Saturated with Shadows: Taking Space, Leaving Room
Related papers
The Passion of the Word. Chapter 2
The Passion of the Word. Chapter 2, 2023
The prophecies were like an arrow released into ‘the unknown’, travelling towards distant horizons yet to emerge as Israel travelled through the landscape of history with God. Or like a flare which for a few seconds lights up the dark landscape of the present, showing us the nature of our position. In terms of the arrow, the horizon could be manifold, revealing itself gradually, severally, with different aspects coming to fruition at various times as Israel travelled forward. Eventually the prophecies would take the complete form of a coherent perfection, as in the Paschal Mystery of Christ, so poignantly alluded to in the Servant Songs. Having reached the moment of fulfilment, the prophecy continues to travel by being embodied in the Eucharist and the phenomenon of the Ecclesia. In terms of the flare, the prophecies illuminate the inscape of religious consciousness, and cast their beams beyond, to the landscape, the expression of Israel’s identity and morality, her love or lack of love. The interface between that inscape and the landscape is where Israel’s sanctity, or lack of it, is bathed by the same lumen. In the time of the prophets ancient Hebrew was a sacred language with restricted vocabulary, and this played an important role in the consciousness of Israel. If, for example, the redactor used a particular word in the context of a prophecy, it resonated for the listeners who knew it in other contexts. Poetry works in a similar way and the prophecies and songs are essentially poetry. But the prophet was in an authentic prophetic ecstasy. His prophecies, when recorded and related, used the methods of poetry. I am discussing a society in which the oral tradition was still very important and cultures dependent upon oral tradition have memories far surpassing our own. The poetic form, the pun, assonance, onomatopoeia, repetition, alliteration and the balance of parallelisms to name some features, were used to perfection in the Semitic prophetic tradition to create a response in the receptive soul. This was instinctive and inspired, to preserve in the memory of the people their identity as a nation belonging to God. So as a particular word or sound fell on the ears of the listeners it created concentric circles of meaning upon the hearers’ consciousness like a pebble falling on water. The circles of meaning radiated outwards from the place of impact within the receptive psyche in a mixture of unconscious and conscious association. Perhaps the ordinary person could not have explained this, but if prompted he would show that he knew the connections and nuances. There was also a corresponding ‘downward’ projection of meaning as the phrase created or lit up layers descending into the historical consciousness, which reached backwards through the generations of the corporate ‘person’ who was Israel beloved of God.
SIGHS AND WHISPERS FROM WITHIN
FAMBATA PUBLISHERS , 2017
“Sighs and Whispers from Within” is a collection of 120 poems that covers a wide range of themes which could be summarized as God and nature, man, good and evil, as well as tradition and modernism. Specific poems include `The Rain Has Done It`, `The Wanton Bird`, `Monks of Remorse`, `My Life`, `My Cry`, and `Victory`. The poems portray man as a creation of God`s who has free will to choose good over evil but who sometimes chooses evil or does not combat it strongly enough when confronted with it. Sooner or later, God the omnipotent, the omniscient, the omnipresent intervenes, his firm hand of discipline strikes, but his fatherly heart of mercy also serves to mediate and redeem man. Through the poems here, one understands the power of poetry, seeing clearly how in the process of composing a poem, the poet can predict the nature of events. An example is the poem `My Life`, which the author wrote on a colleague of his at the Cameroon National Radio and Television (CRTV). The poet asked the subject to give him a phrase on which to write a poem on her and she said “My life has been full” (Poem Number 51). The author uses the phrase as the opening line of the poem and what follows is an apocalyptic analysis of the subject`s life as if she was already about to die. Although at the time of the encounter between the poet and the colleague the latter is in good health, things later happen dramatically when six months later, the poet learns that the colleague has died. From that point of view, one can say that poetry is predictive. But poetry is also many other things which you, the reader, will discover in the book.
Preface Unheard Voices
Acta Theologica: 2019: Supplementum 27: Unheard voices in the Bible, 2019
The Passion of the Word. Chapter 8
The Passion of the Word. Chapter 8, 2023
Is this dialogue outside time or in it or is it on the interface between eternity and time, being as it is in the ecstasy of the prophet? Or is this the Son sharing with His Prophet His Inner Face, His Truth as it will be incarnated in time centuries later. The dialogues communicated from within the prophetic ecstasy are of the nature of prayer which travels on the boundaries of time and eternity, yet is closer than our breath, upon our lips, in our mouths. The Third and Fourth Songs of the Servant occupy all these dimensions and more. They travel towards the Eternal on the boundaries of spirit and consciousness, moving between marrow and bone, so essential to us and deep in us, towards the Godhead and returning to us again not empty. This is the Eternal within and among us, the Kingdom in us and among us in the Ecclesia where this travelling finds expression.
WORDS WORDLESSNESS AND THE WORD Silence Reconsidered from a Literary Point of View
In Quaker silence one participates in the unity of Godhead by abandoning the inauthenticity of words. But most deeply, words and wordlessness are allies; silence is not speech's elimination so much as its seed-bed.
'Hear and Give Ear!': The Soundscape of Jeremiah
Sound offers a significant but underappreciated point of entry into the book of Jeremiah. Drawing on R. Murray Schafer's concept of the ‘soundscape’ and other work on sound and sensory criticism, this article explores the significance of sound in constructing meaning in Jeremiah. The sounds of human voices mingle with the clamor of warfare, the vocalizations of animals, and cries of pain and suffering in a way that adds complexity to an already complex and layered text. Attending to sound also clarifies structure, as the text contains multiple nested soundscapes. Sound is likewise linked to gender, as in the use of marked feminine sounds such as lament. Reading Jeremiah with an ear to its sounds reveals previously unheard subtleties, while also offering a new way to perceive what is already familiar. It also demonstrates the usefulness of sound studies for reading the prophetic books.
1
Contents
Inter-coursing // Textual Map
Acknowledgments
2
3
1
Exhumation: The Parable of the Anemic Voice
4
2
Enunciation
9
3
Illusion: Strategies and Shortcomings
24
4
Exhibit: The Parable of the Three Canvases
43
5
Allusion: Experience and Expression
48
6
Exchange: The Dance of the Disappearing Body
96
7
Annunciation
99
8
Givenness: Living Sacrament
115
9
Renunciation
130
10
Excess: The Parable of the Phantom Limb
138
11
Giving: Loving Sacrifices
144
12
Denunciation
149
13
Gift: Serving Genesis
167
14
Exploration: The Parable of the Kiss’ Risk
173
Bibliography
181
2
Inter-coursing // Textual Plot
Group A – Narrative Locations
Chapters
1
4
6
10
14
Exhumation
Exhibit
Exchange
Excess
Exploration
(pages 4 - 8)
(pages 43 - 47)
(pages 96 - 98)
(pages 138 - 143)
(pages 173 - 180)
Enunciation
Annunciation
Renunciation
Denunciation
(pages 9 - 23)
(pages 99 - 114)
(pages 130 - 137)
(pages 149 - 166)
Illusion
Allusion
(pages 24 - 42)
(pages 48 - 95)
Group B – Philosophical Inquiries
Chapters
2
7
9
12
Group C – Theological Responses
Chapters
3
5
Group D – Sacramental Suggestions
Chapters
8
11
13
Givenness
Giving
Gift
(pages 115 - 129)
(pages 144 - 148)
(pages 167 - 172)
The above ‘map’ reveals the more circuitous structure inherent to this piece. As the
titular parallels suggest, each group consists of chapters that speak to one another
explicitly. Though, the aim of the work is to flow both linearly and cyclically, in a
sort of helix structure, offering flow without closure.
3
I am in love, hence free to live
by heart, to ad-lib as I caress.
A soul is light when full,
heavy when vacuous.
My soul is light. She is not afraid
to dance the agony alone,
for I was born wearing your shirt,
will come from the dead with that shirt on.
Vera Pavlova, “42”1
The human voice becomes a place where the world returns to God. It gives
what it does not have—which does not mean that it gives nothing—and it
can give itself only because it is not in possession of itself....[But] why call
[prayer or praise] a wounded word? It always has its origin in the wound
of joy or distress; it is always a tearing that brings it about, that the lips
open. And it does so as it is still and otherwise wounded. Wounded by this
hearing and this call that have always preceded it, and that unveil it to
itself, in a truth always in suffering, always agonic, struggling like Jacob
all night in the dust to wrest God’s blessing from him, and in keeping the
sign of a swaying and limping by which speech is all the more confident as
it is less assured of its own progress.
Jean-Louis Chrétien, “The Wounded Word”2
1
Vera Pavlova, “42,” If There is Something to Desire: 100 Poems, trans. Steven Seymour (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 46. This paper is dedicated to the woman who taught me to dance despite my
shame and sing despite all forgetting. In loving memory of Myrtle Beatrice Nathalie Wrye, who left the
world March 5, 2011.
2
Jean-Louis Chrétien, “The Wounded Word,” Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French
Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 174-175. I would like to acknowledge those who
have nurtured my voice without asking me to cover my wounds, so to speak: my parents, Don and
Melissa Gay, and my academic mentors, Prof. Mark Burrows and Ms. Ellen Oak.
4
Chapter 1
Exhumation: The Parable of the Anemic Voice
…gluttony of Delicacy, not gluttony of Excess….You see? Because
what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set
before her, she never recognizes as gluttony her determination to
get what she wants, however troublesome it might be to others.
Screwtape to Wormwood, The Screwtape Letters3
An emptiness like dull hunger gaped in their souls: no expansive
emptiness this, but rather a narrow, restricting hollowness that
deprived them of head and senses…What plagued them was so
insidious that imperceptibly all of their sensations died away.
They were dead, so thoroughly dead that they thought they were
alive.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World4
There once was a voice that refused to consume words. It would not
swallow them. It would not taste them. It would not even give them to hungry
neighbors. It saw no use for them: neither to warn, to proclaim, to sing, to address,
to pray. It absolutely refused to cook the delicacies of poetry. Too rich. Too
indulgent. But the voice was also resistant to lukewarm words, tasteless words
cooled by cliché. The voice only played with the food of thought; it picked apart its
possibilities until the words were scattered on its plate. Or sometimes, it would cut
off the fat of concepts until all that was left was an abstraction. (Though this too, it
would not eat). Because it would not partake, it had nothing to offer. It hardly gave
breath. The voice was a monument to silence, worn thin by refusal.
Upon seeing the emaciated voice, a Prophet queried, “Why do you not
speak? Why do you not listen, not taste? Soon enough we will not even be able to
see you. You will have nothing to express, no energy to give.” The voice, angered
and atrophied, turned its eyes away. The Prophet persisted, “Make haste: eat, taste.
3
4
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 87-88.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World (San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press, 1954), 60-61.
5
No matter the word selection: we are in desperation! Any word is better than none
at all.”
The starved voice did not stir as the quickened Prophet presented a table of
words: ideas from every age, books piled high, some smelling of exotic delights,
some of home’s comfort. But the thinned voice could not bring itself to eat. It had
chosen silence because words carry the germs of unknown origins; they are handled
by who knows and for how long? Even if no hand had touched, no tongue had
tasted in transport--perhaps the words were unhealthy, over-processed? Graver yet:
would they fatten the voice, until surfeited it would be complacent, unable to move
in the corpulence of its indiscriminate acceptance?
The voice would rather starve than discern.
The voice had elected silence because speaking required concession, a
confession that the voice’s body had to rely on something other than itself. Every
word stirred and tasted, sliced and swallowed, would be a compromise of
independence—a wager on form, one bind short of a covenant with Meaning. In
truth, the voice feared words as it feared kisses and promises. Once tasted, would
words leave the voice longing?
The voice would rather renounce than embrace.
Soon enough, the thin voice would invert like air in a vacuum.
The Prophet felt time fleeing as the voice fasted. Form was evaporating
into nothingness. “The grace of time, as in the space of forms, is not meant to be a
gift wasted. The voice must wrestle the void! It must give forth to receive its
blessing!" Thus driven to the point of thunderous urging, the Prophet pulled the
6
voice (in its seat) to the table. The Prophet clamored through texts, beating them
with gestures like lightning. Suddenly silence, stillness: an epiphany.
In a gentle whisper, the Prophet crept into the voice’s cavernous hunger,
serving the entire first chapter of Genesis. The Prophet spoke of expressions
handled by purity; of material worlds created by immaterial words; of utterances
becoming the flesh of celestial bodies, waters, land, plants, creatures. “Words
becoming flesh,” the Prophet intoned, “Words becoming form. Thoughts becoming
matter—visible movement. The invisible pouring itself, overflowing into the
visible. Substance will never be the same." Bending lower, kneeling in a softened
plea, the Prophet added, "The flesh of your voice, your very soul, will waste away
without this Word.”
In a flicker of recognition, the voice blinked.
Excited but careful, the Prophet decided to ease the wakened appetite. The
Prophet sensed the voice would refuse more words; but perhaps if the Prophet filled
the voice with words’ shadows? (For shadows take form but not space: in the eye’s
stomach, in the body’s memory. They will give the voice a taste, and open its
longing for the sustenance!) Singing, the Prophet crept into the voice’s ear, its
mouth:
O, Taste and see.
O, Hear and know:
You cannot live
on bread alone.
Repeating, the Prophet gingerly fed the voice song. And the voice’s
hunger, which was its stubborn forgetting, began to remember. Its members filled
with shadows of sound.
7
Seeing that the voice was able to swallow song, the Prophet brought out
the visible lexis of paintings, sculptures, structures. And while the voice acquired a
taste for art, the Prophet moved to draw back a curtain. Light from outside poured
in, filtered through forms—as if the earth were a sieve, and radiance its gold. Traces
of light, latticed like lace through the leaves. Upon smelling the fragrance of light,
the voice opened its stomach. It gave its eyes to the outside. Re-entering the womb
of the world's matter, the voice poured its perception into the invitations of contour.
Eyes like hands, thoughts like steps, the voice surveyed the feast: mountains, trees,
flowers, birds. The secret languages to the voice’s ear: rustling, chirping, all
creation sighing on the wind, singing. Vibration. Movement. Offering.
I unpetalled you, like a rose,
to see your soul,
and I didn't see it.
But everything around
— horizons of lands and of seas —,
everything, out to the infinite,
was filled with a fragrance,
enormous and alive.5
The Prophet lured the voice outside by reciting poetry, even performing
dramatic literature, until the sounds had so nourished the voice that it began to
move, to follow. Made aware of its craving, the Voice walked out into the world—
not in a shrinking form, but in a form filled by shadows. Art and literature gave
form to the Voice’s faith, recalling it to the world and to the Word—not in a
certainty of things unseen, but in some wounding uncertainty of what it once saw.6
In a reconciliation of call and response, gifts given and returned, the Voice began to
5
Juan Ramón Jiménez “I unpetalled you, like a rose,” Into the Garden: A Wedding Anthology, ed. and
trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 76.
6
“Experience supplies us only with paper and ink, so to say, that is the means of representing these ideas,
the field on which to project the shadow of our unity.” Paul Claudel, Poetic Art (New York:
Philosophical Library, Inc., 1948), 45.
8
smile, to sing, and then to speak. It chased the shadows of words; it caught and
caressed them, setting them free, and following after. As often as it could, the Voice
cradled Meaning in its mouth. It welcomed the whispers, like a secret received. And
bringing memory to the lips of its once famished forgetting, the voice uttered,
“Take. Eat. Do this in remembrance.”7
7
My parable has been influenced by the idea of a “visible voice.” It first appeared to me in the stage
directions of Karol Wojtyla’s “Our God’s Brother,” The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater, trans.
Boleslaw Taborski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 241. This See also Jean-Louis
Chrétien, “The Visible Voice,” Call and Response, trans. Anne A. Davenport (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2004), 33-43. Chrétien credits Paul Claudel with the impetus for this work. See also:
Jean-Louis Chrétien, Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2003).
9
Chapter 2
Enunciation
…So you give a kiss,
Wanting really to give life.
So you give a bouquet of flowers
Instead of a garden around a house.
You give a book as repayment
For the wisdom of the world.
All gifts are only sensation
And images in a cave.
Now that I feel all fullness,
I finally know how poor I am.
But if a human being does not want merely to say something in
dialogue but rather to “give” himself…as we experience this in
sensible words, then the “poverty” the speaker experiences in
these efforts does not need to be something hopeless. Souls can
truly encounter one another and change places through the
narrow passage-way of image-bound words.
Hans Urs von Baltahsar, “Self-Saying”8
An actress turned theology student, turned philosophy’s ‘interloper,’ I
halted at the intersection. Cautioned to hyper-aware silence by philosophers of
religion, called to uninhibited worship by artists of ministry, I was crossed. A mind
stuttering, a fumbling faith.
At the cross of “Faith and Knowledge,” I discovered Jacques Derrida’s
double bind: religion as religio (abstract scruple) and relegere (gathered many).9
God abstracted from experience while attracting my every expression. I confessed
God as holy—wholly other, “unscathed” by any concrete claims, concepts, or tekne
of being. And yet, this God asked the currency of belief—“fiduciary,” fidelity,
credit, trust. How could I invest (believe in) no-thing, no-being? If I must not invest
8
Richard Borchardt’s poem and von Balthasar’s response are given in: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Epilogue
(San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press, 2004), 80.
9
Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge” Religion, ed. J. Derrida and G. Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998).
10
my this-worldly ideologies into some-Thing, some-One, where would I aim my
hope, my faith, in that which exceeds ontological expression? Launch it into the
desert space of khora and expect that wherever it lands is yet a lapse into the
intelligible, the sensible?10
According to phenomenology, as a being in this world, all I can attain
(intend toward) are phenomenal expositions; all I can hold are intuitions hardened,
concretized, by intentionality. But even these conceptual holds musing moths and
rust deconstruct. The Being beyond beings reveals itself as Nothing. If God—to be
holy and Wholly Other than beings—must be untouched, ungraspable, elusive, then
God’s identity is transcendence from this world (absence). ‘God’ might as well be
no God, the ‘dead God’ that Nietzsche’s madman saliently critiques (and no less
seeks).11 If this ‘God’ is bankrupt, where might one’s treasure be stored? How can
one praise the fire that disintegrates song, or pray to the air that carries away words?
How can this God be anything but a credit card on which to charge our convictions?
(God, save us from investing in ‘God!’)12
The dilemma resides in this accounting—insofar as the ‘exchange’ is one
of expected reward (endowed presence) and not risked love (un-calculated gift).13
Love as uncalculating, desiring while not requiring, wagers belief even in (because
of!) God’s absence. Faith in the Judeo-Christian God baffles economies of trust and
its notions of ‘wise investment.’ Yes, the holy must have about it a naked purity. It
10
Plato, Timaeus, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html (accessed online February 1, 2011).
Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Madman,” From Modernism to Postmodernism, ed. Lawrence Cahoone
(Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 116-117.
12
Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, trans. Oliver Davies (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 207.
13
“We should earn this possession of God by not being in possession of ourselves here on earth or of all
those things that are not him. The more perfect and naked this poverty, the greater this possession. We
should not intend this reward or have it in mind, nor should we direct our gaze at a possible gain or gift,
but we should be motivated solely by love of virtue.” (Ibid., 48).
11
11
must be considered immune, unscathed by human concepts, “Not requiring human
hands as if God had need of anything.”14 And yet, with every retreat away from us
(ascension), this God descends deeper (the Spirit’s descent). This is the Holy’s
movement, the claim if we can trace (trust) it:
The world cannot accept [God], because it neither sees him nor
knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be
in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before
long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me.
Because I live, you also will live.15
God reverses economy by binding creation in a love that exceeds the
created’s blindness. God’s love (and holy deposit) breaks accounts: both what eyes
accord through lips and what minds, apart from this spirit, might hoard. So what is
‘this spirit’ or deposit that posits a life to come, and sees it (somehow…) now?
After the ascension, the incarnation ushers in the sacramental descent of a
God who calls in words (scriptural revelation, prophecy) and inhabits material
forms (theophany through phenomena).16 This Holy is unafraid of the holes; its
kenosis pours a spirit in those who would receive. Christ claims this gift, when
received, is life. But certainly not all who are living see by this light or acknowledge
this way. So we return to a bind: we must treasure the gifted spirit, while
proclaiming its promise unfulfilled, to come. We must set free a gift we never truly
possessed as our own: it is a promise secretly told to us, that when told by us, loses
its secret. But does the secret shared soil or suspend the promise? The spirit,
radically interior, summons us as ambassadors,17 to clothe God, to serve as God’s
14
Acts 17:24-25.
John 14:17-19.
16
Romans 1-2.
17 nd
2 Corinthians 5:20.
15
12
extremities, so that others might “taste and see that the Lord is good.”18 And yet,
Christ proclaims that the world cannot see by appearances alone. It would seem that
the spirit, then, is at the center of the story, while yet in the aporias of our speech.
As Derrida reminds, in order for the ‘immune’ Holy to express itself as
such, it must both challenge and become complicit with the structures it employs.
God must be in the world (secular, immanent) but not of the world (sacred,
transcendent). But why even have these binaries track God’s movement? When we
say ‘secular, immanent,’—is there anything else? In imagination we can leap over
our own horizons of phenomenal perception, or theological constructions. But even
imagination is the combination of images from the world. How can we speak of
transcendence, when to speak is to render immanent? How then is faith not simply
the processing of images, or perpetuation of illusions conjured by beings? How
would one even begin to make distinctions between the sense and the soul, say, in
what Karl Rahner claims as utterly human— “sense-endowed spirituality.”19 For
Rahner, the senses are endowed upon the spirit, and revelation, as light spirit to the
sensory being.
These tangled questions intensified during my attendance at Andover
Newton’s ‘Summer Institute 2010’ (what I now affectionately call: the boiling
point). In this opportunity, sense and spirit met to enjoin worship and the arts. That
summer afforded an exceptional experiment, perhaps unique to the crucible of
seminary. As it happened, I was reading White’s survey of Christian worship while
18
Psalms 34:8.
Karl Rahner, Hearer of the Word, trans. Joseph Donceel, S.J. (New York: Continuum Publishing
Company, 1994), 107.
19
13
inundated with responses to onto-theology: Derrida’s qualified logocentrism,
Marion’s idol/icon distinction, Ricoeur’s place for second naïveté, and Levinas’
plea for an uncontaminated God.20
In their complex courtships with theological expression, these Continental
(a)theos-‘turning’ philosophers had inadvertently complicated worship.21 Just days
before the summons to sing, I paused before Heidegger’s conclusion, “Someone
who has experienced theology in his own roots, both the theology of the Christian
faith and that of philosophy, would today rather remain silent when speaking in the
realm of thinking.”22 Silenced thoughts: would this inevitably lead to silence in
other expressions about or to God? If for Heidegger, all our expressions about God
are too late and too soon—what would this mean for worship? If we must heap the
idol we have made of ‘God’ upon an altar, what would emerge from the ashes?
Where in this silent holocaust is the occasion for song?23
No one should have to mourn God’s absence in order to promptly (and
often inexplicably) encounter the surprise of God’s Presence. The reverse is at least
as jarring, as poet Ellen Hinsey writes, “That something from Without: which then
abandons/ The Within—fleeting presence, brutally followed by absence…”24
Jarring and incomprehensible as God may be, we feel the pulses of this pattern in
20
James F. White, Introduction to Christian Worship (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000). Peter Jonkers,
“God in France: Heidegger’s Legacy,” God in France: Eight Contemporary Thinkers on God (Leuven:
Peeters, 2005).
21
Dominique Janicaud, Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: the French Debate (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2000).
22
Heidegger as quoted in Jonkers, God in France, 26. Heidegger draws from Meister Eckhart’s “Sermon
28,” especially when Eckhart quotes Augustine: “The finest thing that we can say of God is to be silent
concerning him from the wisdom of inner riches.” (Eckhart, 236).
23
I think of Kafka’s parable “Couriers”—where all have elected to be messengers for the king, and there
are thus no kings: only a proliferation of couriers, of words without import. See Bryan Cheyette,
“Between Repulsion and Attraction: George Steiner’s Post-Holocaust Fiction,” Jewish Social Studies 5.3
(1999): 67-81.
24
Ellen Hinsey, “XVI. Meditation on the Unlanguageable Name of God,” The White Fire of Time
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 57.
14
the Biblical story: recession dances with abundance, every broken fall courts
covenantal promise.25 Formlessness gives way to fruitfulness, chaos to creation.
But in the interim: Noah floating amidst destruction, uncertain of future
life; Abraham ready to slaughter Isaac, unsure of God’s intervention; Moses and the
Israelites wandering, doubting divine providence. We turn with the psalms in their
strange voltas between “Where are you God?” and “I will praise the Lord!” Again
and again, primal as the change of seasons, riding every wintry dawn: the promise
of spring. All investments leading to the paschal mystery where God dies to
resurrect, divests to recollect. In the Son, the profundity of God’s absence and
anticipations of restored presence.
But how long will the world play God’s game of parousia peek-a-boo,
before we cry: Enough! No more hide and seek! Our nerves are thin, our suspicions
occluding; our doubts are stronger than our affirmations. All these existential
exercises, all our rehearsed anticipations in worship, are supposed to stretch us?26
Open us to receive God?27 Will GOD even show up? All God’s invitations are
obstacles! Fed up with flirtations, we want a lover’s touch. We crave God’s
Presence; but we also want the freedom of our privacy.28 God, You can touch my
life here. You may watch this performance. This and no more.
25
Hans Urs von Balthasar calls this “the creating wound. Heart of the World (San Francisco: St. Ignatius
Press, 1979), 153.
26
“That Word in the Scripture, in proclamation and sacrament keeps stretching us—seekers and ‘settled
believers’ alike.” Don E. Saliers, Worship Come to Its Senses (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 26.
27
I think of Calvin’s view of sacrament as religious exercise toward unity. “We are lifted up even to God
by the exercises of religion. What is the design of the preaching of the Word, the sacraments, the holy
assemblies, and the whole external government of the church, but that we may be united (conjugant) to
God” (White, 23).
28
For a creative and indicting elaboration of this theme: Von Balthasar, Heart, 91-144.
15
And then we read, “Come near to God and he will come near to
you…purify your hearts, you double-minded.”29 And we realize: we do not simply
occupy a stage, and God the audience. We do not solely occupy the world, and God
the heavens. We were meant to meet: in helix formation we face even as we chase
one another—reside in one another, in a dance that is both freedom and fidelity. In
infinite cycles of giving, we show up and weave around the absence. As T.S. Eliot
describes, there remains the space for a still point of covenantal love, around which
pivots the infinite dance of desire between flesh and fleshless:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor
towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.30
The “still point” glimpses in prayer and worship seem safe bets—nearly
presumed spaces for desire’s dance with the Divine. In these terrains, we confess
our emptiness in order to give; we trust God’s excess in order to receive. The act of
giving and receiving—of emptying to open, of inviting the excess—is perhaps most
conscious in worship. But how much longer before we admit our non-experience,
God’s suspicious absence? Will we have a desire to dance if there is in fact no
music? Will we soon frame our worship spaces, our memories, our prayers as exile,
the place of “no singing…no ringing single note…no echoing of space in space…no
calling along the lights”?31 And supposing we assume God’s absence from these
29
James 4:8.
T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets (Orlando: Harcourt, 1971), 15-16.
31
W.S. Merwin, “That Music,” Migrations: New and Selected Poems (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon
Press, 2007).
30
16
contact zones within time-space, how much longer will we presume traces of the
Divine in one another, in our world, in our historical narratives?32
Our questions of theophany are related to, though not contingent on, our
appearing before God. In turn, God’s appearing is not contingent on our empirical
categories. In other words, our appearing before God does not obligate God to
“appear” before us. And yet, as Jean-Yves Lacoste reminds, this does not diminish
the significance of our liturgical relation to God. Lacoste’s definition of liturgy is
not simply defined as worship service, but a broader way of being present before
God. What does this mean? Is it akin to Heidegger’s being that “dwells
poetically…stand[ing] in the presence of the gods…struck by the essential nearness
of things?”33 If this means a being as proximate to God as to things, then Lacoste
critiques that this acquaintance would be with an “immanent sacred…but not with a
transcendent God.”34 Immanence is the most any phenomenologist could presume.
But is there not a supra-phenomenal presence, marked by absence? As poet
Christian Wiman suggests, in the image of “a tree/ris[ing] kaleidoscopically”:
…as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close
to the pane as I could get
to watch that fitful, fluent spirit
that seemed a single being undefined
or countless beings of one mind
haul its strange cohesion
beyond the limits of my vision
over the house heavenwards.
Of course I knew those leaves were birds.
Of course that old tree stood
exactly as it had and would
32
See Emmanuel Levinas on perceiving God in the face of the other. Johan Goud, “The Extraordinary
Word: Emmanuel Levinas on God,” God in France, 96-118.
Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2000), 60.
34
Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans.
Mark Raferty-Skehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 18.
33
17
(but why should it seem fuller now?)
and though a man’s mind might endow
even a tree with some excess
of life to which a man seems witness,
that life is not the life of men.35
Here, the “excess” that appears is not entirely empirical. “Beyond the
limits of vision,” and yet somehow palpable, arrives this other “life to which a man
seems witness.” 36 At the seam of “seems,” appearance grips absence. The speaker
occupies the terrain of the “as if,”—here phenomenology meets hermeneutics.
Revelation is necessarily compromised by (and comprised of) the individual’s
reception, apprehension. Therefore, any claims to a mighty grip on God as
phenomenally revealed lapses into the recognition of the mind’s “perhaps…”--its
conditionals that “might” perceive correctly and might not. “Might [we] endow/
even a tree with some excess?” And is this excess not marked somehow by its
missing—as in a trace, a shadow?
If a particular speaker calls this ineffable fullness, this remarkable absence,
God—it is a God whose appearing is on the margins of experience. This marginal
space or borderland, for Lacoste, serves as the topos of the liturgical encounter or
“nonevent.”37 He employs the term nonevent, or inexperience, to convey the
admitted absence of conscious perceiving, the insufficiency of phenomenal
disclosure.
However, even though the liturgical encounter cannot equal the parousia
or Absolute appearance, the being-before-God brings all desire for the “parousiacal
35
Chris Wiman, “From a Window,” Every Riven Thing (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2010),
31.
36
See Lacoste’s phrasing of this phenomena, “We should also say, if liturgy manifests what is proper to
man, that being-before-God is fundamentally defined in terms of an exteriority more profound that
interiority…We will thus have to speak of the gift” (Experience, 157).
37
Ibid., 46-54.
18
presence.”38 And this desire seems to make meaning tremble, make phenomenal
disclosure move between what is and is not present. Therefore, the liturgical topos
requires a “dwelling at the limit”—in spaces of prayer and praise for example.
Created by words hurled to God, these terrains subvert our relation to the place of
earth, even as they provide a vantage point from which to radically engage the
world.39 At the intersecting horizons of the “here-I-am” empirical self and the “yetto-be” eschatological self, dasein neither dwells in the Holy Saturday aporia, nor the
Heideggerian Fourfold (geviert).40 That is to say, appearing before God opens up a
“liturgical field,” where one’s vulnerable exposition enables him to “live now in the
fulfillment of God’s promises to come. Man takes hold of what is most proper to
him when he chooses to encounter God….man says who he is most precisely when
he accepts an existence in the image of a God who has taken humiliation upon
himself—when he accepts a kenotic existence.”41 Thus, for Lacoste, the being
exposed to God and expressing God’s image marks both an absence and a presence,
as if a herald living her allusion.
Though Lacoste resists translating his liturgical phenomenology into the
details of worship, he does address how the inexperience of God affects prayer:
…the act of presence that constitutes prayer is accomplished after
Easter in the element of a knowledge that perhaps leaves room for
nonknowledge, but which is not endangered by this
nonknowledge. To know is not to understand, and it also belongs
to what we should know of God, for our knowledge to be
consistent, that God give rise to thought without it ever being
possible for its reflections on him to come to an end: he must
continue to elude our grasp.42
38
Ibid., 45.
Ibid., 42-44.
40
Ibid., 16-17.
41
Ibid., 194.
42
Ibid., 141 (the italics are mine).
39
19
If we are to worship what exceeds our grasp, this will require an
interaction that goes beyond reason’s grip.43 It will be an ongoing event of reaching,
desiring, not simply volleying between theological or philosophical alternatives.
Does church provide such a topos—where God is heralded, but not fully
experienced? We fool ourselves if we think that worship is the fullness of Divine
encounter; after all, rarely does anyone leave church with a profound case of
mysterium tremendum, white-haired and blinded.44 So why should any postEnlightenment society wish to attend church: if it cannot provide sound, sure
knowledge or immediately empirical affirmation? Or why should any disillusioned,
disheartened person attend a space that (from all appearances) might as well mark
God’s funeral?
At root, these are questions circuiting desire. How to keep open the space:
between full presence and mystery, between creator and created, between
significance and sign, between truth and its interpretations? Life’s surname is
desire; but how to live restless until we find rest in God,45 “still and still moving.”46
At stake in desire’s survival is not only an ethical openness to others,47 but our
appearing before a Love that is for our change, our becoming. In sum, how do the
respective wagers of theology, phenomenology, and the arts address the interplay
between infinite desire (predicated on an ever-absent Absolute) and desire for the
infinite (predicated on an ever-existent Absolute)? Each discipline has its wagers on
43
“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what’s a heaven for?...” Robert Browning,
“Andrea del Sarto: The Faultless Painter,” Selected Poems (New York: Penguin Group, 1989), 100.
44
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey, (London: Oxford University Press, 1958).
45
Augustine, Confessions I, i, trans. H. Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3.
46
T.S. Eliot, “East Coker: (iii),” Four Quartets, http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets (accessed online
December 1, 2010).
47
As in Emmanuel Levinas’ work, where our totalities are irrupted by the infinite, the divine traces we
experience in the face of the other.
20
what the Absolute might be—Love, Power, Pure Presence, Ultimate Meaning, the
Good Beyond Being… The Absolute wears many names, even Death, Silence,
Bottomless Chaos, Ultimate Absence. Where do these respective titles leave
phenomenal beings—whose appearance in the world is as much marked by limiting
finitudes as it is life’s fullness?
In the case of Lacoste’s phenomenology of liturgy, “appearance” before
the Divine Absolute is not simply a word for our “showing up” at church. And
while prayer—as an intimate exposure before God—does not require our definitive
knowledge, we must know enough to trust that “we are pray[ing] to God and not
mammon.” 48 So we are caught: wanting to give up assurance and wanting to
receive it. It is this confusion of how we give and what we should expect to receive
that Lacoste seeks to illuminate. He does so by marking the distinctions between the
soul’s apperception and conscious knowing.49
But how to relay the significance of these distinctions? How to discern
them on the ‘ground level’—in the worship space, in the world? Phenomenological
appearance as a metaphor of givenness is deeply connected to existence (being) and
ethics (acting): giving ourselves to the world’s perception and the calls of human
need. The concept and practice of givenness (giving forth as self-presentation,
giving up as self-abnegation) are not simply questions we can toss to philosophers,
or conceal in our occasional bouts of disbelief. At least, I could not do so while
attending a summer course on worship. It felt disingenuous. How could I “approach
48
This is Derrida’s point in suggesting the (unavoidable) apophantic character of apophatic theology,
made explicit by the pragmatics of prayer and praise. In this expression he has in mind PseudoDionysius. Qtd. in John Caputo, “Apostles of the Impossible: On God and the Gift in Derrida and
Marion,” God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 190.
49
Lacoste, 61-66.
21
the throne of grace with confidence” while uncertain that I would “find grace.”
50
Would I find anything at all? Could I even trust a “God” existed?
The theme of the summer worship course was, “God Surprising.” And I
anticipated that we would sing about the favorable surprises of God. Songs in the
key of Jeremiah 29:11 or Romans 8:28. God subverts circumstances, but “all things
work together for the good.” But would there be songs for my doubt? For my
confusion? Had our guest speaker and worship facilitator, John Bell, brought songs
to resound in the caverns of my emptiness, my unease?51 God surprises in
unfavorable ways, too. Delight in theophany lapses into the doubts of theodicy.
Sometimes God’s ‘surprises’ are untimely, unjust. After all, to sur-prise is to overtake, to grasp us unaware and indefensible. We may reason these unexpected grips
as necessary rebuke; but often, when troubling circumstances surprise us, we know
not how to interpret God. Our reason cannot wrestle us free. The holy can be
terrible, violent. And then our songs—if we find ourselves able to sing at all through
our baffled silence—more resemble complaint, lament.
On the eve of the Saturday workshop, I sat in my room, silent, baffled,
attempting to cram down the words of James F. White. Suddenly, an untimely
thought: Why do I go to worship? It is an act of faith, or at least intention, to show
up: to track God down, to tug on Christ’s garment until power goes out from him.
But why offer myself to worship, to the world, if I am broken, unsure? I watched
the lines of White’s text process. My mind kept returning to the question of silence
and sound, formlessness and form: emptiness and excess. And the empties seemed
50
Hebrews 4:16.
“There is a true sense in which we are in danger of seeing the depths of sorrow, anger and confusion
lost from our singing.” John Bell, The Singing Thing: A Case for Congregational Singing (Chicago: Gia
Publications, Inc., 2000), 26.
51
22
more real. Broken of expression, I felt like a paralytic watching Christ walk by—
curious, but unable to cry out. The altars of worship, the sacred spaces of creation
(not to mention my neighbors) ask me to present my offering, my life, and all I had
were my empties. “Help me overcome my unbelief!”52
I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me; I was found by those
who did not seek me.53 “God Surprising.” I attended the Institute. And surprise: God
showed up, too. Was it our songs that summoned God? Was it my desperation or
my attention? For even when my eyes were closed, my feet far from following, I
heard. My God, what have I heard in You?
John Bell believes that “songs have for long been the means whereby
people created or celebrated their identity.”54 And at the Institute’s closing course
session, Professor Ellen Oak reminded that song is not only created by people; it is
not only a celebration of human identity. Music creates and permeates the forms of
this world; it constructs its identity. Music, on a basic, physical level, is moving in
sound waves through us. It touches us, permeates us…in some way, creates us. The
worship of the cosmos penetrates and sings through us. All the world is on strings,
“fleshing out a meaning.”55 As the psalmist writes,
The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament
proclaims his handiwork…There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard; yet their voices goes out through all the
earth, and their words to the end of the world.56
52
Mark 9:24.
Isaiah 65:1.
54
Bell, 17.
55
Bell, 29.
56
Psalm 19: 1, 3-4.
53
23
If all the world and all time is vibrating with God’s song, not only are
we—as part of the world—invited to sing, we are called to listen. 57 This is my
attempt to not speak about God.58 This is my attempt to hear the song’s summons. 59
This is my “attempt to sing.”60 I will sing, loud as love and longing. Like the
“crazed flower [that] buds in the dark,’ I call out into the shadows: “Be the ax that
breaks this lock,/ the dew that weeps from trees/ if I become mute kissing your
thighs/ it’s that my heart is eagerly searching your flesh for a new dawning.”61 A
new dawn. Stillness. A quiet rumble. Listen.
57
“Of all the arts music opens itself to the greatest degree of participation and creativity.” (Bell, 75).
“How not to speak about God” is Lyotard’s contribution to the philosophy of religion (Jonkers, 29).
For its implications in worship, see Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God (Brewster: Paraclete Press,
2006).
59
As Dona Musica exclaims, “When you cannot take a step without finding on all sides barriers and deep
cuttings, when you can no longer use speech except for disputing, why not then take note that, across the
gulf, there is an unseen ocean at our disposal? He who can no longer speak let him sing!” Paul Claudel,
The Satin Slipper, trans. Fr. John O’Connor (New York: Sheed and Ward, [n.d.]), 137.
60
See Pierre Chavannes’ introduction in Paul Claudel, Three Poems of War, trans. Edward J. O’Brien
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), 9.
61
“Francisco X Alarcón. Poem from Of Dark Love,” The Poetry Foundation,
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=240070 (accessed online: October 21, 2010).
58
24
Chapter 3
The Strategies and Shortcomings of Illusion
If you live near a waterfall, after a week you’ll no longer hear its
rumble. In the same way, we have forgotten how to listen. The
spheres make music, but all we hear any more is ourselves and the
clatter of our own interests.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World62
The God who may be is a God who does exist and does enter
human experience, but without submitting to comprehension in
and through the concept of being, understood in its fully verbal or
active sense. Here, then, is the source of an inevitable polemic
against onto-theology on terms remarkably close to, of all
possible works, Jean-Luc Marion’s God without Being, where it
is also said that ‘‘God is, exists, and that is the least of
things’’…God without being It that is, without being ‘‘God,’’ or
more precisely God without having to be ‘‘God.’’
Jeffrey Bloechl, “Christianity and Possibility”63
Unavoidably, I had submerged Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology in the
context of worship (perhaps where he never intended it to go). Without knowing, I
had placed chaos in the center of creation. As Wittgenstein claims, “When you are
philosophizing, you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.”64
And so to steep philosophy’s chaos in the church’s worship seemed as precarious as
reverse genesis.65 Liturgy does, after all, take its cues from the singing of the world;
I was simply taking liturgy back to the murmurs of flurry, the buzzing of primeval
chaos.66 Would I find Levinas’ uncontaminated God there?
During the first session on Saturday, I arrived at Old South Church.
Immersed in bustling Boston, its building stands as a monument to historical
62
Von Balthasar, Heart, 96.
Jeffrey Bloechl, “Christianity and Possibility: On Kearney’s The God Who May Be,” Metaphilosophy
36.5 (October 2005).
64
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 65.
65
See Walter Brueggemann’s discussion of worship as world-making. Israel’s Praise (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1988).
66
Psalm 19. This song of creation to God (praise) contrasts the poetry of God to creation (prophecy), or
the questions God lodges at Job.
63
25
faithfulness, or at least institutional presence. We waited outside for someone to
open the doors. And perhaps because I waited awhile, I would carry the “outsider”
sensation with me. Though I was humbled by the beauty of the space, deeply moved
by the vibrant colors and the overlapping voices, I still felt disconnected. In a space
staged for Presence, I smiled dryly: We’ve enticed you now, God. Surely You are
here. …The truth concealed in my jest: I was withholding, feeling trapped by my
restlessness. The church felt empty as my heart, a trap lying without lure.67
And then the organ began, underscoring Nancy Taylor’s dramatic reading
of scripture. I found myself tracking the artistic choices of the organist, the colorful
inflections of the speaker’s voice. I listened as they then unpacked their methods of
worship planning. After enumerating her worship manifesto, Nancy summarized, “It
has to sing. Really sing.” At the time, I found this phrase disconcerting. I had
always heard it in an advertising environment. Was she really saying: “Our worship
has to hook people like a song. They have to buy into this gospel…”? Is the pastor
actually just a pied piper, whose music more resembles illusion than the reality
ahead?
I withheld. Maybe I misunderstood her phrase.
Several of my peers then asked variations on the theme of resources—as if
the source has to be re-served to be marketable. “I don’t have your organ, your
organist. Your building. Your staff. Your funding. What can I do in my church to
get people involved and excited?” I understood their concerns; but at root they
seemed questions of mimesis, not anamnesis. We were concerned with reproducing
67
I later happened upon R.S. Thomas’ “The Empty Church.” His sonnet sounds me even now. “They laid
this stone trap/ for him, enticing him with candles, as though he would come like some huge moth/ out of
the darkness to be there…He will not come any more/ to our lure. When, then, do I kneel still/ striking
my prayers on a stone heart?” Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Phoenix Press: London, 1995), 349.
26
worship techniques, rather than reconstituting our worship in ways that re-called
presence. Perhaps we echoed the concerns of the early disciples, who asked Jesus
what they must do to enter the Kingdom, to be first in the Kingdom. Christ’s
answers were always frustratingly simple. Love. Faithfulness. Simple, not easy.
I was hoping someone would summon Christ’s beatitudes: his subversion
of what we consider resourcefulness and blessing. At risk of sounding trite, I kept
quiet.
Nancy urged us to “give [our] congregants some credit…You don’t need
my resources. Congregants are smarter and more spiritually attentive than we
think.” And yet, she also spoke of distilling the sermon texts to a sound byte;
processing the worship service for attendees. Another marketing device. I was
unsure whether Christ should be a billboard or a catchy tune. When is adjustment to
the culture a compromise of form or content? Wide roads. Narrow words.
I thought again of Nancy Taylor’s comment (“make worship sing”) when
my more experienced peers repeatedly asked, “So how should we make worship
more hip? More attractive to young people?” These were real questions for them. I
do not mean to discount their inquiry; it is a considerate question. As a genuine
concern for people (not just numbers and demographics), it is a pertinent question.
And sure, I note a general religious indifference in my generation. But is church
something we market? If we package the Bible just right, if we acculturate the
church just so—something peppy, something hip, something old, something new,
something borrowed, something blue[sy]. (Sometimes I would prefer the question,
“What does our church communicate to people about the nature of God?”)
27
I assumed that their questions were of genuine concern for the apparent
“godlessness” of my generation. I finally responded, “The concern in your voice is
your answer. Love the people who come into your church. That will not only be
appealing; it will be compelling. Do not underestimate love; it is not a fad that will
attract temporarily. Love and hospitality have lasting significance; these qualities
will grow with young people as they grow. If the church is a place of genuine love
and hospitality, its members will never outgrow it. Nor will they ever be too young
to sense their place in the body.” Silence. My response came across as utter naïveté.
Could love’s transparency be enough? The question remained: how do we represent
this love in worship, so that it is transparency, not illusion?68
In an attempt to be transparent, many churches strive to be apparent; they
borrow from the terminology of marketing and sales. These considerations of ‘how
to contrive the gospel for a particular market’ unsettle me.69 Though the good news
should be proclaimed and embodied, the gospel is not an advertisement and Christ
is not a fix-all cure. The sacramentality of church is not for sale. If the church
becomes a product line, it is an illusion of “God,” not an allusion to what is often
Wholly Other and Ever Greater. When striving to fill a market niche, the church and
“God” become assertions of presence that cannot fulfill their promises—because
these promises are not of a dynamic God, but a ready-made deity that solves a
particular problem. We must not reduce God to marketing terminology: “you need
God; God will solve your messes and justify your selfishness. God gives and never
68
“The Church’s primary task therefore is, by constantly subjecting herself to self-criticism in the light of
the judgment of Christ, to make her structures as far as possible transparent to Christian love, so that the
Church as a whole may witness purely to God’s action in the world.” Hans Urs von Balthasar,
Engagement with God (San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press, 2004), 89.
69
See William Everett Johnson’s mention of Peter Berger’s influence on worship concerns in Politics of
Worship (Cleveland: United Church Press, 1999), 21.
28
has any claims on you. God is your toy, your pill, your one-night stand.” This is a
travesty of the resurrection and a trivializing of the cross. God participates in
mystery; God does not simply provide solutions.
Thus, God is better understood in the incongruent revelation of love than in
the economies of demand (as if God were in short supply). As Simone Weil writes,
“The language of the market place is not that of the nuptial chamber.”70 In our
attempts to bear forth the “secret word” of God’s love, what illusions do we risk
creating, what idols do our words promote?71 I was long down the path of these
thoughts when I encountered two surprises: one from without, and one from deep,
deep within.
The first surprise: as the day progressed, I found that in some ways, the
beautiful building of Old South Church was its proclamation. The contrasting
architecture and its historically rich spaces were an assertion of something Wholly
Other but wholly inviting. The building spoke of a God who asserts presence
without compromise: representing difference without complete indifference. The
church communicated a God starkly contrasted to the structures around Her; and
yet, a God who is imminent, not on an unreachable hillside outside the city. God
was a towering building that opened Her doors, even to me: impervious in its highly
recessed ceilings; penetrating it its hard-lined seams; and yet, whispering sweetly
through its stained-glass shards, like a lover calling from behind a curtain. God was
not a message marketed to a particular demographic, but One in whom I found
myself purchased and prized. My attendance and attention in the space was my
dowry.
70
71
Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1951), 79.
Weil, 80.
29
And then, surprise number two, an inconvenient question. To whom will I
give this dowry—God or “God?” Is all worship a sham: an illusion? A delusional
mantra we keep repeating, like children scared of the monsters under their bed?
Without invitation, Karl Marx appeared. Oh, Ashley, haven’t you heard:
[Religion] is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as
the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real
happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition
is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.72
If faith is simply an “opium of the people” to numb them from real pains, it
is no wonder that so many have wakened from their forgetting to agnosticism, only
to declare that worship has proved ineffectual.73 And then there are those that seem
addicted to God, to church; their tolerance peaking, they keep upping their intake.
And surely I had met some (been one) who had switched drugs from religion to art.
After all, did not Plato, like Marx, proclaim art as another means of
excusing oneself from responsible action? Plato viewed the mimetic arts as a
particularly inferior distraction. Look out liturgy, Plato’s accusation comes close to
home: the theater’s ability to stir emotions through sensory perception is inferior to
philosophic thought and ethical action. For Plato, theater is not only inferior, but
also deceptive. Requiring the lies of fiction, it can problematically deceive. This
deceptive quality—and its ability to shape audience—was utilized by the early
church fathers as justification for condemnation.74
72
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (New York: Press Syndicate of the University of
Cambridge, 1982), 131.
73
Or as Von Balthasar laments, “For the images of God and of the Church of Christ that circulate in the
world are so grotesque, that one can scarcely be surprised that there are so many vowed to atheism, so
many hostile to the church” (Engagement, 103).
74
Augustine agreed with Plato’s distrust when he asserts that emotional stirring in the theatre is “an
insidious form of self-indulgence; it relieves us of the need to act, and so feeds our passivity and
narcissism.” See Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1981), 54.
30
Some might say: pick your hallucinogen—art, religious worship—both
deliver us, distract us, from the eyesores of pain, the inconvenience of human
responsibility. Like Marx’s critique of religion, St. Augustine accuses that the
theatre is “an insidious form of self indulgences; it relieves us of the need to act, and
so feeds our passivity.”75 We might answer Augustine with a more favorable view
of art and performance: renaming escapism as “transcendence” and self-indulgence
as “self-reflection.” We could suggest the same to Marx, responding that religion
does not simply deaden a real pain with illusory solutions. Ideally, religion—if
attentive to God’s values of humility, justice, and mercy—exposes the deceits and
delusions behind injustice, and awakens us to respond.76 After all, worship, religion,
and art—for as much as they call us out of ourselves—can also equip us in the
ekstasis. In a sort of view from the aerial “velvet bridge,” transcendence provides a
heightened call toward radical immanence.77 As George Steiner, for example, writes
about the arts (it holds for worship and religious revelation):
“Aesthetics means embody concentrated, selective interactions
between the constraints of the observed and the boundless
possibilities of the imagined. Such formed intensity of sight and
speculative ordering is, always, a critique. It says that things
might be (have been, shall be) otherwise.”78
These interactions between constraints of form gesture toward “boundless
possibilities.” This is reminiscent of a sacrament—which exposes the infinite in the
finite—not as mere imaginative illusion, but as critique and call that recreates.
75
Qtd. in Todd E. Johnson and Dale Savidge, Performing the Sacred: Theology and Theatre in Dialogue
(Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Group, 2009), 33.
76
Micah 6:8.
77
“You ask me how to pray to someone who is not./ All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge/
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,/ Above landscapes the color of ripe gold/ Transformed
by a magic stopping of the sun.” Czeslaw Milosz, “On Prayer,” The Collected Poems, 1931-1987
(Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1988).
78
George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 11.
31
As a result of ‘being caught up’ in a sort of sacramental time or
transcendent mode, God returns us transfigured, vulnerable to God’s call, to
ourselves, and to our world.79 This exchange is what David Bentley Hart
characterizes as the “Christian use of the word ‘beauty’ [which] most properly
refers to a relationship of donation and transfiguration, a handing over and return of
the riches of being.”80 Hart’s notion of Christian beauty is the antidote to the
Marxist critique of religion—if this beauty is not for its own sake. Insofar as
Christian beauty is not mere abstraction but rather palpable presence (a pattern of
“donation and exchange”), it is not illusory.
Unfortunately, when many current connoisseurs of beauty examine
religious life, they find it compulsory and not compelling. They critique believers
with a suspicion that resembles Plato and St. Augustine’s critique of the mimetic
arts. Critics of religion generally launch the attacks of:
1)
deceptive duplicity: believers’ lives belie their beliefs, their
claimed values do not inform their interactions
2)
deadening deliverance: faith and worship relieve believers of
“real” responsibility
Beneath both of these concerns is a breakdown in beauty—the loss of
donation and transfiguration of being. Belief is impoverished: worship becomes a
79
See Hans Urs von Balthasar’s comments on what occurs in sacramental time. A Theology of History
(San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press, 1994), 86-87.
80
David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Wm.
B. Eerdman’s Publshing, Co., 2003), 18.
32
contrived experience; theology becomes prosaic and literal. The gospel is diluted,
and faith’s beauty seems banal.81
The accusation: the Christian life, the church community, exists as a
distracting illusion despite its commission to exist as transparent allusion.82
Ironically, against Plato and St. Augustine’s attacks, literary critic, Elaine Scarry,
claims that the arts better equip individuals toward beautiful action and ethical
engagement.83 The critique given by art is considered more authentic and inviting
because art is indirect and unapologetic about its difference from reality. Because it
does not claim to be reality, art serves as a contradicting question and imaginative
response to its context. Art is simultaneously query and response; it calls to us and
our attention to it is its answer. In this way, art has become more respected than the
idea of God. Because our arts attempt the feat of God’s creation (an excess poured
into finitude), beauty overflows to us, looking to occupy not only the spaces of our
senses, but to alter our perception on a more lasting level. Listen to me, I am already
speaking of art as so many have spoken of God.
Upon coming to Andover Newton Theological School, I realized that its
community is as vibrant spiritually as it is artistically. This has been a gift, but it has
also been a reversal of my faith tradition. Instead of the heedless certainty of
believers, I encountered an adamant fidelity to the arts. I found seminarians that
spoke more overtly—or at least more often—about art than they did about a Creator
God. And yet, I found these artists, and their spiritual expressions, to be deeply
81
I cannot help but see the overlaps between Peter Brook’s prognoses regarding the theatre world and my
own concerns about the church. Peter Brook, “The Deadly Theatre,” The Empty Space (New York:
Touchstone, 1968).
82
On the transparency of the church, see “Part Two: Our Involvement” (Von Balthasar, Engagement, 65106).
83
She makes this argument while referencing Augustine and Plato. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being
Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
33
theological. It is as though their arts were theological assertions that simultaneously
opened a space for listening, attentiveness. How had they achieved this?
My previous experiences in theatre have revealed the ability of forms to
provide a means of faithfulness and freedom. Diverse people came together, giving
their talents, dedication, and vulnerability to a script. We entered into its world,
gave ourselves permission to take risks, to play. We parented the project, committed
to one another and our audience. When collisions of ego or interpretation occurred,
the director and producer made a decision. Or, as in the case of theatre troupes, the
ensemble had built trust and grown through these issues. As is theologically
popular, we can enumerate the overlapping structures of theatre and worship.84 And
yet, so many flock not to church, but theatres, cinemas, concerts and museums. And
why? I do not think it is a matter of adjusting the church to resemble these places in
form alone. At least, not if the central concern is how these domains communicate
presence and establish community.
Can faithful worship, like artistic encounter, crack open its participants’
perspective? Ideally, art and belief give, not answer. They can give in the manner of
a calling question, a hunger that makes space for our sense of the Other (Divine,
human) and in turn begs our response (contemplation, action). Faithful worship and
artistic encounter can offer more than mere illusion. But the claims of art are
compelling; while in contrast, many have experienced the claims of faith as inert.
I write these words as an artist and one invested in the questions of
worship. Others I know have been burned or snubbed—or worse, desensitized—by
the church; so much so that they have found other means of experiencing
84
Richard D. McCall, Do This: Liturgy as Performance (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
2007), 82.
34
transcendence. They have found other encounters to deliver them from finitude. I
think of Jeanette Winterson’s discovery:
If truth is that which lasts, then art has proved truer than any other
human endeavour. What is certain is that pictures and poetry and
music are not only marks in time but marks through time, of their
own time and ours, not antique or historical, but living as they
ever did, exuberantly, untired.85
As a thought experiment: replace the word “art” with worship; “pictures”
with rituals; “poetry” with Scripture texts; and “music” with hymns. And lo: we
perceive the faithful witness of Winterson. And then the challenging reality: our
worship forms have escaped her confession. In some circles, the arts have taken the
place of worship’s connection in “that which lasts” and that which lives through
time. We may ask, “What is art that it should affect us so?” Art’s answer, as
reported by many, is, “I AM…. I am the muse of your ancestors.”
Winterson’s words could easily be the confession of my friends and
family—several of whom are patrons or professionals in the arts. My sister, Jennie,
for example recently expressed, “I don’t know about the whole church thing
anymore.” Her weariness was unmistakable. In the last year, her small church
community in Brooklyn decided to disband for various reasons. The members still
meet together for a monthly brunch, but all have taken up church shopping. My
sister and her husband, lay leaders of the former church, have discovered what
Jennie describes as, “The sense that worship is so contrived. It’s not a space that’s
open to ask the real questions, to ask the hard questions. It’s not open to honesty.
You know: it’s ‘Oh hi! How are you? How was your week? Are you coming to
Bible Study?’…” She rehearsed its script, unimpressed.
85
Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (New York: Random House, 1996),
iv.
35
I queried, “It feels like a facilitator of illusion? Or a preserver of
formalities--to a fault? Maybe it’s something of a production?” She nodded and
returned to what I thought was her Bible. (It was so thick, but was actually a
bestselling novel.)
Based on my own experiences of breaking into new communities of faith, I
understand her impressions. Worship services do not always encourage
vulnerability and risk. Or, at least, its modes do not always feel organic—as if it
were a stage where everyone knows their role, their lines, and no one steps outside.
Few people improvise. It can feel duplicitous. And it can be very exhausting. There
are several factors behind any experience of worship, but I honor the assertion of so
many: the church, its worship and its beliefs, have not made a case for forms that
free. Art has proved more sacramental, more unifying, more dialogue-driven. It
appears to have more substance than illusion, ironically because it leaves more
spaces for imagination. It operates in interchange between absence and presence: its
difference is its grace, its inconvenient, unsettling sacrality.
Writer and critic Salman Rushdie signaled the turn from religion to the arts
as a source of meaning. In a now notorious essay, Rushdie pointedly asks from his
title forward, “Is Nothing Sacred?” Rushdie’s compelling, if not Nietzschean,
answer is that in the realm of sacredness, religion has died and art is its next-of-kin
inheritor.86 He suggests that the fictive quality of art and literature better serves the
spiritual quest for unconquerable truth. For Rushdie as for Picasso, art is a lie in the
service of an unconquerable truth. In contrast, Rushdie identifies religion as art’s
86
“It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a
secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of
faith.” Salman Rushdie, “Is Nothing Sacred?,” Writing the Essay – Art in the World – The World through
Art, ed. Pat C. Hoy et al. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2003), 309.
36
inverse: truth whose conquering mentality exposes its lie. At least artists admit their
lies; their arts wear incompletion, différence, intentionally. And art’s use of
difference is not concerned with condemning what is other, but contrasting what is
other through choices that both participate in and reconstitute reality. The
difference, once actualized in the artwork and acknowledged in its viewer/audience,
reshapes truth through what it reveals and what it conceals.87 Art plays by the rule
of Thomas Aquinas, “We must love them both—those whose opinions we share and
those whose opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth, and
both have helped us in the finding of it.”88 Thus, even art’s illusion is an allusion to
what is shared with the world; and its “lies” are not always misleading, but rather
invite our search.
In Rushdie’s schema, absolute truth is an absolute lie insofar as it reveals a
knowable end to the search instead of the dynamic revelations of dialogue, desire.89 The
claim art has for Rushdie is one of faithful love, whereas the believer’s claim
manifests as forceful devotion:
Love can lead to devotion, but the devotion of the lover is unlike
that of the True Believer in that it is not militant….I may very well
attempt to change your mind; but I will finally accept that your
tastes, your loves, are your business and not mine. The True
Believer knows no such restraints…He will seek to convert you,
even by force, and if he cannot he will, at the very least, despise you
for your unbelief.90
87
And thus do our ‘secular arts’ better serve as liturgical arts—in White’s definition: “Liturgical art has
to use the objects of this world to represent the immaterial. But when painting and sculpture simply
reflect naturalistic reproductions of the appearance of persons or objects, they fail to penetrate beneath
the surface, not matte how skillful the artist.” (White, 104).
88
Quoted. in Vernon Rutland’s Imagining the Sacred: Soundings in World Religions (Maryknoll: Orbis
Books, 1998), 263.
89
“The elevation of the quest for the Grail over the Grail itself, the acceptance that all that is solid has
melted into air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from
which fiction begins…The challenge of literature is to start from this point and still find a way of
fulfilling our unaltered spiritual requirements.” (Rushdie, 310).
90
Rushdie, 303.
37
This criticism cannot simply be discarded as an embittered attack on
fundamentalists. In fact, Rushdie is channeling the conversation of mysticism, and
more broadly the impetus for theological aesthetics. Granted, Rushdie’s portrayal of
religion does not account for its mystical and more nuanced strains; he is tragically
aware of the violent literalism of religion. He has witnessed the extreme overasserting of believers, who stand more like impenetrable monuments than bridges to
the Divine. In some sacramental sense, Rushdie has found the arts more spiritually
charged than his encounters with the religious.
Even current missiologists within the Christian tradition have been
critiquing Christian assertions. As opposed to evangelism that is an allusion to
Divine love, Bryan Stone has noted in his book, Evangelism After Christendom, that
“the very notion of evangelizing is automatically connected to an attitude of
intolerance and superiority toward others—a belligerent and one-sided attempt to
convert others to our way of seeing things”91 Stone goes on to suggest that
evangelists and apologists must no longer consider themselves as inviting others to
their sacred beliefs. For Stone, evangelism must not be an invitation, but a
summons, and therefore, “a Christian apologetics may very well have more to do
with aesthetics, since, in declining every ‘secure’ foundation for belief other than
Jesus Christ, evangelism relies from first to last on the beauty of holiness made real
in the church by the operation of the Holy Spirit.” 92
According to Stone, if the gospel is to be more than illusion, the church
must render its holiness as beautiful. Ideally, the Christian life, as it bears fruit,
91
Bryan Stone, Evangelism after Christendom: The Theology and Practice of Christian Witness (Grand
Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006). I do not know the page number on which this is located. It is in an
introduction draft that the author sent. See also his site: http://people.bu.edu/bpstone/evangelism.html
(accessed online: February 15, 2010).
92
Bryan Stone, “Introduction,” Evangelism.
38
provides an aesthetic encounter of Christ’s likeness. Fruitfulness, in order to be an
allusion to the source, cannot be an illusion of sustenance, with God as an idol
standing in for our own agendas. God calls for a dialogue, an exchange between the
forms of faith (confessions, embodiment) into the space of love and listening. This
exchange is dynamic, multi-faceted; it is not the dead-end and bottoming out of an
illusion. It is the fullness of metaphorical allusion—which values both the
experienced and the imperceptible as referents because they are covenanted in
ongoing exchanges of meaning.93 Contrastingly, there is nothing ultimately glorious
or plentiful about illusion. Its shimmer fades to whimper.
Thus, we would do well to heed the Theopoetic diagnosis of Amos Wilder:
“The church today has widely lost and all but forgotten the experience of glory
which lies at the heart of Christianity….That the plenitude is so widely smothered in
the creaturely condition only enforces the special and irreplaceable role of religion
in witnessing to it.”94 According to Wilder, the church has been its own smothering
threat to receptivity. It has neglected the experience of glory, has left unanswered
the thirst for excess, and consequently has been unable to summon others in its
witness.
Glory and plenitude combine in the concept of transcendence. But it seems
so many potential contact zones for transcendence have been under attack—and not
just by Protestant literalism.95 Deconstructionist tendencies have picked apart
93
See Everett’s definition of metaphor that resembles sacrament, “Metaphors are words or concepts that
use a familiar meaning to help us grasp a less familiar or necessarily hidden reality” (Politics, 31).
94
Amos Wilder, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1973), 8.
95
“Our Protestant population has indeed had its own forms of ceremonial expression and its own
imaginative piety. But these have been so sober that they have often failed to satisfy the human need for
celebration and spontaneity…[And] in some legacies of American Protestantism, reason shaped faith at
the expense of more vital and plastic expression….some will still recall the powerful voice of John R.
39
articulations—artistic and theological. And yes, the church joins the game,
attempting to expose the inherent contradictions and blind-spots of any structure
that counters her own. While the church’s claims on transcendence may critique the
culture’s methods, none can ignore the impulse (or imprisonment) that all share: a
wager on the metaphysical, the desire to express that inherently risks otherness. As
Derrida asks, “Is not the idea of knowledge and of the theory of knowledge in itself
metaphysical?”96 Literary critic George Steiner would respond: yes.97 And thus, he
laments the skeptical philosophy undergirding deconstructionist impulses:
Scepticism has queried the deed of semantic trust. Sceptic
philosophies have ironized, have sought to negate altogether, the
correspondence between human discourse and the ‘reality’ of
correspondence of the world. A veil of illusion and unknowing
cuts us off from any possible cognition let alone valid enunciation
of objective truths and relations, even if the latter existed.98
He worries that in a “fully consequent scepticism” language itself will
become a “shadow system”: internalized and disconnected with what is other.99
George Steiner, on behalf of the arts and humanities, prophesies the world of the
post-Logos. He hearkens us to real presences in the midst of our claims of “real
absence.”100 He does so by revealing the mutual risks shared by artistry and faith: an
artist’s mediation between form and space, between presence and absence. My
desire to distill dilutes when I recall my engagement with a painting, more still with
a person. Experienced forms exceed expression’s space. And yet, the inexpressible
Mott. He began his typical address to his great audience with the words: ‘Christianity first and last is a
matter of the Will!’” (Wilder, 42-43). His critique perhaps suggests some connection between literary
deconstructionism and Protestant iconoclasts. Current philosophy is as much a response to the
inadequacies of the Enlightenment as it is a product of the Protestant iconoclasms (which eventually
aligned with Enlightenment agendas). Postmodernism is not entirely post-modern.
96
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. by D.B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1973), 5.
97
Steiner, Real Presences.
98
Ibid., 91.
99
Ibid., 91.
100
Ibid., 96.
40
risks itself to be engaged. This ability to risk expression while acknowledging its
deficiency—to give self and admit a space for what exceeds—is a practice found in
the arts and in faith. Thus, over against skeptical remove, Steiner calls for the
recognition of sacramentality: a finite form bearing infinite expression. He is not
calling for the protean self. Over against limitless plurality, Steiner suggests the
fullness of art, which pares itself to finite forms in order to give itself to infinite
interpretation.101
Ultimately the radical clearing of deconstruction proves problematic. As an
academic discipline, deconstruction is necessary: it creates a space for critical entry;
it grants the spaciousness of questions; it reintegrates voices once excluded. And
yet, at a certain extreme the openness is an illusion to cover its annihilation. Without
boundaries and without ground, the space cleared is an infertile womb, where no
one (human or god) can claim habitation. Methodological deconstruction exposes
the questions behind all answers until the questions are met with silence. As such it
is a polarity that wraps around, converging into a chaotic proliferation of more
questions. The genetic and the static court one another, and we become children of
illusion, waiting to be realized in their meeting.
Deconstruction has come to admit the shadows of construction. If not
Marion’s hyper-ousia (infinite overflowing the finite, intuition exceeding intention),
Derrida at least grants the hypo-ousia: a love, a justice, a meaning yet to come,
always “on the way.”102 And so we find ourselves, the finite tasting infinite,
wrestling with their illusions. We neither wish to fall for the illusion of Marion’s
101
Ibid., 99.
Jacques Derrida as quoted in John Caputo, “Apostles of the Impossible: On God and the Gift in
Derrida and Marion,” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1999).
102
41
idol (where the infinite is reduced to the finite, intuition equating intention), nor the
insufficiency of Derrida’s deferral. It is these illusions that our worship, our arts,
and our theology strive to illuminate. As allusions, these mediums are as much a
gesture toward a believed otherness as a mark of its elusive presence. They seek to
reveal and enact the conversation between that which recedes (hypo) and that which
exceeds (hyper) expression.
Covenanted in all matter is our understanding of the immaterial; as if to
know or perceive anything in its dimensionality, we must distinguish the negative
space and positive givenneness of form. As Paul Claudel expresses:
Matter is characterized by being that which is not, for mere
movement is not more than transition. But transition is obedience.
Obedience implies resistance and resistance implies composition.
But composition implies form, and form in every way implies
avowal just as a frown implies a face. Multiplicity, which seems
to rule out unity, succeeds only in reshaping it. For survival or for
persistence in a state of negation, there must be some sort of
rhythm; there must be a law, which is a written and signed
confession.103
These words by Paul Claudel might seem oppressive—words such as
obedience, avowal, law, confession, unity. (This is the rhetoric of religious
dogmatism!) But here, Claudel reminds that these words of fidelity are implicated in
our concepts of movement and rhythm, resistance and transition. We explore this
exchange in our creative acts: whether it be making or performing art, interpreting
scripture into our living, or bringing together the body of believers in worship.
Recently, scholars, artists and religious leaders have called the bluff of
methodological deconstructionism. If deconstruction resists its own structures, its
103
Paul Claudel, “Evil Before Original Sin,” The Essence of the Bible (New York: Philosophical Library,
Inc., 1957), 111.
42
aporias become a free-for-all.104 If methodologically structured, deconstruction
founders in its hypocrisy; and thus its questions have struggled to sustain (while
resisting) the creativity necessary for its presence.105 Our statements of apophatic
spaciousness are yet forms (if even “under erasure”).106 Even extreme formlessness
borders on chaos, which in turn beckons creative delineations. Deconstruction’s
parasitic activity preys upon that which it needs for its own livelihood. As
commensalism will always outlast parasitism, reconstruction arrives—expression
sustains—despite deconstructive maneuvers. The necessity of ‘calling into question’
must share its livelihood with the desire to re-call, respond.
All form and expression, all matter and immateriality, is bound by
anamnesis: by the beckoning of our memory and our bodily members. And thus we
sense, deep in our being, the patterns of the Eucharist. Even though we take forms
from without and break them from within, we somehow cannot resist the impulse to
bless and give: to express, to create, to wrestle angels for our naming. So how can
we grant a space for the risk of questions and response, while permitting a level of
functional stability and trust? How can we grant both the negative space created by
deconstruction and the positive forms of expression? Surely they rely on one
another in order for any concept to be experienced in all its dimensionality?
104
Rodolophe Gasche, “Infrastructures and Systematicity,” Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John
Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 3-4.
105
“It follows that, almost alone among cognitive-aesthetic movements and strategies of interpretation,
deconstruction neither champions any body of past literature or art, not does it act as vanguard or
advocate for any contemporary or incipient school.” (Steiner, 117).
106
Jacques Derrida, “Letter to A Japanese Friend,” Derrida and Différance, ed. David Wood and Robert
Benasconi (Warwick: Parousia, 1985), 3.
43
Chapter 4
Exhibit: The Parable of the Three Canvases
Art and Theology stumbled upon one another at the museum. Art had been
standing, poised in front of a blank canvas. Theology struggled to speak. He hadn’t
seen Art in years, and their divorce was not exactly amicable. Before Theology
could edge out a greeting, Art addressed him with a smile, cryptic as the Mona Lisa.
She kept her gaze ahead, and smirking to conceal her pleasure, she asked, “What are
YOU doing here?”
“Fancy meeting you here—” Theology began.
ART: Oh, cut it out. You knew I’d be here. Is our daughter with
you?
THEOLOGY: No, really, I had no idea. Of all the exhibits, you
decide to come to ‘Three Canvases of Creation?’ Really. I…Is our
son with you?
ART: Oh, Worship, he’s in the courtyard. Wanted to sit in the sun
for bit.
THEOLOGY: I see, well, Sacrament is in the gift
shop…So…er…um, what do you think of this exhibit? (He
gestures to the three paintings, spread wide across the wall before
them. From left to right we see three canvases: VOID, CHAOS,
GENESIS).
ART: (Silence. Then Art turns again to the blank canvas.) This
one here is called, VOID. Wonderful use of negative space.
THEOLOGY: Yes, very…apophatic. A bit mystic. How
elusive…(He draws near to the canvas, so near that the room
attendant, Politic, rushes over.)
POLITIC: Ah ah ah… You mustn’t get too close. These paintings
aren’t made to last you know…Lovely painting isn’t it? Very
freeing. I think it should be called utopia. Do you see what I
mean?
ART: (Smiling, she looks at Theology then back at Politic). I can
see why you’d say that. (Then pointing to the next canvas, a
Pollock-like flurry of textures and colors, she announces:) This
44
one is entitled CHAOS. It seems to be an abuse of positive space,
to where I can hardly see the negative space. It seems so…
POLITIC: (Offers) Abusive…Imperialistic? Or perhaps…
anarchic? Pah! (Self-importantly) Democratic!!
THEOLOGY: …The prioritizing of positive space. Positivism.
An excess of evangelism. All these distinct lines, running into one
another, separate still. Sectarian maybe? Kataphatic to the
extreme?
ART: Yes, I think you’re right. The positive space is too much. It
borders on becoming just another negative space—but darker.
Sacrament and Worship, having found one another
apparently, run in to the gallery. Sacrament has been chasing
Worship playfully. Sacrament looks more like her mother (Art),
though she has the speech patterns of her father (Theology). In
contrast, Worship looks more like his father (Theology), but has
the mannerisms of his mother (Art). As the children tumble in,
racing, POLITIC shouts, waving his warnings.
POLITIC: Uh uh…no. Absolutely not. No running. You two
needn’t even be here…stop this at once! You will have to leave if
you cannot make yourselves less conspicuous. Be quiet and stay
over in that corner.
THEOLOGY: It’s okay, sir. This is my child.
ART: Yes, these are our children: Worship lives with me.
Sacrament lives with her father, my ex-husband, Theology.
POLITIC: I see. Well. (Recovering himself, compensating and
soft). Nice to meet you both. SO what do you think, little girl, of
these paintings here? We’ve looked at the VOID and CHAOS set
so far.
SACRAMENT: (Pointing at VOID) Invisibility. Infinitude.
POLITIC: (To Theology and Art) A bit precocious isn’t she? (And
now asking Worship) And you, little boy, what do you think?
WORSHIP: Absence. Puritans. Zwingli. Maybe influenced by
your exhibit last year… you know that strange one called
“QUAKERS.”
45
Art laughs; Theology shoots her a glance. She takes
Worship to the next painting: CHAOS. All narrow in on the
painting.
THEOLOGY: And what, Worship, do you see in this?
WORSHIP: Presence. So many rituals. So much form. So many
things going on at once. What is it supposed to be? Who is it
addressing?
SACRAMENT: It’s the visible. The finite. Though, there are so
many lines overlapping. So much visibility. I don’t think it’s
respecting the invisible. It’s crowding it out. Don’t you think so,
Daddy?
THEOLOGY: Well, I myself found it a bit much. But I wanted to
know what was behind all the choices first…all these lines and
spots, what do they mean?
ART: Perhaps it’s intentionally random.
THEOLOGY: Intentionally random?
ART: Yes, as in…the forms seem without origin. Without any
connection to predecessors, or without claim on other forms.
Totally immediate, unmediated. Novelty at the expense of what
influenced, contextualized, or preceded it…
WORSHIP: (Interrupting) Protestants!...Postmoderns!!
POLITIC: (Overlapping) REVOLUTIONARIES!
THEOLOGY: (Steering) But can a form really come from
nothingness? I mean, aside from the incident in the book of
Genesis…is true novelty possible? Is immediacy between
otherness and expression achievable?
ART: Well, my friend T.S. Eliot says in Tradition and the
Individual Talent…107
THEOLOGY: (Adamant. Perhaps jealous.) Not him again! I
thought you promised…
107
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: 7th
edition, vol. 2, ed. M.H. Abrams et al. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2000), 2395 –
2401.
46
ART: (Frustrated. Escalating.) Well then, what about our mutual
friend, Thomas Merton? In Answers on Art and Freedom,108 he…
POLITIC: Now, now, do I need to mediate here?
WORSHIP AND SACRAMENT: Everyone look!!
In the movement of their argument, they find themselves
in front of the last canvas: GENESIS. It is a mirror framed by a
canvas. On the canvas frame is a pattern that makes use of line
and color; it is a dance of the preceding canvas designs. Above
the mirror is a great light, which given the relative darkness of the
gallery, highlights their faces in exchanges of light and shadow.
In the mirror they see themselves and the room, a dialogue of
colors, lines, form, space.
ART: It’s so dimensional. Almost supra-dimensional. Or the
joining of multiple dimensions. The way the forms and space
interact. Inseparable from one another. The shadows and the light
kissing, but so distinctly separate. An intercourse of form and
space. It’s…It’s…beauty. It’s creation!
THEOLOGY: It’s…It’s…us. I see our likeness. The likeness of
God.
POLITIC: It’s Government. It’s peace. It’s…Shalom. (This word
surprises, eliciting a knowing glance and kind smile from
Theology).
WORSHIP: Is it Unitarian Universalist? Is it Episcopalian? Is it
Catholic? Is it… Is it?? Wait: it’s all of us! Held together by this
frame. One canvas. One body. Surrounded by this…this…help me
explain, Sacrament, you know what I mean?
SACRAMENT: It’s the finite bearing the weight of the infinite.
It’s the joining of absence and presence. It’s all of us. It’s God
with us.
ART: In the dance between chaos and void, between form and
space, darkness and light, presence and absence: dimension,
creation. The contours of the Divine. God’s shadow inside our
own selves.
THEOLOGY: (Enamored with her words). My darling—Yes.
108
Thomas Merton, “Answers on Art and Freedom,” The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton (New York:
New Directions Publishing Corporation,1980).
47
POLITIC: In the economy of a presence asserted and a freedom
permitted. A Divine Kingdom.
SACRAMENT: A Divine Incarnate.
109
WORSHIP: A song.
…And if the song is sung truly,
THEOLOGY:
from the whole heart, everything
at last vanishes: nothing is left
POLITIC:
but space…
ART:
…the stars…
SACRAMENT:
the singer.109
Osip Mandelstam, “Poison in the bread,” The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence
Brown and W.S. Merwin (New York: The New York Review of Books, 1975), 6.
48
Chapter 5
The Experience and Expression of Allusion (Recovering Asymmetry)
…the whole of Creation, from one point in time to the next [is]
pregnant with meaning; the writer’s pen animates all its scattered
words by linking them together and giving them meaning. A
sentence is made, so to speak, of transient words which give up or
bequeath their particular values to the sentence and become more
than the substance of its form. But God is more than a
grammarian; He is an artist; He is a poet skilled in all the
resources of discourse…
Paul Claudel, The Essence of the Bible110
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls for him off under his feet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Hurrahing in Harvest”111
We could consider all doubts as annulled by faith. But a cursory, “Just
have faith. See the unseen” requires elaboration—and most likely of the experiential
(rather than explicitly didactic) sort. It will require new ways of “beholding”—eyes
with “wings” to see the “more than,” while remaining rooted in the “particular
values” of “the whole of Creation.” In other words, it will require an asymmetrical
“discourse”: a shining-through (epiphany) or transgression of bounds (luminosity)
that subverts our notions of whole and part by permitting difference via relation.
The first obstacle: a world dulled to aesthetic epiphany has no place for
theophany. In the accounts of Scripture, when the righteous meet God—in Her
providence, Her messengers, Her Son—they respond: some wrestle, some stutter,
some gasp, some argue, some plead, some praise. But when the unrighteous come
upon the glory of God, their hearts are hardened, their minds are darkened. Their
110
Paul Claudel, “My First Love: the Bible,” The Essence of the Bible, 14.
Gerard Manley Hopkins “Hurrahing in Harvest,” Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 3rd edition, ed.
Helen Gardner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 75.
111
49
spiritual senses disengage—they become “senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.”
112
They become as inanimate as their idols, as abstract as the ideologies to which they
submit, because they no longer sense the real presence in form.
Thus the prophets bemoan the ears that do not hear and the eyes that do not
see;113 Paul laments the mind that is desensitized. This is a matter for the senses—
the intercoursing cooperation of body and spirit. Insofar as consciousness is
covenanted to sensation, we are all (wholly and universally) implicated.114 Thus, we
must not let the worn phrase, “Just have faith,” fool us. The “Death of God” and the
“Illusion of Religion” are not only salient critiques for the faithful. As George
Steiner reminds, all caught in the web of representation fall under a similar risk:
The wager on meaning of meaning, on the potential of insight and
response when one human voice addresses another, when we
come face to face with the text and work of art or music, which is
say when we encounter the other in its condition of freedom, is a
wager on transcendence.115
In fact, everyone gambles: all place their wagers on form. We deal in the
understanding that experience requires an exchange of forms internal and external,
material and immaterial. To disentangle the desire to believe from the desire to
experience is a detriment not only to faith and art, but to love and community.
Therefore Steiner’s case for encountering the other (Real Presences) is rooted not
only in language but also in love. Living up to his training in philology, he unites
communication (logos) with friendship (philia), community with the impulse to
112
Romans 1:18-32.
Isaiah 42:20, Jeremiah 5:21, Lamentations 3:56, Ezekiel 12:2.
114
Hence, the significance of Don E. Saliers. Worship Come to Its Senses (Nashville: Abingdon Press,
1996).
115
Steiner, 4.
113
50
love.116 Together, these reaches toward otherness, the choice to explore another’s
freedom, to momentarily transcend in order to return—all found our artistic,
theological, and liturgical expressions. In Steiner’s scheme, to undercut one of these
modes of expression is to endanger the others. Hence, his discomfort with the
antinomian tradition that manifests in the mistrust of language and indiscriminate
deconstruction. It is as if Steiner has met an Iconoclasm all grown up. He warns us
of a spirit that is no longer content to attack images, but all semiotics and perhaps
all structures. How do we fare in the spirit of an age that prizes suspicion and fear
over risk and faith, over hospitable love?
We do acknowledge that words and images have been abused—that the
structures and institutions of this world have over-asserted their force in atrocious
ways. However, it would be mistaken to ignore the forms that have made possible
our freedoms, our expressions of love, our art, and our ethical action (for every
choice is an avowal to form). We must not pull the wheat with the tares, right? But
how can we develop discernment?
The difficulty arrives when we deal with the forms that not only take up
space, but leave no room. We have witnessed these weeds: when the brute force
silences the possibility of human freedom; when a human is appraised not by their
infinite mystery, but by a limiting bias; when the expression is an end of dialogue
and not its opening; when the illusion’s smoke clears and there are no allusions to
pulse us onward. These tares choke at growth, and are determined to loom larger
than our strivings. And thus, there are crops where art and transcendence have little
116
In this association, he is ironically not far from the lips of famed deconstructionist, Jacques Derrida.
Granted, when Derrida affirms this link, he does so in a particular homage to his friend, Emmanuel
Levinas who wrote in Totality and Infinity, “The essence of language is goodness…[and also] the
essence of language is friendship and hospitality.” Jacques Derrida, “Adieu,” Adieu to Levinas (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1989), 51.
51
choice but to wrangle against and grow, or wither under and suffer. For art, like our
very being, flourishes when freedoms are insured by forms and not prohibited by
them.
Therefore, when Steiner defines art, it is in the language of freedoms
cultivated, secured; of forms irreconcilable but pulsing, growing together to reach
out and up. In short: he defines art as so many have defined sacrament. He claims
that art is “the maximalization of semantic incommensurability in respect of the
formal means of expression. Here an object, the description of whose formal
components can be finite, demands and produces infinite response.”117 Both
theology and art believe that the infinite (Divine encounter, human experience) can
bear forth in finite forms (sacraments, rituals, art objects).
Because of the semantic incommensurability, the essential difference
between sign and signifier, intention and interpretation, our arts notate call and
response: a dialogue of forms, mediating between experienced world and fellow
humans, between the artist’s experience and audience response. Thus, it is no
surprise that our earliest arts were sacred, calling and responding to gods in the
shared language of creation.118 For undergirding the world’s forms is the imitation
of the very first Call, whose response was our Being.119
George Steiner thus holds up the arts as a means for communication with
God and communion with one another.120 Against deconstructionist dismantling,
117
Steiner, 83.
Gerard van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006).
119
Again, see Chrétien’s Hand to Hand and Call and Response.
120
“It is in the perspective of death—how can we die, how are we able to?—that Western consciousness
has spoken, has sung its realizations of love and of caritas. A ‘high seriousness’ of questioning and
immateriality, in the true sense of that most radical word, inhabits what we recognize as lasting in the
acts of art and in our readings of them….Its is the Hebraic intuition that God is capable of all speech-acts
118
52
Steiner posits that the sacramental nature of expression liberates the possibilities of
meeting. As in our brushes with divinity, forms call us out of the boundaries of self
to shared experience and exchanged meaning. He writes:
Theology and speculative metaphysics engage the possibilities of
meeting or of non-meeting with the ‘other’ in its transcendent
guise. The second analogy is that of the erotic, of our meeting or
refusal of meeting with the other in the incidence of love (or of
hatred). Analogously, the reception or denial of the aesthetic
presence engages an exchange of liberties, liberties given and
taken.121
While these parallels of exchange are related, we need not claim their
sameness (hence Steiner’s word, analogy). Though they rightly operate on the
premise of forms bearing what transcends them, love, art, and theology have unique
claims. They each depend on giving and receiving, of freedom and form. But in art,
the art object cannot love us, and thus it cannot rightfully ask us for ourselves; art
cannot desire us. It may ask our thoughts, our emotions, our talents, our
interpretations, it may even beg our transformation. But art, does not (should not)
ask for our very being. So, too, lovers have their claims on one another, their
covenant of understanding that makes possible their love. But the lover who desires
to consume her partner—to own the other and erase difference—is no lover at all,
but a narcissist.122 Love neither consumes nor subsumes.
But in the case of God as Loving Creator—we have a blurring of
consummation and desire: because we are both God’s art and the receivers of God’s
love. Though art has a compelling claim upon its beholder, an art object’s claim is
except that of monologue which has generated our arts of reply, of questioning and counter-creation”
(Steiner, 224-225).
121
Steiner, 154.
122
This approaches the wider critique of Luce Irigaray and what she perceives to be the detrimental
phallocentrism of our age, also called the illusion of “sameness.” For example, see her critique of
mimesis in “Plato’s Hystera,” Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1985).
53
uniquely felt by its maker. And the art, in turn, has been uniquely claimed in its
making—if an act of love by the artist. Thus, the created have claims on one another
that are unique; but the shared covenant between the Creator God and created
humans is exceptional. What makes this exceptional is that God initiated creation. It
was not a response of mimesis (like our arts) or anamnesis (like our worship). God’s
Word was the originating love that melded art and worship in order to create the
world. As Creator, God’s prerogative in revelation, and in love, is singular—an
initiation that necessarily precedes and exceeds, like a womb. God’s prerogative is
to unite life and love in creation—which serve as modes of allusion to God as Giver.
Supposing we believe the rumor of God’s finitude, eliminating the source
and end of our allusions: will we discover that God’s art (the world and its various
species) becomes more highly valued (as if God’s art is posthumously popular)? If
our words diagnose God as dead, we claim that God is a non-word. God is “God.”
We can hold in quotes, like hands, our convictions, cupping either side as if God
were an object. Then God is entirely maluable, inevitably dispensable. We can
excommunicate God from any claims on our living, any part in our exchanges of
expression--which ironically were God’s own gifts to us.123 If God is dead, we
return to the edge of formlessness and void; we return to the cross.
Our mistake would be to see the cross as nothing but a tree of good and
evil. We do not simply walk away from the cross with our conclusions about who
123
“We have just seen the magnitude of the contribution of God to the spectacle of nature. Indeed,
Creation could not dispense with its Creator. It wanted to speak and managed to speak. It spoke to
someone about something. Whether interpreted as a poem or as a scientific treatise, Creation spoke.
Isolated terms entered into communication with each other and were resolved into meaning.” (Claudel,
Essence, 15).
54
deserved to die and why. The cross is the tree of life, confounding our notions of
who deserves what sentencing. It breaks the economy; it surpasses the ethical.124
The gospel as “knowledge” is not ultimately “a given” to be taken as
granted; because if God is dead our teachings about God are invalid. Revelation is
not “a given” we can relegate; revelation is God’s givenness. Thus, only God can
resurrect a response to speak a word of love, of life. And perhaps phenomena
whispering of resurrection (rebirth)—and people quickened to incarnation (birth)—
venture the most profound replies. Our arts, our worship, and the sacramentality of
our lives can whisper of such wonders; but first, we must recognize God’s initiation.
A recovery of allusion, by virtue a testimony of asymmetry, will therefore
require an understanding of revelation as ongoing dialogue. In the drama of
existence, we would do well to let God give Her lines. As a proponent of theodramatic revelation, Von Balthasar reminds, “Christianity, as a genuine revealed
religion, cannot be a communication of knowledge, a ‘teaching,’ in the first place,
but only secondarily. It must be in the first place an action that God undertakes, the
playing out of the drama that God began with mankind in the Old Covenant.”125 In
this way, the contributions of aesthetics and phenomenology are asking the
questions of revelation and sacrament—the giving of otherness that undergirds
existence and expression.
124
See Derrida’s reading of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death and
Literature in Secret, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007).
125
Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 70-71. See the
continuation of this argument, “….It would be a peculiar lover who sought to measure the love of his
bride by how much her love benefited or injured him. God’s action on man’s behalf is, instead,
‘intelligible’ only insofar as it is not understood and justified in terms of incomplete anthropological and
cosmological fragments; in the light of such standards, it cannot but appear as ‘foolishness’ and
‘madness.’”
55
Phenomenology frames consciousness in the ability to receive from
without. The ‘from without’ in phenomenological discourse is differentiated
however from the liturgical “breaking through” voice of God. Phenomenology
provides what Lacoste names as the “closed region of experience.”126 It is being
calling to being, not God calling to humanity.
Nevertheless, there are some parallels perhaps in the process as an event of
dialogue. The phenomenological reception asks some silence, a waiting before
form. Phenomenology, as a posture of waiting or attention, attends the call of
consciousness by first attempting to bracket self. This seems as difficult as a human
claiming to hear God in her own thoughts; how can I distinguish God’s line as
separate from my own? In aesthetics, this question appears in the debate: “If beauty
is truly in the eyes of the beholder, how can we claim to know Beauty?” Can we
simply let Beauty say itself, let God speak God’s self? How to tease out the parts of
the dialogue?
Heidegger defined the phenomenological enterprise as: “let[ting] that
which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from
itself.”127 This letting phenomena speak, if even in the imprecise language of
everyday existence, claims that existential meanings (ontological language) can
inhabit and shine through (exceed) to our conscious.128 Heideggerian
phenomenology then takes its insightful departure from Husserl’s enterprise.
Heidegger grants that facts speak, but they are not bare and require our
126
Lacoste, 51.
Martin Heidegger, Being And Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson. (New York:
Harper Perennial, 2008), 58. Here he would distinguish phenomena, “that which shows itself in itself,”
from appearance, “that which shows itself in another.”
128
See Michael Gelven’s Commentary on Being and Time (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University, 1989),
42.
127
56
interpretation. Though we may bracket the self upon first encountering a
phenomena (theological transposition: though we may kenotically empty the self
before a Divine revelation) we thereafter claim it by our interpretation—conceptual
and lived. Our interpretation is our articulation of the call; it is both response and
correspondence to phenomenal disclosure.129
At best, these respective dialogues—between phenomena and hermeneutic,
revelation and theological embodiment, beauty and art—are inseparable and
ongoing, attempting to articulate the overlaps and distinctions forged in
conversation.
Though Von Balthasar’s sense of revelation is called aesthetic, it resembles
phenomenology in the priority given to the disclosure of the other. Like Heidegger,
Von Balthasar spent considerable time in philology, which has as its rule “the
principle that one should let the texts say what, of themselves, they wish to say.”130
If we accept Von Balthasar’s claim of God's dramatic self-revelation, then we
rejoice: ah, a Presence outside the self! We run to its image in the distance; it
flickers, signaling our thirst. And as we run closer to its approach we become
troubled. To “let” is to suspend discernment, to put off our interpretive structures.
But after considerable time before a text or phenomena—sacred or profane we ask,
“Is this God? Is this not? Is it a mirage in the desert, or a providential oasis?” We
become indecisive: our thirst calls us to this living water, our doubt accuses the
veracity of what we find. We stall at Peter Jonkers’ words as he assesses the postHeidegger dilemma:
129
130
Chrétien, Call, 28.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 190.
57
Precisely because the loss of the gods is not the result of a human
decision but happens to man as a destiny, every human attempt to
put an end to this indecision high-handedly, e.g. by promoting
God and religion again as valuable objects of philosophical
inquiry, or by stressing again the value of faith in God, is a
confirmation and strengthening of the loss of the gods rather than
an overcoming of the same.131
What Jonkers observes in Heidegger’s assertion is not only our indecision,
but also our over-compensation. Like a canvas overrun with abstractions--a chaos of
lines and colors to the neglect of negative space--our proclamations have perhaps
further concealed the invisible God that we claim to encounter. The indecisions (by
another name, sectarianism) have proliferated of forms without concern for unity.
Perhaps our fault has been to find means of definitively expressing what is
infinitely relayed. Instead of claiming interpretations as such, we claim that the
hermeneutic is the phenomena, the articulation is the God. Unity is predicated on
mimesis, equating, monologue. But it must be heeded: theological unity is no
predicated on mimesis. We are not simply to copy one another without distinction,
swallowing abstract dogma without regarding diverse experiences. Scripture is not a
memo received and confirmed; it is a story heard and lived into, a living dialogue.
Even on the level of natural revelation, the living canvas of the world does
not overwhelm in sameness. It distinguishes, separates in order to fully co-operate.
The world as a body, the church as a body, cannot settle for mimesis. After all, our
arts have not settled for mimesis; they utilize both relation to and difference from
reality. In the space created by their simultaneous difference and dependence, the
audience’s participation is summoned. What is this piece asking? What is it not
saying? What are its sources of influence? Its context? What are its messages for the
131
Jonkers, 23.
58
present? These are questions of anamnesis: recognizing the incomplete presence in
the present, its trace of the past, and its allusion to the future.
Mimesis as imitation for the sake of representation manifests in art for art’s
sake, religion for religion’s sake. Perhaps Plato and St. Augustine were onto
something when they criticized the mimetic arts. And perhaps Rushdie and Marx
were also correct to call out the mimetic nature of religion. But they are correct only
if the roles that believers play are affected (copied illusion) and not enacted and
interactive (lived allusion).
In his comparison of liturgy and performance, Richard McCall’s defines
mimesis as “the attempt to represent or make present that which is ‘somewhere else’
or ‘something else.’”132 Signs and illusions alike can achieve mimesis. But as God’s
living art, humans are not simply stand-ins. We are not advertisements that change
out our captions and images without being involved. As created beings, we are
implicated in the dynamism of what (or whom?) we represent; we are inseparable
from its movement. If living in praise of God, we are involved in a constant process
of anamnesis
…re-calling, not in the sense of making present that which has a
separate existence…but in the sense of constituting a new thing in
the present of which the recalled event remains a symbol or image
but is being constituted of its own power and presence in the
present.133
Our participation in the world is not simply to cultivate experience for our
theologies, our arts, our worship. We must engage in both dialogically
(diachronically), as allusions fully present in one arena in order to credibly point to
132
133
McCall, 61.
McCall, 61.
59
134
the other.
It is not that our lives represent God’s presence perfectly and thus
replace God. Rather, our lives as sacraments can allude to and serve God’s power in
the present. To serve is to both offer to others and defer to God.
Sacrament and service thus stem from the capacity to give (be present)
with respect to an incomplete givenness (acknowledged absence). The word
“sacrament” derives from the Latin word sacramentum—historically, the oath of
allegiance or a promise given.135 This word was chosen by Tertullian in the third
century to replace the original Greek word mysterion. Mysterion referred to the
“secret thoughts of God, which transcend human reason and therefore must be
revealed to those whom God wishes these secrets to reach.”136 When Jesus uses the
word, he speaks of the mysteries of the Kingdom being given to the disciples. The
mysteries of God are a function of God’s self-giving. Anamnestic witness is
unsettled and unsettling. Re-calling and re-constituting God’s incomplete and
ongoing presentation, believers are, by definition, faithful re-presentatives of an
inchoate promise. Grace upon grace: gift unto gift, without end, serving until He
comes.137
Service and giving are terms that permeate Paul Claudel’s sacramental
theology. Sacramental living means serving, giving. In his view, “everything in
nature is a symbol and everything that happens is a parable.”138 Thus, the world and
its history become poetic expressions in service of Divine meaning. But this giving
fills. Forms and events empty themselves as vessels to signify what is beyond; and
134
See Thomas Merton’s critique of the cult of experience in “Theology of Creativity,” The Literary
Essays of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1980), 360-361.
135
Everett, 63.
136
White, 181.
137
Robert Cording, “Gift,” Walking with Ruskin (Fort Lee: CavanKerry Press, 2010), 90-1.
138
Claudel, Essence, 13.
60
yet, by doing so, they are filled with the richness of infinite interpretations. They are
not devalued by their disproportion, nor diminished by the wide interpretations; they
are refined and renewing. Likewise, when humans offer themselves to “give
testimony concerning God,” they do so as finite forms admitting the infinite. And
this testimony, if it is to become what it signifies, permits a space from which to
invite participation. Hence why Paul Claudel says that theology “stands beside
poetry and liturgy.”139 He unites all three in their compelling call for participation,
for a multiplicity and motion made possible by the spaces within porous form.
This sacrament as giving, as porous form, is perhaps best understood as
creation: God’s speech-act. And thus, for Claudel, the ultimate sacrament is
procreation—both when God “seeded the world with His likeness” and when God
grants us the capacity for offspring.140 And because Claudel perceives the world as
offering its sacrifice of praise and testimony, the sacramental givenness is also
deeply rooted in worship. After all, one of the more common etymological
constructs for worship is latreia, often translated service.141
Worshipful participation is predicated on giving. It is characterized by a
willingness to exchange with the excesses of God’s call and the recesses of our recalling. The meeting reconstitutes and equips us to re-call God in the world. Thus,
worship can prepare us by striking the deepest chords of participation: collective
memory, sacramental experience, and congregational enactment.
For example, in Matthew’s account of the transfiguration, the selected
disciples experience Christ in God’s glory. Their encounter of the bright
139
140
141
Ibid., 15.
Ibid., 17.
White, 27.
61
overshadowing not only shapes how they interpret the Scriptures (recalled events),
it also leads them to worship (re-constituting of presence in the present). When
Peter requests to remain on the mountain, Christ does not permit this. Instead, Christ
requests that they tell no one. Their worshipful response is to animate in their bodily
responsibility. He leads them back down into the world: to confront the requests for
healing; to challenge the demons not simply with words, but with faith-induced
actions. Christ will not permit his theophany to be an ephemeral illusion, nor an idol
handled by words without enactment. Neither will God allow our worship to be the
final word while in this world. The transfiguration shapes our symbols, our praise,
our living. It is not a period, but an ellipsis...
It follows then that our words and our images in worship, as in life, are
inextricably linked. As an unintended result of Luther’s ante-communion decision,
sacrament (form and action) and word became separate.142 We are still recovering in
some ways from this misunderstanding. The transfiguration of worship, as in our
encounters with beauty, are total. A union with God (Calvin) becomes a
reconciliation of self, a human made fully alive (Irenaeus).143 And if our words,
sacraments, and selves are linked in this transfiguration, so too are the apparent
“dualities of worship”: Luther’s revelation and response; Cranmer’s glory and
rectitude; Florovsky’s call and response; Nissiotis’ action and acknowledgment.144
The binaries in fact allude to one another; they are wed, drawing us into their
covenant.
142
“Though Luther did not intend it, by a long slow process the service of the word or “ante-communion”
by itself came to be the normal Sunday service among Lutherans, thus dividing the two so long wed,
word and sacrament” (White, 160).
143
White, 24.
144
White, 23.
62
Several years ago, I was speaking to a friend who grew up in a particularly
constricting congregation. He was touting the benefits of his departure, freed in his
latest spiritual interest: contemplative mysticism. In my ignorance, I pointedly asked
him, “Suppose when Moses came down from Sinai, he spoke at length about his
experience of being in God’s presence. Say he totally tossed the commandments to
the side and began recounting the theophany. Do you think the Bible would be
different?”
Startled, my friend took silence before responding, “I never thought of
that.”
What I did not ask him is the follow-up question, “If different—for better
or worse?” Because this question is doomed for failure, I am glad that I did not
voice it. The question presupposes that the Biblical story privileges either glorious
experience or revelatory word. Covenant is incomplete without word, but it is also
incomplete without worship and wonder. It is a dialogue in the sense of exchanging
call and response; but it is also the exchange of a kiss, where we become uncertain
in the meeting who is calling and who is responding. The mystery of shared
expression, also experienced in artistic collaboration and worship, places us in
liminality’s embrace. As Don Saliers writes in Worship Come to Its Senses:
To come alive to what the liturgy contains and implies we must
learn to be attentive to what it is to address and be addressed by
the living God. As Abraham Heschel observed: “The way remains
closed to those to whom God is less real than a ‘consuming fire,’
to those who know answers but no wonder.”145
145
Saliers, 23.
63
As at dawn when night has ended and day is entering, a collapse of
identities occurs; it is not oppressive but nevertheless consuming in its freedom.146
The wonder of Sinai, like the transfiguration event, evades by momentary
embracing; it is the touch inherent in erasure that then prepares again the page to
receive the word.
Wonder at the “event of Being” reconciles distinctions we might make
between the aesthetic and the practical: mysticism/legalism, received
experience/confessional expression.147 Communion with God is as sensorial as it is
semantic. It is deeply semiotic, capable of sweeping all—not simply into the
analogy of being, but the event of Being. In fact, on the level of creation and
sacrament, the sensorial is inseparable from the semantic. The visible and the
vocalized unite in the dialogue of substance as symbol. Thus, as a variation on
Heidegger’s sense of Being-in-time, “Process and becoming have replaced being as
the central metaphor for understanding reality.”148
Covenant thus requires our sensitive participation, engaging God’s
presence, proclamations, and providence. These are our entry points into revelation
and faithful realization. At the base of the mountains of worship, or even at the end
of an artistic arrest, will we find ourselves made sensitive to and by this process?
Will we involve ourselves on more than an illusory level—which ends the moment
reality “sets in,” the moment a hard-lined distinction is felt and easy distinctions are
146
I envision Robert Cording’s account: “the day pauses between what is/ and what was, darkness rising
up/ between the hemlocks and spruces/ that have brought their shadows/ together. I’m waiting for the
moment when the oaks and ashes slip out of the names we gave them.” Robert Cording, “Erasure,”
Walking with Ruskin, 22.
147
This is suggested by Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of Being-as-event which “comes about not by my
being absorbed by Being or my absorbing Being but by my doing the answerable act of self-renunciation
into the other, recognizing that the other is, in fact, “other,” a separate unique other that is now in a
specific and unique relationship with myself. The moment of that relationship becomes something new in
Being, reducible neither to one nor the other, but enacted in the unique relationship” (qtd. in McCall, 69).
148
McCall, 75.
64
made? Or will we perceive the world’s substances and our actions as allusions?—
which become more dynamic and rich while the reality referenced becomes more
apparent and embodied.
Here again we return to the hesitancies of onto-theology and those
(including myself) who have viewed theological expression with suspicion. To what
degree can we rely on forms to reveal, articulate, enact what we wish to cultivate? If
we claim that God’s divine excess fills and overflow the finitudes of form, our task
seems as difficult as netting the stars or straining the dessert. How can we catch
expressions, fleeting and falling as they may be?
Epistemology as com-prehension renders this question as what and how to
take (prendre)? Thought becomes a net, and its forgetting the tangled holes. But to
“take” connotes a mind that makes thoughts like objects to be handled. This is
nuanced by the Latin concept of sapientia—to taste, to experimentally savor. In the
early Middle ages, theologians considered epistemology as an activity of developing
a taste for truth: receiving it from without, savoring within, and discarding what
does not nourish. Again, this would seem to be an objectification of materials into
matter for consumption and rejection, not to mention the dangers of poisonous
discoveries or unhealthy teaching.
But Von Balthasar re-envisions sapientia in terms that are more relational,
more redolent of human interaction than mere object relations. Our tasting requires
ingestion: what is essential about the external becomes part of us in its
internalization. Thought is not simply input-output, take-discard; it is receiving,
gleaning—feeding in order that we might live, might give. Von Balthasar thus
regards sapientia as deeply interactive and constitutive. This implies that “God
65
gives himself in his self-revelation from outside (in salvation history) and inside (in
infused faith, hope and love) to participation.”149 This participation founds worship:
both through liturgy and living as praise. John the Baptist, great herald,
emblematizes worshipful living, “He must become greater, I must become less.”150
We tangibly sense our participation through internal and external givens
(forms material and immaterial), though we may not determine the gift (gospel
revelation) and definitively know the Giver (God). This participation is predicated
on God making way and humans making room. But, how will we know what to let
in?
In the Augustinian view, our ability to perceive God’s glory lies within our
ability to see the Whole within the fragment, the image of God in creation.151 This
not only requires a willingness to remain open (so wide as to permit the possibility
of a Whole), but also an ability to make ourselves present to creation. Presence
entails reaching out while receding, a pattern we come to know in prayer. Even
Christ’s prayer for the unity of the world bespeaks this interplay: sending and
receiving, giving unto giving, God’s reaching out and taking in, reconciling parts
within a Whole. Christ’s prayer circulates like breath and blood, purifying:
The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they
may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may
become completely one, so that the world may know that you
have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.152
149
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Convergences: To the Source of Christian Mystery (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1983), 47.
150
John 3:30.
151
Augustine thus defines divine beauty as “the presence of the Whole in the parts of the fragment, where
each of these parts is in harmony with the others, and where together they relate to that which is other
than themselves.” Bruno Forte, “Divine Beauty: Augustine,” The Portal of Beauty: Towards a Theology
of Aesthetics (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008), 4.
152
John 17:22-23.
66
The participation of our presence and our perception is thus an act of love,
a faithful dialogue. In this motion of revolving integration and concomitance, we
hear St. Augustine’s distinction of Christ’s pure enactment of beauty, “We
understand that there is something so similar to the Only and the Unique, the
Beginning from which issues the unity of all that is in some way one, that it is able
to achieve this Beginning in itself and to identify us with it.”153 For St. Augustine,
our understanding of God is thus a function of the Word, its recollection in the
sensorial world, and its hints of Unity residing within us.
To perceive God’s glory through the senses is the gift of inhabiting our
present forms. But to recognize through the senses is not to idolize the sensible—so
long as we do not deify fragments in place of the Whole. Our theology cannot fall
into the trap of equating humans with God (anthropological reduction) or material
with God (cosmological reduction). However, we remain attuned to God’s imprint
in humanity and in nature.
I am reminded of St. Augustine’s inquiry of the created world: how he
queries all forms from the depths of the sea to the expanses of earth. He ultimately
reasons that his bodily senses serve as an analogy for his spiritual sensing of God.
He asks God first, “What am I loving when I love you?” We echo: An illusion? An
idol? And in a litany of the outpouring forms, of the sensory gifts, Augustine
resolves:
And yet in a certain sense I do love light and sound, smell, food,
and embrace my inner being. There a light shines for my soul
untrammeled by space…there I experience an embrace never to
be broken by surfeit. All this I love when I love my God…. I
153
De vera religione 36, 66 as translated by Bruno Forte (The Portal of Beauty, 10).
67
looked at the creatures, and asked; their beauty was their
answer.154
If St. Augustine reminds us of the revelation within the world’s beauty,
Paul Claudel concords, “Creation spoke…everywhere rich analogy was the
instrument of discovery.”155 Claudel would also add that we are similarly called to
the beautiful revelation of Scripture. Like the spiritual senses St. Augustine attunes
through bodily sensation, Claudel speaks of spiritual senses attuned to the Biblical
text. The ability to attune one’s sensibilities, according to Claudel, requires an
openness, a receptivity and attention to the Divinie’s confiding whisper. We have
the image of a lover: “the Scriptures contain many allusions and faint echoes to
delight hearts and ears made sensitive by love.”156 For Claudel, the logos of creation
and of Scripture proves sacramental only as it animates us toward God’s love.
In his rich sense of sacramentality, Louis-Marie Chauvet similarly suggests
this dialogical quality. Forms are no longer confined to Being as substance. He
advocates a new definition of symbolism that accounts not only for substance but
for relation—which necessarily implies movement, interaction. We find ourselves
back in the homo-ousios debate of the Nicene Council: does the form dialogue with
the substance? Does the Divine mix with the human like water and wine, or water
and oil? At stake is the level and nature of interaction. Is the human-divine
conversation, epitomized in Christ a comingling that eradicates difference, or a
separation that diminishes dialogue?157
154
Forte, 6-7.
Claudel, Essence, 15.
156
Ibid., 14.
157
For an exploration of this discussion in the art world, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action (Grand
Rapids: William B Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980).
155
68
Form and substance are more than instructive illusions, more than the
stakes of an early church debate. If we regard them as in continuous conversation,
as allusion to one another, they are forms that act. The divine and the human point
to one another in dynamic covenant. A God that is hardened against such
involvement is an idol; a human that is resistant to divine penetration is spiritually
dead.158
Illusions, like idols, are forms that do not act. Illusion has no verb form.
But form as allusion, implies the act of alluding, a movement that mediates between
realities. And its movement constitutes its form. As we engage form, its allusions
reveal its unrest. Allusive forms (whether God’s creation or human creation) are not
content to be an abstraction, a stagnation of movement; they engage in both
realities, vacillating between being and becoming. Allusion cries, “I am…” with a
gesture toward, “I will be…” The allusion as ellipses is significant. This punctuation
presses against stagnation and systematic reduction: it marks overflow and
deficiency. The allusion resists objectification, completion, and finitude; it is
desire’s spiral, surrounding the still point that it cannot hold yet always pursues.
Dogmatic abstractions, as an avowal to finite claims over and above
presence, can thus be for theology what the iconoclast was for art. Even on an
ethical level, systematic reduction can rob forms of their inner dynamism. At the
core, these are confusions of sacramentality. Once the form of immaterial thought
becomes an idol, once the material creations (the world, its creatures, our arts)
become mere illusion—forms are denied their dynamic quality. They are reduced,
even deadened. Chauvet’s approach as a corrective emphasizes “the very symbolic,
158
Ephesians 4:18.
69
dialogical, and intersubjective nature of reality, which for Chauvet, can be
encountered only in a concrete sacramental mode.”159 Sacrament is what wakes us
from the potential reality inherent in the Marxist critique of religion. We awaken to
our role as dynamic allusions as we come to perceive the world as such.
As God’s creation and co-creators, we navigate a process not unlike
theologian Alois Gügler’s definition of art—a “conscious exteriorization of the
inner fullness in the ‘form’ which must, of course, never be lacking, since art may
only be found where a ‘living entity’ mediates between pure life and lived life.”160
In other words, to be God’s art is to be like Christ: embodying the “inner fullness”
of love, mediating between God’s pure love and existential execution. Underwriting
the artistic enterprise (and arguably the scandal of incarnation) is the assumption
that different forms convey an “inner fullness” not simply by their contradiction but
in their conversation. In the form of Christ, we strive to be conscious mediators:
reconciling recess with excess, form’s assertions with faith’s spaciousness.
Sacramental allusion facilitates an exchange between the infinite and the
finite. Form speaks in the exchanges of our senses. It whispers mysteries that the
recesses of our bodies and minds seem to know. For when we strive to articulate
them, we confess our impressions (both what has impressed upon our minds161 and
what the recession left).162 Because of sacrament, we are sensitive to the notion of
being as process and subject as verb. Even as we feel the relative emptiness of
159
McCall, 73.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: Seeing the Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1982), 99.
161
Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Unforgettable and Unhoped For, trans. Jeffrey Bloechl (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2002), 115.
162
“The ‘Decree for the Armenians’ began by listing what had by then become the conventional list of
seven sacraments which ‘both contain grace and confer it upon all who receive them worthily….Three of
these sacraments—baptism, confirmation, and ordination—impress indelibly upon the soul a character, a
certain spiritual sign, distinct from all others, so they are not repeated for the same person.’” (qtd. in
White, 186).
160
70
expression in the face of wonder, we employ its gifts because they are forms that
assert themselves and point beyond themselves. They are little prophets.
And yet, we realize, at least by the philosophical critiques of metaphysics,
that words can be prophet’s for God’s coming as much as they can be prophet’s of
God’s death. Contrary to Steiner’s assertions, even for those who no longer
acknowledge God’s presence, words have not yet been emptied their force. As if
God was a star that long ago died, the effects are not yet witnessed in the words of
the Post-Logos prophets. Madness has not yet overtaken rhetoric. What can our
words tells us of a Post-Logos world? Will it be an eschaton? Or an eschewal of all
expressions, all reaches for transcending self, and all gods?
Far be it from me to prophesy the dangers or destinations awaiting religion
and worship. Who knows what might emerge out of the formlessness of theological
articulation (as Heidegger would have it), out of the void of God (as Nietzsche
prophesied). I will say that beneath their critiques, something more than organized
religion is at stake. Under all these pressing questions quakes the primitive ghost,
challenging our absurdity, “What is this separation of flesh and spirit? Visible form
from invisible presences?” 163
Christians stutter to explain. Chalk it up to the Western Enlightenment, to
modernism, to the Reformation, to the transubstantiation controversy. Or trace it
further back to scholastic nominalism, to the daring of ascetic monks, to questions
raised by Donatus or bishops at the Nicean Council. Ask the theotokos; she’ll smile
and speak crazily about a spirit impregnating her flesh. It is a strange irony that the
incarnation gave way to a denigration of flesh. It is as if we continue to crucify
163
7).
I use “primitive” and “modern” in the manner of Gerard van der Leeuw (Sacred and Profane Beauty,
71
forms to test “what they’re made of.” Now we answer this testing not with theology,
but with linguistics and scientific formulation.164 While understandably there are
linguistic distinctions between material and immaterial properties, we need not pose
them in false opposition. We need a language that recognizes their similarities (not
sameness); perhaps this is the language of our bodies—which both house
immaterial thoughts and engage the physical world.
Tragically, the “Death of God” principle has come about from our response
to Christ’s bodily incarnation. Some may blame Nietzsche’s assertion on the
crucifixion. In actuality, he exposed a faith that had moved too far from the cross.
Nietzsche’s prophet who proclaims the death of God is the same one who reminds
that we have killed Him. Our metaphysical speculations cover over this dirty secret;
our faith as certainty, revealed truth as power, incriminate us no less in the
crucifixion. Though Hegel closes the eschatological gap, Nietzsche reminds of the
wounds that even the resurrection leaves gaping. Christ’s wounds welcome
Thomas’ pokes, and yet we deny Pilate’s prodding. Western metaphysics speak
where even John’s gospel passes over in silence. Pilate’s question “What is truth?”
leads him not into an encounter with the incarnate Christ, but to the crowd, to
defend, to ask them—as if only the majority can adjudicate. The birth of apologetics
is perhaps the turn from experience to expression.
If we travel the reverse, from Christ’s truth as expression that leads to
experience, word made flesh, then Nietzsche’s prophetic reminder ultimately
returns to the controversy of Christ’s incarnation: the possibility of an invisible and
164
It may be more than coincidence that the language supplying our sciences is rooted in the Greek that
delineated Paul’s separation of psyche and soma. Perhaps we might recall the Hebrew script: which is as
much about material image as the immaterial word. The beauty of Hebrew is that it handles respectfully
the letters of the law, and the writing of the mysteries of the Divine name.
72
visible reality comingling, the residence of the infinite in the finite. Perhaps, in this
way, our arts, our worship, and our words will forever be wagers on truth. But
above all, our worship must raise the stakes: because there is never a reason for
worship to make use of lies. Dogmatic assertions are “unskilled and unseemly
methods” for wooing Truth, let alone speaking it in anything but “caricatures.”165
How is worship more than the philosopher’s pretense to impersonal truth (a
supposedly disinterested “impulse to knowledge,”), or otherwise than human
experience writ large to enforce the herd’s ‘morality’?166 Essentially, how can its
expressions, like art, maintain relation to the particularities of experience?
For much of my life, worship has been treated as an education in truth.167
Even before attending an evangelical Christian school, I understood that the sermon
was a time of instruction, that communion was for cognition (and not the Emmaus
re-cognition). Truth was exegetically processed and delivered as an Answer. Truth
was an end, not the opening of discussion. In Biblical courses, I never heard of God
as mysterious—Wholly Other, Ever Greater. (No appeals to Anselm’s argument; no
mention of Aquinas’ analogical refutation of univocality.) Instead, God was equated
to how one spoke of ‘God.’ I gained exposure to various missiological practices: all
assuring that ‘God’ could be articulated; the gospel and its effects could even be
enumerated (the x-steps to salvation…how many have you baptized?). I suppose, in
some sense, I had witnessed a Protestant period of Scholasticism; this may be too
165
Friedrich Wilhem Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans.
Helen Zimmern (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1907), 1-2.
166
Ibid., 11.
167
See William Johnson Everett’s cursory summation (Politics, 27-8). See also White, 152: “Recalling
what God had done and rejoicing in those memories—is that worship or education?”.
73
kind a reading.
168
In all fairness, my tradition is known for its textual studies, its
emphasis on words, systems, ordering, analysis, and orthodoxy.169
Nevertheless, I initially sensed the relation of theology and art while
pursuing drama and literature at a conservative, evangelical institution. Rather, I
sensed their relation in their apparent discord, like an anticipating ear that imagines
the resolution of dissonant notes. On Harding University’s campus, the Bible and
humanities departments were on opposing sides; and fittingly, their professors
hardly intersected. When they did cross paths, the common word was either “God”
or “Postmodernism.” In exceptional cases, they could gather on the concept of the
psalms, and perhaps at last arrive on some vague gesture to “Beauty.” While both
departments might permit the freedom to articulate what is beautiful or ‘moving’ to
them, the Bible faculty generally favored one articulation of God (sola scriptura).
Hermeneutic circles were more enthusiastically run in the English
department. But outside of literary theory courses, the word “Postmodernism” was
more of a slithering accusation than an embraced eidos. However, during one
Sunday Bible class, an especially hip professor spoke on postmodernism and the
church. After his PowerPoint presentation, he encouraged us to discuss with a
partner. My brother-in-law teased, “So are you postmodern?”
Silence. Scanning. Then, “Yes and No.” (Which may be a more revealing
response than the qualification that followed…) “I have postmodern sensibilities
when it comes to art and literature. But, I have kept these lenses away from my
Biblical interpretation.”
168
At least, this is so far as I can tell from White’s comments on the word-reduced sacrament, the
systematizing that led to economic understandings of sacramental grace (White, 186-7). See also Richard
D. McCall’s exploration of scholasticism (Do This, 23, 73).
169
This has been the stereotype of the ‘old guard’ within the Churches of Christ; there are exceptions
since my tradition boasts autonomous church structure.
74
Granted, the word “Postmodernism” is almost as evasive as the word
“God”—and each employs it to her own bending. But that Sunday I realized, more
acutely than ever: the humanities department and the divinity school would do well
to share practices. Indeed, to discount the value of this exchange would
underestimate the overlap, as well as the unique contributions, of artists and
theologians. After all, did we not value the mutual relations (and distinct
differences) of the created and their Creator? To divorce human arts and literature
from God’s generation and revealed logos would be an error. I would even suggest:
a second fall.170 It is at root a rupture between the created and the Creator: a mutual
sheering of expression that leaves unaccompanied our aesthetic and epistemological
gifts. This separation leaves unanswered—renders unanswerable—our invisible
Giver. It promotes one-sided conversations, soliloquies unheeded.
When I mention “rupture,” it is not to disparage the necessary distinctions
we must make between humanity and God, between human creativity and God’s
creation. Nevertheless, there are two kinds of separation between the created and
Creator. One (bad news first) is an undesirable divorce: break of covenant, widened
by misunderstandings and missteps, until the created turn around and notice that
they have left their God far behind. The second is a necessary differentiation: an
expanse that makes possible the act of creation.171 In a worldview that makes room
for the separateness of the holy, we are made “aware of infinite distance and feel a
170
I am not simply suggesting that art become explicitly religious, that theologians utilize “art for
novelty’s sake” in religious rhetoric. As Amos Wilder suggests, “What is needed today, Wilder claims, is
“a better theology and a better aesthetic. A better theology will not identify religion or Christianity with
any and every fervid or didactic impulse, nor with any and every experience of Beauty of the Spirit.”
Amos Wilder, “Christianity and the Arts: The Historic Divorce and the Contemporary Situation,” The
Christian Scholar, XL.4 (December 1957): 268.
171
For this question viewed through kabbalist creation myth, interfaith dialogue, and the demands of
pluralism, see Or Rose, “In the Footsetps of Hillel: Judaism and Religious Pluralism,” Tikkun
(November/December 2009): 62-67. (Especially the subsection, “A Partnership Perspective,” 64).
75
never-suspected nearness.”
172
This paradox unfolds a space to insure not only
creation and holiness, but also the choice of love. Embedded in the created order are
convergences predicated on distinctions: kisses between air and form, caresses of
water and land—and so too, a space in which to stretch the lovers’ call and
response.173
In this second rupture, God is preserved as Holy—set apart in mystery—
uniquely positioned for the short-sidedness of our belief and the near-sightedness of
our doubt. God is near as a lover, and as mysterious. In this position, God is “not
susceptible anymore to any specific determination whatsoever; [we are unable to
call God] either nothing (i.e.: total indeterminateness), or anything (i.e.:
comprehension of all determinations).”174 In other words, we no are no longer
excused from ongoing relation, mitigated extremes. Here, we benefit from “the
Derridean metaphorical expression of difference”:
…the very incapacity of language to attain definitively its denoted
meanings or signified objects, the very impotence of language to
extend a supposed non-linguistic ‘reality’ that would be its
significant foundation. But at the very same time language is not
wholly enclosed on itself. Were this true, then language or speech
acts would not be possible at all.175
What Derrida uncovers is the testimony of difference: the exchanges
between self and other that sustain the distinctions, thereby making communication
an ongoing and possible effort (even if he spends more words focusing on its
impotency and impossibility). We are unable to claim that we fully know God
(conceptually); but we are also unable to claim that God is altogether unknowable
172
Van der Leeuw, 5.
Matthew Arnold, “To Marguerite,” The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Margaret Ferguson et al.
(New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1996), 987 - 88.
174
Rico Sneller, “God as War: Derrida on Divine Violence,” God in France, 153.
175
Ibid., 153.
173
76
(liturgically). The space that creates distance is the same space that enables
communion. The gaps in knowledge (gnosis) are the same gaps we fill with the
desire to know and be known (intimacy, love in the Hebraic sense of ahav).176
Ideally, this expanse resembles the womb: the opening that simultaneously
nurtures distinct identities and intimate unity. In contrast is war: a battleground
where intimacy and identity are predicated on distinctions that battle (rather than
preserve) one another. We can think of these two gaps as we observe them in
everyday communication: in the duplicity of hypocrisy (war), and the dialogue
inherent in paradox (womb).
Hypocrisy communicates two realities united in an inherent lie; like war,
the realities are in opposition until one reigns supreme and the ‘truth’ is exposed.
War’s united ground, of course, proves untenable—as does its truth. As W.H.
Auden writes, war’s shared territory cannot be reduced to the “low democracy of a
nightmare nor/ An army’s primitive tidiness.” No, the shared “predicament” that
founds war is not simply its historical moment, but its ignorance of “subtle loves,”
of “ambiguities.” War provides senseless, heedless opposition that prevents
conversation between our senses and our selves:
That catastrophic situation which neither
Victory nor defeat can annul; to be
Deaf yet determined to sing,
To be lame and blind yet burning for the Great Good Place,
To be radically corrupt yet mournfully attracted
By the real Distinguished Thing.177
These lines from Auden’s, “At the Grave of Henry James,” might be read
as an indictment on war, as an ironic gesture towards hope—depending on whether
176
177
On the requisite of separation, see Paul Claudel (Essence, 16).
W.H. Auden, “At the Grave of Henry James,” Collected Poems (London: Random House, 1979).
77
we read in these lines a hypocritical contradiction, or a persevering paradox.
Paradox communicates truth dimensionally. All faces of the paradox are uniquely
experienced, but ultimately held in their seeming oppositions, united by the infinite
dialogue permitted in paradox. There is a singing that defies deafness, a burning that
denies blindness, a lameness that travels in yearning. Hope, faith, love, exceed the
“radical corruption” of one who hypocritically employs warring oppositions toward
some nebulous “real Distinguished Thing.” Faith, hope, love, in their perseverance,
occupy the vast terrain between victory and defeat, between the catastrophic
situation and the “Great Good Place.”
Because these theological virtues posture themselves in the topos of patient
suffering and persistent joy, living even in spite of their own non-realization, they
provide a model for assymetrical excess (womb). This excess provides a space from
which to eye the particularities, to unite them in perception, by working toward their
remaking. This birth begins with vision, with listening, before it ever permits the
grasping of an object. As Anne Davenport writes in her preface to Jean-Louis
Chrétien’s Call and Response:
Chrétien discerns the distinctive infinity of the religious
phenomenon as presenting itself—giving itself—in paradox.
Jean-Luc Marion offers a first helpful formulation in this regard
by defining “a religious phenomenon, in the strict sense” as one
which “should render visible what nevertheless can not be
objectivised.”178
Some might wish for a religious experience untangled from paradox.
However, this brand of paradox is not simply the incommensurable, warring
impulses stalemated. Even the case of Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith, resigning to
178
Davenport, “Translator’s Preface,” Call and Response, xiv.
78
paradox implies an asymmetrical call.179 Exceeding the competing claims of ethics
or aesthetics, the Knight of Faith is left without a response, without an action he can
grasp with reason alone. The paradox renders him porous: simultaneously feeling
the walls of asserted action, and the gaps of suspended intervention. Pressing hope
and present disappointment: these pores open him to receive God’s call while
leaving others’ claims only at surface access.
Here we distinguish paradox (an insufficiency in reasoning) from
hypocrisy (a deficiency, hypo-, in deciding, krinein). In the situation of true
paradox, two oppositional concepts or claims do not simply give way to the protean
existence. Rather, in paradox, say as Socrates defines it, the two claims imply a
third point, an irruption into another dimension where both points can exist because
joined mutually in this desire for a third—an asymmetrical element that makes
possible their conversation in desire. Thus, the person living in the paradox of faith
has restlessness, desire, only satisfied in continuous relation to a third point. In true
paradox, there is no permanent satisfaction; but this does not preclude permanent
relation (analogy, allusion). As Anne Carson writes in Eros: The Bittersweet,
Plato’s analogies are not flat diagrams in which one image (for
example, gardens) is superimposed on another (the written word)
in exact correspondence. An analogy is constructed in threedimensional space. Its images float one upon the other without
convergence: there is something in between, something
paradoxical: Eros.”180
Anne Carson therefore suggests that the “experience of eros is a study in
the ambiguities of time. Lovers are always waiting.”181 This is perhaps why
179
Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
180
Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998), 145.
181
Carson, 117.
79
Kierkegaard spoke in terms similar to Roland Barthes.
182
In chorus, they seem to
say that love’s desire lives in the anxiety of faithfulness, the present waiting. As
love’s presence is deferred, so is its final judgment. God’s absence is our grace, his
presence a “terrible beauty” that trembles the present and its paradox.183 Or as Rilke
writes in the manner of Yeats’ Easter, “the stillness between two notes/ which
mingle badly with each other,/ because the note ‘death’ wants to raise itself –/ But
within this dark interval, trembling,/ they reconcile with each other./ And the song
abides, beautiful.”184
Out of the two trembling, a song; but the song as such is nothing to be
grasped, least of all to be anticipated. The song comes after, an assymetrical third
that rings through and reigns over the economy of differences. The paradox sounds
in an eruption that disrupts.
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard claims that the authentic individual
makes absurd, supra-universal (beyond “ethics”), supra-particular (beyond
“esthetics”) moves in loving faithfulness to God. Because these choices (his
example is Abraham binding Isaac) require one to uphold contradictory claims (I
must sacrifice/must not kill, God can/cannot ask me sacrifice one I love), the person
acting in faith experiences anxiety as a being-before-God. The distress of
182
“Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved’s absence; actually a preposterous situation; the other
is absent as referent, present as allocutory. The singular distortion generates a kind of insupportable
present; I am wedged between two tenses, that of the reference and that of the allocution: you have gone
(which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you). Whereupon I know what the present, that
difficult tense, is: a pure portion of anxiety” (Qtd. in Carson, 177). Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse,
trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2010).
183
Like an internal revolution brought by external revelation, a disruption that is for our metanoia,
excessive love and excessive death, troubling perhaps as Yeat’s description of “a terrible beauty is born.”
William Butler Yeats, “Easter, 1916” and Other Poems (Mineola: Dover Press, 1993). Or, perhaps on
the level of revolution brought by difficult holiness as opposed to political violence, Rilke’s offering,
“Let everything happen to you: /the beautiful and the terrible. / One must always fare forth: no feeling is
beyond us./ Don’t let yourself be separated from me./ That country which you call life/ is close at hand.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Vom mönchischen Leben, from Das Stunden-Buch, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1
(Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1955), 294-295. Mark S. Burrows provided this translation.
184
Ibid., 264.
80
indeterminacy is the paradox that gives birth to the dimension of faith.
And yet, even in Kierkegaard’s telling, this anxiety qua faith is not the
final word; the final view and verdict is given to God. The otherness of the call
disrupts comes back with an immanent response. Abraham’s perceptive equilibrium
(his ability to feel and hold every truth and its opposite in a suspension of faithful
absurdity) remains in relation to an intervening God. The indeterminacy is in the
suspension, Abraham’s vigilant preparation for obedience (the “teleological
suspension of the ethical”).185 Kierkegaard’s vision of faith holds the possibilities of
kairos above the horizon of chronos. Therefore, the being-before-God, the person of
faith, perceives the irreducibility of choices within the paradox; however, this
individual can also therefore choose any action and be able to see within it. Each
action is an allusion, a yet to be determined. Faith is the enactment of an ellipsis,
which only God can close or extend.
The being-before-God is not ambivalent to the choice (as if unable to see,
blinded by anxiety). Rather, the vision trusts an outcome, and lives riskily into it,
fully within it. In a system where God does not arrive to “bring the sacrifice,” this
testing of love, of “infinite resignation,” goes unanswered and continues to be a
chaotic openness (Heidegger’s abyss of indiscernible Being/Nothing). But
Kierkegaard’s anxiety is not without parameters. The vision of faithful love can be
summarized by Kierkegaard as the capacity to perceive equally and distinctly, in a
union that does not eradicate heterogeneity:
The absolute duty can lead one to do what ethics would forbid,
but it can never lead the knight of faith to stop loving. Abraham
demonstrates this. In the moment he is about to sacrifice Isaac, the
ethical expression for what he is doing is: he hates Isaac. But if he
185
Kierkegaard, 64.
81
actually hates Isaac, he can rest assured that God does not demand
this of him, for Cain and Abraham are not identical.186
So what marks the difference between Cain and Abraham? Perhaps this
marks the difference I am tracing between hypocrisy and paradox. Paradox gives
way, even subjugates itself, to constant relation to the other (the third erupting from
two oppositions, the God disrupting the faithful's tension). Whereas hypocrisy lets
one of the two internal drives rule—without deferring to a third, without necessity
of relation. It privileges a false hierarchy that is internal, rather than an asymmetry
that is referential.
A little closer to home: take the situation of hypocrisy, a critique often
launched at believers of various faiths. In the phenomena of duplicity, two
contradictions fight for the title of reality. And given the context and time of battle,
one might be clearly leading. Take Paul’s wrestling in the Letter to the Romans:
For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not
want to do—this I keep on doing…So I find this law at work:
When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my
inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in
the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind
and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my
members.187
At an isolated moment, a viewer might see one “law” leading, and say:
“This is the true Paul.” Paul anticipates our labeling claims and seems baffled by
which force is directing what choice: the law of delight, the law of the mind, the law
of sin, the sinful nature living in him, the good not living in him? And while he
jockeys between, swimming in dialectic, suddenly he erupts into dialogue—a praise
that lifts him out of his competing claims, out of the ego, out of his argument. He
186
187
Kierkegaard, 73-74.
Romans 7:21-23.
82
praises God for Christ who lifts him by a clemency, jarring our notions of
symmetrical justice. Justice, when “seasoned by mercy”188 provides a different
economy altogether, an invisible, incalculable reward. Love’s justice quakes our
notions with its “aneconomy”—as Derrida would claim in his reading of
Kierkegaard’s text.189 This mercy is the secret truth, “learned by heart”—which is to
say, a paradox that reason can neither hold nor fully articulate, except perhaps in
poetry or prophecy.190
Take for example Portia’s words in The Merchant of Venice. In the trial of
competing claims, she summons a judge whose vantage point is love, whose
salvation is neither a reward reduced to earth’s economy nor power’s gain:
The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute to God himself,
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Thought justice be thy plea, consider this:
That in the course of justice none of use
Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea,
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.191
188
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, IV.i.196,
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/merchant/full.html (accessed March 10, 2011).
Jacques Derrida, “Tout Autre Est Tout Autre,” The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, trans.
David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007).
190
Ibid., 97.
191
Shakespeare, Merchant, IV.i.183-204.
189
83
According to Portia, mercy gives freely and profusely without being
restrained or sifted (“strained”). It comes from above, in somehow asymmetrical to
human capacities, in order to bless human actions like rain: unpredictable,
unobligated, altogether gifted. Our activity in exercising this divine gift of mercy
then should temper (“season”) our justice. Though our judgments can only
analogously reveal this mercy, we nevertheless can demonstrate mercy by giving,
portioning it out (as is the Latin etymology of Portia’s name) as we deal the
sentence of justice.
I could not help but link Portia’s note of mercy’s “salvation” quality with
Nussbaum’s medical parallels in her essay, “Equity and Mercy.”192 Here, salvation
meets salve: both pay attention to the particularities of an injury in order to tend
compassionately (or at least fittingly, proportionately) to it. Nussbaum points out
that there are several ways to ad/dress a wound: Anaximander’s retributive justice
(restoring imbalance); counter-injury or “counterinvasion” (Andrea Dworkin’s
novel); Aristotle’s equitable justice (as superior to strict legal justice); Stoic
considerations of katorthoma (only looking at the motives and knowledge
surrounding an act); or Seneca’s situation-specific discernment.
Nussbaum begins by exploring a false impression of mercy—the inability
to distinguish particularities. She claims that the absence of mercy in moral and
legal cases can yet be served by the “novelist’s art.”193 Art can break up the false
homogeneity, it disrupts the economy that justice seeks to establish in reciprocal
retribution. By imaginatively entering into story, Nussbaum contends that we can
192
Martha Nussbaum, “Equity and Justice,” Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999), 154-183.
193
Ibid., 155.
84
link the “vision” of particularities with receptivity to a case’s complexities. In doing
so, we experience epieikeia (pliant mercy, attending the circumstances of an
offense) and not simply dikê (harsh justice, presupposing the suffering of an
offender). In contrast to the “harsh and symmetrical world” of dikê’s “emotionless
clarity,” a plea for epieikeia is an appeal to equity (the “gentle art of particular
perception”).194 In Nussbaum’s exposition of Aristotle, we understand that equity
does not necessarily require symmetry, but rather filling in the gaps of law with the
breath of suggnômê (a judging-with). Aristotle’s model grants an entry into the
story of another’s plight (compassion also factors into his understanding of
spectators engaging tragedy).
Mercy, as Seneca renders it, continues this step. Instead of the economy of
justice, he proposes a dissymmetrical empathy. Seneca perceived the shortcomings
of the Stoic medical model; it accounted for the particularities of an injury, but with
detachment. More in line with the medical branch of psychology or psychiatry,
Seneca accounts for the social pressures and predisposing factors that “make it
extremely difficult not to err.”195 In short, Seneca notes the world surrounding the
wound; he trumps the break between two parties, by appealing to a shared third. In a
society of poor resources or systemic crime, retributive justice plays by the rules of
symmetry (“you take, I take”)—but it cannot help that society rise above its own
mores. Against retributive anger, Seneca is therefore “in favor of mercy”—which
will necessarily be disproportionate.196 But this disproportion does not imply
indiscriminate heaping. It is “a gentle rain” (Portia), a tender attention sensitive to
194
195
196
Ibid., 159.
Ibid., 165.
Ibid., 165.
85
both the mitigating factors and the aggravating action. Rain comes upon all, notices
all: the wrongdoing and the complexity of its variables.
Unique to Seneca’s concept is clemency—which he perceives in terms
similar to Portia’s double blessing. Clemency blesses both the taker and giver
somehow, who are made to feel their commonality in mercy’s gift and judgment’s
gaze. The ability to perceive a common meta-judge can bring about this sympathy:
in Seneca’s case, the self-examining conscious reminds that we are all subject to
judgment and error. Portia’s rhetoric, expressly Christian, reminds of the judge
higher even than our own individual conscience—the Divine judge that surpasses
temporal power with the timeless empowerment of mercy. In every season
(Anaximander) and in the particulars of every case (Seneca), mercy has its place.
But can reading a story (the “novelist’s art,” the dramatic play, or even the
Bible)— really be equated with making a legal judgment? Though stories give us
spaces to exercise sympathy and see complexity, they are supra-dimensional,
another world unto themselves. We intrude upon them, but this traversing is not
readily reciprocated. The story does not demand our immediate action, judgment, or
response within its world. (Again, back to Plato and Augustine’s claims of art’s
distraction or neglectful catharsis). Meanwhile, the legal case does beg the court’s
judgment: here, now.
Perhaps the notion of a judge existing outside the contingencies of our
time-space, makes God’s justice that much more capable of mercy. Because God,
somehow outside our story, claims to be deeply invested in it. The story of God
expresses as even as it effects changes. Perhaps God cannot come to a conclusive
judgment until our lives themselves conclude. And even then, God’s ability to
86
resurrect allows Her to rewrite the story as She pleases. Her mercy can turn a page.
Her judgment can close a book. God’s Son and the Spirit can enter the world, just as
our sympathy might enter into a piece of fiction. This move motivates our entry into
another’s life, with humility and justice—incarnating a clemency that blesses the
world, though not entirely (symmetrically) of it. This gives a whole new resonance
to “sentence”--especially in a story that we are writing, where God is no less given
the first and final Word.
One could argue that paradox is simply hypocrisy granted the grace of
infinite time and penetrative judgment. But this would require that paradox is not
only the vision of an over-arching Other, but also an eschatological, ultimately
transcendent Other. In other words, paradox houses in the present the capacity for
relation to what is not present; and by so doing, it offers a kingdom not of this
world, but always at hand. It preserves diachrony, dialogue, attuning us what is
Other.197 Paradox, in relation to the mutual repulsion/attraction point of the Other,
does not permit the alibis of hypocrisy. Where hypocrites would serve pretension,
paradox preserves tension by its strained (but sustained) relation.
We can theologically attend Kierkegaard’s rendering of faith, the absurd
sacrifice disrupted by love, without speaking of the sacrifice of praise. But how
might we transpose this tension for the events of worship and prayer? Paradox, in its
preserving of desire’s restlessness, is an exercise in grace that keeps oppositions in
conversation. As such, paradox is a dialogue that not only preserves horizontal
polarities, but also vertical distance. Thus Jean-Louis Chrétien writes that the space
of prayer is ultimately a manifestation of paradox. Anne Davenport summarizes his
197
Emmanuel Levinas, “Diachrony and Representation,” Entre-Nous: On [] Thinking [] of the [] Other
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
87
observation found in La Parole blesée, “Prayer is at once a surrender of self and a
heroic wrestling with truth, at once thanksgiving and theopathy, self-revelation and
self-destitution.”198 In Paul’s wrestling is his prayer. And in his prayer, are the seeds
of his freedom: Christ opening spaces for Paul’s awareness and change, theopathy’s
striving and thanksgiving’s leverage.
Prayer and praise create a space of meeting for God and humanity. In this
way, they are freeing, recoveries of the allegorical fall. Liturgy exposes all our
allusions to their origin, when we played with God. The word “allusion,” from Latin
allūsiō199 (“a playing with”) thus forms the basis for our worship as sacer ludus.
The sacer ludus dramatic scheme traces the fall’s reversal: it is a ritual of death to
life, of resurrection and battling of life and death. Through the spaciousness
provided by prayer and ritual, the illumination of our allusions, we experience tastes
of Eden. As Gerard van der Leeuw proposes, “Thus life is given consistency, and
happiness guaranteed. A work of art arises which we call dance, game, drama, but
also liturgy, and for which I suggest the name sacer ludus.”200 As the sacer ludus
develops in cultural customs over time its focus shifts: from the innocent paraded
only to be cruelly ended; to a life dying only to resurrect; to a great battle between
life and death, summer and winter; and finally in the Greek traditions to an
unexpected unity (deus ex machina). This development would seem to parallel the
journey of theological history. On a looser reading, the sacer ludus centers around
the transition of death to life, and life to death. The former insinuates the un-hoped
198
Davenport, xiv-xv.
“Allusion,” Online Etymology Dictionary, Hist. Douglas Harper,
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/allusion (accessed online: July 18, 2010).
200
Van der Leeuw, 80.
199
88
for resurrection; while the latter suggests the burdensome memory of Eden—the lie
that transported us from womb to war.
Perhaps the original “fall” was not simply a cliff-jump from immortality,
so much as a falling for the double-speak of Satan, a trading of womb (paradox) for
war (hypocrisy), tree of life for the tree of disguised death. The mistake was not
simply disobedience; but fundamentally, an aesthetic evaluation unaccompanied by
the anamnestic capacity. It is the trading of allusion for illusion, anamnestic relation
for mimetic degradation. In Satan’s lie, we recall the sophistic paradox of Meno:
And how are you going to search for [the nature of virtue] when
you don't know at all what it is, Socrates? Which of all the things
you don't know will you set up as target for your search? And
even if you actually come across it, how will you know that it is
that thing which you didn't know?201
Socrates’ answer to Meno is that since the soul is immortal, it has already
been exposed to an a priori knowledge. The soul knows; and all its searching and
learning are but recollections. But this searching and learning require courage.
There is nothing easy about knowledge. Thus the lie of Satan that seeps in between
the spaces of memory and experience. “Behold the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil: its fruits are yours for the taking. Wisdom is a function of taking from the
world and creating your own knowledge base. Ingest it. Do not rely on your
recollection of truth, of God, for your sense of good and evil. The fruit of ease, of
searchless learning, this anti-anamnesis, is yours for the taking!”
Between the space of Eve’s memory and the fruit set before her, a vacancy
was left open to faith. Faith, the vehicle between what humanity remembered God
201
Plato, “Meno,” Epistemology: Contemporary Readings, ed. Michael Huemer (New York: Routledge,
2006), 134.
89
saying and what they perceived in the tree’s beauty (uti and frui). They were
believers: sure of what they hoped for, and certain of what they did not see—a
formula that serves Truth and Lie alike. Surely the fruit was good for food, and for
the immediate revelation of knowledge! What need have we for gods, for searching
when we have this fruit? What need have we for life and its allusions? What need
have we to experience God’s presence and discover Her world—when we could, in
one bite, do away with our memory of God’s word, our need to look back to God in
love?
And in that interstice between materiality and memory, Satan crept,
tempting humanity into an epistemology apart from God’s words and providence.
After all, God’s warning manifested in God’s providence. God let them eat from
every tree—even, presumably the Tree of Life. But the fruit of gnosis was as sweet
and easy to swallow as nothingness: an anti-sacrament, an empty pulp that would
not nourish life. A fruit to deny the knowledge inherent in immortality.
It is this space in Meno’s paradox that the Immortal God rightly occupies.
And yet for as much as the “fall” struck us with amnesia, the allusions extend to us
still. And our anamnestic search, our reaches with our words, our arts—made
closest in our worship—thus recover incrementally our God and our selves.202 This
is why George Steiner writes of Berkeley who paradoxically “characterizes matter
as one of the ‘languages of God.’” Steiner clarifies, “If at all, speech is edged in
202
“We must recognize the medium and its powers and limits. Speech acts in worship as a means of
giving oneself. Through words we are present to others, and God is present to us. Words express our
thoughts, our emotions, and our very being so that others may share in them” (White, 166).
90
reach of materiality, this is to say, in educative reach of that which must, finally, be
left unsaid, in the notations made by artists and craftsmen.”203
We must not make the ‘Christian’ mistake: to devalue the world,
materiality, and our own makings (artistic, technological) would be as absurd as a
silent scream.204 The church would be proclaiming salvation and “joy to the world”
at louder and louder notches, while adamantly silencing the calls of the world.205
The excessive volume of heedless certainty is in fact emptier than silence; it is too
full to carry a space for love and listening, for attentive engagement with what is
other. It would be an assertion that takes space and leaves no room.
The reverse is also true however, that “to deify Being is precisely to be
deaf, to kill the human voice, to deny God.”206 (If to “deify Being” means to make it
an idol, as opposed to recognizing its role as a sacramental container for the divine.)
While housed in the body, our epistemological claims rely on what is in
some way outside the self. So as to avoid the complex conversation of what is
internal and what is external reality, we will speak of their shared categories of
form: we know via memory, sensations, and semiotics.207 When I say form, I do not
mean simply materiality. These categories are not univocally related to materiality;
memories, sensations, and imagination employ form. Form implies shape,
203
Steiner, 16.
In this way, we could stand to learn from Jewish sacramentality. White reminds, “From time to time,
Christians need to remember that they are not called to be more spiritual than God; the path to the
spiritual leads through many material realities” (White, 177-8).
205
See Bell’s exploration of Amos’ prophetic voice as a critique of worship (Singing, 84, 137).
206
Davenport, xxii.
207
Here I find interesting Jean-Louis Chrétien’s work, as well as Orthodox theologian, Pavel Florensky’s
assessment, as characterized by Dvoretskaya Ekaterina, “Words help us ascertain operative systems to
unarchive files of collective memory. As Florensky wrote in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: ‘The
whole theory of knowledge is, in the final analysis, a theory of memory. Memory is the activity of
assimilation in thought (i.e., creative reconstruction from representations) of that which is revealed by
mystical experience in Eternity, or, in other words, the creation in Time of symbols of Eternity.’”
Dvoretskaya Ekaterina, “Personal approach to Symbolic reality,” http://www.crvp.org/seminar/05seminar/Ekaterina.htm (accessed online: June 10, 2010).
204
91
arrangement—ultimately, a negotiation between: what is present and what is absent;
what is acknowledged, what is unknown; what is material, what is immaterial; what
is learned, what is forgotten.
These are not the poles of Hegelian dialectic, where God might be
perceived as their meeting. Christ might be the closest we come to ‘synthesizing’
these categories. But insofar as synthesis suggests a rational arrival, we miss the
mark, and Christ sublates behind the haze of our abstractions. For now, we might
consider Christ as a “convergence” as Von Balthasar has demonstrated.208 And, so
that we do not misunderstand “convergence” as a rational resting place, we might
consider God as the infinite space of “paradox” in which all convergences are given
dimension, their seeming contradictions intact.209
In the space of epistemological paradox and its play (its elusive allusions),
we engage the material (empirical reality, actions and reactions, artistic and literary
expressions) and immaterial (our thoughts, our emotions, our memories, our
desires). Thus, a definition of religion that accounts for its role in Being must
acknowledge the perennial questions of:
1) Sacramentality—can finite forms reconnect (re-ligare) us to
the infinite?
2) Anamnesis—what have we inherited from grace, from tradition
from a collective memory that helps us to read again (relegio) God into our experiences?
208
Von Balthasar, Convergences.
Von Balthasar is especially adept at capturing God’s paradoxical nature. See “God’s Word,” Epilogue
(San Francisco: St. Ignatius, Press: 2004), 29. And also, Von Balthasar’s Heart of the World.
209
92
3) Response—how do we regard respectfully, or treat carefully
(re-legere) God, our earth, and one another?
These words have two implicit concepts in common. First, an interaction
and interdependence that requires open relationship with what remains outside the
self. This openness is a covenant made, a promise to relate with difference—the
Wholly Other, the human other, empirical reality, and revelatory claim. Second,
these categories require a criterion of worthship. Worthship implies appraisal and
discernment (the evaluative perception of faith that worship should rightly
cultivate).210 In worship, we are confessing the worth of God, based on our memory
and our experience.211 Thus worship is the link of allusion, bringing value to both.
As William Johnson Everett writes:
The word worship, of course, indicates that this symbolic action
points us toward what is worthy and especially what is worthy of
our praise and devotion. That is, it lifts up this symbolic activity
as an ethical action that vivifies and inculcates values to direct our
lives….It is our paradigm of service. It rehearses the goals,
powers, and patterns we are to serve in life.212
Everett sees worship as the “rehearsal of God’s right order,” a dramatic
enactment that “schools people’s capacity for improvisation, reworking,
collaboration, and actual performance.”213 I do not echo Everett’s assertion that
worship must establish “right order”—in so far as this connotes the theologically
complicated words “power” and “governance.” Everett’s call for democratic
worship and borrowed political terms seems more loaded than I care to implement
210
As John Bell succinctly reminds, “It is important that every song sung is offered to God with that
sense of uniqueness. God is worth it.” (Singing, 81).
211
As William Johnson Everett suggests, worship resembles a play rehearsal necessitating purpose and
participation because God is worthy of our offering. It follows that, like a rehearsal, “all worship is
ultimately provisional [and] essentially eschatological” (30).
212
Ibid., 33.
213
Ibid., 30.
93
at this time. However, his description of the rehearsal or performative nature of
liturgy provides a helpful schema.214
Everett focuses on the pedagogical and formative nature of dramatic
rehearsal. Worship as “an activity that only anticipates the final event,” thus trains
us in its dramatic exchange between memory and experience.215 This “training”
would be better understood as transformation, which is not taught but experienced.
As Mikhail Bakhtin claims, existence is an act. And thus our participation in the act
of worship (“the work of the people,” liturgeia) “is experienced as something given
as something-yet-to-be-determined, is intonated, has an emotional-volitional tone,
and enters into an effective relationship to me within the unity of the ongoing event
encompassing us.”216
Richard McCall’s text, Do This: Liturgy as Performance utilizes
performance theory to suggest that the similarities between worship and drama arise
in their overlapping structure. Using Turner and Schechner’s theories, he reveals a
transformation that occurs through story. But the worship service is somehow a
combination of aesthetic drama and social drama. He writes, “The function of
aesthetic drama is to do for the consciousness of the audience what social drama
does for its participants: providing a place for, and means of, transformation.”217
214
In addition to Richard D. McCall’s Do This: Liturgy as Performance, Everett would do well to
explore the implications of his performance metaphor in Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Engagement with
God: The Drama of Christian Discipleship, or more theatrically based works such as Todd E. Johnson
and Dale Savidge. Performing the Sacred: Theology and Theatre in Dialogue. For a less political, more
ethics-based approach to spiritual formation, see Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian
Ethics (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004).
215
“Worship is also an enactment of what we already have learned. In this sense it is a matter of memory
and memorial, of representing what we already know in a way that trains our speech, motion, and
emotion so that the lines and actions flow through us….It becomes a world of shared reference” (Everett,
33-34).
216
McCall, 69.
217
Ibid., 52.
94
As a place of transformation, a space for epiphanic encounter, worship
elucidates the allusion between actual events and ritual enactment, between God’s
revelation and our realization. This is not simply a mimetic connection. We are not
only mimetically representing God’s presence as actors (in the sense of hypokritēs).
We practice a living, highly participatory anamnesis. This way of viewing worship
and the entire aesthetic world as “Being-as-event” has implications for our ability to
value the calls of form, the responses of action, and the memory that roots them to
the One who first called us. The implication then of worship as a “performed
theology would contemplate Being more actually than a theology built only on
abstraction and generalization.”218
Thus we return to the value of Hans Urs von Balthasar theo-dramatic
sensibility, this time in his work, Engagement with God: The Drama of Christian
Discipleship. Here he describes the worshipping body of Christ as
the community of those for whom the Word had not grown cold
and become just abstract doctrine, but is the living personal
presence of the Trinity, articulated in their life of brotherly love
and a communion that is both sacramental and existential.
Wherever in the world such a community exists, there is the
source whence the world’s true liberation begins.”219
In anamnesis is our freedom, because we do not feel the burden of beingas-God (mimesis) but beings-toward-God’s call—past, present, future (the embrace
of anamnesis). In this living recollection, all allusion sings of a “personal presence.”
In the worshipping community, we are reminded that existence and sacrament are
one. And this sacramental existence is a human assertion of self (participation) that
218
219
Ibid., 69.
Von Balthasar, Engagement, 105.
95
makes room for otherness (presence). This is the paradox of allusion that in turn
serves as the basis of communion.
96
Chapter 6
Exchange: The Dance of the Disappearing Body
The disciple’s helplessness to pick up his mind and hand it over to
somebody else gave him some idea of the nature of his
“problems.” One cannot begin to be an artist, in Suzuki’s sense,
until he has become “empty” until he has disappeared.
Thomas Merton, “Theology of Creativity”220
…love is the ego’s fruitfulness, its creative inclination to what is
other, the transcendence which is rooted in it. Even when its
yearning seems to make the ego rattle the grill around it, even this
belongs to its life and it makes the ego’s existence richer and
more love-worthy. This self, O God, is the highest and only gift
which I received from your hand…How could I make you a gift of
my love or offer you my ego in love if I no longer have this ego, if
I am dispossessed of myself?...Leave me my ego and then you can
have it!
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World221
During a workshop on improvisation and worship, Kit Novotny broke us
into pairs. She asked us to silently mirror our partner, taking turns on who led. By
default of location, I found myself partnered with Rosemary. I was disheartened and
a bit intimidated. She was one of the people in my first brainstorming session—the
one who misunderstood my every contribution. Perhaps I misrepresented myself (or
impeded myself by confessing that my tradition does not know much about liturgy).
Regardless, whenever I suggested something, I found myself re-explaining to her.
Did she mishear? Did she get what I was saying? She qualified everything I said.
And the more I communicated my ideas, the more she disengaged. I disconnected
and essentially disappeared from those conversation.
But, the philosophy of improvisation is receptivity, epitomized in the
response, “Yes, LET’S!” This opens up a source of playfulness for the participants,
220
Thomas Merton, “Theology of Creativity,” The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton (New York: New
Directions Publishing Corporation, 1980), 364.
221
Von Balthasar, Heart, 141.
97
a space of no judgment since everyone has the excuse of “going along with” the
external stimuli received. It was easy following Rosemary. I had no pressure to
perform, to explain; and because we were in our bodies, focusing on movement, we
made no room for self-criticism. She had a dancer’s grace; a softness I had not
sensed in speaking with her. Her eyes smiled, followed by her lips. Then her body,
full of energy and lightness, began dancing. I mimicked her salsa steps. And when it
came time for me to lead, she mimicked my ballet bar exercises with good humor
and attention. Her body moved with generous listening, giving me courage to lead.
Then Kit announced that in the final phase, we should both follow—both
mirror. Everyone objected, breaking what had previously been a silent and attentive
room. “Both follow?” “How can we do that?” “Maybe we can come up with signals
for each other?”
“Go with it,” Kit said, “Give yourselves permission.”
Rosemary and I were hesitant at first. We began very simply and slowly,
trying to intuit how the other would unfold the movement. It was difficult to bear
the task of creating new movement, simultaneously speaking and listening with our
bodies. It was an exercise in narrow focus and wide receptivity. Then suddenly, in
trying to imitate one another, I said, “I’m so lucky you’re my partner. I get to learn
how to dance from you. I’ve missed dancing, and you’re so gifted!” She laughed,
rightly flattered and a little embarrassed. Coyly, she started teaching me a samba
line dance. Though she was clearly giving the steps, I was contributing my self in
proportion. With us both giving, we made space in our bodies, building sensitivity
to the form and to one another. Soon enough, I had learned the dance; we were able
to truly follow one another because we had a common form, and a shared
98
generosity. “Leadership” dissolved. Though we danced with our own bodies, our
individual identities disappeared. Or converged? We adhered to form, but the
fidelity freed us.
Our dancing continued until we erupted in laughter, like two girls giggling
at their feat. As we stopped dancing, we noticed everyone had been watching us.
They applauded as Kit dismissed us for a break. During the recess, I spoke with
Rosemary at length. We revealed ourselves to one another, responding and giving a
space for listening, as we had during the dance. “I haven’t danced in years. I used to
enjoy dancing before I decided to quit pursuing theatre,” I confessed.
“I took up dance after my divorce. I had a lot of time to pursue things I
hadn’t done. I decided to take a chance. I started group lessons and now take private
lessons and compete….How old do you think I am? It’s never too late to dance.
Besides, you’ve got some natural gifts. I can tell. You should develop them. If you
want to. I’ll teach you another step during the dinner break.” Rosemary exuded
vibrancy and openness.
“Yes!” I exclaimed. “And you should perform at the showcase tonight.”
“I don’t know…will you do it with me? I have my dance shoes…and I
could find some music. Yes…yes, let’s do it. What do you say?”
“Yes, let’s!” I walked away from our conversation, feeling lighter—as if
the traces of our dance had not yet disappeared from muscle-memory. Reflecting
now, the whole scene seems sacramental somehow. As our distinctions disappeared,
we became our dance.222
222
“The experience and its expression must not be separated, for, as [Suzuki] says, ‘In Zen, experience
and expression are one.’ What is this Zen experience? It is often explained by the term ‘self-realization,’
99
Chapter 7
Annunciation
The encounter with the aesthetic is, together with certain modes of
religious and of metaphysical experience, the most ‘ingressive,’
transformative summons available to human experiencing. Again,
the shorthand image is that of an annunciation, of “a terrible
beauty” or gravity breaking into the small house of our
cautionary being. If we have heard rightly the wing-beat and
provocation of that visit, the house is no longer habitable in quite
the same way as it was before.
George Steiner, Real Presences223
I have said on many occasions before that the Holy Spirit flowers
from the work in God, from the birth in which the Father
generates his only begotten Son and from this outflowing in such
a way that is proceeds from them both and the soul flows forth in
this processions. The image of the Godhead is impressed on the
soul, and in the flowing out and flowing together of the three
Persons the soul flows back and is formed into its own first
imageless image.
Meister Eckhart, “Sermon 8”224
Many summers ago I was teaching English in the Czech Republic. Since it
was a service connected to the Kristova Obec church, my fellow teachers and I
instructed by reading through the Book of Luke. When we came to the
Annunciation passage, I remember Kamilla, like every student before her, asking,
“What does this mean…this Holy Spirit overshadows Mary?”225 I loved the way she
pronounced overshadow. She said it with softness, even though her mouth held the
last vowel so tightly. She said the word in a way that recalled me to its strangeness.
Honestly, the word sounded like a term of ominous force, or a euphemism
for a peculiar sexual encounter. I do not presently remember how I explained it;
perhaps because even I was not convinced by my definition. I described the scene,
but this can easily be interpreted in a sense exactly contrary to its intended meaning…it is an emptiness,
an ‘original suchness’ in which not such false and illusory self can be present at all.” (Merton, 363.)
223
Steiner, 143.
224
Eckhart, Selected Writings, 137.
225
Luke 1:35.
100
and focused mostly on Mary’s yielding, her exemplary faith, and the blessing born
of her receptivity. But this term “overshadow” has continued to elude me. In some
ways, the word effected what it expressed: it haunted my mind with its imprecision;
but its imprecision was also its power. The term overpowered me, and I gave up
wrestling with its mystery for many years since.
Any exegete worth their learning would turn to the commentaries. But in
my years of theological study, I had neglected the term, until recently I found
myself aroused by another word: bara. The word bara is used as a verb that only
God performs. It is mentioned in Genesis 1:27 when God creates the first humans. I
have since learned that the word bara can mean “to fatten up, fill up.” In the case of
Genesis 1:27, God is said to fatten the human with God’s shadow (tselem).226 How
peculiar. God’s shadow is three-dimensional. Even the apparent emptiness of God’s
shadow fills to the brim created forms, giving them life.227
Therefore, when God creates (bara) in God’s likeness, She grants
humanity a strange gift: a simultaneously abundant and evanescent presence. The
shadow provides a symbol of imminence wed to transcendence: it makes a presence
known, but does not deny the presence its différance. God does not simply pour Her
definitive presence into the reaches and recesses of humanity. God will not let
Herself be grasped.228 And yet, God is unmistakably present and somehow given to
our sensibilities. Consider the palpability of absence: the coolness of dusk as the sun
226
“Genesis 1:27,” Hebrew-English Tanakh (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2003), 2.
This could serve a theory of God as four-dimensional or rather, supra-dimensional (on the premise
that three-dimensional objects cast two-dimensional shadows). Some physicists have already explored
these implications.
228
Urging us toward the humility of being, Abraham J. Heschel relates, “‘No illumination,’ remarks
Joseph Conrad in The Arrow of Gold, ‘can sweep all mystery out of the world. After the departed
darkness the shadows remain.’” God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1983), 57.
227
101
recedes; the touch that leaves the skin longing, hungry with remembering; the
liminal sounds of music that hang like silhouettes upon the air; the fragrance that
follows a stranger and leads us powerfully back to another time.229
How extraordinary. In human memory and in our very members: we are
saturated with shadows of the divine. These shadows are forms that take up space
but leave us room somehow. We are weighted with hints, fattened with God’s
contours—that yet change depending on our encounters with luminosity
(revelation). Our living is predicated upon what simultaneously occupies and
exceeds us. We are living with an awareness of a God that is inextricably part of us,
but evasively other. Perhaps Plato’s shadowy cave was closer than imagined…so
close, the cave lives in us, is us.
If three-dimensional beings cast two-dimensional shadows, our existence
as three-dimensional shadows (if Genesis’ poetry is taken up by physics) implies a
four-dimensional presence. The fourth-dimension is usually deemed as “time.”
Perhaps then God does not exist as a Being outside of time or in time, but is akin to
our experiences of time. Whether we wish to make this link may prove to be
imaginative play. More important to this discussion is Jean-Francois Lyotard’s
mathematical exposition of Euclidean space within theological discourse. After the
third dimension, the cutting-off point (the finitudes) of geometrical shapes within an
unknown fourth dimension “will result in the plane loosing its coupure-function and
passing it on to volume.” Representations that we carry now (definitions via
discernment of what form is/is not) will give way to openness, a dis-closure. This is
229
Perhaps this last example boasts the longest shadow cast. Smell is the strongest memory despite the
formal irreducibility of its stimuli; we cannot reduce the smell to a perceptible color, sound, or particular
texture.
102
significant on two immediate points. First, when the lower order enters into the
higher order, it is said to be “‘impregnated and preserved’ by divine plenitude.”230
Secondly, when the higher order discloses itself within the lower, a human being
will seek for words to capture the encounter, but feel only the shadow: the backside
of God’s presence231 as we reach for the hem of the garment,232 the edge of the
cloak.233 Thus, in our physical members, as in our memory, God punctures with
plenitude, experienced as cross-sections in space over time. This intrusion of time in
space, or God within our very being-in-the world, gashes experience as Chrétien
suggests:
in order to strike [us] with a wound of love that eternity itself
could not close again….This annunciation of God to memory
does not at all signify that we do not have to seek God, to desire
God, and to tend towards God, for it is only if God manifests
himself to us, precedes us, and foresees us that a desire for him is
possible.234
The poetry of Genesis 1:27 reminds us that our notions of God abound
within while exceeding our inner being. As St. Augustine reminds: “So learn to
recognize what constitutes the most perfect harmony: do not go out of yourself, but
enter into yourself; truth lives in your inner self…”235 In our selves we find God’s
shadowy representation. This is both humbling and heartening. Because God has
impressed “eternity in [our] hearts,” we are overwhelmed by our inability to
“fathom what God has done.” And yet, we are also able to see that God “has made
230
Chris Doude van Troostwijk, “Phrasing God: Lyotard’s Hidden Philosophy of Religion,” God in
France, 174.
231
Exodus 33:19-23.
232
Zechariah 8:23.
233
Luke 8:44.
234
Chrétien, Unforgettable, 88-89.
235
De vera religione 39, 72 as translated by Bruno Forte (Portal of Beauty, 7).
103
everything beautiful in its time.”
236
The excesses of Beauty call out to the eternity
within, reminding that our finite bodies yet hold intimations of the infinite.237
The dilemma of ego is how to hold these intimations of God, without
believing ourselves to be or replace God. The habitation of God’s shadow in human
form can give way to two idolatrous impulses to count God’s shadow as God’s fully
realized presence:
1)
First, in the metaphor of ancient idolatry: we can absolutize
otherwise finite forms. In our post-Enlightenment context, we
may not give objects infinite import; we are more inclined to
deny gods altogether. However, we are not immune to
constructing a humanity apart from God, and granting objects
a sort of ultimacy. Tyranny manifests the capacity for a human
being to exceed his or her limitation by seeking power
‘unlimited.’
2)
Second, in the step of hairesis: we can objectify the infinite238.
This is often the critique against onto-theology, which has
selectively systematized God. God becomes ‘God.’ Thus,
Jean-Luc Marion defines idol as a representation of the
visible—“‘that which is seen’ and no more.”239
Thus it is not far-fetched to claim that all sin is some shade of idolatry.
Because to sin is to respond to a call that promises the infinite—but is in actuality, a
236
Ecclesiastes 3:11.
Thus Von Balthasar comes to understand beauty as God’s “self-showing.” (Epilogue, 59-68).
“The idol consigns the divine to the measure of a human gaze.” Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 14.
239
This contrasts Marion’s sense of icon which is a representation of the invisible (God without Being,
9).
237
238
104
step in the direction of finitude, death. This call is drastically contrasted by the
Annunciation. Sin is the inverse of sacrament. Where sin would promise fullness
and deliver constraint, sacrament promises the fullness of grace as made mobile by
the constraints of form.
Just as we believe sacraments to be God’s presence in action, so too we
understand our lives to be vessels of divine agency, ex opere operato.240 The
sacrament, as grace in the grammar of form, is God’s assertion of excess within
what is deficient. As God created humanity through forms (shadows) that take space
while leaving room: so too the sacraments of the church (and by degree, the
sacramental quality of our lives) are intended to be this intimation of grace. Grace,
as the gift that is excessive, is given by God through our forms in order to create
spaciousness within us. This spaciousness is an openness to love, to give. It is the
spaciousness created by an Annunciation: God’s likeness whispering to us what our
minds cannot comprehend, calling us to the Beauty of the infinite overshadowing
the finite. Our response is to bear the fullness of God’s likeness, by our acts of love.
This love is first a womb, a self-giving created when we open ourselves to God. It is
also a wound, a self-emptying vulnus that bleeds love upon the children of God.
Admittedly, our role as bearing the fullness of God’s likeness resembles—
but in no way replaces—Christ as God’s ultimate revelation of love. In Love Alone
is Credible, Hans Urs von Balthasar holds up Mary and Christ in their ability to
accept God’s revelation of love—God’s fiat.241 This acceptance is not some
nebulous spiritual exercise. It is deeply rooted in materiality: as real as giving birth
240
That is, so long as this concept is not an excuse from responsible living, but a recognition that when
we act justly, we are not seeking praise for ourselves. “God operates simply through the work being done
independently of the human agent. Augustine’s great contribution is to make clear that the source of
sacraments is divine agency, not human” (White, 183).
241
Von Balthasar, Love, 126.
105
to Christ, as walking the road of Christ’s suffering. In another text, Von Balthasar
returns to this theme. He utilizes Scheeben’s Mariology, which also borrows from
the incarnation of Christ, and the creation of the world: a process whereby nature is
impregnated by grace, and thus bears the fruits of the Spirit.242 This willingness to
be impregnated, to give one’s life to “transformation into the objectively good and
beautiful,” predicates itself on the consent of faith. We are asked to be as God’s
fruitful womb: canvassing the contours of Her presence, bearing Christ’s new love.
Von Balthasar, as we noted in the sacramental theology of Paul Claudel,
takes his cues on faithfulness from nature. He writes of creation’s response to God’s
fiat: “Nature’s forms spring forth from creation, rising up and opening themselves
in spirit and love to the infinity of fructifying grace they thus receive from above
their ultimate form…”243 This giving of self, asserting of form, is an opening to the
spirit. It would seem that the first Annunciation occurred when God sang, “Let there
be light.” This fiat fore-shadows Mary’s Annunciation news, “And now, you will
conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be
great, and will be called the Son of the Most High.”244
The underlying assumption of this Annunciation: it is God’s prerogative to
announce good news. It is the underlying assumption of sacrament that God
initiates grace. So, too, we must remember that it is God’s right to reveal God’s self.
This last point is the most difficult, because we cannot know, as we might with an
idol, what God has planned. But surely the God of our ancestors is known in some
way, while yet completely free?
242
243
244
Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: Seeing the Form, 111.
Von Batlhasar, Love, 126.
Luke 1:31-32a.
106
According to Von Balthasar, God arrives in an intentional and selfinterpreted manifestation—love fashioned in the form of Christ. And since this form
is not stagnant, God is best understood in the dramatic revelation of Christ.245 After
all, as Von Balthasar writes: “If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for
the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize.”246 But Von
Balthasar warns that after perceiving this love, we risk reducing it with our reasoned
schemas.247 As if to counteract the ‘reasoned schemas’ of his more theological or
philosophical works, Von Balthasar’s Heart of the World operates in dramatic
monologues. Von Balthasar’s first section of Heart of the World (“The Kingdom”)
concludes with Christ’s inner monologue as he wrestles with and resolves upon
God’s will. God’s over-taking of Christ is not as readily praiseworthy as Mary’s
surprise.
Nevertheless, Christ resolves upon the gestation of God’s love as he takes
his place in the “law of weakness.”248 But unlike humanity’s tending toward futile
hollowness, Christ exhibits a weakness and emptiness that creates a space for love,
for perfecting fullness. Von Balthasar’s second section (“The Suffering”) recounts
the inner monologue of a man’s response to the suffering of Christ. The subject is
tortured by his inadequacy, and deadened by the futile excuses that remove him
from receiving and embodying God’s love. The suffering, double-minded man
experiences a glimmer that he calls the “ghostly hour.” This ghostly hour, a taste of
245
I employ drama in Von Balthasar’s usage, as described by Rowan Williams in “Balthasar, Rahner and
the apprehension of being,” Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (London: SCM,
2007), 96.
246
Von Balthasar, Love, 75.
247
I am reminded of Von Balthasar’s phenomenological counterpart, Jean-Luc Marion, namely, his work
God without Being, or his essay, “The Saturated Phenomena,” Philosophy Today 40, no. 1 (spring 1996),
103-24.
248
Von Balthasar, Heart, 82-84.
107
Annunciation, occurs when “strange things touch you, when something brushes by
your face like the down of a nightbird in the darkness. You shudder and are startled.
Your soul’s hair stands on end in the wake of this unspeakable and abrupt
encounter.”249 The encounter includes a sense of being summoned by the Wholly
Other, of being called to the Ever Greater of Divinity and thereby ever-greater
manifestations of self.
I am reminded of George Steiner’s Real Presences where he conjoins the
calls of aesthetic and divine encounters. Art intrudes upon our created lives; its real
presence summons us and engages us with its search, its questions. Like a god
dwelling in our fallen pockets of paradise, summoning us from our hiding, art asks,
“Where are you?”250 Therefore, Steiner suggests that “the indiscretion of serious art
and literature and music is total…This interrogation [is] no abstract dialectic. It
purposes change.”251
And yet, the ghostly hour—the touch with transcendence that begs our
transformation—quickly lapses. The pores that once opened to the Spirit occlude;
the eyes that once opened to Christ close. As the ‘suffering’ man in Heart of the
World accounts, the touch gives way to a calloused husk, an imprisoning fortress
erected by excuses: faulty appeals to the universal (93); self-righteous comparison
with others (94); unfulfilled good intentions (95); fulfilled religious obligations
(95); entrapment in mechanistic living and innocuous routine (95-96); selfentitlement’s procrastination (96-97); compartmentalized living (97-99, 122-125);
delegated spirituality (100); spiritual bartering (106); enjoyment that fades to
249
250
251
Ibid., 93.
Genesis 3:9.
Steiner, 142-143.
108
indifference and ultimately, rejection (101-103). The man winnows away at Christ’s
commission, until—rejecting God’s summons—he believes himself beyond God’s
love.
One might then raise the concern: the tendency to deconstruct the call of
Christ has been misconstrued as apophatic theology.252 Perhaps our desire to grant
God space, is really our own concealed desire to bracket God’s call? Meaning: does
the (rightful) desire to let God be Wholly Other, to accept humbly our own finitude
in understanding God, somehow translate into a crippling, false humility? If we say
that we cannot possibly know God’s fullness, will we also negate the possibility of
God’s love to penetrate us and claim us in full? Will we shirk God’s loving
summons that recreates us, enabling us to praise Her goodness?
Though I understand the openness enabled by an apophatic understanding
of God, I wonder if this tendency to say “God is God, not...” will be a skill falsely
employed to say, “Well, I’m only human, I am not…” Von Balthasar’s depiction of
one man’s excuses—the stream of via negativa justifications—“with one stroke
dispose of grace and guilt.”253 The sinner who views God as Wholly Other, need not
see himself as completely beyond reach, beyond the immanence of a transforming
Spirit. Sacraments arrive to effect God’s grace. Annunciations intrude to effect our
transformation. Will we receive?
In Steiner’s estimation, it is simply not enough to recognize that we are
created being; we must look, through the eyes of faith, toward creative becoming.
252
As Chrétien asks, “How could love of the truth never love to encounter it? And the alleged ‘humility’
which prefers seeking to receiving substitutes the egocentric and derisory enjoyment of our procedures,
passions, and feelings for the truth itself. This is to enter into an idolatry of self. It forgets that the truth
given by God, even if given suddenly, needs an eternity to be received, for receiving is no easy task”
(Unforgettable, 113).
253
Von Balthasar, Heart, 93.
109
This process, Word Made Flesh, is what Steiner’s calls poiesis: “meaning made
form…the processes of transformation which the aesthetic sets in motion.”254 Like
the aesthetic, God invades “the last privacies of our existence.” She questions our
excuses and our resistance. All creation carries with it the knowledge of good and
evil, beauty and terror. 255 What we do with that knowledge, what we choose to hear
in the “wing-beat and provocation” of the created and the cross, begs an artistry of
lived response.
The creations of our choices carry within them “an eternal meaning…
contained within the precise contour of a moment…Here the world ripens and
rounds itself out like a fruit and laden with such divine meaning it falls before the
feet of the Eternal.”256 This Eternal fruit that grows within the contours of space and
time—in our thoughts, our choices, our words, our deeds, our art—intrudes. It
grows dangerously large, ripening into all aspects of existence. For God’s love
desires intimacy. Though we may push God out with false humility, with excuses,
and even with the praise of false piety—God’s grace continues to spill through the
chinks in our cells.257 God’s love, like an interrupting brush with annunciation,
beckons us outside what we perceive possible. Until finally, we move from
questions and bartering into faith and trust: we are called from Mary’s “How can
this be” into her “May it be to me as you have said”; from Christ’s “Take this cup
from me” into His “Not my will, but yours be done.” We leap to the loving
reception of Mary that enabled Christ’s fleshly life—and we land in the loving
reception of Christ that enables our spiritual life. All call-response in conscious
254
Steiner, 187.
“…any thesis that would, either theoretically or practically, put literature and the arts beyond good
and evil is spurious” (Steiner, 142).
256
Von Balthasar, Heart, 119.
257
Ibid., 120-121.
255
110
sensation and in conceptual sense, thus requires a trust, a mark of faith in meaning’s
ability to be mobile.
At stake in meaning-full form is always its mobility: its vehicle, what it can
carry, whom it serves, whom it neglects, and what it receives. George Steiner’s
suspicion of extreme deconstruction proves helpful here:
Where it is consequent, deconstruction rules that the very concept
of meaning-fulness, of a congruence, even problematic, between
the signifier and the signified, is theological or ontotheological…The archetypal paradigm of all affirmations of sense
and of significant plenitude—the fullness of meaning in the
word—is a Logos-model. [But] Derrida’s formulation is
beautifully incisive: “the intelligible face of the sign remains
turned to the word and the face of God.”258
The capacity to convey meaning requires drawing deeply from a historical
reserve of meaning-making, while wagering again and again transcendence (what
exceeds, escapes the present moment, the determined concept, the individual self).
Words are not simply holograms: appealing but ultimately empty and illusory.
Because the logos is half-turned to the world, half turned to “the face of God,”
significance is a conversation between the Infinite and the finite. As such,
interpretations are not without limitations. Like a that fruit ripens to a certain size,
our words will decidedly press against the skin of their own volume. They will feel
the limitations of their containers, and necessarily so. We encounter the inchoate
excess streaming through finitude, and not the full-gloried face of God in which all
binding finitudes collapse or unloose.
Beauty is not diminished by this finitude; neither does truth’s incompletion
fully undermine its traction. Finitudes need not give way to aporias. We are
humbled not to our own hollowness or speechlessness, but to a place that desires
258
Real Presences, 119.
111
movement, conversation. On the theo-logical level, existential anxiety (the felt
aporia of speechlessness) is precisely the abyss that only God can seed. The chaos
and the void cannot refuse God’s recreating love: a space filled with God’s shadow.
As Von Balthasar concludes, “Just as the first creation arose ever anew out of sheer
nothingness, so, too, this second world—still unborn, still caught up in its first
rising—will have its sole origin in this wound [of Christ], which is never to close
again. In the future, all shape must arise out of this gaping void, all wholeness must
draw its strength from the creating wound.”259 This creating wound is God’s
simultaneous absence and presence. This is a God who creates meaning from voids,
fills us with shadow’s stand-in, until our being becomes a womb for love’s light.
It is true that God fills the hollows of our need (though this is not what
defines God or makes God “marketable”). God fills, but to overflowing: often
invading spaces of hunger we did not know we had; stretching the insufficient
tunnels of inadequate desire; or more controversially, exposing the rotting cavities
with light. God’s abundance does not simply produce material health and wealth; it
stretches our possession until we feel emptied by the burst. God’s abundant blessing
is love, and the Biblical revelation of this love is often counter-intuitive.260 As
Kahlil Gibran writes in his poem, “Love”:
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is
for your growth
so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest
branches that
quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging
to the earth.
259
Ibid., 153.
“Or, as with Paul [Jesus] was the wisdom of God, a peculiar upside-down wisdom of self-giving that
began with the knowledge of a crucified God rather than a victorious king” (Everett, 45).
260
112
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become
sacred bread for God's sacred feast.261
While we promote the relief of cleansing and re-creation, we do not often
market these as difficult, taxing experiences. As we sell the gospel, we pitch “God”
as genie: one who grants unlimited wishes for forgiveness, cleansing, wealth. When
difficulty arises, the genie is summoned more than ever; and then more than ever
exposed for its powerlessness. A god with no strings attached is a god with no
batteries included.
As Kahlil Gibran notes, true Love is potent: and as such it is both aweinspiring and terrifying. The concepts of God cleansing us and justifying us do
resonate with God’s excessive grace. God clothes us in a radiance that denies all
darkness. But because market terminology speaks of needs satisfied by products, of
a market demand met by a limited supply, God’s excessive radiance eludes market
terminology. And God’s less marketable features are placed in fine print (depending
on the potential buyers, this varies).
God is not an end to suit our needs. God’s presence is less the product of
the marketing mind, and more akin to our encounters with love and with beauty.
Thus. In Love Alone is Credible, Hans Urs Von Balthasar arrives at a conclusion
that is as aesthetically significant as it is theologically invaluable. He suggests that
our experiences of exceptional beauty in art, in nature, in one another are our best
261
Kahlil Gibran, “Love,” www.maryourmother.net/Gibran.html (accessed July 17, 2010).
113
entries into understanding the Annunciation of God’s presence. Our encounters with
the Divine (in life, in liturgy) can be
as overwhelming as a miracle, something we will never get over.
And yet it possesses its intelligibility precisely as a miracle; it
something that binds and frees at the same time…If Mozart’s
Jupiter symphony has a finale—which is something that I cannot
anticipate, derive, or explain on the basis of anything within
myself—then it can be only the finale that it has; the symphony
possesses its own necessity…Such a convergence of what I
cannot have invented and yet at the same time what possesses
compelling plausibility for me is something we find only in the
realm of disinterested beauty….In both cases [of mutual love and
aesthetic encounter] “to understand” what reveals itself does not
mean to subsume it under master categories; neither love in the
freedom of its grace nor the beautiful in its gratuitousness are
things “to be produced”…least of all on the basis of a “need” on
the part of the subject.262
Originating Von Balthasar’s premise is a form that simultaneously “binds
and frees.” It is unproduceable but nevertheless intelligible: a miracle. This
bespeaks God’s creation of humankind—when God gives Her shadow to fill human
form—an action that permits God’s freedom, but also Her fidelity in us. As a living
differance, one’s existence in the world permits freedom in responding to God, but
also fidelity to intimation and constant longing. In this regard, God’s structures (the
world and its sacramentality) serve as an ideal for our own (our arts, our political
structures, our worship). Ideally, we seek forms that bind and free us at the same
time. I would suggest the word compelling—which carries with it the notion of
compulsion (that which binds) as well as beauty (that which frees).
Our arts and our worship strive for the same process of creation that God
reveals—with the distinction that our arts are filled with the shadows of humanity.
Though art can have luminous shadows, flickering the excess of divine and human
262
Von Balthasar, Love, 53.
114
traces, we acknowledge worship’s forms as singular. In worship, we expect the
shadows of humanity and the shadows of God to unite, coming nearer and nearer
such that our proximity, if but for a moment, brings our full selves so close that
there seems nothing but presence and light. Thus, the image of worship remains:
“We, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed
into his likeness [Hebrew: tselem, shadow] with ever-increasing glory, which comes
from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”263
263
2 Corinthians 3:18.
115
Chapter 8
Givenness: Living Sacrament
We “become” what we are doing…The intention of the Christian
is to discover how to improvise according to the same gracious
ensemble action in the less obvious plot structure of the daily
world.
Richard McCall, Liturgy as Performance264
This explains the salutary effect of relics and saints’ bones which,
like a vessel saturated with a powerful fragrance, continue to give
off that love which dominated their growth, that unction which
penetrated their marrow, that gift of communication, which, in
death as in life, is the prerogative of the pious.
Paul Claudel on the “Liber Scriptus”265
Claudel boldly asserts that the uniquely Christian gift is that of
communication—one that we exercise best in our becoming, our participation. And
while I generally delighted in the “gracious ensemble” of my Institute peers, I
immediately found myself in the “less obvious plot structure of the daily world.”
What did the world care that I was humming everywhere I walked? Surely I was
saturated with some strange fragrance. What was it? What could I say to my coworkers when they asked the generic, “How was your summer school course?”
And how to respond to the continental philosophers who launched me into
the Institute, so full of questions I did not know if I would be able to sing. Permit
me to reinstate (and re-address) their questions. I ask in earnest: can we seek the
‘invisible’ God in this world and its forms? Is God even couched here, in our verbal
and active comprehensions? Or is it true that—far worse than hiding—God has not
only ceased to occupy matter, but has deceased entirely?266
264
McCall, 97.
Paul Claudel, I Believe in God: A Meditation on the Apostle’s Creed (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1963), 154.
266
For the registering of this question in political tones, see Marcel Gauchet’s The Disenchantment of the
World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University, 1997).
265
116
This last wounding question is the nightmare of faith. We realize that a
claim of God’s Death is as possible (linguistically, experientially) as a proposal for
God’s Presence. It would seem that a claim at either extreme (Absolute Presence or
Absolute Absence) un-tempered by the other would signal God’s death in the world.
To be human is to be in conversation; to be a religious human is to exist as prayer.
To stop con-versing with those who do not agree with the self is to deny the
humanity of the other. To cease acknowledging a God in words, is to deny the
God’s whose words we are. The material world is the marker of these
conversations, their punctuation in terrain as in terror, in air as in peace.
At root, it comes down to presuppositions, hermeneutics: what interpretive
schema of beliefs can we swallow that will then allow us to feed the very real
hungers of our neighbors? What will nourish humanity, and be for our flourishing?
Is it the eradication of an asymmetrical other, of rituals, or words about or to God?
No matter my belief ‘system,’ I personally cannot help but return to the
cosmological ordering of Genesis. Between the heedless certainties of the believer’s
assertions and the atheist’s denial, between chaotic superabundance and void, matter
emerges—in all its play between being/nothing, asserted form/spacious recess, it
slants its dance between, breathing within and beyond its contents. Art, whose
forms tremble the exercise of meaning-making, most consciously recognizes
matter’s role. My theological roots (and this holds for my constant relation to the
arts), permit me the widest space for movement, the greatest means for loving all
though only devoted to one. In theology’s constraints are my mobility.
117
This is not only a spiritual reality. It is cosmic, historical. Paul Claudel
defines matter as “movement imprisoned by form.” 267 This definition not only
applies to matter, but all form—even the conceptual. For example, new historicist,
Stephen Greenblatt, explains how cultural identity is created and distinguished
through “mobility and constraint.”268 Von Balthasar examines how distinct
identities converge in the “openness and limit” of theological understanding.269 At
the Institute, John Bell spoke on “Vital Worship and the Anatomy of Change.”
Placing church controversies under organic models of change, he reminded, “Some
may say, ‘It’s not in our tradition.’ But the secret in tradition is that it’s constituted
of changes.”
Tradition, when observed and not simply appealed to, reveals an origin
behind each change, a moment of inception that necessarily broke from another
accepted pattern. So too, behind any true freedom is a sensitively formed structure.
Anarchy and constant self-renewal to the detriment of functional stability is not
freedom—at least, not in the community’s ability to develop (eudaimonia).270
After John Bell’s talk, I spoke with Professor Ellen Oak about the Catholic
tradition. I had heard Protestant professors stereotype the Catholic Church: its
267
The “kingdom of matter” is what Claudel calls “movement imprisoned in form.” Can this too be
God’s domain? (Claudel, Essence, 68).
268
Stephen Greenblatt, "Culture," Critical Terms for Literature Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas
McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
269
“Openness and limit are equally granted to and fixed for the Christian theologian in his relationship to
other religions and (in some circumstances atheistic) world views. Openness is granted and fixed insofar
as he cannot prescribe for the universal grace of God in Christ which hidden ways it may make us of in
order to allow as many men as possible—all men, if possible-to share in the final redemption. On the
other hand, he has his defined, theological-kerygmatic commission; he is no ‘free scholar,’ but one sent,
who is to work within the boundaries set for him” (Von Balthasar, Convergences, 72).
270
During the Summer Institute, I happened to receive an email response from Gerald Garutti, a
professor of theatre and political philosophy in Paris, France. His response was a surprise. He gifted me
with an essay entitled, “Bertolt Brecht's Political View at the End of World War II: Reading The
Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944-1945) as a Revolutionary Utopia in the Age of Totalitarianism.” His essay
has revealed to me the art of form and freedom in political inquiry. In this way, I found his projects more
complex than William Everett’s thesis (Politics as Worship).
118
distinctive developments of hierarchical structuring, liturgical ordering; how bound
it was by tradition and ritual forms. All this structure, repetition, sameness of liturgy
and differentiation of members. How oppressive, some scoffed, how boring. The
weight of scripted worship, pre-determined and prescribed by councils.
Undoubtedly, if this reduction were the full story, it is no wonder that American
Protestants shirk. Catholicism encroaches upon my values of freedom, selfexpression, self-determination, innovation, and novelty! I’m sorry, it just doesn’t
appeal to me. What else is on the menu? Perceptively, John Bell reminded that both
Catholic and Protestant, liturgical and free churches, utilize change in tandem with
tradition.
Speaking with Ellen Oak about her experience of liturgical structures,
revealed what I had found to be true as an actress: shared forms liberate and create
community. Rituals provides modes of contact with God and with the church
body—worldwide and throughout history. These forms serve as vessels, relatively
unchanging though respecting of times and places. In their distinct shapes and
identities, they represent a God that is Wholly Other and extraordinary. And yet,
because all are members are united in the doing of them, there remains a strong
sense of God’s proximity. Forms, though finite, make possible the reach.271
There is something to this meeting of form asserted and space granted,
excess and empty. We witness this on several relevant levels:
a)
In matter, as Claudel’s definition has noted. Though, outside of
his poetic wording, physicists would affirm the interplay of
271
“Words, after speech, reach/ Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,/ Can words or music
reach…” (Eliot, Four Quartets, 140).
119
space and form, fill and interstice—and in especially nuanced
ways—chaos and void.
b)
In art, which presumes shaping through intrusions of form
into negative space (in visual art and architecture). And as for
notated arts (drama, poetry, music): the shaping occurs in the
space of interpretation—the exploration of what is written and
what exceeds the page in performance.
c)
In worship, as in performance, Richard McCall notes “the
complex interchange and borrowing of verbal and gestural
events…a process both of traditio, the passing on of
authoritative material, and of construction. Words and action
may remain the same…but the performance—the way in which
they are done and the ‘meaning’ of that doing—undergoes an
intentional interpretation by a sort of dramatic expansion.”272
In so far as worship is anamnesis, we re-call what is absent or
in the past, thus reconstituting its symbol as a container for
presence in the present.273
d)
In theology, which rightly should include apophatic and
kataphatic claims. These admissions attempt to account for the
indispensable presence and undeniable absence of God: a God
that breathes, pulses, seduces even. Recent developments in
phenomenology contribute the categories of excess (especially
272
McCall, 21.
McCall describes anamnesis as “re-calling, not in the sense of making present that which has a
separate existence…but in the sense of constituting a new thing in the present of which the recalled event
remains a symbol or image but is being constituted of its own power and presence in the present” (61).
273
120
Jean Louis-Chrétien, Jean-Luc Marion) and the trace of that
which recedes and precedes us (Emmanuel Lévinas, Jacques
Derrida).
e)
In ethics, which is often overlooked as a creative or formative
process. Action, a medium for our sensitivity and shaping,
negotiates engagement and withdrawal, the thrust of
compulsion and the receptivity of compassion.
f)
In politics, which deals primarily in exchanges of freedom and
fidelity, governmental presence and citizen liberties.
Now, these categories would benefit from further development and
clarification. But let me at least explain that I have used words of contrast not to
suggest dualism or false dichotomy. I am identifying the contrasts; but only because
to value the distinctions of both is to more deeply grant their space of meeting.274
These six domains are creative in their own right. My definition of creation
is an exchange between excess and recess, form and space. Therefore, creativity is
an intentional participation in this act of exchange, this perichoresis of desire. It
follows that to deny this exchange is to value its extremes. Recess without excess:
starvation. Excess without recess: cancerous proliferation. Space without form:
obliteration. Form without space: obstruction. In the act of creation, habitation is the
goal: which necessarily entails homes that prize rooms for hosting as much as walls
that partition against hostile elements. Deconstruction is not the enemy, and neither
is theological construction. Nihilism is as hideous as over-speculation--nothing
converges with everything at the extremities. Therefore, creation as a perichoresis
274
A Euclidian “breadthless line” is no less defined by the establishment of at least two points. (And
between those points: an infinite domain.)
121
of desire, a dance of the trinity around the space of khora, will resemble a return to
Plato’s Symposium.275 We recall Diotima's tale of Penia (lack) and Poros (fullness)
copulating on Aphrodite's (beauty's) birthday, giving birth to Eros (desire). Creation
as the ongoing exchange between lack and fullness, the homemakers of desire, will
be a return to the beautiful as the event of gratuitousness: an occasion for Penia
(deconstruction's negations) and Poros (construction's assertions) to come
together—this time without drunken seduction—to produce an ongoing re-birth, the
becoming of desire which is the life of faith.
The survival of creation is predicated on this exchange between spaces that
listen or recede (topological apophasis) and faces that protrude or exceed
(topological kataphasis). Consequently, creativity is inherently a dialogue. It may be
that, to engage in the arts and in religion is to experience a wide creativity, a deep
dialogue. We note this cosmic conversation in God’s work in the opening chapter of
Genesis. We think of Michelangelo who heard even a stone speaking to him of what
his eyes and hands must soon set free. His task as a mediator between excess and
recess made his process a metaphor for the artist. It even informed his standards: the
same standards that inspire priests, prophets, poets, artists, actors, and musicians—
those who express, “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too
high and falling short, but in setting our aim to low and meeting our mark.”276
275
That erotic love is born on Aphrodite’s (Beauty’s) birthday is significant. Perhaps the lover-artist
experiences eros in the very act of creating, poiesis—as the move from non-being into being. The
questions remain: how is agape love distinguishable from erotic love? How is Christ’s poiesis in
incarnation distinguishable from our own poiesis through art-making? Plato, “Symposium,” Symposium
and Phaedrus (New York: Cosimo Books, Inc., 2010), 27.
276
Michelangelo quoted by Robert D. Dale, Seeds for the Future: Growing Organic Leaders for Living
Churches (St. Louis: Lake Hickory Resources, 2005), 140.
122
In this case, “meeting the mark” is missing the mark. A creator is one who
would rather pour excess into a frame too constraining, than pour just enough to
meet its limitations.277 “Just enough” is not an option for the artist; neither is it a
category for the Christian. This is not a judgment on the ascetic impulse that says, “I
require just this and nothing more.” In fact, it is quite aligned. Ascetics minimizes to
make room; they are reclusive to radically host the whole world in their prayers, the
fullness of God in their cell. Their emptiness creates an excessive openness to
divinity. Similarly the desired excess of the artist, and the Christian, is neither the
hoarder’s abundance nor the epicure’s indulgence—which may go unused. The
artist overpours so that the medium speaks forth, shines forth.278 This excess is the
epiphany of beauty. It is not the excessive waste of pollution or trash, which are in
fact empty remainders, decay whose only speech is death. The excess of beauty is
born to perpetuate itself (as in Claudel’s view of creation). Beauty is fruitfulness,
form that exceeds itself while receding to welcome our interpretations. It is a
bulbous paradox that tugs upon our memory and fractures open new schemas.279
The aim of beauty is hospitality.
A few weeks before the Summer Institute, I found myself in the home of
Robin Jensen and Patout Burns. They were generous hosts during my attendance at
a conference on faith, beauty and the academy. My first evening in their home, we
shared a meal steeped in Carvaggio’s candlelight. The meal was highly sensorial:
277
For this reason, I deeply respect George Steiner’s words as he strives to recreate the educational
system. Grammars of Creation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
278
“In writing this, I notice the care it costs me not to use certain words more than I ought to. I am
thinking about the word ‘just.’ I almost wish I could have written the sun just shone and the tree just
glistened, and the water just poured out of it and the girl just laughed…People talk that way when they
want to call attention to a thing existing in excess of itself, so to speak, a sort of purity or lavishness, at
any rate something ordinary in kind but exceptional in degree.” Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), 28.
279
See Marilynne Robinson’s understanding of excess and its connection with beauty throughout Gilead.
123
rich in lamb’s taste, cumin’s fragrance, rituals of conversation and consumption. I
remember the air, the images and the space more than I remember our shared words.
Their hospitality was sacramental. So when they beckoned me to watch Into Great
Silence with them, I followed.
I had forced my mother to watch it with me a year earlier. Bored with the
endeavor, she made the viewing something like “Mystery Science Theater.” Her
humor confessed her discomfort, or perhaps exposed our shared inexperience with
sustained silence, wordless meaning. The concept of the film frustrates or tires
most—especially those used to the fast-paced thrills of cinema, or the noisesaturated air of everyday life.
But Robin and Patout, devoted Catholics and artists in their own right,
watched the movie with me in near silence. Occasionally they asked one another
questions, or voiced the questions they felt were being asked of them. “Doesn’t this
look like a Vermeer?” “Is this the Corpus Christi occasion?” “What do you think
this flicker means, or this constant return to cloud shots?” They were more involved
in vocalizing the questions than proposing answers.
I was initially drawn to Into Great Silence because of its foreign concept.
The film unapologetically documents the everyday existence of Carthusian monks.
On a superficial level, the Carthusians of the Grand Chartreuse are rather removed
from the world, removed from words. Some might ask, What is the point? Are they
just staying on the proverbial mount of transfiguration—too otherworldly to enter
into society? In the film, we observe the monks labor for one another through their
respective chores; but they mostly dwell in silent rituals and prayer, enacting and
passing on the symbols of their beliefs to novitiates. Given the pragmatist’s lens, we
124
might suspect this lifestyle, thinking it the height of religious stupor and disconnect.
Some might accuse that the Carthusians’ service to past traditions are a disservice to
the present world. But steady remains their belief that symbols, ritual action, and
silence act as spiritual words, speechless dialogue that affect and effect the Divine.
During one of the few conversations in the film, a monk puts into words all that the
surrounding images, actions, and sounds reveal:
Our entire life, the whole liturgy, and everything ceremonial are
symbols. If you abolish the symbols, then you tear down the walls
of your own house. When we abolish the signs, we lose our
orientation. Instead, we should search for their meaning … one
should unfold the core of the symbols. … The signs are not to be
questioned, we are.280
Symbols do not simply preserve faith through dead rituals. The symbols
are alive: orienting and challenging. The substance is active; the symbol is speech.
Life is sacramental. The Carthusian monk in fact views his entire world, his life, as
a symbol pointing to and becoming the meaning found in Christ.
This statement broadens our understanding of worshipful living, of the
spiritual import of ritual in everyday existence. It demands a perception that
integrates the spirit in every fragment of symbol, the Divine at the core of every
form. It is what Amos Wilder expects when he calls Christians to poetic existence,
“It is a question rather of heightened sensitivity for which the ordinary transactions
of life are shot through with meaning, with moving charities, and with
providence.”281 Some may shirk at the phrase “heightened sensitivity”—it smacks
of altered awareness, as in Hegel’s problematic view on art: “Art liberates the real
import of appearances from the semblance and deception of this bad and fleeting world,
280
Die große Stille: Into Great Silence, dir. Philip Gröning, 2005; Düsseldorf: Philip Gröning
Filmproduktion, 2005.
281
Wilder, Theopoetic, 92.
125
and imparts to phenomenal semblances a higher reality, born of mind.”
282
Will
Wilder’s suggestion of heightened sensitivity translate all “ordinary transactions”
into mystical encounters--unaccompanied by articulated meaning? Or, at the other
end of the impulse: will we denigrate the world as “bad and fleeting”—as if the
materiality were a husk to be promptly removed in order to engage something
“higher”?
These questions are dead ends whose termination is signaled by their
beginning. The word “higher”—though religious in its concern with ultimacy—is
misleading. For meaning to be of ultimate value (significant), its container of form
(as signification) must be valued (attended). In order to fully evaluate meaning (the
signified), its container must enter into us: in a process of ingestion, digestion, and
embodiment. Any disjoint in this process counters what is natural to our
subsistence. We cannot benefit from a food’s energy without consuming its
container; and at various points in human development, we cannot know what is
nourishing until we risk ingestion. We need not separate the aesthetic from its form
before taking it in. We need not sheer form from matter as if we could take one
without the other.283 Rather, our bodies accept what we encounter, our soul’s
digestion discriminates, and in turn our bodies are filled by the shadows of meaning
gleaned. This is the body: perceive, discern, express—take, break, give.
Put another way, the world and its forms are not simply trees we dig up in
order to see the roots exposed. We are not to be solely concerned with the “rooted
meaning” of what gives itself to us in fruitfulness. That is to say, our cultivation is
282
G.W.F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1993), 10.
Etymologically, the sensible ousia, for Aristotle, was an articulation of the relation between form and
matter. Hence, phenomenal beings are dynamic. Christopher P. Long, “Toward a Dynamic Concept of
ousia: Rethinking an Aristotelian Legacy,” http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Anci/AnciLong.htm (accessed
online: March 12, 2011).
283
126
one of becoming, both concerned with roots and branches, thirsting and thriving.284
Strangely, the mystery of fruitfulness is self-giving in order to receive—and this is
as apparent in the roots as it is inherent in the structure of the limbs and leaves.285
One who humbly engages materiality discovers meaning through participation,
loving attention as cultivation. As Linda Gregg poetically proffers, “[God’s] grip is
suffering,/ revelation is the release. The sap rises up in man and beasts, and in all
things vegetable….But God loves us more, because/ of the dread and seeking we
contain.”286 Our seeking is our stretching to give, not overgrown (without dread),
but uninhibited somehow.
Like the garden plot, this negotiation between restraint and release takes its
shape in community. Fortunately, the process of cultivation is something we can
seek in artistic collaboration and in worship. When we join in collaborative acts, we
experience the creation of what is uniquely composed of individuals, and yet what
surpasses the fragments to “perform being.” Joining in an exchange of self-giving,
we collaborate to form what exceeds the self, an allusion rather than an alibi. In
Toward a Philosophy of Act, Mikhail Bakhtin observes that our experiences of
participative-effective processes are grounded in the analogies of our perception and
action. Thus, our engagement utilizes--while surpassing--aesthetics. As Bakhtin
writes
284
Take, for example, Luce Irigaray’s arrival: “The only task, the only obligation laid upon us is to
become divine men and women, to become perfectly, to refuse to allow parts of ourselves to shrivel and
die that have the potential for growth and fulfillment. And in this we still resemble plants. We climb
toward God and remain in Him, without killing the mother earth where our roots life, without denying
the sky either. Rooted in the earth, fed by rain and spring waters, we grow and flourish in the air, thanks
to the light from the sky, the warmth of the sun.” “Becoming Divine,” Sexes and Genealogies (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 68-69.
285
For another poetic reading of the tree, see Paul Claudel’s symbolism as explored by Fernand Vial,
“Symbols and Symbolism in Paul Claudel,” Yale French Studies 9, (1952): 95.
286
Linda Gregg, “There Is a Sweetness in It,” All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems (Saint Paul:
Graywolf Press, 2008), 109.
127
It is the affirmation of my non-alibi in Being that constitutes the
basis of my life being actually and compellently given as well as its
being actually and compellently projected as something-yet-to-beachieved. It is only my non-alibi in Being that transforms an empty
possibility into an actual answerable deed…for to be in life, to be
actually, is to act, is to be unindifferent toward the once-occurrent
whole.287
Appearance, in the phenomenological sense of givenness is the prerequisite
for our transubstantiation before God and one another.288 We appear. We give
ourselves to be perceived. But even inanimate creations can do this. Our arts
bespeak this capacity for giving (both in our act of creating them, and their ability to
be perceived, attended). However, in worship we are called to give our whole self.
As created to our Creator, we appear without alibi. This is in preparation for our
willingness to offer our gifts to others. The spiritual gifts exercised in worship ripen
our spiritual fruits for the world. Thus, liturgy must facilitate not only our talents,
but also our sense of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.289
This a tall order. It requires a liturgy that responds “to something larger
than itself, something to which it must offer itself, to which the enactors can only
give themselves over….[It is] a performance that is also an enactment, a
remembrance that is also a construction.290 Like the fruitfulness we see in nature,
our existence is predicated on our ability to give: both to self-empty into fruition
(giving), and in this empty, to leave room for others to gift us (receiving).
287
Qtd. in McCall, 71.
“Zwingli, impatient with any concept that the physical could convey the spiritual, repudiated Luther’s
teaching on presence with the view that Christ is only spiritually present by his divine nature. [Ironically]
Zwingli’s strength was emphasis on fellowship and the spiritual union of the participants together
confessing their faith, a transubstantiation of people rather than elements” (White, 255).
289
Galatians 5:22-23.
290
McCall, 136.
288
128
As we draw near to God by examining the way nature gives of itself, we
find that the beauty of the Divine Whole reaches out to us, intrudes even, by way of
the spiritual senses.291 As Paul Claudel explains, “[Some] believe that the world is
an illusion, but Genesis teaches us that it is an allusion….We learn that nature is not
only good, but that it is good for something; that it serves…and that its purpose is to
honor its Creator by perpetuating itself.”292 To exist is to give: it is the giving, the
expressive extension, we find concentrated in worship and distilled in art. And thus,
to come into contact with creativity (God’s forms and ours), is to be reminded of
love (self-giving) with every visible voice of form. To perceive God’s love is to be
called to worship. To receive God’s gifts is to give ourselves.
To give the self requires a clearing out of underbrush, a renunciation: an
ousting of the “false self” as Thomas Merton has understood it. In his essay,
“Theology of Creativity,” Merton exposes the false self as one who is “alienated
from life, from love, and communion in creativity by his own demonic selfassertion.” For Merton, the symptoms of self-assertion are an extension of this
alienation. Alienation lies: it speaks of freedom from, but not freedom to. Freedom
from suffering, dependence, charity, and obedience—are freedoms to selfishness,
but no less a freedom that inhibits the freedom to love. When renunciation arises as
a word of freedom, it is in Christ’s kenotic emptying. Merton advises:
The fact that the Christian renounces his own limited ends and
satisfactions in order to achieve something greater than he can see
or understand means the sacrifice of immediate visible results.
But it also means that the efficacy of his action becomes lasting as
well as universal.293
291
292
293
Hebrews 10:15-23.
Claudel, Essence, 13.
Merton, Literary, 370.
129
The giving of self creates a space of perhaps invisible result. But the space
is lasting, as if to give up the self in this world is to claim it in another. This is not a
deferred self-actualization, or an enabled remove. Rather, the crux of freedom’s
sacrifice is to give up the self for another world that is here, now—to “be the change
you want to see in the world.” To lose one’s life in order to save it, is to sacrifice in
order to become. Shedding the skin rather than mortifying the flesh: letting go in
love, giving up in growth.
130
Chapter 9
Renunciation
…and between God and us the world remains that which we can
neither leave nor abolish. It must be understood then that, in
being patient, we renounce all pretensions to being the project
managers of the definitive, and put ourselves in God’s hands as
the giver of all that does not pass away. We are free to open
ourselves up to the Absolute’s design. We are free to offer him our
hospitality…Our time must thus be lived in patience.
Jean-Yves Lacoste, on “Patience”294
During the first session of the Institute, at Old South Church, I kept
wondering what Christ’s words about the greatest commandment had to do with
church growth; and what could his call for renunciation in order to follow have to
do with worship? I heard nothing of love or renunciation in the process of worship
planning that day. Though, in our group assignments, we attempted brainstorm as
give-and-take. Our results were rich, but in some ways, so filled with diverse
suggestions that was there no apparent criteria for unity or coherence. An
abundance of ideas is not always desirable: there is a threshold, a tailoring necessary
for any creation (artistic, liturgical). Otherwise, chaos converges with void.
Essentially, the worship planning sessions provided exercises in balanced
giving. (A nice trick since we were all resolute to “give our best ideas.”) Strangely,
the closer I listened, the more I analyzed and did not hear. And the more I tried to
assert my ideas, the more I was misunderstood.295 I consequently became very
withdrawn, shut down.
I sensed that there is a type of self-giving that is actually selfish, an overassertion of one’s resources to the suffocation of others. When certain people spoke,
294
Lacoste, Experience, 93.
As John Bell writes, “Each of us, usually in less dramatic circumstances, will have experience of what
may be called ‘the ambiguity of communication.’ What we say is not what the listener hears, or what we
hear is not what the speaker has said” (Singing, 140).
295
131
though they were occupying the space of silence, their words were also creating
room: a forum of understanding. Strange. How could I speak like this? How could I
do much with little? I sensed my words were not even economical; perhaps my
thoughts took up more room than they granted.
In the middle of our brainstorm, I sensed others coming to their lack. Our
efforts to communicate to one another mirrored the very dilemma of constructing a
worship service. We strove to communicate what was inside, to extend it to others;
but when it did not create a space of shared understanding, we foundered. We strove
to receive what was outside, to give it spaces of understanding within ourselves; but
when we misunderstood, we closed down. Worship, like communication and
creative collaboration, functions in using finite forms to bear the weight of what
exceeds. As I tried to catch my words and instill them with my thoughts, I wondered
how much God has to wrestle humans to inspire them with Spirit.
As we chased the fullness of our ideals and the inadequacies of their
expression, we were occasionally consoled by the receptivity of others. In the
group’s presentation to our peers, a space opened in the ears of those outside our
group. We described a ritual action for our service, something in which all could
participate. It was simple, finite, but when expressed to others, it became larger than
our words. How does this happen? Why is it that some gifts open us to give
ourselves (the proper definition of reception)?
Inevitably, in these exchanges of failed and filled expressions, we settled
not on God’s ability to work with limited resources (though there was plenty
mentioned about humans struggling to do much with little). We liked to joke about
the limitations of our congregations. (I’m not sure if we were bragging or
132
complaining.) We landed again on the question to Nancy, “What if we can’t
recreate these ideas in our congregations?”
We doubted our resources, doubted our ability to express and be heard,
perhaps even inadvertently doubted our God. We had been affected by the critiques
of onto-theology without realizing it. Worship is not immune to these questions and
their indecisive answers. We pared away at who God is and what God can say
through worship, while over-asserting human creativity in compensation.
In another group session, I remember meeting Catherine. On this occasion,
our group was tasked to come up with nonverbal rituals for a service. I found that
everyone had pertinent ideas, but as they came together, the service was
overwhelmingly complex. In our case, the ritual forms were the equivalent of visual
verbosity. We had so many ideas, and I could tell Catherine was thinking deeply. I
remember soliciting her thoughts. She gave them wisely. And then everyone else
piled on more ideas. I confessed, “I don’t know much about nonverbal rituals—at
least, not from my church tradition. But I know that when I was in acting, there was
a process of pruning in order to grow out. Because somewhere in the choices, in the
simplifying, a space would be created that acknowledged the audience. It let them
feel, instead of doing all the work for them. What if we decided to simplify?”
Our group opted to give all our ideas instead of refining. It seems some
valued our group’s brainstorming more than a crafted worship service. I wondered
how many worship services are predicated on: Wouldn’t it be neat if…? Let’s do
this and this and, if we do that, we’ll have to include this idea… I wondered,
essentially, how many services were the unedited version. And isn’t editing an act
of caring? Isn’t the space created by making clean choices and admittedly clumsy
133
executions, somehow an invitation? Doesn’t God function in what is revealed as
much as in what is withheld?
That is, of course, the challenge we often bring to God: God, do much with
our lack! Pour Your In-finitude into our limitations! Though, this perhaps only
functions when our little is our carefully selected gift and not our leftovers, when
we are offering a form that is porous and pliant—not pre-determined to a fault. As
Don E. Saliers indicts, “We bring so little to Christian worship…But then we may
also settle for so little because we bring too much with us.”296 When our little is our
all, like the widow giving all she has—this smallness is an opening for God. Not the
camel through the needle’s eye. Not the worker’s buried talents. It is an opening
made perhaps only in risk, in daring to fall, that we profoundly receive the
expansion of grace. As Peter Brook writes of the actor:
…Every actor wants to play everything. In fact, he can’t: each
actor is eventually blocked by his own true limits, which outline
his real type. All one can say is that most attempts to decide in
advance what an actor can not do are usually abortive…it is better
to have the time and conditions in which it is possible to take
risks. One may often be wrong—but in exchange these will be
quite unexpected revelations and developments. No actor stands
completely still in his career. It is easy to imagine that he got
stuck at a certain level, when in fact a considerable unseen change
is under way inside him.297
A change was under way in me: an admitted craving of a space, desire
stirring toward the “times and condition in which it is possible to take risks…in
296
Saliers, 42.
Brook, 103-104. I also find echoes of this practical knowledge running through Gabriel Marcel’s
philosophy (as in his own playwriting). For example, he notes in his concept of the simulacrum’s
reduction of mysterious beings, “…for if illumination is to be communicated it must inevitably become
language, and from the moment it has passed into a sentence it runs, in some degree, the risk of blinding
itself and of sharing in the sad destiny of the sentence itself, which in the end will be repeated
mechanically, without the person who repeats it any longer recognizing its meaning…. Though it may
be, of course, that some circumstance will arise which will enable us to thrust aside this obstacle we have
placed in the path of a true human relationship…” Gabriel Marcel, “Chapter III: The Need for
Transcendence,” The Mystery of Being: Reflection and Mystery 1948–1950,
http://www.giffordlectures.org (accessed online: February 15, 2010).
297
134
exchange.” Somehow, I felt “stuck” in worship services that had few limits to what
it could do, how much it could produce. It had resources, choices; it possessed them.
Why was I not so possessed?
Was the service like Peter Brook’s description of the Deadly Theatre—
“done by good actors in what seems to be the proper way…colorful, there is music
and everyone is all dressed up, just as they are supposed to be in the best of classical
theatres.”298 And yet, he continues, the deadly theatre, affected and un-affecting,
cheats audiences; it proves boring instead of gripping, shortchanging instead of
changing long-held views. Brook calls for a holy, living theatre, à la Antonin
Artaud’s, that “work[s] like the plague, by intoxication, by infection, by analogy, by
magic; a theater in which the play, the event itself, stands in place of a text.”299 This
is not to say that the text becomes unimportant, but rather that there is a singular
moment of alignment, an event where flesh engages flesh.300 A theatre that
consumes, possesses, takes all and offers much. Essentially, a theatre where text
becomes flesh: an irresistible incarnation, drawing us out of ourselves and into
events of becoming.
I came to the workshop fearing that I would not have much to offer, and
little space for becoming. I was bearing the question of silence, feeling that silence
must be its answer. And what’s more, my tradition is comparatively sparse in its
liturgical forms. Until my experiences of the Brookline Church, I had no knowledge
of worship forms, liturgical structure, lectionary texts, and so forth. Essentially, I
feared that I could only offer myself as a canvas with few contours.
298
Brook, 10.
Brook, 49.
300
“But the vehicle of drama is flesh and blood and here completely different laws are at work. The
vehicle and the message cannot be separated” (Brook, 17).
299
135
The Sunday session of the conference, I had attended Old South’s “blue
grass worship.” It was fun, crammed with music, people, dancing, laughter;
crowded so much with the celebration of the community, that I became
progressively attuned to their performance. In all the liturgical maneuvers and
brilliant performing, I found myself dazzled by the forms, the choices. There were
so many thrilling moments. But after it was over, where in all of these forms was
God? God was hardly mentioned, except perhaps as a relic of blue grass musical
heritage. I think one Scripture was read. The gospel, if it was at all present, was a
tablecloth for the extravagant feast. The parade had me marveling at the worship
presented, like exotic dishes. Upon leaving, I realized it didn’t matter if God showed
up to that service or not. The people and proceedings were satiating enough. What
need have I for God and all God’s complications, when I can take my gospel with a
spoonful of the spectacular? I felt drunk, inebriated with the ease of God’s love. So
easy: a God that does not require I address Her, or know whom She Was before
asking that She Be. A God that did not ask my humility or my wrestling with
difficult texts. God: an answer to a question I was too distracted to ask.
I went to my home church afterward. We have a few liturgical fabrics in an
otherwise white space; old wooden pews, floor carpeted in serene blues, and walltall windows where light pours in. (I sometimes stare outside during the
congregational singing, so as to praise the trees I see instead of the walls man has
made.) As I served the communion, I noticed the light streaming in upon the cups,
illuminating the grape juice, setting it apart from anything else in the room. The
blood of Christ was the richest color in the space. And the people to whom I
clumsily passed the cups, were the most dynamic presence. No instruments. No
136
bright colors. Not simply because we are austere, but because somewhere between
the choices made and the options shorn, between the sacred vessels used and the
ones reserved, we felt God’s presence.
The sermon text spoke of Elijah encountering God in the sheer silence. In
our space of aesthetic sparseness, this text came alive.301 Like the blood glowing
scarlet in light.
I know that many (myself included) have teased about the sparse aesthetic
of some Reformed traditions. In a city filled with vibrant forms of worship, rich
inheritances of art, I have been apologetic about my worship aesthetic. Not to
mention, I am a bit perplexed by my place within it as a seminarian invested in the
questions of art.
But I was struck by the fact that John Bell, despite his jokes about dully
decorated Protestant churches, spoke about imagination flourishing in deprivation.
He told the story of a young boy who had a birthday party. All his family
and friends brought out expensive toys; they were novel and dazzling. Surely the
boy would have everything he needed to keep him entertained! Then an aunt
brought out her gift, meager though it was. She gave him a cookie tin and two sticks
of wood. The boy puzzled over it first, and then began to play it as a drum. He
invented several uses for it in the coming hours, all to the neglect of his other toys.
I relate this story not to say that one worship form is better than another,
but to pose the question: is there a freedom granted to the imagination when the
given forms are not doing all the work? In not having “all we want,” do we use our
301
1 Kings 19.
137
imagination to create what we truly need? John Bell spoke often about the surprise
of God in simplicity: of a young child’s Christmas song lyrics, of an older woman’s
care for a boy dying of HIV, of the pared down worship of poor, rural parishes. In
our worship, what is left to the imagination? And does it have anything to do with
what God leaves open to ‘faith’ in revelation? How does our worship (and our
living) leave room, inviting spaces for the presence of what is absent?302
In our worship, our lives, our arts: how do we give the gift of receiving?303
302
“Frequently, we grasp the importance of music best when we are deprived of it, as at a Good Friday
service in some traditions” (White, 111).
303
As Dona Prouheze challenges her love, the Viceroy (Don Rodrigo) “Why pretend not to believe me
when you believe me despairingly, poor unhappy man! Where there is most joy there is the most
truth….Open and [the joy] will enter in, how give you joy if you do not open the only gate by which I
can come in? Joy is not possessed, ‘tis joy possesses you. One does not lay down conditions. When thou
hast set up order and light in thee, when thou hast made thyself to be embraced ‘tis then she will embrace
thee.” (Claudel, Satin, 213).
138
Chapter 10
Excess: The Parable of the Phantom Limb
…love alone sheds light on the phenomenon of touch—on the way
that touch because of its very bereavement of images listens
supremely and responds, sheds a light from elsewhere…
Jean-Louis Chrétien, Call and Response304
Prayer eludes the parameters of objectivity, it has the bewildering
character of “an event, with light from elsewhere.”…The event of
prayer, which manifests itself as a wound and as the suffering of a
gift, cannot be constituted by the ego as its object. A paradigm for
religious phenomena, prayer… manifests what in itself is
undecidable: we suspect that “only a thought of love” harbors in
its depth what thought as such is unable to master.
Anne A. Davenport, on Chrétien’s notion of prayer.305
It is said that the body remembers what has been removed. Philip did
experience phantom sensations: each day he woke as if he had the legs to launch
himself. And the day he saw Sophia, he swore his tongue had turned. He forgot
himself, and almost dared to speak.
Sophia had dedicated her life to learning. The company she found in the
silence of a library—where only the texts spoke—thrilled her. Each book cover was
a pair of lips that spoke only to her, only when she opened them and traced their
lines with her fingers. She was known to occupy the corner table of the basement
floor. It was there that she met Philip. He had noticed her often enough. And she
knew about him. Everyone knew about Philip, even though he was silent.
A mystery, a book in an unknown language. Inconvenient but inviting.
Philip was rumored to have a capacious intellect; but he was known most
for his horrific handicaps. In the war-torn country of his youth, Philip was tortured
by a band of guerilla soldiers. When he was ten, they urged Philip--who had been
304
Anne A. Davenport quotes and elaborates Jean-Louis Chrétien assertion that “the voice requires the
body and a sensing flesh, which thereby demands the touch of love.” (“Translator’s Preface,” xi).
305
Davenport, xiv-xv.
139
mute from birth--to join them. They interpreted his silence as refusal and left him
for dead, severing his legs and dislodging his tongue. Philip was never again able to
run, though he prided himself on the speed of his thinking. Now twenty and enrolled
at a university, he devoured literature anthologies, musical scores, and the
occasional photography book. His fingers loved to trace the notes, imagining that to
feel them was to voice them. He would walk his fingers on the photos, imagining
the surroundings. He could jump the Grand Canyon if he spread his hand.
Philip eventually ventured off campus. He invested long silences in lowlit galleries, movie theatres, darkened concert halls, and dusky parks. In these
places, he found fellow tongue-less companions that would not stop speaking. The
crafted forms spoke to him through the dark; they drew near him, but granted the
freedom of his anonymity.
It was ‘freeing’ for the first year: to enter these places of fine art and
twilight nature; to wear the darkness like a veil; to engage figures and voices that
did not inquire about his limitations. The paintings only said what he wanted them
to say; and when they talked back, he moved to the next, or went across the street to
the movies. But he found himself aching for a different freedom. Not the freedom of
going unseen, unknown, but the liberation of being deeply known, utterly loved. He
craved the spacious intimacy created between people. Was he not also a created
form capable of expression, open exchange?306
He had never spoken to anyone. He had even given up praying; though
perhaps his thoughts were overheard anyway. Even his thoughts were raised like
306
“One’s consciousness, one’s self-possession and possession of being, can grow only and precisely to
the extent that one breaks out of being in and for oneself in the act of communication, exchange, and in
human and cosmic sympatheia” (Von Balthasar, Alone, 154-155).
140
Braille; he imagined God touched them in his sleep. When he was younger, he
would wake up hearing his prayers.
He decided to pray again when he met Van Gogh.
In a visiting exhibit, he learned about the man without an ear. Philip
followed him loyally, pausing before each painting to listen. He finished at the
Pietà. The linear strokes that aligned into swirling fabrics. The colors of night
colliding with hints of daybreak. Thick pigments rose from the canvas, so near they
kissed his eyes. The image was close, but remote in its strangeness. Peculiar: Mary
stood behind Christ like a shadow—near enough to hold her son—but surprisingly
her arms were wide in a gesture of presentation, offering. Her hands on either side
made the Christ figure an overflowing ostension.307 Why did she appear more open
to what was beyond the canvas than to the sagging son before her? It is as if she was
communicating to some figure not present. What was she saying? The painting was
like an imperceptible prayer; perhaps one only Van Gogh could hear. After all,
creations pray to their makers.
I am your false god, he jested, you will not pray to me, but I hear you
nonetheless. That evening he began praying, and hoped the right God heard him—a
God with phantom ears. And soon he began noticing other ostensions of prayer. The
hanging notes after the symphony’s end; they whispered of excess brimming into
empty, like luminous orbits haloing worlds. This is the freedom of the created, he
thought: employing limitations to experience true mobility.308 He thereafter longed
307
See McCall’s use of Umberto Eco’s concept “ostension” (Do This, 65).
For example, the freedom Levinas attributes to the poetic and prophetic use of language. Johan Goud
writes, “[Levinas regards language as] a tapestry both of what is said and of saying, both of establishing
fixed meaning within the perimeters of the system of language and of the ability to transcend the limits of
thought—a tapestry that is almost impossible to unravel. ‘This possibility is laid bare in the poetic said,
308
141
for the mobility of communication more than he longed to feel his legs. He wanted
to experience the gravity that simultaneously binds, bonds, while enabling
travel.309
He resolved to travel toward someone, to test the freedom of prayer. After
Sophia traveled from her library table, he placed a scrap in a book she had left open:
I feel pain in the legs that I do not have. Is that strange? I ache
to speak, though I have no tongue. And in dreams I swear I can
swim, and taste, and dance, and sing. In dreams, I swear I’m
restored. Does that make sense?
Sophia returned and puzzled over the page. She noticed Philip and looked
quickly to her text: ashamed for him and then for herself. These words were both
provocative and a bother. She was steeped in her books, her own writing—the
inconvenience of intrusion!
But the secret thrill of being intruded upon, specially selected.
A written word from someone living and in her reach. Though, this was
not a person she could hold in her hands, thumb through, return and ignore until
again needed. In short, she could not use Philip. (What use had she for him?) She
could not even care for him as she did a prized text. She could not memorize him;
his text was ever-changing, always adding and exceeding itself. And what of his
silence? How could she know him? Despite her insatiable thirst for knowledge, the
and the interpretation it calls for ad infinitum. It is shown in the prophetic said, scorning its conditions in
a sort of levitation’” (God in France, 109).
309
For a presentation of covenant as a bind that frees, read William Johnson Everett’s comments of
binding forms that free, “Thus covenant is seen as the foundation of law in the sense that it provides the
basic set of trustworthy expectations by which a people might create and engage in public life. Without
such law we are reduced to caprice and coercion. We cannot trust one another other than the way an
infant might trust a mighty parent…Israel is called to trust in this law to secure its freedom, which is why
it is seen as such a gracious gift of liberation” (Politics, 61).
142
possibility of someone incomprehensible was off-putting. I have my limits, she
affirmed, even if her quest for knowledge seemed indefatigable.
She walked promptly upstairs and returned with a thick volume. Placing it
before Philip, she threw her words, “See: phantom limb.”
He handed her a scrap of writing: Would you pray with me?
The library was her haven from such solicitations. She was not prepared for
this; it was an awkward invitation that she could not anticipate or prevent. Books
invited Sophia but were indifferent to her reaction; they prayed to her, she
responded by reading, not actively, personally responding. “Philip, that is kind of
you to ask. But I really have much to accomplish this week. I cannot afford to take
breaks. Maybe another time.”
Every evening of that week, Philip would leave a note for her on the corner
table. And when he returned the following afternoon, a book would be in its place:
always something to respond, if even remotely, to Philip’s message. Sophia
borrowed texts to speak to Philip.
For efficiency, they began writing messages in the books they had left for
one another. They carried this correspondence until the pages stopped being written.
It was as if their strange friendship halted abruptly: like a reader progressing toward
an end, only to find the resolving pages torn from the spine. Had the pages fallen
free or been wrenched loose? Was the end controversial? Painful? A release?
Sophia would not see him again whenever she returned to use the library.
143
When weeks later she read of his death, she was in the her usual corner.
Made silent, but restless: her words escaped through tears, running like wet feet,
treading lines down to her chin. She retrieved a book from the reference section and
found the entry marked: PHANTOM LIMB. Scrawled tightly down the left margin,
dated just months before:
Do you believe in the soul? Is it like a phantom limb? Could it
be that the world, people, are filled with the phantoms of God?
And having been cut off from this God, perhaps we feel God more
profoundly here? Though when we look, God does not force upon
our eyes.
With you, I felt what a shadow must feel when it senses it is
like—though not completely the same as—someone. A respect of
difference, distance, but an undoubted relation. In the words you
left, I remembered someone I did not know I’d forgotten. Does
that make sense?
Would you pray with me sometime? I mean, not in books?
144
Chapter 11
Giving: Loving Sacrifices
The world acquires an inward share in the divine exchange of
life; as a result the world is able to take the divine things it has
received from God, together with the gift of being created, and
return them to God as a divine gift.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodrama: The Last Act310
…the Latin colere [is] an agriculture term meaning to cultivate.
Both the French le culte, and the Italian il culto, preserve this
Latin word as the usual term for worship…It is a relationship of
mutual dependence, a lifelong engagement of caring for and
looking after…It is a relationship of giving and receiving,
certainly not in equal measure, but the two are bound to each
other.
James White, Introduction to Christian Worship311
In his Epilogue, Von Balthasar unites the transcendental modes of being
thus in “their epiphanic character, which permeates everything that exists: selfshowing (beauty), self giving (goodness), self-saying (truth). [These are] seen to be
various aspects of appearing. This appearing is a kind of shining-out that recalls the
illuminating action of the light.”312 Von Balthasar favors the appearance; his
language of epiphany most resembles his category of beauty (self-showing). But
again, for Von Balthasar, beauty as self-showing is in trinitarian communion with
the other transcendentals. Beauty remains in conversation with goodness as selfgiving, and truth as self-saying. In every transcendental, there is a forth-pouring, a
dis-closure that we also mark in phenomenological givenness. Both the offerings of
word (saying, truth) and image (showing, beauty) are gestures of extension.
310
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodrama: Theological Dramatic Theory, V: The Last Act (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1998), 521.
311
White, 27.
312
Von Balthasar, Epilogue, 83.
145
McCall notes that Protestants are typically more word-centered in their
theology, and Catholics more matter-centered. But central to both words and matter
is the notion of givenness: both appear and express. It is crucial therefore that
liturgy (as in our lives!) rely on this notion of giving. As poet Linda Gregg writes,
“Bodies, light, sap, our language. The body and the spirit.” It is the language of:
1) Epiphany—giving by “shining forth”
2) Surprise—giving beyond expectation
3) Revelation—giving truth through its concealing (a[lethe]ia)
4) Light—giving into darkness, giving visibility
5) Love—giving of the very self, making a space for what is
other
The gospel as a gift alludes to all these (and more). As we experience and
bear forth this light to the ends of the earth, we are propelled by the gifts of God’s
Spirit and Christ’s healing.313 But as we give we find ourselves emptied, drained,
for love must squander. And yet, as Hans Urs von Balthasar distinguishes in Heart
of the World, there is a difference between the emptiness of this love and the
hollowness of human self-love. The fullness of God is carried in the kenotic vessel
of Christ. In the fullness of love, Christ has “compassion for the void, willing to fill
up what was hollow.”314 But in order to fill the void with the fullness of God’s love,
Christ not only descends into the “bristling barrier of spears and shields” 315—but
also empties himself “down to the dregs, to the point of collapse.”316
313
Matthew 28:16-20.
Von Balthasar, Heart, 39.
315
Ibid., 41.
316
Ibid., 36.
314
146
He does this that his grace and love might fill our “hollow vessels.” But
this love is not without claim, not without a desire for fruitfulness in turn. His blood
does not wait, stagnant in the vine but begs to blossom in fruit. God’s love will not
stand to “lie empty within” us.317 Neither will it compete with our lesser love, the
poor and needy human love.318 This love desires to fill us with its own poverty.
God’s love both prunes and grows; it is time and eternity, outpouring on us that we
might be capable of similarly giving. Thus, Von Balthasar asserts, “if human limits
became capable of receiving God’s fullness, this was through a gift of God and not
through the creature’s own ability to contain it. Only God can expand the finite to
infinity without shattering it.”319
God’s revelation as a love that risks gives us the confidence to engage
expressions in a sacramental way. We must handle our expressions about God with
delicacy, washing our hands before we even come near. All this not because our
expressions are equivalent with God—but because in the spirit’s gentrification, we
acknowledge the deficiencies of our forms, while praising the God who became
form. This paradox allows us to treasure the fragility of God’s name, to prize our
expressions about and experiences of God—all the while sensing that God too is
holding us with wonder. God’s love overflows us; but it also makes room in us,
around us. God’s fullness is a gift that overflows our expressions, and we in turn
recognize our destiny to give and receive infinite love. As Von Balthasar marvels:
And greater still than the miracle that a heart can be extended to
God’s proportions is the marvel that God was able to shrink to
man’s proportions…that the Abyss of Being could so deplete
317
318
319
Ibid., 81.
Ibid., 39.
Ibid., 54.
147
itself into an abyss of nothingness. But even this mystery is taken
up and contained within the space of a Heart.320
Again, this is a question of sacramentality—one of the greatest
contributions faith communities have to offer the world. But these sacraments are
not the end of shadows. Rather, they are a glimpse of one beyond the abyss, the
chasm crossed in the infinite becoming finite. We still perceive God in Her
shadows; and yet, in proximity to Christ, we come closer to a form that in turn
directs us to the source of Light. We marvel, with Von Balthasar, upon the mystery
of the cross and resurrection: the infinite shadow and the infinite light entering our
experience.
I am not trying to make an object lesson of the cross; it is a complex
mystery of love. However, in so far as the horror of the cross is a receding abyss
that nevertheless reaches us, we must involve ourselves in its mystery. The cross is
the most baffling ostension. It is a divine performance that has erupted in 2,000
years of confusion and conjecture. Richard D. McCall incorporates Umberto Eco’s
use of the word ostension into his discussion of liturgy as performance. He writes,
“Ostension is one of the various ways of signifying, consisting in de-realizing a
given object in order to make it stand for an entire class. But ostension is, at the
same time, the most basic instance of performance.”321
Christ frequently employed ostension, making use of the environment and
its people to perform God’s nature. In some way, Christ may have been God’s
ostension, pointing reflexively to Divine love. But the crucifixion collapses
ostension somehow. What can we possibly learn—in any rational, definitive
320
321
Ibid., 54.
McCall, 65.
148
sense—from the cruel death of an innocent man? Perhaps the same lesson we might
learn from the common birth of an infinite God. Christ’s incarnation was a
crucifixion from the outset: a donning of death. What foolishness. What curiosity:
the infinite compacted into finitude, crammed so full he brimmed with excess—
unending provisions, abundant grace, indiscriminate touch. Even in his death he
gave, he poured, hurling his spirit from his mouth.
149
Chapter 12
Denunciation
--We speak here in and on a language that, while being opened by
this ference, says the inadequation of the reference, the
insufficiency or the lapse of knowing…. Such an inadequation
translates and betrays the absence of a common measure between
the opening, openness, revelation, knowledge on the one hand and
on the other a certain absolute secret, nonprovisional,
heterogenous to all manifestation.
--According to you, it is this normative denunciation on the
ground of impossibility, this sweet rage against language, this
jealous anger of language within itself and against itself, it is this
passion that leaves the mark of a scar in that place where the
impossible takes place, isn’t it? Over there, on the other side of
the world?
Jacques Derrida (to himself), “Sauf le nom”322
Not even for a single moment is the word separate from the
ordeal; it is undergone by and through itself, both by what it says
and by what it does not succeed in saying and by him to whom it
speaks. It itself learns from this ordeal, and this is why this wound
makes it stronger, all the stronger as it will not have sought to
heal it.
Jean-Louis Chrétien, “The Wounded Word”323
Hermeneutical phenomenology, as Heidegger understands it, preserves the
No-thing-ness that Being is. Analogically, Christian understandings of God’s selfrevelation preserve God as calling, penetrating the world with a Word without
collapsing God into being, or equating God with our words. After Heidegger’s
metaphysical critique, phenomenologists approach God not as another Being (first
cause, unmovable mover) or another being (measured and made by humans), but as
a call. This of course is complicated by the God who in some way unsays Herself in
order to be incarnated, to be crucified, crossed-out.
322
Jacques Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1995), 69-70.
323
Chrétien, “Wounded,” 175.
150
What separates a Heideggerian understanding of Being’s Call from a
theological approach toward God’s Call is not simply attention to phenomena
bearing excess, or the question of Being’s irreducibility within the constraints of
beings’ contingency. The distinction of being-toward-death and being-toward-God
is a fundamental distance between “consciousness” and “soul” in sensorial
engagement: the difference between attending phenomena for interpretive ends and
listening for God in order to interpret one’s life toward praise. Whereas the
fundamental attunement for Heidegger is anxiety in the face of an irreducible
Being/Nothing; the Christian’s fundamental attunement before an irreducible God is
not simply anxiety. When beings come in contact with the irreducible glory of God,
the theophanic shining-through that is both terrible and beautiful—silence is not the
final word. God is neither Heidegger’s conception of Nothing nor Being. Though
perhaps terrible and anxiety-inducing, God is a question that consistently calls, “Do
not be afraid.”
The reconciliation that occurs in the liturgical encounter, as Lacoste
articulates, is not simply one of Christians “turned to face the ‘Highest,’ the
‘Almighty,’ and the ‘Redoubtable,’ but to an Absolute that grants peace and
alliance. He does not encounter a ‘frightening and fascinating mystery,’ but a
benevolence.’”324
This does not diminish the fact that God’s revelation ruptures: initially
humbling whomever it strikes into silent reverence and radically passive
324
Lacoste, 157.
151
“exposition.”
325
It is a wound that makes a space to hear, yes; but in its transgressive
call, it empowers one to a chorus of responses. God takes on particular forms to
draw all form to Herself.326 Heideggerian Being may be relational, but not personal;
it requires our listening, but not our love. But love, as a listening that speaks, is a
confession that leaves space as it takes form.
As suggested by Jean-Louis Chrétien, love is therefore
phenomenologically presented in terms of aesthetics. In the titular essay, “Call and
Response,” he explores the relationship of love’s call (to kaloun) to creation and the
consequent call/response of beauty (kallos). Chrétien acknowledges that beauty
requires a chorus of responses. He then ventures to say that evermore so does the
Creator of beauty, the caller of form, solicit not only our being-in-the-world, but our
entering into the silence of God’s nothing (and this is key—) humbled and
empowered to speak with Her. As Chrétien voices with Paul Claudel, “‘I lack
absolutely all means, says the soul, with which to answer,’ yet it ‘calls upon the
inexhaustible resources of its own nothingness in order to provide what is required
of it.’”327 And why? Because for Chrétien (and Claudel), the excess that makes us
sense our nothingness, is the same excess that empowers our becoming.
This response demands a particular patience: not only the inexhaustible
resources of voicing over time, but also a vigil waiting on fulfillment. This waiting
need not translate as an abyss of silence, but is more akin to the space of prayer or
praise, as Lacoste describes.328 The call does not negate our response, but like a
sound whose speech is only made possible by a collision of the vocal chords, God
325
Ibid., 40-42.
John 12:32.
327
Paul Claudel, Paul Claudel interroge le Cantique des cantiques (Paris: Egloff, 1948), 108.
328
Lacoste, 91.
326
152
speaks in the “trembling” of liturgy—using consciousness and soul to collide Her
call.329 History and its full-fillment—the “epistemological I” and “eschatological
I”—vibrate against one another to speak what belongs to neither but calls both into
being. The vigil of liturgy resembles the catachresis of the vocal folds, awaiting and
attending a Word that is not compelled to come. Though if and when it does, its call
is a resonance that ruptures, perpetuating the “first passivity”—the gift of
creation.330 As Jean-Louis Chrétien writes of the call that creates us:
In calling us the call does not call us alone, but asks of us
everything that voice is capable of saying…In his fourth ode,
Claudel affirms it: “When I hear your call, there is not a being,
not a man,/ not a voice that is not necessary to my unanimity.” He
pursues: “Yet when you call me, not with myself alone must I
answer, but with all of the being that surrounds me,/ A whole
poem like a single word in the shape of a city within its walls,
rounded like a mouth.” Such a yes, even when proclaimed by all
things and all voices, would still be insufficient. It would still not
amount to more than a mere “hosanna in the window-discarded
day,” …The call that recalls us is also a promise that keeps us
beholden; it gives us speech only by gripping us by the throat.331
Chrétien suggests in his reading of Heidegger that the call predicating
being will always exceed the response. Even if our words correspond (Heidegger),
they sense their chasing-after, their naming-of, prompted by what originates
elsewhere. What is the difference between being conscious of excess and believing
in a soul? This question arises because consciousness within the closed region of
experience is content (or at least, comprehends) that its parameters are contained by
beings and grounded by Being and Nothing. The call/response of consciousness,
329
Lacoste often suggests the compelling image of the Absolute (in liturgy) “making our present
tremble” (59, 85, 97).
330
“…the man reconciled with God, even though he exists within the horizon of his absolute future also
recollects his absolute past; liturgy does not speak the language of the eschatological without also
speaking that of the originary (though the distinction between the two, admittedly, is not always easy to
discern.)” (Lacoste, 157-158).
331
Chrétien, Call, 32.
153
like a sonar, perceives the excess of finitudes by the contrasts marked by
definitions. But our naming, which may be in fact the soul’s primal call/response,
somehow in-finites even as it de-fines: above and beyond the dialogues of
consciousness, a name employs limitations to make meaning mobile.
But to move beyond the naming of phenomena (in art) into the naming of a
God (in worship), one must move beyond an excess that is comparative-relational
(which founds our epistemology) into one that is personal-relational (ethical), even
supra-personal-relational (theological). Heidegger’s Being and Time articulates well
a world occupying Good Friday or Holy Saturday—a world of profound
denunciation. But can it address the phenomena of: rebirth, re-saying, resurrected
Words after silence, joy after anxiety, love’s re-assertion after desertion? Is there an
excessive mystery to contradict and converse with the irreducible recession toward
death?
Perhaps only after marking the limits and liminal spaces of being can we
begin to profoundly perceive excess. As Gabriel Marcel suggests, the finitudes of
matter, the categories of being we delineate dissatisfy us. Though finitudes
communicate what is external to us (what we long for or feel as different),
externalities can be assimilated into us on the basis of need, of mine-ness. I can yet
own what is external to me by letting limitations be my means of mobility,
comprehension always on the way.
The anxiety that robs us of speech reminds us of a power which does not
belong to being; but as anxiety, death or chaotic openness, it also has no need of
being. Can a Being/Nothing that has no desire for being function as its culmination?
What a cruel abortion: that which grounds being also pulls itself out from under
154
being. It throws being and ultimately lets it fall into finitude. It calls being into
existence and then reduces it to silence, crying, “Why have you forsaken me?”
Because Heidegger’s irreducible encounter is attributed to the abyss, it culminates
in a confrontation with a Being/Nothing that exceeds consciousness, and ultimately
has no need of consciousness. The caring being is destined for an uncaring Nothing.
Hence, death’s silence is the final word. Dissatisfaction is not satisfied but annulled.
The restless conscious does not find rest but coma.
Can a being-toward-God hope for a different satisfaction, whose caring
does not dispose of being or consciousness, but somehow transfigures it? Can one
hope that the possibilities of the cross (the crossing-out) will give way to the
impossibility of resurrection (a-crossing over)?
To approach this question, we must speak of how the cross transfigures our
very sense of finitudes, of power. Playwright and philosopher Gabriel Marcel
intimates this difference in the not-at-homeness of spiritual beings. Both spiritual
and material unrest require a desire to possess “a certain power which does not
fundamentally belong to me, a power which is not, strictly speaking, myself. The
dissatisfaction has to do with the absence of something which is properly speaking
external to me, though I can assimilate it to myself and in consequence make it
mine.”332 So what is the difference then between the restless soul dissatisfied with
the dead-ends of materiality, and the caring being dissatisfied with contingencies?
Both have some notion of excess, of reaching-for or an attention-to what is
332
Gabriel Marcel, “Chapter III: The Need for Transcendence,” The Mystery of Being: Reflection and
Mystery 1948–1950, http://www.giffordlectures.org (accessed online: November 15, 2010).
155
external.
333
But is one dissatisfaction more freed to experience and exercise this
excess as gift? Can the spiritually restless claim a Giver whose gift subverts?
In worship, sensation and soul seem to momentarily touch, or at least
dance round one another preserving a space for the unsaid, unknowable. It may not
be for science, philosophy, or theology to ask “And what God shall I say sent me"
into being with a call? But the luminosity of experience as captured by worship’s
aims and art’s media dares to carry Augustine’s question. Worship addresses the
Giver even as Her gift subverts our notions of receipt:
And how shall I call upon my God—my God and my Lord? For
when I call on him I ask him to come into me. And what place is
there in me into which my God can come? How could God, the
God who made both heaven and earth, come into me? Is there
anything in me, O Lord my God, that can contain thee?334
While our brushes with excess in experience somehow penetrate our
distinctions of heaven/earth, human/God, they erase distinctions not by silence but
by collaboration, by crossing. The light ventures into the dark absence—that void of
our voice as it “grips us by the throat” somehow to give speech. It sends us
searching for containers to hold the overflowing oil of the call. We scramble for jars
of all sizes, broken, dirtied, wearied and weighted by time. We are the jars, as are
our words, our ideas, our poems. The call (as the overflow of experience) somehow
necessitates a response (a container of expression). Perhaps this is why Paul (and
333
Paul Claudel’s response to the success of L’Otage (The Hostage), reflects something of this shared
sense, “If my play was so favorably received it is because the spectators, most of whom probably did not
share my religious convictions, nevertheless felt the tragic power arising from the intervention in our
individual and daily lives of a call exterior and superior to us. The more or less miserable circumstances
under which we all live nevertheless leave the feeling that there is in us something unused […] which is
perhaps precisely the best and deepest in us.” Quoted in Louis Chaigne, Paul Claudel: The Man and the
Mystic, trans. Pierre de Fontnouvelle. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc. [n.d.]), 156.
334
Augustine, Confessions, I.ii.
156
Augustine) fretted over the question, “How can they call on him in whom they have
not believed?”
Belief is entangled in the “call on God” in prayer and praise. If
Heidegger’s call-response structure resembles religious concepts, its similarity halts
here. Though Heidegger understood the call and response nature of language, he did
not fully develop the disproportion of the call to the response. Without this infinite
disproportion of conversation, one need not believe in the capacity of transcendent,
transfiguring calls. This radical conversation is in turn thwarted if Heidegger’s call
is not the excessive cry of grace, of love, of a gift incommensurable but no less
meaningful for the response/cor-respondence of being. But how then did Heidegger
have a place for the poet’s daring to articulate a language forgotten? How is it that
the poet can draw a forgotten expression into a forged experience?
The art-object’s nonplace-nonevent may superficially resemble Lacoste’s
liturgical topos. For example, in the poem, in every path taken and word denied, a
through-word (dialogue) is chosen to carry the opened voice into a plane in-theworld and yet not-of-the-world. The artist’s intention is open to and diffused by the
audience’s attending. But there remains a difference between the poet’s capacity to
saturate its pared words with meaning (art), and God’s capacity to saturate the world
with Her meeting (worship). Though the poet liberates words into shared
expression, they are shadows of human experience. When a God, who calls us Her
poems (poiema),335 speaks words that create our being (saturated with Her
shadows),336 a fuller saturation and deeper trans[de]scendence occurs.
335
Ephesians 2:10, “αὐτός γάρ εἰµί ποίηµα κτίζω ἐν Χριστός Ἰησοῦς ἐπί ἔργον ἀγαθός ὅς προετοιµάζω
ὁ θεός ἵνα ἐν αὐτός περιπατέω.”
336
Genesis 1:27.
157
This voice of the saturated phenomenon is what Marion claims as the
distinct call of theology.337 Phenomenology can only accept the exchange of excess
between finitudes; theology perceives in and through the exchange the ground
uncovered, subverted and suffused. The paradox is that the parameters of finite
phenomena are exactly what demarcate our sense of excess. An infinite line requires
two points (being and being); three points are required for a plane (beings-in-theworld); and all points are contained in the supra-dimensional (perhaps, a God
outside of being and time). But how can this supra-dimension, which spatially
infiltrates even as it holds the world, be distinguished from being if not in how it
exceeds? Limitations provide definition; increments mark dimension. What meeting
of finite-infinite might intimate to beings-in-the-world that they are beings-towardGod?
Again, Lacoste grounds the human experience of an exceeding God in the
relational expanse of liturgy. One phenomenon that marks this liturgical relation
(for Chrétien and Lacoste) is prayer: the non-space that permits the finite to call the
infinite. But how to exist as prayer—an inquiry that calls upon and responds to the
Divine Excess—while rooted in time, in space? It may imply the summons of a
reverse prayer, an incarnation: the infinite entering space in order to call the finite.
The infinity of human words to God meets the finitude of God’s Word among
humanity. The acts of prayer, praise, and poiesis (as articulations that fits words and
forms in order to exceed them) can clear a space more fitting than silence alone
(which permits all and nothing to be said).
337
Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
158
Jean-Louis Chrétien writes of speech as the exchange between call and
response, predicated on the call that exceeds every attempt of a response at
correspondence. So too we might think of the conversation between theological
revelation and phenomenology as the dialogue that exposes through their dis-course
the openings: the wounding intrusions that disrupt or overflow finitude. The
touchstones of the Christian faith—grace, love, hope, beauty—emerge from the
finitudes that bind and loose them. Thus, as Chrétien writes, “revelation must
shatter something in us in order to be heard. It reaches us only by wounding us.”338
As a Christian, poet, and phenomenologist, Chrétien’s words are not intending to
gloss over particularities, but rather to employ them in the infinite reach of
paradox—the conversation of unlike coordinates.
The words of revelation, prayer, and praise as wounds: this is perhaps as
unpalatable even as it is understandable. Art is often the balm through which the
artist responds to a sublimity that has struck her. In fact, the question of God
becoming man is not unrelated to the question of art and poetry, “Why put an
experience or essence into expression?”—or even the question of sacramentality:
“Why does the infinite inhabit the finite in order to shine forth, to exceed?”
Language about God should, like poetry, preserve the distance between said and
unsayable. Like art’s relation of forms navigating assertion and negation,
theological confession should operate in the excesses and the finitudes they
overflow.
The growing seed (either in thought or form) does not shun the enclosing
womb (of mind or matter). Excess utilizes ends to be born into experience, that it
338
Jean-Louis Chrétien. Lueur du secret (Paris: L’Herne, 1985), 38.
159
might move and breathe. Like a word employed by a poem in order to liberate
experience: the logos subjects itself to be perceived, to be said, to be thought, to be
crucified even.
Thus, the crucifixion’s violence must be compared to the inherent violence
of incarnation. Humanity’s part in the violence of the crucifixion is a destruction of
the logos; whereas the violence unique to the incarnation is a shearing required for
expression. We are speaking now of the violence of self-denial or humility as
opposed to the violence of other-denial: either by indifference or destruction. Otherdenial—as exemplified in responses at the cross—manifests as complete destruction
of an other’s self-revelation, all the more atrocious when identity is communicated
as love.
There is a violence in Judas’ handing over to death, as there is violence in
Peter’s leaving for dead. Both may have believed that their letting would create a
space for God’s self-assertion. Judas did not live beyond the cross to see the selfassertion of resurrection; whereas Peter--perhaps not unlike Christ--outlived his
letting-die, and re-engaged the Word. In terms of theological expression, one might
tend toward these options: denying the Word its claims or refusing the Word its
response. Both reject the vulnerability of God’s self-revelation as expressed love:
either by an extreme withdrawal (an apophasis untempered by kataphatic assertions)
or an extreme deconstruction of words. The latter radically destroys the ability of
containers—concepts, words, art forms, beings—to make meaning mobile. Here,
silence and violence culminate in denial, death.
160
If artists want to keep from these options, they occupy the between-silence,
the suspended violence, of Holy Saturday.339 In worship, however, the space is felt
uniquely as the entr’acte of Lacoste, the after-death and rebirth inherent to now.340
After and growing between violence/silence: a Word ventured in praise, a dialogue
of prayer reinstated and ongoing. Between and after formlessness and void:
creation. And it may be then, the only way to speak about God in theology or to
God in worship is in the subversive act of creation. Here our arts, theology, and
worship align. Like Chrétien’s paradox, or Lacoste’s liturgy, Marion’s icon,
Hölderlin’s poetry, John the Baptist’s preaching, or superlatively, Christ’s presence:
God employs particular forms in order to herald what exceeds them.
Thus, fundamentalist readings of scripture (or pared phenomenological
attending341) and their often wooden translations, may have a place. In making
experiences manageable (cataleptic knowing as kataphatic), they serve as objects to
be handed-down (traditio), mirrors to be measured against. But insofar as they limit
the excess (the poetic, paradoxical, or metaphorical capacities of language), they
enact violence to and through words, thwarting the liberation of the encountered
Word, the asymmetrical other than cannot fit in prosaic equating. Anamnestic
language exceeds mimetic language. The unforgettable (anamnestic) exceeds the
unsayable (apophatic) and the uncontested (mimetic kataphasis).
God’s entry into the world risked reduction, a death or diminishing of God
by degree. But if the incarnation could be falsely interpreted as the grounds human
339
See Steiner’s supposition that our arts will always be created in the Saturday moment. (Real, 231232).
340
Lacoste, 56.
341
By pared, I suggest any phenomenological or theological account of the call which denies the more
dangerous exposition—attention, intention--of love. Not that we must love the attended phenomena and
the heeded scriptures as an idol, but as an icon, pointing beyond to the God—irreducible and selfrevealing as love: no more compelled, but no less compelling.
161
mimesis (“we are now Gods in Christ”), in the crucifixion, we are jolted by
anamnesis, recalled to an event that we can make present in our own lives, but never
fully imitate or replace. The anamnestic quality of the cross reinstates the proper
hermeneutic for the incarnation; we renounce the self not to sameness, but to a
kenotic heralding that makes room for others. God’s willingness to pour Divine
Infinity into the finite is an act of love: it is a rejection of vain self-preservation, in
favor of reduction for the sake of interrelation. God knows—even more than
Derrida—that forms are incomplete vessels. But this did not stop God from
speaking, from singing with Christ’s very presence in this world.
Yes, material beings are crammed with what is less than God. But as threedimensional beings in four-dimensional time, we can at least intimate this excess,
unpacking its manifestations across time’s ticks and memory’s marks. Thus, our
lives as sacraments (and by degree our arts) are responses to the crucifixion: a
continued recognition that what exceeds form can in fact operate and appear in
forms.
And yet, as we note in the crucifixion, the excess is thus vulnerable,
dangerously (violently) subject to our claims. In an attempt to keep God safe342
from our violent reductions, we might say that mystery is preserved when it is
approached and not touched.
Our apophatic words attempt to wash away the silt of kataphasis, the dirty
declarations that dust the ultimately Unknown. But can the Unknown Infinite not
handle our hands, the handling our words over time? Every image, every walling
word is both a denial and a declaration. We cannot escape the economy of words
342
Jacques Derrida, “Sauf le nom.”
162
that exchange with silence, the very call and response embedded in our being. No
assertion is without its degradations. No denial is without its statement. So how to
permit a space, that language might be a leeway?
Expressions, the poet knows, are apophases—for the sake of pores.
Experiences, the mystic senses, provide clouds of great unknowing, dark nights, for
the sake of pouring where yet the rain of an Other can enter, trickle, flood into the
self until all the land is sea, and all kataphases are leveled by kenosis. This co-lapse
is the mystical experience that Theresa articulates as the “orison of unison.”343 But
before and after this union that conflates categories in their embrace, is the sorting,
the sifting of the simultaneous: presence/absence, Divine/human, denial/attestation,
phenomenal/numinous.
How thin and thick the w/all between them,344 how like prayer their
bridge.345 In rhetoric, an apophasis is both allusion and denial, a heralding as much
as a withdrawal. Two steps forward, three steps back: a dance to permit a space in
anticipation of an excess greater than all speech, all movement, all flesh could
fathom on its own. An example of apophasis might be, “I will not mention that you
are God.”
But when the logos is bound and beaten by misunderstanding, handed over
to the wrong authorities, cheapened by kataphatic claims—apophasis still
343
Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle as quoted in William James, The Varieties of Religious
Experience (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1905), 408.
344
“We build up images in front of you like walls,/ until by now a thousand walls surround you./ And our
pious hands veil you/ as often as our hearts see you clearly…Only a thing wall stands between us,/ by
chance; and it could be:/ a cry from your mouth or mine—/and it collapses/ without noise or sound.”
Rainier Maria Rilke, Vom mönchischen Leben, from Das Stunden-Buch, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1
(Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1955), 254-256. The translations are provided by Mark S. Burrows
(2009).
345
“You ask me how to pray to someone who is not./ All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge/
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,/ Above landscapes the color of ripe gold/ Transformed
by a magic stopping of the sun.” Czeslaw Milosz, “On Prayer,” The Collected Poems, 1931-1987
(Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1988).
163
withdraws, denies the “I AM” with an “I am not.”
346
When the young girl asks the
double-bind, “You are not one of this man’s disciples too, are you?”…When the
crowd around the fire, huddled in the cold, notices, “Didn’t I see you with him in
the garden?”347 …They echo God’s query to Adam in the Garden, “Where are
you?”
The cool of the garden becomes the cold of the night. Peter, no less bare
than Adam, feeling known and naked, clothes himself in denial. A crow and a cry:
“I am not…I was not.” But perhaps even Peter hears with us, with T.S. Eliot, “…in
the garden, echoed ecstasy/ Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony/ Of death
and birth.”348 Meanwhile the abandoned Word is prodded until revealed, a mocking
Pilate, “You are a king, then!” And we wonder which is nearer the Truth, a guard
beating into the Word his derisive kataphasis, or a safeguarding apophasis that only
the crow-call of memory can convict.
Apophasis is a hesitant wager, a trembling truth staked in reverent awe, in
fear. It is the desire to cloak God, but to nevertheless rain our words upon Him. It is
a cloak that keeps us too, so we think, from being seen. If I close my eyes to the
Holy, will the Holy yet see me? And in being seen, will I have to hear the voice in
his eyes?
There is a Divine darkness that cloaks Glory to preserve us; the infinite
made finite in some way darkens its excess. There is a human darkness that covers
Glory to preserve the Divine—in negative theology, in acknowledged difference of
the signed and signified. But there is another dark that preserves nothing and
346
347
348
John 18:17b.
John 18:25-27.
Eliot, “East Coker: (iii).”
164
destroys all as if a fire. This fire asks our words, our arts, like rain upon the deserts
of formlessness, of chaos and void. Where light cannot be felt, water will intrude.
Lucretius knew this, and before him, Job. But unlike the water that wears the
mountain and man’s hope, the artist’s forms are like the water that resurrects the
sprout from its soil.349 Art commissions the finite in service of its flourish.
A wall that keeps dark the light will tumble in time. The walls of
expression and experience that we build to keep us from the light, can yet be worn
down by the very words and images that build the fortress. The artists’s images, the
poet’s words, the mystic’s encounters, are therefore less like walls and more like
windows, upon which only the finitudes of earth can draw a shade. Which is to say,
only the Creator and preserver of limitations can initiate and penetrate the dark. Our
enclosures perpetuate Her disclosures, so long as our arts, our rituals, let revelation
run like rain, creating cracks for light.
Whereas our words might dilute or over time destroy; they chase the Word
whose water distills and tastes of wine. This wine is no less the cup of wrath350 than
the gift of life. Bitter and sweet is the vineyard of our knowing (gnosis, Greek
knowing); this is no less true in loving (ahav, Hebrew knowing) the Divine. In fact,
the bitter and the sweet grow large in Divine knowing; so large their contradictions
fuse, skins in-growing. The distinctions quake to open a space in our soul’s home
(ousia: essence, household, property). Belief can live there, but so can doubt.
Mystery is born when both points copulate. Between the dialogue of being and
nothing, formlessness and void, is the vibration that renders the material world.
349
350
Job 14:7-22.
Jeremiah 25:15.
165
The sacraments—as forms that take space in materiality, and make room
for the immaterial—provide us a glimpse of a reversed crucifixion. Or perhaps it is
more telling to determine the crucifixion as an apophatic sacrament.
The sacraments of love and grace are wounds that heal us as we open a
space.351 We confess: Yes God, you did become Christ and dwell among us. Yes
God, you can animate forms as you animate flesh. Thus the sacramentality of our
lives is of utmost significance: in our giving we make a space for resurrection, while
simultaneously treating tenderly, gingerly, the wounds we caused in our disbelief of
Christ’s appearing, God’s gift. This Gift has given us the spirit.352 Do we believe
that the spirit can still occupy flesh? Many artists seem to think so. And so do our
attempts of expression, our every act of love.
Only lovers can weather one another’s less-than-truths; because only
lovers will not accept them as final. Which is to say, the gift of love is the gift of
time—time to live into the largeness of the truth, time to make a space for the
other’s healing, strengthening, growth. In a word: resurrection. Only love will
remain even after its denial, to see the Beloved restored.
After the conference was over, I received a kind note from Catherine. It
deeply affected me because her words were too large. They were like an
Annunciation experience one feels in encountering beauty. Her words were
beautiful to me, a call that I hope to answer with my life. In the space between her
words and my felt reality: I felt a challenge and a gift. The challenge was to live into
351
Von Balthasar’s on the receptivity predicated on giving in (History, 120-121).
This is God’s “pledge of eternity” that we experience in the sacraments. “But even then, it is not that
anything will be withdrawn or cancelled, it is only that this form of encounter will have become
superfluous, because the Lord will no longer need to give himself under the veils which have been
instituted for this part of time, which is the time of the Church” (History, 99).
352
166
her words with other people in other contexts. The gift was her encouragement,
which effected in me my desire to meet her challenge. She wrote, “You listened to
what I said and what I didn’t say, to make a space for me in your week, rather than
to make sure you made a dent in mine. What a lovely and rare gift you have.”
I was overwhelmed with emotion. I do not know why so few words
affected me so much. Was she an artist who had done much with little? Who had
gone out of her way to do more than “just enough”? Was this an act of beauty? It
certainly seemed creative; her words recreated me. It seems that Catherine served as
sacrament of Divine love which “produces an image [with which] the beloved
would not credit himself, and when love is genuine and faithful it gives him the
power to come closer to this image or make himself like it.”353 How strange—that
love, like faith and hope, is a function of seeing what is there and not there.
Perhaps this is why Claudel writes: “Love springs from need. We know
that our need can be satisfied only by the fixed being who stands apart from us.
Starved by the effect, we cleave to the cause.”354 As God fill us with Her shadow,
we are paradoxically gifted. For as God makes us full of what She is not, we
become fully aware of our distance. And yet, because the shadow as relation
constitutes us, we are filled with a hunger that nourishes. God’s creating love asks
for all of us, and exceeding us, it gives space for our very self. Thus God is what we
sense in our arts, our giving, our expressions, our acts of love. God gives love in
excess of lack. Time like grace, like shadow, is always at our back, and before....355
353
Convergences, 129.
Claudel, Essence, 16.
355
After discovering the freedom that comes from this notion of “giving,” I traced the occurrence of
natan (Hebrew: give) and didomai (Greek: give) in the Biblical text. I was surprised by how much of the
Biblical narrative could be told through the occasions of those words alone.
354
167
Chapter 13
Gift: Serving Genesis
I shall not be ashamed to confess that it is a secret too lofty for
either my mind to comprehend or my words to declare. And, to
speak more plainly, I rather experience than understand it.
John Calvin, on the mystery of the Eucharist356
The soul is forever seeking to take its fill of the world’s endless
play of becoming.… and still unsated, to pass beyond the
boundaries of the world altogether, toward the supreme
beauty…As that which moves, becomes, is reborn or repeated,
human nature’s perfection is nothing but this endless desire for
beauty and more beauty, this hunger for God.
Gregory of Nyssa, translated by David Bentley Hart357
Infinity manifests itself in this, that we are called beyond being by
what has no need of us, convened to an unknown feast by a Word
we cannot utter.
Anne Davenport, on Chrétien’s Call and Response358
The Sunday after the Institute ended, I was given an opportunity to serve at
the “communion table.” In the Churches of Christ, women do not typically speak in
the worship service. But I have fortunately been a member of exceptional
communities within my tradition—the most exceptional of which resides in
Brookline, Massachusetts. Not only does this church follow the Revised Common
Lectionary and structured liturgy, it also permits women to serve in whatever
capacity they desire. As a first experience, I offered to give my thoughts on the
Eucharist. What follows is a memory of my words that day.359 They derive from the
group assignment of constructing a worship service for the gulf coast.
356
Quoted in White, 183-184.
Hart, 190.
358
Davenport, xv. She is here conversing with Jean-Louis Chrétien’s L’Arche de la parole (Paris: Presses
universitaires de France: 1998), 191.
359
On June 27, 2010, the lectionary texts: 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14; Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20; Galatians 5:1, 13-25.
357
168
I had something prepared to say several weeks ago. And then it all
changed this week. I attended an intensive course—Andover Newton’s Summer
Institute on Arts and Worship. During one break-out session, we were tasked to
create a service in response to the BP oil catastrophe. We talked around the
atrocity, brainstorming highly creative ideas for ritualizing the horrific loss. After
all the groups had presented, had applauded one another for their ingenuity, we
were dismissed to eat. It was a short walk from lament to laughter.
And it was then that I felt the rupture very profoundly. All our “ideas”—
the mounted rituals and poignant words, the artistic developments and enthused
planning—had we reduced tragedy to a brainstorm session? We would go to lunch
smiling: clean and energized. But, as one musician sang in our presentations: “Still
the ocean bleeds on.”
Her song was haunting. I stayed behind in the room for a moment to
collect. And in that space of worship, I had to ask myself: does what we do in
worship really matter? It is a question I asked myself today as I heard the psalmist’s
cry. “I cry aloud to God…in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying;
my soul refuses to be comforted.”360
Does our worship answer this cry? Is worship our alibi, our release? Do
all our words and rituals—in planning, in prayer and in worship—tangibly make a
difference? Does it answer the groaning sea and its creatures? As you can imagine,
these were ill-timed questions to ask while taking a class founded on the premise
that what we do in worship matters. Perhaps these questions are inappropriate to
pose before you all today.
360
Psalm 77:1-2.
169
But I have to be honest… I realized, for the first time in my church-going
life: I lack faith in worship. Compared to the direct solution of human action, our
solicitations of God in worship and in prayer seem ineffectual. I had a weak concept
of sacrament in both directions: I distrusted the ability of finite forms to summon
Infinite presence in worship; and I doubted that Infinite Presence could summon
finite forms to the world. I doubted that we would show up in the world because I
doubted that God would show up here.
Growing up, communion was a time for recounting to myself the plotlines
of Scripture.361 The communion meal was a reminder to feed the memory; which is
important, but alone, it is very cerebral.362 Hence, my unease about whether or not
forms do anything. I had affirmed the false dichotomy between contemplation and
action, spirit and flesh.
But I don’t think Christ is content with my dichotomy.
And this Eucharist meal is why.
What is unique about this meal is how it undoes all our doubts about
human participation with God. Matter and spirit are inextricably linked. Here,
humanity and divinity are wed: this is the lesson of the incarnation, and it is also
the reminder of sacrament. In a moment when the elements are transfigured, we in
turn are transfigured. At the moment Christ offers his whole self—body and blood—
he integrates our entire selves: our substances, our actions, our memory. And yes,
361
“Today there is a real split in Protestantism between those who follow Luther, Calvin, and Wesley in
the traditional view that God acts in the sacraments, using them as a means of grace for divine self
giving, and those who follow the desacralizing tendencies of the Enlightenment which saw the
sacraments as something humans do in order to stimulate memory of what God has already done”
(White, 192).
362
“ Survival, for Israel, meant the ability to remember God’s actions that had made them a distinctive
people….Recalling what God had done and rejoicing in those memories—is that worship or education?”
(White, 152).
170
Christ connected substance with verbs, the limits of forms with the mobility of
action, “DO THIS in remembrance of me.”363 For Christ knew that the hunger of
the stomach is not unlike the forgetting of the mind. And as these empties ache and
long, so too, we confess our desire for fullness. This meal feeds our forgetting and
our hunger.
I know what you’re thinking: this brief moment in time, this small wafer,
this miniature cup—what can they possibly offer? They hardly touch our hunger,
our thirst, our forgetting! But as a sacrament, this meal has a promise. The promise
of the sacrament is its secret: these finite forms are sacred because they open up a
space more expansive than the space they occupy. In consuming this cup and the
nibble of bread, we receive forms that not only take up space in our bodies, but also
make room in our souls. Grace is the gift of expansion. We are expanded to the
shape of the Eucharist, and recognize its contours.
How significant is this space? How subterranean is the impression of this
memory? What is its shape? TAKE. BLESS. BREAK. GIVE.364 This pattern creates
a space as deep as Christ’s descending. Christ—who TOOK on form, BLESSED us
with God’s presence, allowing his body to be BROKEN, that he might GIVE us the
Spirit of true life. The shape of this space is as primal as creation when God TOOK
hold of the chaos and void, BROKE the elements separating and BLESSING them,
that God might GIVE life to humanity.
…So yes, what we do here matters. And what God does here matters. At
the Eucharist we meet. This is no mean feat, no small action: this meal is saturated
363
“Narrative remembers act; act fulfills narrative” (McCall, 2).
“Dom Gregory Dix implies such a method in his classic description of the shape of the Eucharist as
‘take, bless, break, and distribute’” (McCall, 99).
364
171
with the patterns and purposes of creation, of redemption. Here: the excessive gift
of life.
We may come to the table with the cavities of our week, or the cavernous
pains of our world. We have hungered for God, or perhaps forgotten the Spirit with
us. However, here, now, we consume the substances that remind us. They make us
empty and expansive: receiving as we pray, giving as we take. In God’s presence,
we TAKE in Christ. We are here BLESSED by Christ’s presence within us and thus
BROKEN from our forgetting and our hunger—that we might in turn GIVE to the
world. TAKE. BLESS. BREAK. GIVE. Do this. When we remember Christ, we remember ourselves within the world.
At this table, we have been fed with a hunger for creation.
If we grant that creation is (as I have previously defined it) an exchange
between excess and recess, form and space—sacrament is re-creation, and worship
is its paradigmatic action.365 The giving that founds worship, the offering of person
and praise to God, is a prerequisite for creativity. But unlike the Genesis account,
where the created world as visible worship is given solely by God, sacrament invites
us into the creation. In a rich understanding of sacrament, form becomes a
confession, an intercourse between lovers—an acknowledgment of trust in God, and
God’s trust in us. It is a mutual invitation to recreate the world as we sense
ourselves renewed. We acknowledge that God is committed to creation, and we in
turn are restored, committing to one another and the world. It is for this world that
365
In so far as we think of a sacrament as a symbol, McCall’s understanding of signification also speaks
of creation: “to signify is to participate in the constitution of reality; to perform is not to create ex nihilo,
but neither is it merely to describe what is prior to the performance” (63).
172
we shine forth; we live our giving because we have received this bread. As poet
Hilde Domin reminds, “We eat bread/ but we live from radiance.”366
366
Hilde Domin, “Die Heiligen,” Nur Eine Rose Als Stütze (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2006), 30. Mark S.
Burrows provided this translation. I think also of Luther, summoning Augustine in his “Babylonian
Captivity”: “But no eating can give life except that which is by faith, for that is truly a spiritual and living
eating. As Augustine also says: ‘Why do you make ready your teeth and your stomach? Believe, and you
have eaten.’” Martin Luther, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” Three Treatises (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1966), 133.
173
Chapter 14
Exploration: The Parable of the Kiss’ Risk
I love the dark hours of my life
which deepen my senses;
in them, as in old letters, I find
my daily life already lived
and, like legends, distantly beyond.
From these hours comes the awareness that I
have room for a second life, timeless and wide.
And sometimes I’m like the tree, ripe and
murmuring, which fulfills that dream
above a grave, the one a boy in the past –
so that he could press it into his warm roots –
lost in sorrows and songs.
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours367
This is a secret she would not tell. The secret was her hunger, and the pact
she made with the moon. The night the blinds would not shut out the whites, her
eyes could not keep from moving. They traced the ceiling to its corners. She tracked
her pulse.
The doctors tried to scare her into living; their prognoses made her life a long
vigilance. She wondered if this would be the night from which she would not wake.
It was when the moon kept coming through the folds, landing lines across the
sheets, that she whispered a prayer, “Why am I here?...Please God. I do not want to
die tonight. Return me to the day.”
Here. Returned against will, though not without reason, to her parents’ home.
Her childhood room. Thirty pounds lighter, a surgery later, but no less nearer to
death. She knew what she had done: the way she had pushed, pounding the glittered
and black-rubbed pavement, chasing after a dream that her ambitions had dangled
and yanked, seductive. She was her own seductress; the scripted lines, her kisses.
367
Rainer Maria Rilke, Vom mönchischen Leben, from Das Stunden-Buch, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1
(Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1955), 254-255. Mark S. Burrows provided this translation.
174
Never enough thoughts in which to tangle her tongue. Each performance a onenight stand with another lover: always new, always parting. Every day, a starting
over: more to prove, to exhibit, ever more to give, to perform. A perpetual living on
the margins of experience, as if a specter’s honeymoon.
7:00 a.m. Wake. Walk to studio.
5:00 p.m. End conservatory training.
5:00-6:00 p.m. The hardly dinner. The curtailed conversations. The
renunciations for art’s sake. Strange gods that asked her voice, her vulnerabilities,
but not her love.
6:00-11:00 p.m. Dance rehearsals, scene work. The sweat, the thrill of
dancing on the edge of life and hardly keeping up, but always keeping time. The
entering of other worlds. Deft interloper, wearing others’ skins to say her self.
11:02 p.m. Layer the winter wear. Give goodbyes on Broadway.
11:05 p.m. Walk the twenty blocks home. Clipped pace. Bed waiting. And
who knew what devils she would have to outpace, what hungry mouths and crazed
cries she would have to stifle, along with her conscience. The faces she had fed her
lunches. The sooty-nailed fingers she could not warm. The gifts she could not give.
The bag of books they did not want. Her acting training, poor offering. A
monologue would not suffice, nor its tears.
11:40 p.m. Past the same bundle of bodies in their cardboard, huddled close
together. Tight, into her single bed. The heater kept high. She would wake every
night sweating her body’s protest, fits thrown by hormones. She did not know the
signs.
175
And now the blinds. A room whose loudest cry was the air condition’s stirclick. No sirens. No belligerent, after-binge voices, raging down the streets as if still
in the clubs that could not free them from themselves.
Only the parents who hardly spoke to one another, and no longer knew what
to say to her. She was fragile; her heart might stop if their words pressed too hard.
So even she murmured her prayers, turning periodically to keep her own bones from
strangling her nerves. Then suddenly, one turn slightly up: a flicker of moon
alighted upon her cheek, the shadows spreading, allowing it room to rest beneath
her eye. It was there that the angel had kissed her. She knew.
The day the angel kissed her was a day of many steps. The class could not
leave until every last person had the routine perfected. She could not tell that
malnourishment prevented her from focusing the form. She blamed herself. She felt
their convicting eyes upon her, flustered and rolling. “One more time…and once
more…again, for our straggler…”
They should not see her cry. They would not see her break. She gave herself
wholly to the task. The movements were keeping her warm; the adrenaline now
rising, she rode her body like oblivion. Ignoring the eyes. Looking into the mirrors
to watch her limbs, her feet. The feel of the floor pushing back on her toes; she was
being carried. She felt the music feeling her, holding her, claiming her. The salt
running toward her lips. She swore to the music, “I will not miss this again.” And
the steps fell in line. She fit her form into the mirror, the music, the moment.
Repetition’s weight lifted as the class finished, synchronized.
Her peers left, boisterous and bound. She collapsed. Breaking dance
176
decorum, bowed on the ground, head cradled in legs, holding sobs: “Thank God.
Thank God. Thank God…”
It was at that moment that a hand touched her shoulder blade. A gentle
cupping around her bone: it was the first time she had been touched, off-stage, in
three months. Katarina. One of the students from Russia who had come to study,
though for insecurity or unknowing, she did not speak a word of English.
But had she understood? Had she heard the half-prayer, half-praise?
No words. Just eyes and warm fingers around cold-sweat skin. Just touch to
tell. And smiles that knew. And it was then that this near-stranger kissed her cheek.
I remember her kiss even now. The artificial white of the room that could not
keep to the brightness of her. Halted time had me forgetting what I had before given
myself. My accumulated frustrations, my self-critiques, my guilt…dissolved.
It was that kiss I remembered while making my pact with the moon. I
stopped tracking my pulse; I gave up fear to receive trust. I prayed my secrets until I
saw the dawn. And I knew that would be the last night that the moon would have to
kiss me, the last night before I would begin to feel each day as a kiss.
Katarina’s kiss has a way of shining through—such that to tell the story is to
live its traces even now. Her kiss provided a breaking point distinct from that of
defeat, of expenditure, self-squandering. This gift, this kiss, was a risk, a breaking
through. Knowing she had no words to offer, in that moment, she imparted what
little she had. And because of the kiss’ smallness, its insufficiency “left much to be
desired,” as the saying goes. In other words, the smallness, and perhaps clumsy
177
incongruence of the gesture was its virtue.
368
As in Meister Eckhart’s prophet who
emerges from silence to speak of God in “gross matter… teach[ing] us to know God
through lowly creaturely things, since there [is] nothing that could adequately
capture the truth.”369 Or Julian of Norwich’s “quantity of a hazel-nut” that professes
“all that is made.” 370 It is as if the sacrament provides the gracious gift of
expansion. As allusion, it makes more room than it takes. Its “wondrous play of
powers,” like a seed, “burst[s] forth like a resurrection” risked through roots and
into the treetops.371
The risk of her kiss then called into question the risks I had made.
The liberties I had taken with my health, my ‘artistic license,’ my ambitious
self-making locked me in more than they enlarged. I experienced these risks as
competing objectives, a paradox on brink of collapsing. I lived the war and not the
womb—that space of allusion’s gestative becoming, where one risk feeds another in
love’s mutual relation.
Katarina’s kiss was not simply the seduction of the arts—which enlarge us,
providing a space but ultimately leaving us in the “long day’s journey of the [holy]
Saturday.”372 The arts’ gift of space spreads as an erotic expanse between
deprivation and presence. But her gesture was a spaciousness granted in love. It was
368
Emmanuel Levinas confirms this disproportion in his radical ethics. While many characterize his
ethics as an ever-striving, insomniac vigilance, he writes that actually, “its being utopian does not prevent
[the ethical relation] from investing our everyday actions of generosity and goodwill towards the other:
even the smallest and most commonplace gestures, such as saying ‘after you’ as we sit at the dinner table
or walk through a door, bear witness to the ethical. This concern for the other remains utopian in the
sense that it is always ‘out of place’ (u-topos) in this world, always other than the ‘ways of the world,’
but there are many examples of it in the world.” “Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics of the Infinite,” in Debates
in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 82.
369
Eckhart, Selected, 137.
370
Julian of Norwich, “First Revelation: Chapter Five,” Showings,
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/julian/revelations.ii.iii.html (accessed online March 2, 2010).
371
Rilke, The Book of Hours, 266. Again, this is Mark S. Burrow’s sensitive translation.
372
Steiner, 232.
178
the taste that satisfied my hunger for a moment, and awakened a hunger for more.
Bernard de Clairvaux calls the Holy Spirit the “kiss of the mouth” that God
bestows upon Christ in an exchange of “mutual knowledge and love.”373 He
concludes by stating that we, like Paul, participate in this kiss…in a “kiss of the
kiss.” This phrase founds my hope for what worship, and by degree the arts, can be.
This is not simply a theological appropriation of Beaudrillard’s “copy of a copy”—
the simulacrum that leaves us without bottom to the emptiness of representation.374
Rather, worship is participation in the event of allusion: the gesture of and to a light
from elsewhere. Like moonlight through the blinds of experience, like the kiss of
luminosity that alights on our memory, an allusion as anamnesis, hearkening us
back and calling us forward within the porous forms of the present. Praise and
prayer provide these porous forms, these meeting spaces—not the conflated colapses of God and human. So too the arts serve as gap and contact between the
creator and created, between the artist’s intent and the audience’s interpretation.
These spaces offer a metaxu, separation and link. Exceeding mimesis, they permit
our wandering, our wonder, our questions, our quests.
It might be argued that the kiss in some way closes the gap of desire;
however, the kiss is not desire’s end. It is its meal, its agape feast, that temporarily
satiates even as it makes known our deepest hungers and unquenchable thirsts.
Thus, even when Christ comes again, as the “bride adorned for her husband,” the
radiance of the holy city yet boasts a gift for those thirsting. There may be no
373
Bernard de Clairvaux, “Holy Spirit: The Kiss of the Mouth,” Sermon 8 on THE SONG OF SONGS,
http://www.pathsoflove.com/bernard/songofsongs/sermon08.html (accessed online March 8, 2011).
374
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1994).
179
“tears” in this kingdom, but there is much thirst, much water. Our sacraments in
worship anticipate this living water of the “new heaven and new earth,” and in
doing so equip us for our role as allusions to the God who dwells with us, the God
who “makes all things new.” Our lives enact this kiss, and taste this dream “of the
second life, timeless and wide” when
he will wipe every tear from [our] eyes. Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things
have passed away….“See, I am making all things new…Write
this, for these words are trustworthy and true.… It is done! I am
the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the
thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of
life.”375
May the event of worship and the experience of our arts, kiss us in the “dark
hours” of life. May we keep intact their provisions of space, that light might enter in
and render our days as indications of life’s gift. And may the Word the Prophets
feed our voiced hungers be “as in old letters, [when we] find/ [our] daily life already
lived/ and, like legends, distantly beyond…[For] from these hours comes the
awareness that [we]/ have room…”
Room to voice
Room to dance
Room to pray
Room to long
Room to give
Room to love
Room to depart…
to linger…
375
Revelation 21:3b-6
180
…to return…376
376
“In my Father’s house there are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to
prepare a place for you?” (John 14:1-2).
181
Bibliography
Alarcón, Francisco X. “Poem from Of Dark Love.” Translated by Francisco Aragón.
The Poetry Foundation.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=240070.
Arnold, Matthew. “To Marguerite.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Edited by
Margaret Ferguson et al. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1996.
Auden, W.H. “At the Grave of Henry James.” Collected Poems. London: Random
House, 1979.
Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991.
Barish, Jonas. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1981.
Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse. Translated by Richard Howard. New York:
Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2010.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Bell, John. The Singing Thing: A Case for Congregational Singing. Chicago: Gia
Publications, Inc., 2000.
Bloechl, Jeffrey. “Christianity and Possibility: On Kearney’s The God Who May
Be.” Metaphilosophy 36.5 (2005).
Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. New York: Touchstone, 1968.
Browning, Robert. “Andrea del Sarto: The Faultless Painter.” Selected Poems. New
York: Penguin Group, 1989.
Brueggemann, Walter. Israel’s Praise. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988.
Caputo, John. “Apostles of the Impossible: On God and the Gift in Derrida and
Marion.” God, the Gift, and Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1999.
Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet. London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998.
Chaigne, Louis. Paul Claudel: The Man and the Mystic. Translated by Pierre de
Fontnouvelle. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc. [n.d.].
Cheyette, Bryan. “Between Repulsion and Attraction: George Steiner’s PostHolocaust Fiction.” Jewish Social Studies 5.3 (1999): 67-81.
Chrétien, Jean-Louis. “The Wounded Word.” Phenomenology and the “Theological
Turn”: The French Debate. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000.
———. Call and Response. Translated by Anne A. Davenport. New York:
Fordham University Press, 2004.
182
———. Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art. Translated by Stephen E.
Lewis. New York: Fordham University Press.
———. L’Arche de la parole. Paris: Presses universitaires de France: 1998.
———. Lueur du secret. Paris: L’Herne, 1985.
———. The Unforgettable and Unhoped For. Translated by Jeffrey Bloechl. New
York: Fordham University Press, 2002.
Clairvaux, Bernard (de). “Holy Spirit: The Kiss of the Mouth.” Sermon 8 on THE
SONG OF SONGS,
http://www.pathsoflove.com/bernard/songofsongs/sermon08.html.
Claudel, Paul. I Believe in God: A Meditation on the Apostle’s Creed. New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963.
———. Paul Claudel interroge le Cantique des cantiques. Paris: Egloff, 1948.
———. Poetic Art. New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1948.
———. The Essence of the Bible. New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1957.
———. The Satin Slipper. Translated by Fr. John O’Connor. New York: Sheed and
Ward, [n.d.].
———. Three Poems of War. Translated by Edward J. O’Brien. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1919.
Cording, Robert. Walking with Ruskin. Fort Lee: CavanKerry Press, 2010.
Dale, Robert D. Seeds for the Future: Growing Organic Leaders for Living
Churches. St. Louis: Lake Hickory Resources, 2005.
Davenport, Anne A. “Translator’s Preface.” Call and Response. New York:
Fordham University Press, 2004.
Derrida, Jacques. “Adieu.” Adieu to Levinas. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1989.
———. “Faith and Knowledge.” Religion. Edited by J. Derrida and G. Vattimo.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
———. “Letter to A Japanese Friend.” Derrida and Différance. Edited by David
Wood and Robert Benasconi. Warwick: Parousia, 1985.
———. “Sauf le nom.” On the Name. Edited by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1995.
———. Speech and Phenomena. Translated by D.B. Allison. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973.
———. The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret. Translated by David Wills.
Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007.
Die große Stille: Into Great Silence. Directed by Philip Gröning. Düsseldorf: Philip
Gröning Filmproduktion, 2005.
Domin, Hilde. “Die Heiligen.” Nur Eine Rose Als Stütze. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2006.
183
Eckhart, Meister. Selected Writings. Translated by Oliver Davies. New York:
Penguin Books, 1994.
Ekaterina, Dvoretskaya. “Personal approach to Symbolic reality.”
http://www.crvp.org/seminar/05-seminar/Ekaterina.htm.
Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. Orlando: Harcourt, 1971.
———. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Norton Anthology of English
Literature. 7th edition, vol. 2. Edited by M.H. Abrams et al. New York: W.W.
Norton and Company, Inc., 2000.
Forte, Bruno. The Portal of Beauty: Towards a Theology of Aesthetics. Grand
Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008.
Gasche, Rodolophe. “Infrastructures and Systematicity.” Deconstruction and
Philosophy. Edited by John Sallis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Gauchet, Marcel. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion.
Princeton: Princeton University, 1997.
Gelven, Michael. Commentary on Being and Time. Dekalb: Northern Illinois
University, 1989.
Gibran, Kahlil. “Love.” www.maryourmother.net/Gibran.html.
Goud, Johan. “The Extraordinary Word: Emmanuel Levinas on God.” God in
France: Eight Contemporary Thinkers on God. Leuven: Peeters Press, 2005.
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Culture.” Critical Terms for Literature Study. Edited by Frank
Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995.
Gregg, Linda. “There Is a Sweetness in It.” All of It Singing: New and Selected
Poems. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2008.
Harper, Douglas. “Allusion,” Online Etymology Dictionary,
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/allusion.
Hart, David Bentley. The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth.
Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdman’s Publshing, Co., 2003.
Hebrew-English Tanakh. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2003.
Hegel, G.W.F. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics. New York: Penguin Putnam
Inc., 1993.
Heidegger, Martin. Being And Time. Translated by John MacQuarrie and Edward
Robinson. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.
———. Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Translated by Keith Hoeller. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2000.
Heschel, Abraham J. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983.
184
Hinsey, Ellen. “XVI. Meditation on the Unlanguageable Name of God.” The White
Fire of Time. Middletown: Wesleyan Press, 2002.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “Hurrahing in Harvest.” Poems of Gerard Manley
Hopkins, 3rd edition. Edited by Helen Gardner. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1948.
Irigaray, Luce. “Becoming Divine.” Sexes and Genealogies. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993.
———. Speculum of the Other Woman. New York: Cornelly University Press,
1985.
Janicaud, Dominique. Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: the French
Debate. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. London: Longmans, Green,
& Co., 1905.
Jiménez, Juan Ramón. “I unpetalled you, like a rose.” Into the Garden: A Wedding
Anthology. Edited and Translated by Stephen Mitchell. New York: Harper
Collins, 1993.
Johnson, Todd E. and Dale Savidge. Performing the Sacred: Theology and Theatre
in Dialogue. Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Group, 2009.
Johnson, William Everett. Politics of Worship. Cleveland: United Church Press,
1999.
Jonkers, Peter. “God in France: Heidegger’s Legacy,” God in France: Eight
Contemporary Thinkers on God. Leuven: Peeters, 2005.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling, Repetition. Translated by Howard V.
Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Lacoste, Jean-Yves. Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the
Humanity of Man. Translated by Mark Raferty-Skehan. New York: Fordham
University Press, 2004.
Levinas, Emmanuel. “Diachrony and Representation.” Entre-Nous: On [] Thinking
[] of the [] Other. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
———. “Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics of the Infinite.” Debates in Continental
Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers. Edited by Richard
Kearney. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004.
Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Long, Christopher P. “Toward a Dynamic Concept of ousia: Rethinking an
Aristotelian Legacy.” http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Anci/AnciLong.htm.
Luther, Martin. “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.” Three Treatises.
Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966.
185
Mandelstam, Osip. “Poison in the bread.” The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam.
Translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin. New York: The New York
Review of Books, 1975.
Marcel, Gabriel. “Chapter III: The Need for Transcendence.” The Mystery of Being:
Reflection and Mystery 1948–1950. http://www.giffordlectures.org.
Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
———. God without Being. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
———. “The Saturated Phenomena.” Philosophy Today 40.1 (Spring 1996): 10324.
Marx, Karl. Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. New York: Press Syndicate of
the University of Cambridge, 1982.
McCall, Richard D. Do This: Liturgy as Performance. Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2007.
Merton, Thomas. The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton. New York: New
Directions Publishing Corporation,1980.
Merwin, W.S. “That Music.” Migrations: New and Selected Poems. Port Townsend:
Copper Canyon Press, 2007.
Milosz, Czeslaw. “On Prayer.” The Collected Poems, 1931-1987. Hopewell, NJ:
The Ecco Press, 1988.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of
the Future. Translated by Helen Zimmern. New York: The Macmillan Co.,
1907.
———. “The Madman.” Modernism to Postmodernism. Edited by Lawrence
Cahoone. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
Norwich, Julian (of). “First Revelation: Chapter Five.” Showings.
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/julian/revelations.ii.iii.html.
Nussbaum, Martha. “Equity and Justice.” Sex and Social Justice. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999.
Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Translated by John W. Harvey. London: Oxford
University Press, 1958.
Pavlova, Vera. “42.” If There is Something to Desire: 100 Poems. Translated by
Steven Seymour. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
Plato. “Meno.” Epistemology: Contemporary Readings. Edited by Michael Huemer.
New York: Routledge, 2006.
———. “Symposium.” Symposium and Phaedrus. New York: Cosimo Books, Inc.,
2010.
———. “Timaeus.” http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html.
186
Rahner, Karl. Hearer of the Word. Translated by Joseph Donceel, S.J. New York:
Continuum Publishing Company, 1994.
Rilke, Maria Rainer. Vom mönchischen Leben, Das Stunden-Buch, Sämtliche
Werke, Vol. 1. Translated by Mark S. Burrows. Frankfurt am Main: Insel
Verlag, 1955.
Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004.
Rollins, Peter. How (Not) to Speak of God. Brewster: Paraclete Press, 2006.
Rose, Or. “In the Footsetps of Hillel: Judaism and Religious Pluralism.” Tikkun
(November/December 2009): 62-67.
Rushdie, Salman. “Is Nothing Sacred?” Writing the Essay – Art in the World – The
World through Art. Edited by Pat C. Hoy et al. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2003.
Rutland, Vernon. Imagining the Sacred: Soundings in World Religions. Maryknoll:
Orbis Books, 1998.
Saliers, Don. E. Worship Come to Its Senses. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.
Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999.
Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice,
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/merchant/full.html.
Sneller, Rico. “God as War: Derrida on Divine Violence.” God in France: Eight
Contemporary French Thinkers on God. Leuven: Peeters, 2005.
Steiner, George. Grammars of Creation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
———. Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Stone, Bryan. Evangelism after Christendom: The Theology and Practice of
Christian Witness (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006).
The New Oxford Annotated Study Bible, 3rd Edition (New Revised Standard). Edited
by Michael D. Coogan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Thomas, R.S. “The Empty Church.” Collected Poems 1945-1990. Phoenix Press:
London, 1995.
Van der Leeuw, Gerard. Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006.
Van Troostwijk, Chris Doude. “Phrasing God: Lyotard’s Hidden Philosophy of
Religion.” God in France. Leuven: Peeters Press, 2005.
Vial, Fernand. “Symbols and Symbolism in Paul Claudel.” Yale French Studies 9,
(1952): 95.
Von Balthasar, Hans Urs. A Theology of History. San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press,
1994.
———. Convergences: To the Source of Christian Mystery. San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1983.
187
———. Engagement with God. San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press, 2004.
———. Epilogue. San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press, 2004.
———. Heart of the World. San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press, 1954.
———. Love Alone is Credible. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004.
———. Mysterium Paschale. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000.
———. The Glory of the Lord: Seeing the Form. San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1982.
———. Theodrama: Theological Dramatic Theory, V: The Last Act. San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1998.
Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952.
Wells, Samuel. Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics. Grand Rapids:
Brazos Press, 2004.
White, James F. Introduction to Christian Worship. Nashville: Abingdon Press,
2000.
Wilder, Amos. “Christianity and the Arts: The Historic Divorce and the
Contemporary Situation.” The Christian Scholar, XL.4 (December 1957): 268.
———. Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination. Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1973.
Williams, Rowan. “Balthasar, Rahner and the apprehension of being.” Wrestling
with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology. London: SCM, 2007.
Wiman, Chris. “From a Window.” Every Riven Thing. New York: Farrar, Strauss,
and Giroux, 2010.
Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. New York:
Random House, 1996.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1980.
Wojtyla, Karol. “Our God’s Brother.” The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater.
Translated by Boleslaw Taborski. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Art in Action. Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans
Publishing Co., 1980.
Yeats, William Butler.“Easter, 1916” and Other Poems. Mineola: Dover Press,
1993.
Related papers
Diajukan untuk memenuhi Tugas Mata kuliah : Praktikum Kimia Dasar
MAKALAH ASIDIMETRI, 2020
Kajian Teknis Produksi Alat Muat Dan Alat Angkut Pada Kegiatan Penambangan Batubara
Indonesian Mining Professionals Journal
Partial load operation analysis of trigeneration subcooled compressed air energy storage system
Journal of Cleaner Production, 2019
Prevalence of infection with porcine circovirus-2 (PCV-2) and porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) in an integrated swine production system experiencing postweaning multisystemic wasting syndrome
Canadian journal of veterinary research = Revue canadienne de recherche vétérinaire, 2009
Prevalencia de riesgo cardiometabólico en una muestra nacional de jóvenes costarricenses utilizando el indicador antropométrico cintura-estatura
Andes Pediatrica
Updated Transfer Coefficients for Magnetized Plasmas
The Astrophysical Journal, 2021
Related topics
- Find new research papers in:
- Physics
- Chemistry
- Biology
- Health Sciences
- Ecology
- Earth Sciences
- Cognitive Science
- Mathematics
- Computer Science