is an outrage and sacrilege.
The notions of servant and sacred mask are worth stressing. In our egalitarian world we no longer think of servants. Great households no longer have servants, but staff. Possibly the closest most come to encountering someone “in service” is at a restaurant. Of these, very few still have crisply dressed and nearly invisible people discretely attending to every detail of the table. In most establishments we are attended to by chatty “wait-staff”. Perhaps then I ought to conjure the politically incorrect and say plainly: they that are given to occupy sanctuary and chancel are the slaves of the congregation. They have no rights, no voice, no presence except for the function of the ritual to which they are assigned.[iii] No one in either sanctuary or channel ought to be visible. They are “masked” in their function and ritual costume. Not unlike the Christ hidden in God for the salvation of the world, they are “hidden” in divine service. Thus, ritual attire is meant to conceal all ordinary attire. All “personal” adornment is to be covered or removed. Ministers sporting fancy watches, rings, earrings, and coiffures need to be disciplined. Ritual dress is applicable to all in sanctuary and chancel. If one person is ritually robed, all must be. People popping up from the congregation to casually light candles with a packet of matches snatched from a pocket, perfunctorily assisting at the preparation of the offerings, distributing the “Cup of Salvation” in ordinary dress—all such things speak of odious careless-ness regarding things sacred.
Furthermore, the church owns an ancient ritual robe applicable to all—the baptismal robe, or alb. To toss this out or to reserve it to the “ordained” is a sacerdotal conceit. The substitution of this robe with academic gown is a novelty, and one best disregarded while beating one’s breast with mea culpas. Academic attire has a place in the “choir offices” and only if one has title to wear it. Does no one understand the sacred is not the ordinary but that which is herein summoned to transform the ordinary. There is a distinction, and to disregard it is a grave error against the communal spirituality the church is charged to foster. [Cf: Spirituality, Part 2: From Reservations to Resurrection: The Evolution of God, endnotes xxi, xxii (Feb 2017).]
Given the purpose and dignity of the space reserved to divine service, it is not inappropriate that even outside the ritual actions a reverential attitude, and a decorum of dress be kept in the sanctuary and chancel. Once, when religious sisters and brothers were the cleaners, caretakers, and sacrists they seemingly had no issue in completing their duties in their religious habits. The cassock has long been a symbol of bounded service, the uniform of the servant of the congregation. The practice of retaining it for them engaged in such “housekeeping” duties is well kept in certain places, and reinforces and honours the sacredness of the space. Such practice is especially commendable when the sacred space is kept open to the public for private reflection and prayer.
Modern liturgies are conversations with minister facing the people and engaging in a scripted dialogue. This is an acceptable situation if one is engaged in teaching, and has thus been in use by reformed churches that accentuate the learning of the sacred text and downplay any type of ritualization that may sap of a mediaeval or renaissance exuberance. However, dialogue is the realm of the pastoral, not the liturgical. Ritual is about mystery not conversation. Furthermore, the dialogue formatted is bland and common. The recitation of psalms as responses to readings is particularly offensive against the mystery to be encountered. The time between readings is for communal focus and reflection, not recitation. The focus inducing rhythm properly comes from the song or chant of a choir. The babbling of a congregation destroys the opportunity for a meditative infolding of the sacred word. Indeed, the entire rhythm of ritual ought to arose appropriate acclamations, not forced recitations. The congregants ought to be well served by the servants of the ritual and not forced into words or actions. [Cf: on John, endnote ix (Feb. 2016).]
Last, there is a value to reconsidering some modern translations. Rendering the opening of the Te Deum as “You are God” is a literary sin. Where is “We praise Thee, O God”? As it is the sacred depths of reality and its power that are in ritual addressed, there is a deep value in retaining the polite Thee, Thou, and Thine for the all-transcending Holy, and if anyone think otherwise, read Buber’s I and Thou, or simply look seriously into the eyes of your beloved.
There is forgotten that lesson Paul had to learn—agape and anamnesis are distinct functions of church. They inform one another, bolster one another, but cannot be confused or fused. This is the problem of having the person or persons leading the prayer of the sacred assembly face not the icon of the Holy, but the people. The contemporary liturgist will argue that God is in his church, in the midst of the church, and this is true, but the ritual acts are meant to turn the whole of the church in one direction, its core, its standing before and in the divine to the end that the divine more fully, more realistically, possess the church. Fundamentally, there is a distinction between leading and presiding. The leader leads in being of “one face” with them that are led. This gives the eastward position in the eucharist a ritual propriety—all are situated before God in the one direction, for it is God alone who presides in his church. This also gives a certain value to the iconostases of the Eastern churches which have always maintained a sensibility for the awesome mystery of the sacred and its ritual activation in actions and words.
Whatsoever is done in ritual needs be done well—within a confined and dignified space, and reflective solemnity of all dress, word, action, sound, and movement. It needs be the revelation of the mystery of the Sacred before them that would be con-secrated unto the Sacred. About such there is nothing common. It is drama for the therapy of soul. May all who minister that divine service for the cure of souls be awed by that, careful of that, obedient to that.
[i] Snakes hiss and bite, but that does not give breadth to elevate them to symbol of the inquisitor or tempter. Rather, it is something more reptilian about humanity that allows that. There is evidence that snake worship is ancient. In these cults the snake is variably a symbol of fertility, earth, and derivatively, time. In some places the snake is the divine symbol of reason (the unblinking eye). The snake also sheds its skin, and so becomes an icon of renewal, and in that, of healing. Therefrom we have the twinned snakes that enwrap the staff of Hermes (Mercury), and the Caduceus of Asclepius. Asclepius was celebrated as a healer. He was also the son of Apollo. His staff is indicative of his semi-divine healing power, but as a son of the god of light and art, the staff points to a deeper level—illumination and creativity. It represents in reverse the notion of mens sana in corpore sano. The staff of Hermes represents his powers as the messenger of the gods and as a worker of magic. The snake shedding its skin may play a part here, but the snake symbol here points toward a deeper level of psyche for its power—an extra-ordinary, preter-natural, source of directive and power. This is the snake not as symbol of the id, but divine intervention for life. We have this aspect also in the Hebrews’ brazen serpent.
The snake, lion, eagle, and assorted other beasts may stir ideas about some quality they possess, but they open an awareness within us, an awareness of our evolution, our roots both biologic and psychic. We tend to think negatively of people who say, “we are snake people”, or “we are bear people”, or their descendants. We think them primitive and unsophisticated for such statements. But they are not. They are cognizant of our primal roots. We all are snake, lion, bear, etc. because we are Earth. We are Adam [Earth-ling]. It is, thus, the more troubling that we have so distressed Earth. Will we cease to listen to our reptilian id that ever tempts us to scrap the organic harmony of paradise? Christianity claims there is a counter-symbol, something more than a symbol, around which we may coalesce life, a creative power that can resolve (and absolve) id and integrate not merely the human thrust but the Earth we are. Thus says the Apostle to the faithful: “your inheritance is the universe”.
[ii] Regarding the Pantocracy of the Christ, we have a parallel political symbol in constitutional monarchy. The sovereign reigns; the government rules. The sovereign is the icon of state, the living symbol of the historical and embraced identity of the nation. The sovereign is re-presented by the government which deals with the existential reality of the nation of which the sovereign is the transcending and idealized essence. As the Christ at the moment of final decision surrenders all to the Father, the government (in the person of the prime minister) surrenders all to the sovereign at the moment of political decision, be that end of term or of confidence. In the first there is a resolution of the “elect” into the new creation, in the second there is an election for a new government.
We need appreciate the symbolic superiority of our constitutional monarchy. In forms that have an elected head of state for a set term the symbol falls short of the historical identity and continuity of nation provided by sovereignty tied to inheritance and life-term. The ideal of national, historical and integrated endurance is not well preserved in or transmitted by a transient officer. The sovereign may be well compensated, but is obliged to surrender public voice, presence, and identity. Self is always the sacrifice demanded of the icon. Thus, the Jesus of history is lost to the role of the Christ, and for those churches that highly stress the iconic in their theologies, the humanity of Jesus is either supressed or totally lost to the overwhelming presence of God within.
Early in this essay it was noted that theology acts to understand the symbol, the icon. If, however, it takes the icon literally, there follows not only a de-formed theological understanding, but through it a distortion of ritual and a mis-guided spirituality. We see this in the Christological positions of Monophysitism, Monothelitism, Monarchianism, Arianism, Apollinarianism, and the misogynist attitudes fostered in misconceptions about the nature of Mary as the mother of Jesus. We see this in the ecclesiastical malformations of Donatism and Millennialism, and the high-pessimisms of predestination, the Ante- Supra- and Post-lapsarianisms. We see it is the false spirituality that bows to Gnosticism and the world-rejecting dispositions it excites, including the pre-eminence given virginity, sexual abstinence, and physical austerities.
Theology needs always explain the faith, its symbols, and its ideals (doctrines) according to the time and place it addresses. Thus, the early fathers spoke in terms of ancient Greek philosophy. Augustine canonized Platonic thought as the medium of explanation. Aquinas turned the tide in favour of Aristotle’s analysis. The reformers turned back to Augustine. After that, philosophy seemed no longer the “hand-maiden” of theology. Adventurous missionaries tried to use the cult-ure of them they approached, but were largely reprimanded by the bureaucracies that ought to have supported them. With the Renaissance, philosophy developed a distaste for organized and revealed religion, and so provided little ground for tilling. The Pietist movement gave us the notable efforts of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard. The Deist movement gave us the host of the pre- and post-Hegelians. Rome ran back to Aquinas. With the arrival of Boas’ work in cultural anthropology, Durkheim’s in sociology, Whitehead’s process philosophy, and Jung’s psychology theology had new and fertile grounds for explanation.
Theology is neither faith nor doctrine nor their ritual enactments. It is an instrument of credal, doctrinal, and liturgical explanation. It describes the iconic. The grammar and vocabulary it uses must be comprehensible to the age and people it addresses. As its topic is the profundity at the heart of life, it presumes intelligence and, therefore, cannot speak in gibberish or slang. Yet, if it wishes to reference Ignatius, Irenaeus, Augustine, Aquinas, or the scriptures they cherished, it must provide a translation relevant to the world of today. If not, it might as well proceed in Chaucerian English.
[iii] To them that might wish to decorate the idea of ritual slave with a more elegant word, looking to the Greek hierodule is to be cautioned. While it does mean a slave of the sacred, they to whom it was applied were sometimes, in some places, enlisted to serve as temple prostitutes. A retreat to etymology needs also consider the social history of usage. The term slave is in this text employed to underscore the requisite of an absolute loss of self to the task given—to lead the communal prayer, revelation, and activation. The leadership of the community in its ritual state is a crushing task. It attenuates, or better put, it crucifies the individual for the task of the sacred and that which it wishes to sacralize—the community of the church and the world for which church is summoned to be salt, leaven, light.