The Liturgical Door

It's been a while since I've blogged. Below is an article to be published next week in The Christian Century. Just to be safe, I've posted my original submission here, which was shortened and edited a bit for the publication.

I learned to install a door on an ordinary weekday in small town Arkansas. The house was a nondescript tract home, whose pinkish, mottled brick was dated before the mason finished his work. The door was an equally uninspiring metal unit from the lumberyard, to be installed at the house’s main entry. It had been delivered to the site already hinged and hung in its jamb.

In a matter of minutes, my boss, Dave, had given me all the information I would ever need to install a door. He told me how to make sure the studs on the hinge side of the opening were plumb in two directions, tacking up shims to correct for the framers’ hurry. He explained to me that a push on a corner in one direction would effect a movement in another. All I had to do was fill the framed opening with the door, making all things plumb and flush.

When he returned an hour and a half later, Dave was clearly, but politely, surprised that I was still struggling at my task. I had all the information I needed, but when put into practice that seemingly rigid object behaved like a balloon in my inexperienced hands. A push to its here bulged its there wildly. A butterfly of a shim tap created a whirlwind of chaos in a faraway place on the door.

Dave stepped in, gave a few knowing bumps and shoves, and in a matter of moments, all was right with the door.

There are different kinds and loci of knowing. And the goal of any apprenticeship is an accumulation of knowledge in the hands. No explanation is required other than the properly fit thing: the flush door, the mitered corner. Things visibly meet and right.

Some traditions place a great deal of value on religious information. Accordingly, the Christian faith is measured in a quick tally of doctrinal positions. Real Christians are called ‘believers’ perhaps, a term that suggests the possession of some essential and accurate information about God.

I grew up in one such tradition. Our information happened to come from methods and sources embraced by the right end of the religious spectrum. The left had and has their methods and sources as well.

But even though I couldn’t have said so at the time, a hunch was growing that my knowledge of the faith wasn’t making its way into some terribly important parts of my self. I still felt like that clumsy apprentice with plenty of information in his head, but whose hands remained ignorant and inadequate.

Liturgical worship assumes that bodies must learn too. It’s not enough to fill one’s mind with an orthodox collection of facts—whether established by pope, prophet, or sacred text. Something happens, something is communicated to and into our selves when we bow, stand, kneel, sing, and process together. Colors and smells and even the arrangement of furniture deliver information to different parts of our selves.

So might we begin to imagine our hands, knees, noses, bellies, our bodies as curious? As seeking? As wanting to know something of the mystery of God as surely as our minds do?

When Christians read the insistence in James that “faith without works is dead”, we tend to understand works as expressions of faith. Faith is an interior reality that can and should make its way to the surface of a life. But what if more attention were paid to the way that “works”, the concrete actions of bodies in the world, infect faith with life? What if we understood the work we do—thinking here of liturgy, “the work of the people”—in terms of formation more than expression?

Even conspicuously liturgical traditions can ignore or deny liturgy as a means of formation. Gestures and movements are easily employed as secret handshakes, signs that someone carries the right information about how to worship. “Did you see that guy make (or fail to make) the sign of the cross at the Benedictus Qui Venit? Clearly he’s not one of us,” the thinking goes, whether we think the response all the way into words or not.

But more and more people are coming into church blessedly oblivious to the right liturgical answers once agreed upon in their high, low, evangelical, Anglo-Catholic, or broad church congregations. And these people bear a particular gift to the gathered assembly: They simply haven’t learned to read the signals.

The newness of the gestures and motions, perhaps even the clumsiness with which they are first employed reminds us all that sometimes grace is out at our fingertips first. It may take time and motion to settle inward.

Liturgical converts are naturally open to the possibility that liturgy isn’t meant to express who we are so much as it’s meant to transform who we are. Liturgical actions need not function as encoded messages, meant to mark out theological territory nor are they flashy vehicles meant to transport speakable doctrines to our heads. Such actions change us, because we are people who not only think thoughts about God, but who live and move and have our being in God. And the movement of our bodies is an irreducible, irreplacable way of knowing.

So maybe the liturgy is helpfully thought of as a door. Not as a portal to be walked through into someplace else. But a door like the one I struggled with all those years ago as a carpenter’s apprentice. For the transformation worked or wreaked by the liturgy is bodily. We lean into the mystery here and discover something moves there, our bodies learning, learning all the while. Maybe the liturgy itself is the sturdy thing my body is meant to struggle with until its wisdom makes its way into my hands, into my belly, into my bones.

Bearded and Blessed

A disclaimer: There's a decent chance that the story this blog opens with will find its way into a sermon one day. Sorry, Christ Church parishioners, but, as you know, this is the strange stuff I dig. Just nod knowingly if and when it shows up again.

Even among the stories of 16^th century iconoclasm, what happened at the Danish church of Holstebro is uniquely bizarre. As the ideals of the emerging Reformation took hold, pietists worshiping at Holstebro found a painting of the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin Mary in their church suddenly incongruent with, even offensive to their Lutheran worship sensibilities. So, with a few careful (one hopes) brush strokes, the virgin was transfigured into Jacob. She was given a beard. Conveniently, the twelve apostles did not need any corresponding alterations to take up their new identities as the patriarch’s twelve sons.

The edited painting remained unchanged until 1907, when the beard was removed and Jacob became Mary once again. Perhaps the long overdue unbending of Mary’s gender was a tragedy Marcel Duchamp intended to counter by providing the Mona Lisa with a goatee twelve years later.

The obvious question first asked about the project of the 16^th century proto-Dadaists is “Who would do such a thing?” But here’s another: “What did such a thing do to the people who prayed near it for four hundred years?”

Think about it. Sunday after Sunday, generation after generation of the Danish faithful said their prayers near a painting of a bearded Blessed Virgin. Were they changed by the experience?

I imagine some folks came to love the painting, perhaps even knowing its complicated story. Others may have been startled and excited to learn of the subversive presence of the Blessed Virgin, watching over them incognito all those strange years. The beard's erasure may have felt to them like a sacred cover blown. Maybe Mary looked more delicate and vulnerable than ever, her cheeks pale and naked as chalk. Who knows?

But even art can't go back. An old reality wasn't restored, because the restored gaze of the original image fell on a different generation of people, with different expectations, with a different set of experiences including the experience of an unshaven Mary named Jacob.

The strange story is one more reminder that meaning happens in the moment. Nothing is retrieved from history intact or unscathed.

So consider this the next time you retrieve a story from the Bible. Do we really want our art, our scriptures, our religion to stay put? Are they stable things to be preserved, or restored, or returned to? Or to they speak to us even as they are being scarred, defaced, and deformed by history and the hands of folks like us?

Permanence

So much for permanence. The house is gone. The driveway that wandered south where Holly Place turned north remains. But the asphalt is going fast to gravel and the gravel is going fast to grass. The house is gone entirely.

The porch where Grandpa sat in his aluminum lawn chair and tended the ice cream machine is gone. The great spirea bush outside the bedroom window is gone. I didn't venture into the woods to look for the rope swing we would ride out into the air as the hillside fell away below our kicking legs. If it's not gone, it's going.

Mark Strand's lines come to mind:

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

- from "Keeping Things Whole"

It was as if the air had moved in to fill the spaces where the house had been. And perhaps, in the process, things were kept whole. Strangely, I had a sense that they were.

It helped, no doubt, that the house wasn't much in itself. A clumsy addition and the awkward tie in of the house roof to the garage suggested that this building was not evolving into a higher form. It was time for a clean lot and a fresh start.

Which helped orient me to the real holiness I sensed or supplied on the day of my visit a few weeks ago. The fact that the house was gone made plain to me that the sacred lived not in a building or even in a persons, but in the interractions and exchanges that were always happening in some present.

The pleasure of peach ice cream was far more complex than it's sweetness on the tongue. The latent goodness in the soupy ingredients, the slow grinding of the motor and its increasing effort as the stuff got thicker as it froze, the lingering stickiness on our fingers all contributed to the pleasure that was passing through our lives on those fine summer evenings. Goodness was always in motion through our lives and to stop it would be to kill it. Goodness preserved would be like a butterfly stuck through with a pin.

So it made a kind of sense that the house had to pass away too. That's how goodness, holiness, the sacred makes its way through us. It can't be preserved alive.

I think St Paul's famous insistence that most things pass away but faith, hope and love abide was meant for a world in which houses fall down and wildness creeps back in even before memories have much faded. Before we get too sentimental and nostalgic we should also note that the dark side of this truth is the promise that the sins of the fathers are visited on the third and fourth generations. But Paul's good news is that faith, hope, and love will outlive even our sins.

The house is gone but something endures. Something subtler than memories. Something of that strange and lovely group of porch dwellers, whose bodies left us only a little more slowly than the melting ice cream of a muggy August evening. Something abides. In me. In my children. Perhaps somehow even in the abandoned lot that the persistent wildness of the earth is making its own once again.

Something, beginning with just the air, has filled the spaces where that house, where those bodies had been. They have moved, but things are kept somehow whole.