A TROUT IN THE CHALICE

Below is a part of a manuscript I’m calling “The Molten Chalice” which is a bit of an paradox because a chalice is supposed to be an unchanging container, like a crucible, and the contents rather than the container are supposed to be molten. The title is an attempt to capture what happens in the human brain (a bony chalice) when one is feeling holy participation in the universe, which some call meaning. It is not meaning in the sense of a dictionary definition, but rather an experience, a shifted consciousness, that can be perceived and even measured by outsiders with fMRI, fine electrodes, and blood analysis. The idea of a “god” may or may not ever be provable, but the state of the participant in worship is. The key mechanism may be in the neuronal platform that coordinates brain function, allowing sensory information from subsidiary neural networks to shift consciousness. I suggest that liturgy is the art of that shift.

A TROUT IN THE CHALICE

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 Abraxans are never going to kill roosters in church even though Santeria might do that. They are never going to use Plains Indian Sun Lodge ordeals in which their chest muscles are torn. And they are not likely to throw up their hands and speak in tongues and fall on the floor. Worship styles are almost always class-based and so are denominations. The UU Abraxans are upscale.

My approach is so new as to be shocking, but it does not contradict anything above. Two anthropologists (Von Gennep and Victor Turner) are my sources for a three-step process 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 Gazzinaga) to insist that “liminal time or place” is a true brain state in which previous assumed thought categories can be questioned and either changed or confirmed. This “liminal” state can be seen in electrical recordings, 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.”

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 feel when they take LSD, opening 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 politics.

In terms of liturgy, the idea is first to bring up to consciousness what is sinful, painful, dreadful, terrifying and most 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 without an all- powerful God, what can salvation and forgiveness possibly be? I see human intimacy, connection with the beloved place in creation, and participation in the entangled universe, no matter how minute that participation might be. Since you are included, you share its dimensions. On that scale, what is human trouble? (This is related to the literary concept of the “sublime,” but that is a different discussion.)

Vogt was a humanist and honored human cultures in their grandest dimensions, but the industrial revolution was still as far as his mind could reach. He had no 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.

The Eucharist has been powerful in societies where bread and wine are the most basic of meals, taken for granted. When missionaries went to totally different parts of the planet, especially those whose people were still hunter/gatherers who depended on meat and roots, the bread and wine just didn’t work. In fact, the Jewish culture’s pattern of communal meals like the Last Supper where talk mixed with food, and also prayer (at one historical point one was supposed to say a prayer of gratitude for each bite bigger than a tablespoon) doesn’t work in a context like Blackfeet where meat was always simmering over a fire to be dipped into as was convenient, except for major feasts. One whole band was called “Eats Alone” because their chief preferred to take his food apart from the camp. But at ceremonial communal meals, prayer combined with food, notably sarvisberry soup or buffalo tongue.

I’m proposing 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. Which images of which senses evoke the liminal -- a mix of sound, smell, space, and so on -- will test the skill of the liturgist, both in their choosing and in their arranging: both their “beats” and their “arc.” It should be obvious that the liturgist must truly know the worshippers 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.

But I’m pleased to have found something useful and fitting 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.