Monday, September 26, 2005
Ritual and reality
Since being born I've spent considerable amounts of time in Catholic, Presbyterian and Pentecostal churches. If I ever seem confused, that's probably why. Lately, as I reimagine and reconceptualise my spirituality I find myself giving more and more time to ritual and liturgy.
I've found my life follows an almost liturgical flow as work and regular meetings with friends create an ebb and flow. There are high points and low points -- a time to reap and a time to sow -- a time to relax and a time to socialise. It feels like a kind of redemptive pattern.
I'm hooked on the idea of ritual again, not the least after reading Gadamer's arguments about art:
"Self understanding always occurs through understanding something other than the self, and incudes the unity and integrity of the other. Since we meet the artwork in the world and encounter a world in the individual artwork, the work of art is not some alien universe into which we are magically transported for a time. Rather , we learn to understand ourselves in and through it, and this means that we sublate (aufheben) the discontinuity and atomism of isolated reason, we must adopt a standpoint in relation to art and the beautiful that does not pretend to immediacy but corresponds to the historical nature of the human condition. The appeal to immediacy, to the instantaneous flash of genius, to the significance of "experiences" (Erlebnisse), cannot withstand the claim of human existence to continuity and unity of self understanding. The binding quality of the experience (Erfahrung) of art must not be disintegrated by aesthetic consciousness.And, less obtusely:
This negative insight, positively expressed, is that art is knowledge and experiencing an artwork means sharing in that knowledge." (Gadamer, 97)
"...the being of the spectator is determined by his "being there present" (Dabeisein). Being present does not simply mean being there along with something else that is there at the same time. To be present means to participate...Here we can recall the concept of sacral communion that lies behind the original Greek concept of theoria. Theoros means someone who takes part in a delegation to a festival. Such a person has no other distinction or function than to be there. Thus the theoros is a spectator in the proper sense of the word, since he participates in the solemn act through his presence at it and thus sacred law accords him a distinction: for example, inviolability." (Gadamer, 124)
So, for me, I understand afresh God in ritual -- communion, procession, the liturgy of life. In the human we find the divine, which is not to say that the divine is our projection or that the divine can be boxed within our lives, but to recognise the creator's graceful touch within the rythyms and disruptions of our lives. By participating in life, we participate in the maker's ceremony.
Tonight some friends are coming over. We'll eat, talk and, perhaps, take communion together. We share each other's lives, we share the life of Jesus, we take part in the human and divine...
