EXAMPLES OF DEEP EXPERIENCE, SOME DESIGNED

WHY THIS ASSORTMENT?

These six ceremonies of different kinds provide material for discussion that may help to clarify the elements and processes that interact in different cultures and situations.  Not all of them are recognized as religious nor as free-standing liturgies.  The material cultures are quite different.  But each of them has some compelling way of putting people into a liminal space.  None of these examples was designed using liminal theory, but they were the experiences and evidence that convinced me of the truth of this way of thinking.  They are meant for analysis and analysis.

GATHERED COMMUNITY

On a July evening in 1975 at a fort converted to a conference center at the mouth of Puget sound, thirty-six leaders of Unitarian-Universalist churches and fellowships gather for a week-long training session.  When they sit down for supper, their first meal together, they find 3x5 cards by each place and are asked to write on the cards -- anonymously -- a short statement about one of the happiest moments of their lives.  The cards are gathered at the end of the meal.

About 9 PM after an orientation and business session, the group is ready for the first worship service of a daily sequence through the week.  It is now dark outside.  One of the three worship leaders asks the group to hold hands and to sing “Simple Gifts” as they are led outside into the night and across the wide lawns to the dark gymnasium building.  When the group enters the building, they see a huge dark space with what appears to be a camp in the middle of it.  The other two worship leaders sit in a taped-down square of butcher paper, about twenty feet square, with half a dozen fat candles, the only light, clustered in the middle like a campfire.

The group is asked to stand holding hands and sing another hymn.  Then the worship leaders guide them into sitting on the paper.  It is pointed out that the statements each person had written earlier has been printed on the paper with fibertip markers.  Each person is asked to sit on one piece of writing, not the one they wrote.  The leaders explain that each person, in voluntary order, should read aloud the writing on which he or she is sitting.  It is necessary to pass the candles around in order to hold them close enough to the writing to read.  This is done.  One man finds himself reading about the experience of giving birth, but he’s game.  Some of the moments are dramatic and others are serene.

When everyone has read, one of the worship leaders asks for a moment of silent meditation.  Taped instrumental music ends the silence and continues for a few moment.  Another leader rises to read a “collect” prayer, which gathers up the ideas of the statements and talks about the “differences that unite us” and the happy times we expect to share.  Then another leader gives a spoken prayer to which the people are asked to respond with the same short repeated phrase.

The people stand again, sing another hymn with hands joined, and then file back out the door and across the lawn.  The line is not broken and the song is not stopped until everyone is inside the main building again.

In spite of its apparent simplicity, the three leaders had spent considerable time and thought on designing this.  Everyone present was either a leader with experience or someone who was seen to have “potential” as a leader.  There had only been one previous Leadership School, so no one was experienced with this specifically and many had driven a long distance after a full workday.  These people are usually verbal, open, and trusting.  Still, it was a little bit spooky not to know what would happen.  This was in-gathering, more like a summer camp game than a religious service.  Nevertheless, the principles apply.

Crossing the limen was the walk in the night over the lawn holding hands is a child’s sort of thing to do, disarming -- dark is scary but someone’s hand is reassuring, no one could freak and decide to stay behind.  Once into the gymnasium, the “campfire” effect drew everyone together in a natural liminal space.  Sharing the writing was both funny and moving.  We had a chance to focus on each of us but we had something a little difficult to do when people were looking at us.  The “collect” served as a homily.  Then the reversal took us back out over the limen again.  It was quite natural, like a dinner party.

There are two scripted orders of service (written out) often used in UU services that are based on this sort of potluck pattern.  One is historical, the Flower Communion created by Norbert Capek (1870-1942), who founded the Unitarian Church in Czechoslovakia.  Everyone brings a flower to leave in the front of the church during the service, and then after the service takes away a different flower.  

The other is “Coming Home Like Rivers to the Sea”, the first Water Ritual held at the November 1980 Women and Religion Continental Convocation of Unitarian Universalists in East Lansing, Michigan.  Created by activist Carolyn McDade and UU leader Lucile Schuck Longview, it was a way for women who lived far apart to connect to the whole body the work each was doing locally.  It has come to be used as an ingathering/homecoming ritual for UU congregations.  Over the summer people take a little water from a place or event that is meaningful for them.  At the fall ingathering the water is poured together with explanations of where it came from, and then each takes away a bit of water to do some symbolic thing at home, often baptizing babies.  The same pattern has been used for seeds or earth.

What is missing from the Leadership School Ingathering is the evil, the broken heart, the tragedy.  At no point was there anything but the pleasant summer dark.  The sin, brokenness and limitation of humans were not invoked.  It is this awareness that the demonstration of community is meant to oppose and overcome to be fully religious.  The Flower Communion was devised by Capek in the face of Nazi tyranny and now derives much of its meaning and poignancy from the fact that Capek was martyred at Auschwitz.  When congregations find the historical references to this “depressing” or even “creepy” and cut them out, they greatly diminish the worship experience.  A flower might be just a flower, but the symbolized children who died were real.

Likewise, the original feminist “Coming Home Like Rivers to the Sea” begins with the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” to express the rejection and subjugation of women, their powerlessness and homelessness.  If the water is brought in the spirit of offertory, then the statements made by each woman become testimony, witness to both personal losses and sources of strength.  

But the In-gathering at Leadership School was not meant to be a complete worship service, only an opening exercise in a week long sequence.  

In each of the three “schools” I attended over three summers, on about the fourth day there was always an upwelling of nastiness or some other kind of breakdown when people were tired, pressured, homesick, needing solitude, or had run into their limitations and habitual temperament problems.  It was in confrontiing and overcoming that phenomenon of “hitting the wall” that the real leadership learning took place.  This was a specially chosen group of people in an exceptionally open denomination.  Their weakness was their unwillingness to fail, since they were already leaders, high scorers, and highly educated.  This tended to make them rigid and committed to past successes instead of exploration.  The sheltered week among people who would disperse afterwards gave them courage.

ETHNOGRAPHIC WEBS

“ . . .that which can be expressed only in ritual is not trivial.  It is, I think, crucial and because of it I take ritual to be THE basic social act.  I will argue, in fact, that social contract, morality, the concept of the sacred, the notion of the divine, and even a paradigm of duration are intrinsic to ritual’s structure.”

--Roy Rappaport

For a person or organization to persist (survive) it must manage on two levels:  survive short term environmental fluctuations by adapting, and survive long term by transforming. Crucial variables (getting enough to breathe, eat, drink, shelter) must stay within a range of variability that is survivable.  But as variables continue over years to the point of evolutionary change, at what point is this a new organism?  If the Blackfeet tribe come from the Great Slave Lake, as some anthropologists claim, and then moved to the East Slope of the Rockies on the high prairie where they learned to be buffalo hunters by using piskuns, or buffalo jumps, were they still Blackfeet?  When they acquired horses and did their hunting that way, with guns, were they still Blackfeet?  When they accepted reservation life and are by now intermixed with other people and make their living like any modern American, are they still Blackfeet?  

Immutability is the crucial part of the whole that cannot change without ending the organism as itself.  Rappaport suggests that liturgy can repair a people’s sense of themselves as well as finding new mazeways.  This has proven to be true for some of the enrolled tribespeople.  They still perform a “Bundle Opening” every spring, inventing and bridging over as necessary to adapt, but still sitting in a circle of relations.  But it is different in a world that is based on secularity, that draws a separation between church and state.  Instead of the deep and unchallenged saturation of all life, the ceremonies are in a protected circle.

Because human patterns of behavior are not much specified by genetics, people can change quickly by adjusting memes -- ways of doing things -- instead of genes -- actual changes in bodies.  The terms usually used when stepping away from blood quantum and tribal enrollment to feelings of belonging are “Indian-identified” or “white-identified,” that is, the self-identity sense of the person as expressed in participation in liturgy as in “Bundle Opening.”  There is much more resourcefulness in this kind of identity but also more chance of chaos.  The controller is VALUES or what Rappaport might even call SANCTITY, which are values that are never questioned, considered beyond questioning.  At the high level of values, vagueness is adaptive because it is more inclusive. Most Bundle Openers see themselves as also good Catholics because they consider the values to be the same: compassion (often called “pity” in early translations), love of place, dependence on the Great Spirit, and personal honor.

Rappaport suggests that such primary process thought is largely metaphorical, which is good because it helps resist heresy (erosion) and hair-splitting (over-intellectualizing).  Ultimate sacred postulates are almost beneath (or above) conscious reflection.  They are in the mind (“heart”) as the most basic givens.  “Even metaphor’s grasp is exceeded.  . . . All distinction and all likeness may dissolve into a sense of non-distinction or unity.  Ultimate meaning is sometimes called by such names as ‘pure being’ and ‘Being-Itself.’ . . . “Be this is it may, the objectification of self and the world, and the concomitant language, may be overcome for the nonce by the sense of identity with self and the world . . .   that constitutes highest level meaning.  This is mystical.”

One distinction between religion and “magic” is that religion is shared by a community while magic can be manipulated by an individual, maybe for dubious motives.  This becomes important among the Blackfeet because so many outsiders come seeking what amounts to magic for their individual benefit rather than sharing an endorsement of the community values, much less participating in daily lives of the People.  Native American Indians have acquired a cultural attribution of high prestige and purity, but that makes those among them who have “fallen” even more stigmatized, guilty of a religious apostasy in addition to the affliction of alcoholism or whatever.

The Blackfeet Thunder Pipe Ceremony (which I knew in the Sixties but don’t know as it is organized today except second-hand, since I have stepped back from these circles) is an In-gathering of the Beloved Community and also an In-gathering of the spirits of many creatures of the northern prairie.  It is not mysterious, or at least was not when it grew up within the lives of the People years ago.  The animals were familiar, their habits were known as well as the songs that matched them, and therefore the symbolic power of them had meaning.

How many years ago? No one really knows, but the Thunder Pipes that I’ve seen have brass tacks, brass falconry bells, glass beading, satin ribbons, and occasionally exotic birds that were once mounted by a taxidermist (they have glass eyes) and that are not local.  (A parrot, a rooster.)  The stem or calumet, three feet long, is bored by something similar to the technology for rifles, maybe on a lathe.  In fact, the stem is about the length of a “long gun.” This suggests post-contact.  In fact, the pipe may be the kernel of a liturgy meant to adapt and integrate the new material culture, acknowledging and claiming its power.  It may be a source -- or maybe a result -- of the mystique of the “peace pipe” which is not the same thing.

The stone bowl, where the tobacco burns, is not normally put on the stem because this kind of pipe is not smoked except in times of extremely intense need. The most striking element of the pipestem is an appended fan, an entire set of colorfully quilled eagle tail feathers, usually from a young golden eagle, not a bald eagle. Bald eagles are fish-eaters found around water.  Golden eagles live on the prairie and along the mountains where thermals lift them soaring across the sky.  Many ermine hides (winter weasel pelts, which are white with a black-tipped tail) hang with other objects, maybe a Metis Assumption sash. There are beads and sometimes the red wool cloth manufactured for trade in Stroud, England.

There’s sometimes a secondary “pipe”, similarly decorated and called “the Woman’s Pipe,” which is really a length of gun barrel that had been taken off a “long gun” the way a shotgun is illegally shortened today. And there’s a smoking pipe, maybe not kept in the Bundle.  In those days a pipe for smoking tobacco was something like today’s coffee pot or like the famous cups of tea in Afghanistan.  It was a structuring device: the guest comes, the pipe goes around while there is talk, at some point people have had enough and the guest leaves. Social spaces are created for people to consider what they are saying while they puff or re-light or refill the pipe.

The People gathered according to the seasons, coming from far and wide across the prairie to meet when there was enough grass for the horses and fresh meat for the People. Some think they used the stars as a calendar and others guess they went by the same kind of natural indicators that a farmer might use to decide when to cut hay. The Thunder Pipe Bundle is associated with the spring storms that sweep across the vast grasslands, booming and flashing as they move, and sometimes striking lodges, people and animals. Prayers are made that storms will not do damage, but will water the grass and make the sarvisberries flower, for this is the beginning of the berries that will end up in berry soup.

Berry soup is the ceremonial food, not to symbolize someone’s death, but to work by affinity to encourage a good crop. When handed one’s bowl of soup, one picks out a big fat berry to hand forward to an altar where they are dedicated as examples of what is asked for. If Christian Communion is interpreted as a sharing, a plea for salvation, then maybe berry soup is the same. If Christian Communion is about the Crucifixion of Jesus, then berry soup is not the same thing. 

Berry soup is not normally a store-bought food though in desperation blueberries could be improvised. Usually dried sarvisberries are used, the last of the previous year’s crop, so they are more like seed grain than bread. Many different people might donate berries. In the old days they might have been cached somewhere, the way a marmot hoards grass underground among rocks. If you want to be funky, in the old days the seeds of the berries the People ate were returned to the land in the same way that the seeds eaten by birds and animals go back to soil, so sarvisberries handily grew thick near the accustomed campgrounds. Such elements of the People’s lives traveled through natural feedback loops much in the way that our bodies are stabilized by metabolic feedback loops in the blood.

Besides the People and the berries being gathered together, there is another in-gathering within the Bundle, the skins of lesser creatures of the land. Anthropologists and aficionados are always dazzled by big bright objects like the spectacular calumet, but often the stronger meaning is in the humble, scruffy sub-bundles. These might include the skins of an owl, a duck, a loon, a spotted fawn, or a muskrat. Each is wrapped in cloth the way a baby would be wrapped, with the head sticking out. They are harbingers of spring, such as owls being especially vocal because of looking for mates, the ducks coming back and pairing off, the fawns being dropped by the deer. Blackfeet didn’t eat these creatures except in some kind of emergency, but they watched them carefully to see what they could learn. The land was their text, the animals the writing on it. 

At the Bundle Opening Ceremony, when the liminal time is reached, the men choose one of these little sub-bundles to hold as they dance, often imitating the animal’s movements as closely as they can. Each animal has its own song. If a person REALLY wanted to be a Bundle Ceremony participant, the right way to go about it would not be reading the complete notes of Clarke Wissler or John Ewers, but walking on the land daily in pursuit of natural history.  

Today the Bundle Keepers are the more prosperous and educated people who put emphasis on provenance and genetics -- hereditary entitlement. Thus the ceremony has become focused on gate-keeping and conformity to many small rules as remembered by the oldest participants. This is a serious shift and quite similar to the shift in Christian communion away from the valorization of ordinary sensory life towards theological abstraction, away from personal experience and towards arguments over dogmatic divisive issues.  The trouble is that it disenfranchises even further those who are not included in the family or friendship circles, often the more “old-timey” people.

Nevertheless, a Bundle Opening remains a ritual liturgy in Rappaport’s sense of being a community event that sorts and confirms the People’s roles in each other’s lives.  The group divides with men sitting on one side, women on the other, Bundle-keepers on either side of the Bundle in order of importance and the actual keepers of THIS Bundle alongside it.  Guests sit by what would be the lodge door, the most low prestige location, but since the event is in the room of a house, the circle is squared, so to speak.

Outsiders -- white people -- may have had their faces painted by kneeling before a willing woman, paying her by quietly slipping her some bills.  She will use whatever symbolic pattern she is entitled to pass on, drawing in pigment mixed with fat.  This is considered a blessing but it also means that the visitor is authorized by someone who can be held responsible.  These ceremonies were forbidden for centuries and spies were not welcome.

The beginning threshold authorizing moment comes when the oldest and most significant men present each give a little speech about their accomplishments.  This is meant to indicate that the Opening is not some unimportant sideshow, but endorsed by the presence of men of accomplishment.  In the old days their recitations were about the feats of war and hunting.  Today they must be about going to Washington, D.C., to secure a grant or legislation.  The Bundle will “own” an eagle bone whistle which is taken outside by this important delegation and presented with prayer to each of the four directions, circumnavigating the abode.

The Bundle is then unwrapped by the woman of the Keeper couple, singing the song and imitating the action of each layer as it is undone.  The outermost animal is a black bear.  After sarvisberry soup is shared, there is some lunch.  All afternoon the proceedings settle down to men choosing an animal or bird skin with which to dance, pausing for many prayers.  When a man dances, his wife and possibly other close friends and relatives will rise and dance in place. thus identifying who they are.  If a man dances or prays exceptionally well, onlookers may send him a bit of money or send money to someone else in the group as a way of honoring the dancer.  Again, this reveals relationships.  The unhurried day is a meditation.  It seems to end by falling apart, people going home.

The central “liminal” idea of the proceedings is restoration of the harmony of being by noting the qualities of each animal, singing their song and showing how they go along.  So there are two sorts of order being retraced: the social relationships of the people and the ecological relationships of the animals.  This is an insider’s task that can only be performed by one who knows the animals and their lives.  An outsider from some other world would not even be able to recognize these relationships, which is why it’s necessary to be someone who shares these lives.  That’s the crucial criterion -- NOT racial characteristics.

CHRISTIAN MASS

In December of 2011 the Bishop Edward Braxton forced the resignation of the 72-year-old Rev. William Rowe of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Mount Carmel, Ill, because Rowe had deviated from the exact words dictated in the Roman Missal in order to better echo the Gospel message of the day.  Instead of saying, “Lord our God that we may honor you with all our mind and love everyone in truth of heart,” he said, “We thank you, God, for giving us Jesus who helped us to be healed in mind and heart and proclaim his love to others.”

Of three experts on liturgy from within the Catholic bureaucracy, Monsignor Kevin Irwin, professor of liturgical studies at the Catholic University of America, came closest to the point of view of this manuscript.  He said there were some prayers employed by a priest at Mass in which he is “beholden to the structure not the words.”  I see the “order of service” as being traditional, hierarchical, and authority driven, but the content as properly being emergent from the lives of the people.  Good liturgical form supports meaningful content.

HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN WORSHIP FORMS

This brief set of notes are drawn from “The Shape of the Liturgy” by Dom Gregory Dix, a book that is exhaustive but a pleasure to read.

Many early Christians (including Jesus) felt themselves to be Jewish.  The Jewish ceremonies at the time were mostly centered in three places:

1.  The temple, where the Aaronic priest gave sacrifices.

2.  The synagogues, which were located in neighborhoods where groups led by a rabbi gathered to study scripture.

3.  The home, where meals were treated as times of thanksgiving and where bread and wine were blessed by the head of the household.

Before any Christian rites were recorded about 300 AD, they had evidently settled into a pattern where the people gathered in a home, read and discussed scripture, shared a meal (the agape feast or love-feast), and finished with communion, which was now understood to replace temple sacrifice forever, since Jesus was the supreme sacrifice of blood and flesh.  Over the next decades, the communion separated from the agape feast, which eventually dropped out.  (Some people would joke that it was replaced by coffee afterwards.)

When Hippolytus wrote out descriptions of the liturgy in the third century AD, the service was in two parts:

1.  The Ante-Eucharist or scripture reading and homily, intended to recall the teachers of the past.

2.  The Eucharist proper, in which the taking of bread and wine was in memory of Jesus’ sacrifice (often interpreted as God’s sacrifice)

Many small units of liturgy were adapted from the Jewish ceremonies, including hymns, prayers and the psalms.  Other elements came from the many other resources of an intercultural civilization.  Sometimes Jewish elements were changed in meaning by ideas from that larger world.

The service was sung or chanted, rather than “said,” and the people often stood with arms outstretched.  Among the kinds of prayer were long-standing forms and wordings.  Some have acquired names (The Gloria Patri, the Lord’s Prayer, the Aaronic Blessing used in another example).  Some were exactly worded and memorized or read while others were intended to be extemporaneous.  Even then, there were traditional patterns as there are in “blessings” before meals, as follows:  1) We thank You, God, for this food; 2) We ask for Your guidance as we continue through our day; 3) We wish for Your blessing on those we love.  The structure follows naturally from the assumed relationship between person and God: receiving, asking guidance, and interceding for others.

When Christianity finally became legal and then was elevated to the state religion at the expense of Judaism and paganisms, there was a drastic escalation in the amount of pomp and ceremony.  The altar, which had been a wooden table on wheels, now became fixed because it was a heavy and elaborately decorated metal or marble monolith.  Court manners, especially those related to the Emperor, crept into the liturgy: processions, bowing and kneeling, holding the hands palms-together, incense and candles, elaborate vestments, and precious communion vessels.  More prayers were added and they were more likely to be prescribed by an authority, so that they would be properly and beautifully done.

The next historical stage was brought by the disintegration of the Roman Empire, accompanied by many theological controversies.  The river of Christianity was divided into many small streams with various and contrasting stream beds: the Spanish, the Galician or French (who thought up the ashes on Ash Wednesday and the palms on Palm Sunday), the Irish, even various subdivisions of England, developed unique flourishes and integrated local practices and symbols into the archetypal pattern.  To preserve the river metaphor, in those years a wide fertile delta of customs was built up before the streams were reunited by Pope Pius V in 1570, when he promulgated the first uniform missal for the Roman Catholics.  The missal was written by returning to the ancient records of the early church.  Reformation by return to origins is a recurring pattern in liturgical styles.

But what is considered to be “origins” might vary.  By now the clergy was a separate class with ordained priests augmented by monastic communities that specialized worship into a career, praying every three hours on behalf of the people but excluding the practical world except to sustain themselves with work.  Variations proliferated.  The congregation stood passively by while the priest performed mass, which was intended to be as beautiful and flawless as possible.  A priest could not have missing fingers because it might make him clumsy.  

Along with this shift came a change of mood.  The whole idea of sharing a joyful thanksgiving in a context of loving community changed to one of a mysterious rite done in an atmosphere of awe and fear.  Hymns of Praise were supplanted by Prayers of Consecration and Humble Access, and even these slipped towards abasement and extreme penitence.  These were times of plague and disorder, inquisition and groups who went through the land whipping themselves.  (See Bergman’s depiction in The Seventh Seal.)

Late in this period arose another spin-off liturgy, specifically for ordinary people and in their vernacular.  Called a “prone” service, it included intercessory prayers, psalms, the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Apostle’s Creed, the Decalogue, general confession and absolution and a homily.  When the inevitable Reformation came, this was the model some of the Protestant churches adopted.

The Zwinglian reformers went to the most severely pruned version of the liturgy, even more strict than the Prone service or the Ante-Eucharistic segment of mass, which was used by some Protestants.  It was word-centered, based strongly on scripture and teaching about scripture.  There was a return to the Old Testament ethic and the Judaic veneration of learning the law.  Hymns were rejected as frivolous.  The surrounding elements were overpowered by the sermon and its own rhetorical structure, a passionate logic that mixed argument and narrative.  Sermons were epic, lasting literally for hours.  Contrast that with Quaker services in which the norm is silence.

The whole worship event can be like an opera or a Shakespeare play, so familiar that we not only predict what will happen next, but also judge the smallest differences in timing or tone.  Those who like this pattern need not be attracted to it by its theological grounding, but may only enjoy the pageantry.  This is the danger of anything so ancient and elaborate.  It can become so bogged in detail that it is finally emptied of vital content.

DOM GREGORY DIX

Don Gregory Dix (1901-1952) was an Anglican who belonged to an Anglican Benedictine community.  As one might imagine, he lived with a certain amount of tension between wanting to defend his own order’s autonomy, but fully appreciating the great Roman Catholic tradition and wishing for a closer relationship.  He became a major liturgical scholar at a time of re-alignment during and after WWII, and wrote the masterful book called  ‘The Shape of The Liturgy.”   

Two pre-existing kinds of event shape his thinking about the order of ceremony as much as content of the actual words (which is where most people find their arguments).   The historical origin of the Mass was a two-part movement.  The first part, called the “synaxis,” is centered on the origins of Christianity in the idea of the Holy Book (or scroll) and the tradition of study that was at the heart of Judaism.  The second part, which in the beginning was for those who had converted to the idea that Jesus was the Redeemer, people who had been baptized to signify their conversion, was centered on Communion and called the Eucharist.  (I personally would connect these to the ten thousand year old cultural shift from hunter/gatherer culture to an agricultural stationary life, and to the conversion from animal sacrifice to bread and wine, but that’s a different discussion.)

Later the two movements were joined because of losing the distinction between those who were baptized and those who were merely considering it.  At first the Synaxis was gathered in one place and then the baptized people went to a separate place for the Eucharist.  Every institutional religion seems to want to organize an “elect” who have special privileges or to at least have the power to bar dissenters from “full communion,” a practice that continues today.  

There has always been an argument about whether taking communion would be an inner force for salvation, or whether it is a privileged access earned by preparation and conversion.  Would taking communion make you good, or would being good justify communion?  Since it was the passport to heaven, there was also an argument between those who thought children, innocent, should be baptized (as insurance) or whether it should be reserved until a person was old enough to understand what faith was.  Then there were the arguments about “proper” baptism.  (These differences have persisted over millennia, which suggests they are unresolvable.)  Such dissensions sent everyone back to comb the books for justification, which kept the Synaxis alive, but it was the Eucharist, an act of community, that was at the heart of Mass.

Thus Dix saw FOUR parts to the liturgy: entry into the worship space (crossing the limen or threshold, stopping to dip into the Holy Water and make a cross on oneself) where Synaxis took place, a homily, then a further entry into an even more holy place for the Eucharist, before the return to the world over the limen.  The second part can be called an “anamnesis” which commemorates and presents again the sacrifice of Christ.  This second part again has four parts: Offertory, Consecration, Fraction and Communion.  In ordinary language, the bread and wine are brought forward (this is NOT the same as passing the collection plate for money), the priest blesses the bread and wine (now they are holy and effective), the priest breaks up the bread, and the people partake.

One main rift in the original Christian body was between the Eastern Orthodox whose culture encouraged them to see the supernatural in everything.  They concluded that the thing to do with the Holy Bread and Wine was to protect the people from it during its transformation.  A curtain was hung behind the altar so the priest could do the “fractionation” in an enclosed space in case the wafer blew up or became radioactive.  This affected the very architecture of the church, since the Eastern Orthodox fabric curtain eventually became replaced by a wall.  

But in contrast the Roman culture wanted everyone to see and admire the Holy Substance, so their priest not only held it up for everyone to see, but also rang a bell in case people were so sunk in their own prayers that they might miss that moment.  A spin-off liturgy developed during the week when people would come and pray while looking upon the consecrated communion wafers left over from Sunday.    

Every church, it is said, is actually three churches: one in the present; one that is going ahead, cutting trail; and one that lags behind, yearning for the old days.  Somehow the liturgy of the congregation must include them all.  Dix was tracing out the previous path while never losing his grip on the central pattern of worship so natural that it has persisted through the ages.  There’s a story about a Lutheran seminary student who went to one of the early English-language masses of the Catholic church and was thunderstruck to realize that in spite of the theological differences, Lutheran mass was not different.  In fact, in a period of ecumenism, the Lutherans, the Methodists, and a few others formally asserted their liturgies were equally valid.

UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST HUMANISM

A TROUT IN THE CHALICE

My approach does not contradict anything above.  It is as based on the way we understand “reality” and “spirituality” today, so it will probably change when our understanding of our world and the way we perceive it changes. At present those changes are unimaginable.

Two anthropologists (Von Gennep and Victor Turner) are my sources for the three-step metaphor of going over a “limen” (threshold) into a state called “liminal” and then returning back into the secular world.  I am matching that with the research on “neuronal brain platform” function (see Gazzaniga) to insist that “liminal time or place” is a true brain state in which previously assumed categories can be questioned and either changed or confirmed.  This “liminal” state can be seen in brain-wave recordings, neuron impulses, hormonal changes in the blood, and fMRI tests.  It can also be felt by the person and is either identical or close to what Eliade called “the sacred.”

VON OGDEN VOGT

Sociologists could explain why a denomination open to the larger society would turn to humanism in the Thirties.  Ordinary resources appeared to have failed.  It was a general and complex movement but for the Unitarians in particular it crystalized thought about worship services.  Dean Sperry at Harvard was proposing a three-part theory of worship “arc” based on the syllogism of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.”  Then along came Unitarian Von Ogden Vogt, who developed a traditional scheme while changing the terms of the parts.  This is parallel to his attempt to make First Unitarian Church of Chicago a European cathedral in form while converting the content, even the icons, to those of industrial progress.

VOGT’S SCHEMA FOR WORSHIP

THE CALL TO WORSHIP:  “Every service which has a call to worship begins with the state of the worshipper in mind rather than the presentation of divinity.  Exhortation or Statement of Intention are alternative beginnings.”

(“We gather this morning to acknowledge the beauty of the world and the shelter of our community.”  The bells ring.  A procession enters.”)  

VISION:  “An awareness of All Things . . . it is the presentive element, the declaration of the divine life which the worshipper has come to find and it is itself the service of God going on in the sanctuary to which the worshipper has come to offer his praise.  In form, it is the preliminary announcement of the theme of the day, and the initial rhythmic movement of the liturgy, binding together minister and choristers as participants.”

(The first hymn is announced.  All rise.)

HUMILITY:  “The sense of diminution . . . this low point of contrast is a normal and often intense stage in the experience of worship.”

(Some Christians call this the Confession of Sins.)

VITALITY:  “Out of the world of frustration and weakness into the tides of full and complete life.”

Some Christians call this the “Assurance of Pardon.”

RECOLLECTION:  “The heightened imagination begins to operate on earthly scenes . . .a wider range, a fuller review, possibly covering a retrospect and forecast of many years and all their affairs.”

In a Christian context this might be the reading of scripture.  Otherwise, anything that places the congregation in time and space: orchestra, video?

ILLUMINATION:  “Problems are clarified and wishes reordered.  What seemed important sinks in the scale, the great values emerge and are freshly cherished.”

(For Christians the sermon.  Any equivalent.)

DEDICATION:  “When the mind sees what is right and best to do and the whole man [sic] is made more capacious to do it, the urgence to dedication is all but irresistible.”

(For Christians the prayer after the sermon.

PEACE:  “Surely there should be at the end of such a supreme course of experience an integrity of being that is reconciliation and peace.”

We used to form a circle and sing Shalom/Salaam.  Benediction.

Vogt used this sequence to develop many actual worship services, carefully and poetically written.  He was ambivalent about his relationship to Christianity, wishing to keep the high Gothic forms.  Whether this is a synthesis or a collision is open to comment but it was convincing enough to energize his congregation and rally their resources.  At any rate, Vogt was working for a universal worship pattern with an integrity of its own that was drawn directly from human experience, but also heavily influenced by European and especially British models.  It’s his thought about human experience that’s relevant for this thesis.

“. . . the outer form of the exercise of worship should parallel the inner order of the experience of worship. . .If the principle be a correct one, the first task of an artist in worship is to analyze the experience.  It may be opposed to this suggestion that there is no typical religious experience of worship, that the many varieties of religious experience cannot be reduced to the general norm. . .  I only express my view that in the main there is a comprehending normal experience which covers all these major differences.  However varied the situation of the worshippers in mind, body or estate, however varied the approaches, whether mental or emotional or moral, the essential psychology of the experience is identical.”

ABRAXAS

http://www.uua.org/worship/theory/abraxanessay/    At this url is an essay written by a group of ministers and lay people who belonged to the Unitarian Universalist Association.  Now it is part of the UUA website called “Worship Web,” which is particularly useful in this denomination because many of the small congregations are lay-led and don’t have a trunk full of things to read, or any real certainty about how to go about organizing worship.

Two denominations, the Unitarians and the Universalists, had merged in 1961.  They were quite different in style and somewhat different in content, so many things needed to be negotiated all over again.  The Unitarian Universalist Abraxans related to the Mass form, which had become a “hymn sandwich” when the Synaxis overtook the Eucharist -- words overtaking acts after many Unitarians dropped communion, following the lead of Ralph Waldo Emerson.  They also responded positively to the Transcendentalist regard for the major Asian religions and tried to become sophisticated about their traditional books.  The Anglican church had a brief form of service they used at Vespers and some Abraxans felt this was the ultimate form.  It would be interesting to propose that the Synaxis was essentially Unitarian -- all reasoning and word -- while the Eucharist was essentially Universalist, an expression of compassion.

The first essay in the Abraxan Worship Reader is an excerpt from “Art and Religion” by Von Ogden Vogt.  It’s not long or elaborate, but this essay is the source for what I call “the Dilation of the Spirit,” a change of dimension in the scale of thought to respond to what Tillich called “Ultimate.”   Perhaps this is what some people do when they take LSD, open their previously settled minds to new possibility.  “Go cosmic.”  No more wishing for personal prosperity.  No more fellowship mornings devoted to what has been called “city sewer system syndrome,” the crowding out of religion by practical politics.

In terms of liturgy, the idea is first to bring up to consciousness what is sinful, painful, dreadful, terrifying and humiliating in a world full of such forces.  One only has to recall the latest news.  This is “The Confession of Sins.”  Then comes the “Assurance of Pardon.”  The question in our era has been what -- without an all- powerful God -- that can possibly be?  I offer human intimacy, connection with the beloved place, and participation in the entangled universe, no matter how minute that participation might be.  Since you are included, you share its dimensions.  This moves the definition of salvation from preservation of individual identity to participation in every aspect of existence.  There is a strong political implication, valorizing the community.

The skill of the liturgist is tested by choosing which images of which senses evoke the liminal -- a mix of sound, smell, space, and so on -- for the specific congregation to achieve the kind of intense experience that people find poetic, quasi-sexual, life-changing.  This is not to discredit the daily small rituals that order our lives or even the great patriotic spectacles that can unite us en masse.  They are not quite the same.  I’m pleased to have found these useful and fitting ideas in the dim recesses of UU archives, sound theory from an old-fashioned humanist liturgist in a polka dot bowtie.  I grieve that the tower of Vogt’s cathedral has been taken down due to deterioration.   When paradigms shift, by definition priorities change.  But the underlying process and structure persist.

When the Abraxan Worship Reader was assembled in 1980, it was reacting to a couple of decades of tumbling change in UU liturgies.  Open to the culture, the denomination could not help being subject to the same forces of dissension, calls for renewal, demands for social action, and obsession with psychology.  Some were exasperated enough to try to revert to earlier and happier experiences in Christian congregations.  Abraxas undertook to seek a common axis, a point of reference.  

The Reverend Vern Barnet, who always had a taste for the comparative religion discipline with its close attention to the underlying forces as well as varieties of detail and ornamentation, did the editing.  He began with an excerpt from Von Ogden Vogt’s “Art and Religion” in which Vogt described the key principle he found in Isaiah.  It was a two-step process.  “. . .The first reaction or feeling is that of self-abnegation, littleness, humility.”  Then this symbolized idea or truth, this great existence comes into you, fills and possesses and enlarges you.”  Vogt also calls on St. Augustine to describe this sequence of “penitence and salvation.”  This turns out to be one of my key concepts, The two-step “Dilation of `the Spirit”, a way of enlarging and universalizing, seems to me crucial in preserving the “religiousness” of worship.

Thirty years after the Abraxas group, fifty years after von Ogden Vogt, contemporary seminary students are still stumbling across this work and wondering how to revive it.  The terms of the culture have changed.  Now, instead of the anti-authoritarian ferment and anti-European focus of the mid-twentieth century when “God died,” post-modernism has endorsed all that, codified and exhausted the mourning.  Now we are looking at the planet from the perspective of the Entity Formerly Known as God or at least an Angel -- namely, outer space.  We witness while nations implode, international corporations control nations, and the environment is ravaged.  But we are not sure what our testimony ought to be.   Perhaps we can only pray.  In that case, liturgy can make prayer more powerful. 

Rev. Barnet is now at http://www.cres.org/pubs/abraxas.htm  where he leads the Community Resource for Exploring Spirituality.  Abraxas, named for an early god-idea, thought of itself as a quasi-monastic order in a joking way.  They declared themselves “spiritual” but seemed to define that as “interfaith” among the major religious institutions, including those that were Humanist.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTCBKUp42kM   Vern took that seriously and still writes his religion column for the Kansas City Star, working to reconcile world religions. 

Abraxas loved paraphernalia, vestments, smells and bells, secret names.  They were traditional, but would mix traditions within their prescribed ceremonies by using a reading from Hinduism, or a ritual from an obscure corner of Christianity.  It’s a style that came from the Sixties/Seventies comparative religion studies.  Things could get a little confused.  I remember a time at the UUA general assembly, when some Buddhist priests had been invited to perform their liturgy.  The audience, wishing to do the right thing, imitated the priests by standing and sitting or whatever, (paper fans were involved so people improvised with their programs) as they would have in a Catholic mass.  This disconcerted the priests, who came from a tradition where the important people do the rituals while the congregants merely observe.

Abraxas was an admirable experiment in re-invigorating the medieval models by reaching out for world-wide words and practices, something like the New England Transcendentalists realizing what Buddhism and Hinduism had to offer and pulling it into their Christian thinking.  But Abraxas was not particularly aware of sociological constraints.  They were never going to kill roosters in church even though Santeria might do that.  They were never going to use Plains Indian Sun Lodge ordeals in which their chest muscles are torn with skewers.   And they were not likely to throw up their hands, speak in tongues and fall on the floor.  Worship styles are almost always class-based and so are denominations.

Vogt was a humanist and honored human cultures in their grandest dimensions, but for him the industrial revolution was still as far as his mind could reach.  He had little notion of quantum mechanics or the birth of stars.  He knew nothing about the Higgs boson and neither did anyone else.  The powerful marriage of physics and poetry had not quite happened yet. 

KENNETH LEO PATTON

Another humanist gifted at creating content was Kenneth Leo Patton, a Universalist in love with the arts.  Without challenging the structure of the service, he was able to make the rational, naturalistic sciences into poetry by allowing the upwelling of the spirit to come into his words.  The church building he encouraged was the Frank Lloyd Wright building for the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin.  It would not be far off to say he matched Wright in iconoclasm and narcissism.  (They were also both short.)  He self-published an enormous amount of material for Sunday services, all of them very popular.  Many were new words for old familiar hymn tunes.

What Vogt and -- even more so -- Patton knew was that entering or leaving this state of liminality and merger with the universe is deeply entwined with sensory cues and that they touch something real in the person that can’t be accessed in other ways, not even words.  They are emergent from the ecology that has created the local culture.

REFRAMING FAMILIAR LITURGY

The officiant or celebrant, the liturgist, normally leads the congregation through a familiar set of steps, a predictable arc of emotion, but once in a while comes an event that exceeds the pattern and draws on the liturgist’s powers of improvisation.  The example that follows is from a journal of pastoral care in the Seventies.  An Episcopal priest carefully reports the decisions he made and what resources he drew on.

A WEDDING OF LIFE AND DEATH

This is an outline of a ceremony created by a pastor who had been scheduled to do a conventional wedding which was prevented by the death of the groom in an early morning car crash on the appointed day. The bride insisted that she wanted to be married anyway, though her mother and most everyone else thought it was a crazy, if not heretical, idea. The pastor, who had done considerable pre-marriage counseling with the couple, judged that this bride was sincere and needed the closure. Therefore he agreed, but he thought carefully about what to do and why. For instance, he wore every “high ceremonial” garment he had in order to mark the high significance and legitimacy of the moment.

(These titles are mine, the italicized words are those of the liturgist.  He capitalizes “Pastor.”)

1. CROSSING THE THRESHOLD

An ad hoc ritual unfolded in the parlor where the body lay. (It could be said that the movement from the waiting room, across the threshold, into the parlor was a ritual act itself, the basic ingredient of which was the supportive hold of the Pastor and the walk side by side to the point of particular crisis.)

2. PLACEMENT BY THE COFFIN

Maree stood alongside the Pastor at the coffin and the Pastor maintained a ritual presence with her. There was not only emotional and theological need to support her: there was physical need, too. Both she and the Pastor were aware of the fact that she felt faint with emotional intensity. The Pastor stood alongside of her in a ritual stance that expressed sympathy and empathy with her. . .

3. RITUAL ADDRESS

Maree then began a ritual dialogue with her fiancee: she spoke out her feelings toward him. She held his hand while she did this and she spelt out in reverent tones and in a surprisingly composed frame of mind her feelings for him and what their relationship had meant for her.

4. PUTTING THE RING ON THE FINGER

Then came the moment when she placed the ring on his finger. After a little inquiry as to what the Pastor thought was the most appropriate thing to do (casting him in the role of ritual expert and trusting him to ensure ritual propriety and completeness, which are important elements in producing peace of mind and a sense of achievement), she proceeded as the ritual functionary to place the ring on his finger. . . . The whole event provided a tying of a tourniquet which sealed off satisfactorily for the time being so much of her longing and emotive desire.

5. PLEDGE OR VOTUM OR VOW

As she placed the ring on the finger, she spoke a meaningful accompanying votum: “Mark, this is to indicate everything that our marriage has meant for us.”

6. KISS

Then she kissed the head of the corpse in a dignified way. . . The kiss was not sustained, but it was accompanied by what the Pastor thought was appropriate crying without any sign of hysteria. All the while the Pastor was maintaining his supportive hold. Then, when she had exhausted what for her was a sufficient time of physical contact with him, she withdrew of her own volition. (Earlier in the ritual she had become physically weak and had said, “I just wish this heart of mine wouldn’t beat so fast.” The Pastor had interrupted the proceedings at that point and suggested, “why don’t we sit down for awhile, while you take a few deep breaths.” When she recovered, she resumed without further interruption.)

7. CHANGING POSITION TO NEW RELATIONSHIP.

To conclude the ritual she went, now unaided, to the opposite side of the coffin, affecting a significant change in ritual grouping, placing the Pastor in a new ritual role. He now saw himself over against her, and her alongside her fiancée.

8. COMPOSITE PRAYER

a. 23rd Psalm

Because he had the feeling he was meeting the need of Maree who had on another occasion requested prayer, the Pastor said, “Would you like me to say a prayer before we go?” . . . The prayer the Pastor used was a composite prayer. It contained first of all the 23rd Psalm. This Psalm was chosen first because its movement resonated so well with the movement of the fiancée’s relationship with Maree, with the graph of the recent events, and with the hopes the Pastor held out for her. The Psalm -- like their pre-marital relationship -- begins on a high plateau for its first verses, then drops into a “valley experience” (paralleling the tragedy) and emerges into a scene of hope and blessedness. The Pastor chose the Psalm also because he realized that it is a well-known Psalm and Maree would be the more easily “touched” by a familiar biblical quote at that emotionally-charged juncture. He realized too that the Psalm has a long history of use in situations where people have needed comfort and sustenance, and that it depicts much about God’s pastoral care of His people. The Psalm was a “constant”; i.e. long-standing, continuing, traditional element in the ad hoc ritual.

b. Free Prayer

Thanks: The second component in the Pastor’s prayer was a free prayer, the first paragraph of which was a prayer of thanks in which he took pains to gather the details of the rewarding and enriching relationship that Maree and her fiancee had enjoyed. Maree had spelt out these details in the statement she had made to her fiancée. The Pastor had made a mental note of these details and he had gathered them as the substance of his paragraph of thanks. In that context the details served both to commemorate and celebrate the relationship for Maree.

Supplication: The next segment of the free prayer was the gathering of Maree’s needs in supplication. These, too, the Pastor had stored in his memory as they came to light in the counseling ministry for Maree. They included divine companionship, support, nurture, reassurance, guidance, understanding, comfort in sorrow.

Commendation: The next component of the free prayer was a commendation of the fiancée, very similar to the classical commendations of the burial services. This, too, was a “constant” element in the rite and it provided ritual finality to the course that the dead man had been precipitated into.

c. Lord’s Prayer in Unison

Then the Pastor used the Lord’s prayer, again a “constant” component in a rite, and one which he felt sure Maree would be able to participate in. She did, and with reverence and even fervor. Because of the familiarity of the prayer, she could immerse herself in it.

9. AARONIC BENEDICTION

The final verbal feature in the rite was the Aaronic benediction. To symbolize the unity that Maree felt with her fiancée, and to give visible expression to the fact that, in Christ’s death had no power even to separate the living from the dead, the Pastor placed on hand on Maree’s bowed head and one on the head of the corpse, and pronounced the benediction, which he felt would have salutary benefit for her.

10. SIGN OF THE CROSS

He made the sign of the cross at the close of the benediction to transcribe in “shorthand” the victory over death which Christ’s liberating and redeeming death on the cross has achieved. (In his earlier explanation of the funeral rite he had explained the significance of consignation.)

11. DISMISSAL

His words of dismissal, “Go in peace,” sealed off the one event, the contemplative and commemorative viewing, and set Maree upon a course toward the next event which lay in the future.

12. SECOND KISS AND RE-CROSSING THE THRESHOLD

Maree then kissed her fiancée farewell and, together with the Pastor, left the parlor, again unaided by his physical support, but with him very much at her side.

REFLECTIONS ON A "RITE OF JOINING"

Let us begin by noting what the pastor says about why he chose the 23rd Psalm: “because its movement resonated so well with the movement of the fiancée’s relationship with Maree , the graph of the recent events, and the hopes the Pastor held out for her.” “The Psalm . . . begins on a high plateau for its first verses, then drops into a “valley experience” . . . and emerges into a sense of hope and blessedness.”  This is the arc of the liturgy into which the pastor fits his “beats”.

Maree enters and bravely addresses Mark in that liminal space where everyone is equal. Even the line between life and death is ignored.  (The feeling underlying is loving encounter.)  She puts the ring on Mark’s finger. (The key symbol of marriage or at least union of some sort.)  The Pastor picks up the line of thought and synthesizes meaning into a course for the future. (He enables the process of saying goodbye and leaving.)  The three underlying elements are approach, merging, and withdrawal, like any “in-gathering” ceremony.  This is the pattern of a wedding: the bride approaches down the aisle, the couple is joined, and they go back up the aisle, transformed. It is also the pattern of love-making.

There are many three-part sub-sections to this ritual, though not referring to the doctrine of the Trinity.  The “composite prayer” is in three parts (23rd Psalm, free prayer, and the Lord’s Prayer) and so is the “free prayer” of thanks, supplication and commendation.  The overall three-part pattern is echoed internally by smaller three part sequences.  It might be interesting to look for similar ceremonies in other cultures that use the four directions, the six directions, or the simple circle as structural logic.

The rhythm is rather like walking: stasis, going out of balance, regaining balance -- in a chain with sub-sequences (foot flat, then flexed, then lifted) -- all of which tend to carry one forward but sedately, like coming down the aisle.  Another helpful analogy is wave-action on a beach: the withdrawal of one wave helps give shape to the energy of the next.  Each has a unique form which is a version of a form in common.  Pulses of tension and release become rather like the best of music or poetry.  It is repetition containing progress, even transformation.

Maree comes into the room and physically and emotionally goes close to Mark, to the point where it is almost unbearable to her.  Then, unprompted and spontaneously, she moves to a new position, responding to her own inner “felt concepts” but still needing confirmation of correctness from her liturgical guide.  She knows inside when she is approaching, when she is actually fused emotionally (putting the ring on the finger), and when she is ready to withdraw. She is the only person who really knows what these internal shifts feel like, but it is possible to “read” her body, even in very small ways like changes in her posture.

The leave-taking portion of the ritual is much more ceremonial and Maree guides it not at all.  She simply gives the cue for it and then receives it from the minister.  It is more theological, as opposed to the personal messages of the first half, and simply liturgical, as is appropriate for increasing distance.  The phrase the Pastor uses is “ritual finality.”  Real unity is replaced by symbolic unity and resignation.  The concreteness and physical pain of grief begins to be abstracted and bound up in symbols that can be moved aside to make room for new life.

Within the largest wave action -- approaching, fusing and leaving -- is a regular alternation of act (entering), speaking (the address), act (the ring on the finger), speaking (pledge), act (kiss).  Maree does something, then assimilates or expresses it.  She sets the pace because she is the only one who knows how much she can bear.

When Maree changes position and becomes passive, the pastor takes the initiative.  His rhythm is different: a formal known element (23rd Psalm), a spontaneous element (his free prayer), a known formal element (the Lord’s Prayer), a spontaneous element (placing his hands on the heads), a known formal element (the Aaronic blessing: “The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee, the Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace. “), two spontaneous elements (The Pastor signs the cross, Maree gives a second kiss, and then the two leave together).

Probably these two people, even the Pastor, had no consciousness of controlling this rhythm because it was so natural.  The order comes organically from their focus on meaningful image. Maree’s “key” seemed to be the ring to put on the finger, so naturally her sequence depended on an alternation with an act.  For the Pastor the “key” was probably the 23rd Psalm, so that the alternation was in terms of known formal prayers.  The Aaronic benediction combined his formal words with a spontaneous reaching out to put his hands on the two heads.  It must have seemed a very natural gesture, with the two people side-by-side, and a necessary expression of the Pastor’s own feelings. After all, he also deserved closure and reassurance.

Valery says, “The poetic player can choose his game: some prefer roulette, others chess.”  There is an element of chance in every worship event, though we often seem intent on eliminating it.  The value of this “viewing rite” is that it illustrates the great power of spontaneously shaping the event out of what is present, and how much freedom the liturgist can afford if the worshiper is well-known and a familiar body of materials is shared.  Other factors that allowed so much chance-taking were the high level of trust between the minister and Maree and the intimate moments both of them had shared with the dead fiancée.

The dead body becomes a symbol for the living person.  The minister is playing chess, adjusting every move he made to what Maree did.  He trusted the over-all movement of the ceremony to take shape out of his personal sensitivity and resources responding to Maree’s clear intent to put the ring on Mark’s finger.

There was always the chance that Maree might have gone out of control.  If she had, the game would have suddenly become roulette. The one moment of being overwhelmed by her beating heart was shaped by a little ritual: sitting down and taking deep breaths. The Pastor is also conscious of the ceremonial aspect of the way he physically supports Maree, echoing the bride clinging to her father’s arm, though he doesn’t say so.  He DOES say he is acting as a “loving father.”

In a less restrained society Maree might have knelt, thrown herself on the body, or even “keened” without being considered hysterical.  Those more colorful ways of shaping and containing feelings are no less valid, but it is important to reconcile the need for expression of emotion with the need to “do the right thing,” to be ceremonially proper.  In our culture we are used to relieving emotional pressure slowly, mostly by talking, instead of using explosive and exhausting physical expression.

Maree makes her personal testimony with great effectiveness.  Even the Pastor is testifying to what he saw in the living couple, though his prayer comes closer to witnessing.  In some church ceremonies we seem conflicted about how to use personal testimony -- as though it somehow weren’t quite so real as the scripture or a hymn, or as though it were in poor taste and might lead to chaos.  Personal testimony is always roulette.

Some might argue that testimony is more legitimate in this intimate setting than in a Sunday morning service with a full congregation.  Yet every time there is a national tragedy the media is full of personal testimony and people on the streets pause to testify about what they witnessed. It is a particularly important element in funerals, though the Pastor will need to shape them some way.  Too much roulette and not enough chess can defeat the patterning necessary for closure. 

We can draw several formal principles from this ritual:

1. Close knowledge of the worshipper and close observation of the actual worship is invaluable in supplying guidance about what materials to use in what order.

2. The minister and the worshipper need a shared vocabulary and a “library” of familiar resources in common.  However moved the liturgist may be, he must never be swept into the emotion of the worshipper.  He has a task and must keep a clear head.

3. Natural emotional and aesthetic rhythm will carry the worship forward if it is dynamic and focused.  These are the forces that tap into the unconscious.

4. The most effective focus for worship is a concrete act -- such as putting the ring on the finger.  But an act is practical, existing in the real world, and the feasibility of it must be considered.

5. Worship has the power to shape and transform strong emotion if it is appropriate and coherent. In other words, not only is it possible to draw the order of the worship itself out of the situation, but the worship has the reciprocal effect of re-ordering the lives of the worshippers.  This is the work done on the “neuronal brain workspace” that allows reconciliation and personal claiming of the forces.  It is also the task of the “holding community.”

6. The order of the worship event does not come of an arbitrary order of service, but out of the sensitive articulation of “felt concepts,” both personal and cultural, and their expression in carefully chosen materials.  The material culture of marriage meets the material culture of the funeral.  I wish the Pastor had told us what she wore.  I suspect -- and hope -- that for her it was the white gown and that the groom was wearing his wedding suit.  But they were, after all, in a funeral parlor which has a strong sensory content.  We’re not told anything about a coffin.

PRIMAL ECOLOGY

It is early night time when the two Umeda tribesmen disguised as “cassowaries” come leaping into the firelight with huge masks over their heads and shoulders.  They are completely painted black but their bodies betray their age: these are old men.  They hold hands.  In this tribe men wear only a gourd fitted over the penis, but these two men are wearing exceptionally large gourds and special belts studded with seeds and bones so that every time they hop and lurch, the gourd knocks up against the belt and makes a sharp tock sound.  

The two men, older and more powerful among the tribe, were chose for their roles as “cassowaries” about nine months earlier when the “Ida Smav” ceremony was announced by a day and night of mournful, rhythmic horn blowing, done by five men who circled the village while they blew.  These same horns now accompany the percussive tocking of the dancers.  Since being chosen to be “cassowaries,” the two men have been strictly confined to the village, because it is believed that if they went out into the forest all the real cassowaries would follow them off so no one could hunt successfully.  

Two other dancers are also in the firelit area, but they are much more subdued.  These are two youths, painted red, wearing “fish” masks and said to be “the fish of the daughter.”  The young men wear everyday gourds and dance sedately single-file around the edge of the area.  They are followed by all the male children, who come singing with their arms over each other’s shoulders.  Everyone watches, wearing finery, and the men spell each other on the trumpets, which never let up.

The masks of the cassowaries are heavy and there are only short pauses in the dancing, which lasts until dawn, so the chosen men are truly performing a feat of strength and endurance.  Occasionally a cassowary dancer has become ill in the midst of the ceremony, which is considered a very dangerous bad omen.  The fish and the children don’t dance all night: only the two cassowaries leap and hop around the fire until dawn.

When the kib bird first calls, everyone yells “haibudiime,” meaning “it is finished,” and the cassowaries leave, passing their masks to two “sago dancers.”  These new dancers are striped horizontally, like the fence rails around the yam gardens.  The women must leave, for they are forbidden to see the next part.  The men prepare a fire, which the sago dancers leap over.  Sago starch is boiled, which converts it to a white jelly, and the sago dancers must perform their own ordeal.  They plunge their hands into the boiling hot sago and throw handfuls of it up into the air.  All the other men do the same, yelling “ehm bah alehah,” meaning “its head rises up!”  The sago is thrown all over the ground and then tramped in by the men dancing on it.  The sago dancers leave.

A new pair of dancers, the “firewood dancers” come in with taller, more narrow masks something like those of the cassowaries.  They are striped diagonally as though they were trees with vines twining up them.  These two dance for an hour.

For the rest of the day there are “fish dancers” of two kinds.  The “fish of the old hag,” danced by older men, start out and as they tire they are replaced one by one by “fish of the hero,” danced by younger men.  The “fish” all wear the large gourd and the belt, so that they keep up the steady tocking.

When night comes, it is spent by the community singing a capella except that around midnight the “bush turkey” dancers make a quick twirl through the crowd.

On the second day the two cassowaries dance for fifteen minutes and then the fishes repeat their performance.  On both days several varieties of terrible and ridiculous ogres appear for pantomimes, chasing people and menacing children.  All the dancers, especially the older men, enjoy the playfulness of the dancing and feel they are more free than usual because of their theoretical anonymity.  Though it is possible to recognize body types and styles of movement, the dancers are considered very mysterious, especially to the women, and no one admits they know these people in daily life.  

Finally the “termites” come with big yellow heads for masks and funny tentative steps that make the feathers on their masks wave like antenna or insect legs.  The termites are married men with bows and arrows and wear ordinary gourds.

The dancers who end the ceremony will have made two brief appearances by now, late in the afternoon of both days.  At sundown of the last day the reappear.  Their name means “red-painted bowmen” -- but both their penes and their arrows are bound up.  The arrows have multi-pronged points.  The bowmen wear fish masks.  They are accompanied by old men, their preceptors.  The women are sent away again.  Just as the sun sets, the bowmen shoot their arrows out into the bush towards the West.  Then they dash to the sacred enclosure and the “Ida Smav” is over, though technically the actors must go hunting now to get blood to smear on themselves for cleansing.

This ceremony is included here to get entirely outside the Christian worship context.  Just the same, as one gets deeper into the hidden meanings of the rite, one begins to find significant parallels.  This is a relatively simple, if long and intense, ceremony in the context of a primal and geographically limited culture.  The sensitive interpretation supplied by the anthropologist, Alfred Gell, has been challenged, but nevertheless is enlightening in terms of personal psychology and material culture, illustrating how human beings create worship out of their own substance.

Impressively mysterious and arbitrary without context and inner connections, the ceremony becomes coherent in terms of metaphor as well as form in the Turner sense.  Several dramatic acts, such as throwing hot sago jelly and shooting arrows, become explicable when one understands that these people have deduced that semen is a male version of breast milk -- not just seed but also nourishment.  The gourds on their penes are meant to save every drop of precious food.  They see intercourse as a way of feeding the infant while it is in the mother.  (Gell didn’t venture into oral ejaculations.)  They will sprinkle dried semen onto food as a condiment.

In terms of the environment, these people are slash-and-burn agriculturalists in the jungle hills of New Guinea, which means that their spaces are structured by clearings in the forest.  From ridgetops they can see into other valleys, where they never go.  Territoriality here is highly belligerent because food is very scarce.  This tribe is small, divided in half-a-dozen villages.  Their life-span is short: there are few grandfathers and a serious shortage of women because of death in childbirth.  Since it requires a team of two, usually a married couple, to plant sago (the main nutrient), maintain it and eventually prepare the starch (it’s poisonous if this is done improperly), the basic economy rests on the marital couple.

Other crops are gathered, some are raised (yams), and protein -- much needed and valued -- comes from fishing and hunting.  There are relatively large animals -- pigs and cassowaries -- but they are hard to catch in jungle with stone-age weapons.  A pig-kill is a major event.  People cheerfully eat lizards, smaller birds, fish and insects.  The father of the family guards and rations all mammal meats, though it is usually the sons who hunt.  Even the young boys hunt, though they may only catch larvae from under rotten logs.

Villages are a circle of shelters around a cleared arena.  Most people only use their houses for storage, sleeping and working outside under the foundation stilts.  Women work around the edges of the village, near their supplies and fires.  Men gather in the middle to chew and talk.  Families live together and in the garden season, which is most of the year, they live in bush-houses away from the village to guard their crops.  The annual cycle is dominated by the timing of crops, especially sago.   Most babies appear to be conceived when the people move to their bush-houses, which coincides with the announcement of the beginning of the Ida Smav, which lasts nine months.  Intercourse is thought to help the sago grow.  Preparing the sago pith is a matter of boiling it and then pounding it mortar-and-pestle style with poles that take two to manage in a marital thrust rhythm.

The tribe is conservative and, like all small towns, closely supervise each other’s behavior.  The men have a joking style, half-insulting, rather obscene, much like that of hard-working men in American culture.  In the old days this prodding could escalate to feuds between villages.  Today fighting is suppressed by white authorities, so they mostly have shouting matches.

Around the villages are two circles of trees: areca nut palms and coconut palms.  An areca nut palm, which looks like a smaller version of a coconut palm, is said to be the “younger brother” while the coconut palm is the “older brother.”  The coconut palms are the inner circle and shade the houses.  The areca nut, chewed with lime and betel, produces a red narcotic juice used in ceremonies and chewed daily like tobacco.  Out in the bush the fence around the garden has the same name as the areca palm. 

Umeda divide space into bush versus village or inner circle versus outer circle.  Status is related to this:  women and “younger brother” trees are on the edge, while the men and the “older brothers” are in the middle.  The “fish” dance on the edges, but the “cassowary” goes where he likes, especially in the middle.  Rest, peers, and sociability are in the village -- work, family and procreation are out in the bush-houses.  Real escape is in the jungle itself where the actual cassowaries wander.

When a man is born, his father plants a coconut palm that is identified with the baby so closely that a suicidal man might try to chop down “his” tree unless the village prevented him.  Gell noted that the mask that is supposed to look like a cassowary in fact looks a lot more like a palm tree.

A second dynamic is that a man’s life cycle starts out like any baby in a sling on his mother’s back.  He is weaned late as a means of birth control.  When the boy is old enough to get around on his own, he leaves the woman, goes to his father in the village center and sleeps with his father.  Now he travels from place to place on the shoulders of his father.  The pair become closely bonded.  Gell says,  “This relation has a very important physical aspect.  I was much struck by the way in which a small child, having found its father amid a group of adult men, would engage in a minute and prolonged physical exploration submitting hair, beard, limbs, weapons and accessories to a concentrated scrutiny, by touch, taste, and smell as well as by sight, quite mindless of the perfunctory caresses it received in return, and still more so to the adult conversation going on around it.”

  

But, alas, with the coming of the next younger sibling, the child is forced into traumatic independence, “dethroned.”  Abruptly and unfeelingly, the father turns him away and gives all his attention to the new child.  Children still have access to their mothers, who dependably feed and comfort them, but the person who has been the center of their world totally rejects them.  The boys are drawn into a peer group with whom they will spend their time until they marry in their late twenties or early thirties.  (No hurry to take up an arduous life.)  In this peer group they will complete the task of changing through adolescence, but it was clear to Gell that a deep, hot legacy of jealousy remains towards the younger sibling and is reflected in the myths of these people which are always about a rivalry between brothers that leads to trouble.  (Think Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau.)  

Young men, hunters of the village, dress splendidly, complete with scented herbs and fancy feathers.  Once they begin to wear the gourd on their penis at puberty (a sign that says both “I am equipped,” and “my equipment will not be wasted”) they are supposed to be ascetic in lifestyle.  (One suspects this only applies to relations with women.)  Though they do the hunting, the meat is surrendered to the fathers, who hang it in a net bag over the campfire to smoke, then dole it out to family members as they see fit.

The shortage of women means that a young man may marry late, but his bride will be a girl too young to reproduce so he will have to wait for her to grow up.  A man gets a wife by trading his own sister to someone in the proper outgroup who has a sister.  There is always an undercurrent of homosexuality, but since marriage is the only way to be independent and powerful, the bachelors finally give up the hunting life and turn to the duller job of gardening.  This is the second major transition of their lives.  Once a man is established as head of a successful family, he need not be so concerned with social pressure.  He may leave off his gourd except for formal occasions and let his hair grow wild and unkempt.  Now he’s a boss -- a Big Bird.

Gell worked out that the ceremony was what Erikson called “the cog-wheeling of the generations.”  At the beginning the cassowaries that look like trees are autonomous family men.  The fish are the younger generation.  The fish of the mothers are gradually replaced by the fish of the daughters.  Eventually, the older cassowaries (black like the adult birds, like the burnt remainders of fire, like smoked meat) are replaced by the young red bowmen (red like areca betel juice, like the blood of hunted mammals), though the old men are still present as mentors.

The transition from cassowary to bowman is intricate, played out in details of mask construction, style of dancing, language, and so on.  When the bowmen shoot into the jungle, they are said to be causing the bush to generate, to reproduce, to yield nurturance, just as the ceremony of the sago boiling to jelly was intercourse to make the sago grow.  (“Hot sex!”)  This ceremony reconciles the men to their hard but desirable lives as fathers/providers.  Then they can rest in small huts they build as hermitages in the jungle, maybe near their first lovers, men like themselves.

NEW GUINEA MATERIAL CULTURE

Why do we find ourselves interested in the liturgies of a small tribe on a jungle ridge in a place far from modern civilization?  How is it that their human nature and experience can be understood by us?  

Cassowaries are close to being the oldest living descendants of dinosaurs -- not the big ones, but the fast ones like the velociraptors in “Jurassic Park.”  They are rattites, which means they have no keelbone in their breasts -- the anchor-point for the broad wings that allow eagles and geese to fly.  Cassowaries, like emus and ostriches, are without wings fit for flight.  They look a little bit like guinea fowl on steroids, which is natural since they are found in New Guinea these days.  

The rattites evolved in Gonwandaland, the continent that pre-existed what today is South America, Africa, Madagascar, Antarctica, India, other parts of South Asia, and Australia.  At one time it even included Florida and most of Southern Europe.  “Science tells us that the Continents of Australia, India, South America, Africa, and Antarctica, existed together as a separate landmass as long as 650 million years ago.  And as these continents only began to break up some 130 million years ago, this great supercontinent had a life of around 520 million years; making it perhaps the most important geological structure of the last billion years.”  

Dinosaurs crashed about 65 million years ago.  By that time Gonwandaland had reconfigured very slowly quite a lot, changing ocean currents -- which changed weather -- and slowly separating in some places while staying attached in others, so that the evolution of those animals stayed connected as well.  But the evolutionary paths were QUITE different, as playpuses, kangaroos and koalas demonstrate.  This sort of National Geographic history appeals to our sense of wonder.  We are invited to consider Time itself.

The inhabitants of the little complex of villages studied by a man named Andrew Gell in the 1960’s didn’t know anything about plate tectonic geological history, but they knew a lot about today’s cassowary.  The bird lives in jungle, has a five-inch blade of a claw, and can disembowel an adult human.  They are the second biggest bird on the planet (after ostriches) and the third tallest. (After ostriches and emus.)  So elusive that they can stand within a few feet without a person realizing it and then slip away without ever being sensed, they sometimes go on reckless crashing flights through the thick tropical growth, even smashing headlong into tree trunks, achieving speeds of over thirty mph and jumping five feet in the air.  They are good swimmers.  Is this not impressively mythical?

A cassowary might be five and a half feet tall and weigh a hundred and fifty pounds, roughly the size of a sow grizzly.  Like grizzlies, they are frugiverous (they love to eat fruits) and are interwoven with the forest in part because their droppings distribute the seeds of the plants (well-fertilized) over a wide area.  Unlike grizzlies, cassowaries lay three to eight pale aqua eggs at a time, each one three and a half by five and a half inches.  “The female does not care for the eggs or the chicks; the male incubates the eggs for two months, then cares for the brown-striped chicks for nine months, defending them fiercely against all potential predators, including humans.”  And that scourge of wilderness, pigs.  A cassowary, though it produces no nourishing semen, is a good father.

On the top of a cassowary’s head is a kind of callus structure that is evidently a sort of crash helmet.  But they are also very aggressive, ferocious fighters, which might make an extra-large protection like that attractively potent silhouette for the ladies.  Birds seem to admire headgear (which is ironic since so many were almost stamped out when they became popular decorations for human ladies).  Google reports no athletic teams called “The Cassowaries” though one could easily imagine someone in a mascot suit disguised as a big aggressive bird with a helmet.  (I note that there is no school team called the “The Pigs” either.)

New Guinea as it exists today is the product of a plate tectonic crash that left it with a miserable combination of swampy bug-ridden lowlands, tilted rocky foothills and highlands so tall that they cast their rain shadow over Australia, making that nation the fire-swept droughty continent that it is.  The humans who live in New Guinea have a precarious existence, always on the verge of starvation.  The people are among the last to be introduced to the contemporary world.  One should not deduce from this that are not smart and resourceful -- indeed the environment is so harsh that the weak and stupid don’t last long and Gell reports that no man was able to point to a grandson -- only sons.  Life was only two generations long.  Cannibalism was not unknown.  The first missionaries were eaten, a reverse communion.  Their genes are very much like ours, so far as we know, but their memes are quite different.

My hypothesis is that meaningful ceremonies are as ecological as life itself is -- that is, what people believe is true is shaped by the world around them.  The efficacy of their symbols is directly drawn from their familiarity with the phenomena.  “The Lamb of God” can hardly mean much to a New Guinean tribesman, but it means a great deal to a sheep rancher who has delivered a real lamb, held it in his arms, and taken it to maturity.  Still, raising a lamb in Mexico is different from raising a lamb in Montana or Australia.  Knowing that a cassowary is a vital symbol to the Umeda tells us what they think the world and the sacred is “about.”  At heart it is the same as what we think it is about:  survival.

Today most people in the world are no longer “emplaced” as were  the New Guinea tribesmen of the Sixties who had never left their valleys.  Now we look at ecology on a cosmic scale and see relationships over incredible spans of time.  In spite of Planet Earth images, many no longer have the rich tactile and concrete nourishing connections with the local ecology.  Many don’t know where our food was grown, what it looked like before it was picked or killed, what its habits were, its style, its charisma.  The Umeda know cassowaries very well, especially how they taste.

INCARNATIONAL LITURGIES

Embodiment

All anthropocentric and certainly all anthropomorphic religions have strong concerns with human flesh, embodiment.  The sensory pleasures, pains and symbolisms of the body are at the heart of liturgies as well.  This is a quick overview in spite of my resistance to the sensational extreme, not because it is secretive (which body-based ceremony often is, especially if it is sexual) but because it is so universal and returning today among today’s youth, who are fascinated by piercing, branding, tattooing, scarring, cutting, and so on.  It’s hard for some to understand what they are seeking.

Ordeals are used among the Blackfeet and other warrior cultures as training for survival and hardship, to call out courage and demonstrate it to others.  The most commonly known ceremony is the Sun Dance Lodge in which men are tethered to cords that are fastened at the high center of the lodge and the dance, pulling against them until they tear loose.  There is a contemporary covert s/m version of this in which a circle of people set hooks in their backs and pull against each other.  The idea is to mortify the flesh with pain, to kill the sin and weakness of the body, or possibly just to evoke the extremity of the experience for the sake of the strong hormones generated in the body or for psychological reasons.

Whipping is a more familiar mortification, sometimes a self-discipline.  In museums there are displays of ritual whips used in antiquity by penitents.  the practice is often depicted in movies like The Seventh Seal.  In times of great fear and horror, as during the European plagues, groups would join together to whip each other.  Fasting or thirsting are also methods of penance and self-testing, whether it is Christian lent or Blackfeet dream beds in the mountains where someone waits for a vision.

During times of paralysis, boredom and trapped living, self-affliction can increase.  Today people, particularly in teenagers and particularly those feeling shame and/or guilt, sometimes use cutting with a razor to relieve their emotions.  Tattooing can be a slightly displaced self-affliction that leaves a mark often dedicated to strong emotion: love, allegiance, self-definition.  

An ancient form of grieving among the Blackfeet was the amputation of fingertips.  One of my students on the Blackfeet reservation who had just received word that his mother had died, left the building and somehow on the way out managed to catch his finger in the heavy doors, cutting off the end.  He claimed to have no such intention or even knowledge of the practice.

All of these practices can be found in anthropological literature, along with distortions of the body:  insertions, stretching, scarring, and genital surgeries.  Those of us who read the National Geographic know about the ear lobes hanging in loops, the lips like platters, and the elongated necks.  Feminists have made us aware of female circumcisions and activist males in the US have recently been objecting to the routine practice of removing foreskins.  The meanings are intensely complex and emotional: ownership, belonging, sacrifice, submission and so on -- often mixed with theories of hygiene.  A YouTube video entitled “The Perfect Vagina” shows a young woman concerned with her sex appeal having her labia surgically removed.  It was an office procedure, nothing ceremonial, done by a doctor and attended by his nurse and the young woman’s female friend.  The goal is evidently to have a “simple” vulva like a child in the belief this will be attractive to men, which to her was a necessity for survival.

Even our ideas of what life beyond death might be like are connected to the concept of unbearable pain and unimaginable pleasure -- though we tend to imagine both in terms of our earthly lives: pain as burning and pleasure as sex or food.  At least this is the Abramic context.  The Plains Indian context is more like dissociation, possibly like the dissociation of the body/mind under extreme duress.  They speak of a shadowland, the Sand Hills, where one lives a faint gray version of life much the same as already known.

In our times there has developed an attitude known as “extremophilia” -- the love of being out at the edge of risk:  bungee jumping, erotic strangulation, high-speed car racing, Russian roulette, ice-climbing.  Partly the payoff is admiration from persons more guarded and partly, of course, the feeling of the bodily chemicals and the psychological triumph when things work out well.  It is feeling for the edges of survival in hopes of intensifying one’s sense of identity.

“ALIVE”, CANNIBALISM AS COMMUNION

This example is about a famous nearly unsurvivable event and how religious understanding became a life-saving near-liturgical way of going outside normal behavior.  “On October 12, 1972, a Fairchild F-227 of the Uruguayan Air Force, chartered by an amateur rugby team, set off from Montevideo in Uruguay for Santiago in Chile.” (from the book entitled “Alive!” about the incident)  So begins a story that is both terrible and inspiring.  The airplane crashed very near the top of the Andes.  Sixteen young men survived for 72 days until two of them eventually walked for ten days down out of the mountains.  Until this extreme exertion, their means of survival was cannibalism.

Not only did the youths survive well enough to recover good physical condition after their rescue, but also they managed to maintain sanity and morale while living jammed into the remains of an airplane fuselage with no amenities or even enough clothes to keep warm, since the tail section with all the luggage fell far from the rest of the plane. The source of their real strength was religious, “incarnational liturgy,” spontaneously arising from their Catholic culture.

The first suggestion of cannibalism after the crash was when one of the boys, seeing how short the food supply was, threatened half-jokingly to fortify it with chunks out of the dead pilots, since they had made the mistake that caused the crash.  This kind of ironic fierceness was characteristic of the boys.  They were fighters, partly because of the South American macho tradition and partly because of their athletic training.  Many were descendants of people persecuted and displaced by WWII who had endured much hardship. 

Also, their minds were shaped by their schooling with Irish Christian Brothers until they were a remarkable and resilient mixture of matter-of-fact practicality and poetic confidence in other-worldliness. The boys were the cherished sons of large, conservative, closely-knit families. Rebellion and scorn were not directed at their parents, but at those who fell short of family standards. Many of the families were ranchers, so the boys were used to coping with emergencies and knew meat for what it was. Two boys were first year medical students who immediately turned their attention to the wounds imposed by the crash.

“For some days several of the boys had realized that if they were to survive they would have to eat the bodies of those who had died in the crash. It was a ghastly prospect. The corpses lay around the plane in the snow, preserved by the intense cold in the state in which they had died. While the thought of cutting the flesh from those who had been their friends and relatives was deeply repugnant to them all, a lucid appreciation of their predicament led them to consider it.”

“... Finally Canessa brought it out into the open. He argued forcefully that they were not going to be rescued: that they would have to escape themselves, but that nothing be done without food, and that the only food was human flesh . . . He insisted they had a moral duty to stay alive by any means at their disposal. . . .“It is meat,” he said. “That’s all it is. The souls have left their bodies and are in heaven with God. All that is left here are the carcasses, which are no more human beings than the dead flesh of the cattle we eat at home.” 

One of the deeply Christian elements that emerged was a sense of obligation: willingness to give their bodies to the others.  “I know,” Zerbino went on, “that if my dead body could help you to stay alive, then I’d certainly want you to use it. In fact, if I do die and you don’t eat me, then I’ll come back from wherever I am and give you a good kick in the ass.”

The first eating of meat was ritualistic. Canessa, the medical student, cut twenty slivers of meat from the buttocks of one corpse and laid them on the roof of the plane to dry. He invited the other boys to begin and when no one would, he prayed and then forced down the first piece as an example.

The boys wrote letters to their families and novias (fiancées) constantly and there was a testimonial feel to what they wrote.  Even in such extremity the boys could say the equivalent of Prayers of Intercession for others.  They felt part of a strong community.   Some of the boys and an older married couple could not force themselves to take the flesh, in spite of progressing weakness and neediness.  They died.

Pedro Algorta was one of the two boys who had been dressed more scruffily at the airport than the others: as if to show that he despised their bourgeois values. . . . Algorta watched Canessa and Fito Strauch cutting the meat but said nothing until it came to the moment when he was offered a slice of flesh. He took it and swallowed it and then said, “It’s like Holy Communion. When Christ died he gave his body to us so that then we could have spiritual life. My friend has given us his body so that we can have physical life.”

Exalted landscapes stretched away from the improvised camp, which soon became a foul and stinking charnel house since the boys had no strength to do more than a minimum of maintenance. At night the boys clasped each other tightly for warmth and reassurance, but in the day time they sprawled carelessly in the sun, half-blinded by the dazzling sweeps of snow. Every night Carlitoes Paez led Rosary.

Despite their fears, after their rescue the young men’s decision to eat human flesh and their justification of it through the image of Communion was accepted.  A Catholic curate who arrived at the hospital where they were first taken confirmed their wisdom in saving their lives, judged the cannibalism necessary and not sinful, and gave Holy Communion to those who wished it. Later the Roman Catholic church simply cautioned them that it was not a true “Communion” since the flesh was not in any sense the flesh of Christ. Thus the church maintained its dogmatic ownership of the concept.

There was one question the priest could not answer for any of the boys. “Why was it that he had lived while others had died? What purpose had God in making this selection? What sense could be made of it? “None,” replied Father Andres. “There are times when the will of God cannot be understood by our human intelligence. There are things which in all humility we must accept as a mystery.”

This is a very extreme example and deliberately so, partly because it is an excellent antidote to the notion that worship must be “pretty” or “aesthetic” and partly because it is an example of such strong emotional chiaroscuro that things normally taken for granted become more obvious.  One rescuer could not accept any religious explanation.  The skulls the boys had used as bowls were for him not at all bony chalices to hold melted snow water.   

A deeply felt metaphor can order the most chaotic and horrifying circumstances.  This is how the early Jesuit missionaries in North America were able to sing while torturers cooked their still-attached legs and forced them to eat their own flesh.  The need for such powerful metaphors in a society like ours is great though we are threatened by economic, political and geological shocks or the intervention of sudden catastrophe as in the case of this airplane crash. [This was written in 1982, before 9/11.]  Torture exists on our planet everywhere.  It is ritualized as vivid depictions in movies.

In the weeks on the mountain, the young men from Uruguay were in a “liminal” state; that is, ordinary reality was bracketed by the crash and then the rescue.  On the top of the mountains in the snow they were over the threshold (the limen) of reality. Says Victor Turner, the anthopologist who has developed this concept of the limen: “... liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibillty, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.” Initiates who are voluntarily conducted into the liminal state are “represented as possessing nothing... It is as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life.”

One of the strongest aspects of liminality is its link to “communitas.” Turner himself uses Buber’s definition of “communitas.” “Community is the being no longer side by side (and one might add above and below) but with one another of a multitude of persons. And this multitude, though it moves towards one goal, yet experiences everywhere a turning to, a dynamic facing of, the others, flowing from I to Thou. Community is where community happens.”

Certainly the boys did not duplicate a social hierarchy but existed in a daily confrontation that was direct, immediate, and total.  However, though at first there was no social structure as such, a time-structure soon developed.  The base, as in any primitive culture, was day and night, the chores of preparing food and water, and the planning of expeditions.  Formal worship appeared spontaneously at bedtime (Vespers), an element of structure that would be liminal in normal society but became an evocation of the known, loved and orderly in this context.

There are two important aspects of the Vespers Rosary that are worth exploring further.  The first is the fact that the prayer was at the transition of day into dark and the second is that the prayer was to the Mother of God, rather than the Son of God or God the Father, who could have been interpreted as precipitating them into this punishment for His own reasons.  They were looking for fusion, not separation.  Transitions, borders, boundaries are always mysterious and full of potential.  They are the ground of duality.  Huddled in the wreckage of the fuselage, subsisting on shreds of human flesh, not knowing if they would survive at all (especially after their radio announced the search was abandoned), and facing a night of cold and pain, twilight (the hour of the wolf) must have been intolerable.  One more day passed without relief. One more ordeal of restless nightmare. Even in the best of times people have bedtime rituals.  In the worst of times religious ritual is indispensable.

This situation lays bare the ultimate religious duality: that between being and non-being. The most basic possible religious decision is whether or not to go on living.  (There were no overt suicides in this catastrophe, though some seemed to give up.)  Not until the decision is to live -- to be -- is the issue how to be, what to be, so that the decision becomes moral.  Tillich said, “...religion is the state of being grasped by the power of being-itself.”

  I take that to mean that the will to live is drawn from existence itself, both within and without the person. Tillich relates it to mysticism, saying, “In mysticism the individual self strives for a participation in the ground of being which approaches identification... all mystics draw their power of self-affirmation from the experience of the power of being-itself with which they are united.”

Back to Tillich: “The mystical courage to be lasts as long as the mystical situation. Its limit is the state of emptiness of being and meaning, with its horror and despair, which the mystics have described. In these moments the courage to be is reduced to the acceptance of even this state as a way to prepare through darkness for light, through emptiness for abundance. As long as the absence of the power of being is felt as despair, it is the power of being which makes itself felt through despair. To experience this and to endure it is the courage to be of the mystic in the state of emptiness.

 [Kenosis.]”

The doctrinal backing of this view of worship, then, is that so long as a person exists at all, he or she carries within them their connection in the face of despair to find hope and courage. Even in total non-being -- death -- one is still embraced by the Ultimate Principal that Tillich calls the Ground of Being. Worship is acknowledgment of connection to the Ground of Being, whether we exist or not in the conventional sense, and the finding of worthy metaphors for that connection. Nando Parrado, one of the two boys who managed to trek out for help, found his strongest metaphor was his father, a model for refusing to give up.

It is a mistake for worship to avoid non-being and despair, for it is facing these annihilating possibilities -- the Void, the Chasm, the Wilderness, the Whirlwind, the Labyrinth, the Abyss -- that our courage and hope are most strongly felt.  Never to test our connection to the Ultimate Ground of Being is never to be really sure the connection is there.

Anything less than a worship experience that acknowledges both the Void and the Cherished, has evaded its true role. If only easy existence, “being,” is considered to have value, the way is laid for idolatry, an attempt to impose one’s own desires over what exists.  Paradoxically, to cling only to the known and familiar is to invite destruction and sorrow, for the only real permanence is change.  Not to change is to die, as the survivors discovered in the most concrete way when they were forced to break taboos and do the unthinkable.

Therefore, worship has the paradoxical obligation of helping us to find meaningful metaphors in cherished reality, but to face the possibility -- even the desirability -- of having them destroyed or lost, and then to help us find new symbols in a newly found view of reality. The rhythmic pulse or shift of focus in worship that we have already noted corresponds to this deeply human death and resurrection of meaning as we grow up and move through circumstances.

Thus the core of worship has to do with the relationship between the mystery of non-being and the known-ness of being. Worship is most necessary in the boundary moments: birth, death, transformation, emotional extremes, creation. What was NOT comes into being. What IS passes away. All is transient and mysterious. Worship does not give us “scientific” answers about these things, but rather offers metaphorical meanings that engage our brains at some deeply felt, wordless level. These meanings are not to be found analytically, but emerge spontaneously when sensory cues reach deep into the neuronal networks of the brain to the most primal level.

CONCLUDING DISCUSSION

In the eighties when I began doing the research and reflection necessary for this manuscript, I was in a seminary that was not exactly doctrinally Christian but at least a peripheral part of Christian culture.  I had to come to terms with the quadrants produced by working with a Cross.  The explanation I liked best was Tillich’s because he spoke of the horizontal crossbar being experience on this earth horizon (history and geography) versus the vertical timber as being aspiration to the transcendent and possibly rootedness in the deep interior of the person.  I used to have a little riff about how the transcendent strikes through the ordinary again and again, not just once, so that the symbol ought to look like a two-sided comb, a whole lot of verticals and one horizontal.

But soon I went to the idea of a dot in a circle -- the dot being that which is most centered in the person and the circle as the most distant conceivable awareness that person has.  I added the idea of the vertical at the middle of the dot: the person’s “axis mundi” or “umbilical attachment.”  Then a life story seemed to be a matter of traveling on that schema from what is most central to what is most distant.  But what starts out as the edge of the unknown can become the limits of what is allowed.

A person is an instrument of mind/heart, the source of observation, the collection and integration point of experience.  Thus the crucial importance of both sensory access (data) and brain function (theory), one informing the other in both directions.  We have so many ways of extending one’s senses (microscopes, telescopes, various recording devices and intensifying strategies) to things that no human being alone could sense plus the strategies that make circumstantial evidence or testimony from others fairly reliable.  

“Mirror cells” allow one person to access the experience of another person, a phenomenon usually called “empathy.”  When one sees a hand laid gently alongside the face of another, one feels it on one’s own face.  Acting exercises persuade someone else to copy one’s posture, expression, and -- ultimately -- emotion.  So now I wonder how to make my little dot in a circle add some symbolism for empathy.  Maybe a lot of circles with dots in the middle, with arrows going back and forth.  Wireless.  Bluetooth empathy.

All along I’ve been quarreling with two common and stubborn Christian ideas.  One is the concept of God.  I do not believe there is a big humanoid in the sky and I do not think it is helpful to anthropomorphize the concepts of creation or love.  The other is the pesky problem of the church, particularly when it becomes institutionalized, bureaucratized, and begins missionizing to capture others.  So often this is a source of evil.  Both of these problems are helped by considering empathetic sharing with others instead of the constant fortification of one’s own self-understanding.  It is a way to escape both narcissism and anthropocentrism.

In fact, I think empathy was built into my liturgical structure (unawares) at the point of what I call “Dilation of the Spirit,” which is a matter of being conscious of others.  (We say “raising one’s consciousness.”)  To experience the Confession and the responding Assurance of Pardon “properly”, one doesn’t confess one’s own personal sins but acknowledges the tragedies of all people -- maybe all entities.  To exist is to be limited, even broken.  We all die.  The Assurance of Pardon is really an Assurance that the greater whole continues, which can be a source of joy through belonging and participation.  It can be powerful to sit with others and face these two extremes, sharing the experience.

Brain researcher are now better able to explain -- or begin to explain -- how the human brain, that three pound blob of jelly, works.  Research shows that the brain is in a sense rhizomatic -- it is a network where cell clusters (rhizomes) are connected by tendrils.  At first it was thought that each cell contained the information for one function or thought or memory or sensation.  Now we see that there are regions with specialized functions (face recognition, sense of time, attribution of importance) each with connections to other parts.  In a living person the whole brain is engaged in a dynamic and constant dance of processing.

Something about this allows “recursive embedding” which I take to be the ability to think about ourselves thinking, so that I can not only invent a theological diagram, but go back later to see that it is too limited and to devise an addition.  Then to reflect on the implications of this addition.  Not only are we aware of other’s consciousness, but we are able to stand apart from ourselves, observing.  We are our own guardian angels.

Sharing minds, emotions, visions, in a group is at the heart of congregational liturgies.  At its most transcendent, it seems a participation in the Cosmos.  Not control, not protection of oneself, but joining in the ongoing dance.  But for many people the key to the boundary is lost and they are isolated, lonely, unconsoled.  An ordinary church experience does not reach them.  

What are the keys that will open up boundaries?  What screens and mirrors?   Singing and dancing?  Words?  Sex?  Danger?  Drugs?  Masks?  What if a person outside the boundary has an accurate understanding of what is inside the boundary and presents it through the arts, whether talk, painting, pantomime, video?  Will the barricaded person feel the empathy and open the door?  This may be the real effectiveness of psychotherapy.  But it might also be a salvific use of liturgy, to embody a phantom life.

All along in my liturgy manuscript I’ve been evading the question of what the liturgist should address when the congregation reaches the state of “liminal.” Suppose they are now ready to realize what assumptions they have never challenged and to move on to some new understanding. Which assumptions? Which new understandings? It takes far more than one book, one lifetime, one culture, to answer such questions, partly because they change all the time and people don’t agree.  Ray Rappaport’s theories of adapting to a changing ecology are useful since they are directly tied to survival.  What will preserve the human species?  To trace and analyze the macro and micro theories of humans is what humanities is all about -- a sea in which we all swim even as the tide turns.

Many everyday ways of thinking, defended by religion as “moral” collide with each other, creating consequences destructive in their power. Religious institutions claim they are rules imposed by God and will defend them with force.  It is hopeless to simply argue rationally.  The ideas are not thought but “felt” as self-evident, which is why they claim religion as justification. The point of a liturgy would be to free their feelings, to give them an “amazing grace” moment.

All human social arrangements are contingent, negotiable. Evolving morality certainly seems like work to be done socially in a liminal space and internally on a global neuronal platform, because it is so relevant to our behavior. But we don’t see what our own senses would reveal if we paid attention. Brains are meant to filter the dissonant. It’s tough to bypass that. Institutions don’t necessarily want to anyway.

Morality is a big part of what we call “religion,” but there is another category even bigger that we name “holy.” It is unmediated by any humanities thinking, even the kind we call “religious”, “church”, “sanctified”. The holy is what engulfs us all and exceeds all thought. It is the immense unknowable in which all species on the planet are but a fleck in time.  Now that’s raw.  It’ll put you on your knees -- if not flat on your face -- and make you pay attention.

Human knowledge consists of three levels of raw material: the concrete sensory world, the cultural world that is constructed by and shared with other people -- at least those of the same culture -- and the private pre- or sub-verbal world of the individual.

A special dimension to all these levels of experience is the emergent Holy. When it is recognized in the concrete world, we describe the sensations involved as Sacred, giving access to a special depth. When the Holy is part of culture, we call it religious and often identify it with an institution, a structured group of people who agree on a description of what is Sacred. Weaving in and out of all these aspects is the private world of images, yearning, and identities that make a person uniquely human and guide their behavior.

If all three levels of human experience are congruent, or at least complementary, the human being is freed -- though within the givens of the system -- to explore, to dare, to persist, to love, and to create. If the three levels are contradictory, or if there are double-binds within the levels, or if any level is confused (if any of the three levels is totally destroyed, the being will not survive), then the human being is exposed to a unique kind of anguish: a loss of meaning. Every resource will be thrown into an attempt to seek or create a new meaning, even if it is a limited painful one.  Intensely felt meaning is a key to immortality.