LITURGY PLUS

My reading of neuro-research, culture theory, and Alvina Krause’s 1933 thesis on creativity are converging on a new outline for my own manuscript: “The Bone Chalice.”

Liturgy/ritual are poetic, metaphorical ways of discerning, creating, and defending meanings strong enough to act on in our daily lives.  So they are an art form.

Art forms come from the “ravenous brain” that seeks meaningful patterns everywhere and -- if it finds none -- invents them.  The difference between art and some liturgical enactments is that art is usually provisional, exploratory, and maybe transient, but liturgy is meaning that has been captured by institutionalized religion that will destroy variance in order to protect continuity.  It can be enforced meaning.

To survive, liturgy must be constantly recharged and re-enacted, so to some extent art is allowed within the religious establishment.  Caravaggio can live a life outside of virtue so long as he keeps up the pretense of painting religiously admired subjects.   Torture can be tolerated so long as the agony is interpreted as a demonstration of faith.  Sex can be openly celebrated so long as it is seen as a metaphor for the erotic relationship with God.

When religious institutions are far too much of a mismatch to be compensated for by either art or theological apologetics -- as when priests become corrupt and lascivious -- then the establishment throws up a flurry of counter-accusations, moves to new populations, or just collapses.  Their best defense is wealth, so that’s their biggest vulnerability.  If the meaning of life is understood to be wealth, if it becomes clear that faith does not necessarily lead to prosperity, then one of the main supports of religious institutions is gone: then the search for meaning must look outside any established religion.  Wealth is not meaning and will not yield meaning.

Deep meaning in the brain is complex and much of it is pre-human and subconscious.  The concepts are there, not recorded in words but rather in a consciousness best expressed as image and metaphor, the latter defined as two images intersecting in thought.  Words may result or words may evoke, but words are not the real content of the deepest meanings.  If only words are valued, the deep meanings will cruise under the surface of consciousness like sea creatures, powerful but hidden.

Meaning is recorded in the whole body as sensory input from the environment.  This begins as soon as there is enough brain formed in the fetus to begin registering its floating world and move its rudimentary limbs.  As soon as this begins, the brain in its development responds to the sensory information.  The brain is built molecule-by-molecule, neuron/axon by neuron/axon, by forming relationships according to a plan always shaped by reality.  First and therefore deepest, sensory awareness is in contrasting binaries:  heat/cold, moving/stationary, dark/light, sound/silence, alarm/calm.  Much of it is transferred into the womb from the mother.  This is true of emotions as well as sensations: the mother’s adrenaline is an active drug.  So is serotonin and the other molecules of contentment.

At birth the amount of sensory information explodes, which pushes the formation of input-managing neuron nexuses for each sensory organ: ears, eyes, skin, nose, mouth.  These are “educated” and grow according to the pressure of the new engulfing environment.  But they are rarely, if ever, changed later in life, partly because any of the potentially energized neurons at birth that are not used will die away, leaving the space they occupied open for more neuron growth specific to what is happening.  A Saharan brain does not need to think about snow -- it needs the brain space for sand and wind.   It has been proven that if a sense organ is missing, say, due to blindness, then the space normally allocated to seeing will be taken up by other senses, likely by hearing.

These levels of sense and pattern hold the deepest foundational meanings.  All cultures, no matter how resourceful, are built on these first concepts.  The saints who have visions talk about their experience in these terms, but also in terms of parenting: being fed, held, comforted, cleaned.  This is the next constant in human experience: enough care for the baby to survive.  The baby’s survival drive is the most basic urgency, with the goal of  achieving the homeostasic needs of the body:  to eat, to sleep, to excrete, to explore the body by moving.  But also to seduce by snuggling and to express distress by struggling.  That is, relationship is the second most basic task of survival and the source of emotion from the beginning.  A successful religion must support and interpret both.

MEANINGFUL LITURGY must relate to these basic needs, regardless of whether they are explicit in the service.  Therefore, the liturgist ought to:

Explore the sensory information most valued by the congregation and what homeostatic (self-preserving) meanings they have, both for the individual and for the larger group -- possibly for larger categories like the nation or even the planet.

Find the limits of homeostasis: the symbolism of the worst destruction and the answering symbolism of how to preserve life.

HOW TO START:  First of all there must be delineation of safety: a place, a time, a shield of some sort that should provide privacy, belonging, familiarity (even habit patterns), and probably relationship with a person or persons or personifications.

Second must be focusing: the call to worship, the concentration on the moment.  Possibly there are words or actions: maybe a gesture, maybe an act like dipping fingers in water or lighting a candle or drumming or singing an anthem or processing.

These are the same ways that an artist begins.   But an artist may have an intention or at least materials in front of him or her, even if only a computer screen.  The artist has time to doodle, explore, wonder what would happen if . . .  let the mind free-associate in almost the same way as the hypnogogic state before falling asleep.  In short, let images rise up from the normally subconscious state.  They may need to be triggered by making a mark, creating a sentence, blowing a note, making a gesture.

The context of liturgy as most people understand it is pre-determined by the institution, but if we can tolerate the open moment, which most people might call “meditation,” then deep meaning may rise from the subconscious.  This might be easier done by individuals, but the Quakers and Buddhists have developed group meditation, each in their own way.

Human beings are defined by their responses to their environment, their ability to find the patterns that will preserve homeostasis.  The guides they invent from their material culture are called liturgy, ritual, or maybe just “art.” 

A TEST CASE

Instead of going to some remote place with a tribe that has a funny name, let’s choose a “tribe” that is with us, within us, the urban boys who do sexwork in the United States.  This can be no more than a beginning.

Realize that to design any meaningful experience for this group or any other, one must accept their reality.  What they say is real to them IS real to them, because it’s about them and nothing else except the world they inhabit.   The most vehement talkback I get is that:

1. I’m judging them by my standards.  (They don’t know what my standards are any more than I know what their standards are, but that’s not relevant.)
2.   I’m getting off on feeling like I know them or feeling all tender about them, so therefore I’m doing what I do for ME, not for them. 
3.   There is no way I CAN know them.

So, after years of sitting here looking at their images -- both of them and by them -- and reading stories about them, what do I know?

Almost entirely they live in an urban setting, but when they leave that they go to water: beaches, streams.   They are aware of the luxuries of the city, sometimes have access through sex work, but just as often may live like pigeons roosting in the rubble and the abandoned places.

Their world is movement-based:  skateboards, surfboards, running, climbing, doing backflips, orienteering, parcours in a built environment.  Like young animals of all kinds, when they run out of energy, they go flat and unconscious.  If that isn’t safe, they suffer and take drugs.

Music is a driver, music with a beat.  THEIR music.

Bodies vary but these are all male bodies.  Physical styles are quite different, from the smooth and hairless naked body to the incredibly tattooed and studded spectacular skin.  Performance-pride is a constant and therefore physical affliction, esp. something repulsive, is very much weighted.  There’s a contradictory desire to believe they are irresistible.  First impulse with an affliction is to hide it.  Second impulse is to doubt anyone can cure it, even as they long for a cure.  And always the guilt that somehow they caused it or deserve it, which is rarely addressed.  To address it is to imply that they’re not in control of their own destiny, which they desperately need to believe they ARE -- when they are not fatalistically convinced that they are transient, doomed, and will die young so nothing matters.

No one is doing anything about their destiny.  There are few practical societal responses to their needs.  They go hungry, dirty, unsheltered, infected, abused, in unaddressed ways.  On the one hand, they are stigmatized for performing sex acts for money and on the other hand there is a society-wide denial that they have sex, that anyone would ask them for sex or pay for sex with them, and anyway that sex with a boy doesn’t count because he can’t get pregnant and boys don’t care what they do.   “Whipping boy” is not a metaphor -- it’s a reality underlain by the idea that boys can take it.  If they can’t, they’re a “GIRL.”  So first they are demeaned by having to do something unpleasant and socially forbidden and then they are trapped by their own sense of pride in themselves, whatever vestiges are left, and then no one will even name what they do.

What happens after that depends on the foundational sensory organization of their brain/meaning: in the womb, after birth, in the infant stages until walking and talking, in the way they are taken into daycare, Headstart, kindergarten, or just left to wander as they can or actively abused.  Then again in the adrenarche years, what ways they found to form an identity, usually by joining some kind of group.  So adolescence, the years of sexual self-definition, may be built on sand.  Maybe quicksand.  

The situation is different for the tough guys who grew up in abuse and debris, because the weak among them were weeded out by death.  The ones who came from “nice” backgrounds with good educations -- even good smart boys can get thrown out of happy homes when someone dies or something finds out they are gay -- may suffer more because they remember the contrast.

What remedy is possible?  

1. First, they need to be made safe: physically and emotionally.
2. Basic homeostasis needs to be maintained:  whatever it takes to survive, including medicines and mates in the sense of equals, friends, belonging.
3. Role models.
4. Careful listening, because listening calls out their thinking and feeling.  What is heard and recognized can be made real and useful.
5. Generation of options: small empowerments, awareness of choices in the moment and their consequences.  Doing.  Computer videos are excellent for this, but also actual art materials and building things, even rag tents and caves, tree-houses and squats.
6. Connection with others in common cause.  (the Internet allows this to be planetary).

(to be continued)

At-risk boys are an insider culture.  Perhaps then only they themselves could design a meaningful liturgy.  An institution, even one as friendly as the Metropolitan Church, might not be able to reach them.  I only led one Metropolitan Church service and therefore am not qualified to say much, but I was impressed that the focus was on relationship, one-on-one.  Part of the ritual was that two men involved with each other came forward as a pair to be blessed.  These congregations have a Christian focus and it also seems to be focused on the one-to-one relationship with God or, especially, Jesus.