The tumult of our lives meets the patterns of human comprehension where ceremony meets theatre. Both express the primal metaphors that guide our lives to survival.
This is an experience-based “bottoms-up” way to look at rituals that are more usually handed “down” through historical institutions. I began to think this way when the Uruguayan soccer team crashed in the Andes and resorted to real and horrifying cannibalism, avoiding madness through the historic Christian image of Communion, based on a shared meal and durably human enough to survive endless permutations, distortions and heresies.
The expressiveness of a daily act showed up again when a female seminarian was forbidden to serve Communion which was interpreted as a male priestly act. Therefore, as both protest and acquiescence, she served the people bread and water. The jot-and-tittles of the scribes and pharisees became their own indictment. Daily domestic practices can be lifted up to become a key ceremony just as the sharing of bread and wine at Passover was the seed in the Bible.
Other established, specific and institutional liturgies can serve a disrupting experience in a human life. A groom was killed in a car accident on the way to his wedding. The bride, desperate to assimilate this sudden event, asked her Anglican priest to “marry” them anyway. The groom’s body was present, the bride wore her wedding dress, and -- against the family’s wishes -- the priest spontaneously reorganized the traditional ceremony to invest the moment with acceptance. No one else was present. He used traditional materials but was much helped in his choices and spontaneous prayers by the period of counseling in which he had learned much about the couple’s personal faith.
Jonathan A. Anderson, whose lectures are on YouTube. http://open.biola.edu/authors/jonathan-a-anderson, teaches at a fundamentalist school that believes in Biblical inerrancy but he talks about the most avant garde kinds of art with full comprehension and insight. Here is an example of his designed sacred experience, a “proof of life.”
"Put a chilled piece of glass in front of you. An oscillating fan should be running in the room. Lean forward in your chair and breathe on the glass. Observe your breath as it clouds the glass. Lean back. Watch as your breath clears from the glass. This is seeing your life."
Part two:
"Get a friend to sit on the other side of the chilled glass. Put two oscillating fans in the room. You lean forward to make a cloud while your friend sits back. Then you lean back and he leans forward to breathe on the glass. Observe carefully. You are looking at each other's lives."
When I was in seminary (’78 -’82), Abraxas -- a community of mostly male ministers who wished to explore liturgy -- was strong and productive but it had remained within the convention of “the Book,” “the Word,” and though Vern Barnett urged them towards the inclusion of all World Religions, Duke Gray insisted that only Anglican vespers was the true core of worship. None of them was very conscious of indigenous wordless worship, drums and singing, or even what is now grouped as feminist or pagan ceremonies, with some overlap. I don’t know what has happened to “interpretive dance” as portrayed by Jules Pfeiffer. I will not stop here to document all this, but someone ought to. Still, it was a sign of the desire to constantly renew and reframe worship. The UUA supports a website called “www.uua.org/worship” but that is only one -- quite liberal -- set of ideas.
I once had a conversation with a Catholic priest who was absorbed in teaching himself grace in the way he used his hands to perform mass -- broke the wafer, poured the wine, held up the elements, presented to the communicants -- a small dance at the top of the table. Technically, a priest who is missing fingers or manually crippled is forbidden to offer Communion, based on worry that elements considered sacred might be dropped -- also concern for the precious chalice and platen, of course. Elegance and skill reinforce sacredness.
In contrast, consider the book length description of the New Guinea tribal Umeda ceremony that lasts a year and includes the whole tribe in acting out animal and vegetable metaphors -- bugs, fish, boiling sago pulp, palm trees of two kinds, finally climaxing in two men wearing huge masks and holding hands while dancing together. They are said to be cassowaries, the big bird that lurks in the New Guinea jungle -- all in homage to fertility and survival in one of the toughest environments on the planet. The book also explores the hidden psychoanalytical pattern of rival brothers that comes from child-raising arrangements.
Much of my thinking is stimulated by participation in the Blackfeet Thunder Pipe Bundle ceremony in the Sixties. The people come together in a circle, which qualifies it for the category of “circle worship” in the WorshipWeb terms, but it has ancient roots that matured across the prairies in the chaos of Euro invasion. We know the “calumet,” a pipestem as long as a yardstick, was created after metal falconry bells and wire, satin ribbon, and glass beads, had arrived through trade, but the materials also include winter-white ermine skins, eagle tail feathers, and scalps or horsehair imitations of them. Ours had a green parrot with taxidermist’s glass eyes but we heard of another colorful version with a bright rooster on it. The pipestems seem to have been bored by or turned on a lathe, maybe meant to rifle long guns. Brass tacks like those used on long gun butts were also on some pipe stems. I haven’t noticed comments on the source of the wood. These pipes were not for smoking and not associated with war.
The Bundle itself is like a hymnal, containing the hides of animals, each of which evokes a song about its life and powers. The ceremony cannot work as a deep experience without the congregants having had much experience with these animals, enough to imitate them evocatively while dancing. This is a ritual celebrating the experience of place. A Norwegian sea captain or a pygmy mother might be in sympathy but would not bring the experiences. They are not phenomena of the thinking and ethical prefrontal cortex of the cerebrum, but rather of the deepest ties held in the dark brain from the top of the spine through the reptile reflexive brain, and especially unconscious associations held in the dark limbic mammal brain of emotion and metaphor where our dreams in their most erotic and terrifying state shape us from the moment we are born.
At another point in my active UU years (’75- ’88), my ministerial colleagues in the Humptulips Study Group assigned me to distinguish between female-based as opposed to male-based liturgies. I was not interested in picturing a Goddess and writing gender corrections into the hymnals. I was one of the early females but not a feminist. In search of early thought I went back to the saints, looking at primal categories in their writing about ecstasy. Today, in view of neurological research, we might say that they were experiencing the categories of the infant: securely lifted up v. dropped; warm v. cold; fed v. starving; accompanied v. abandoned; dark v. light; dirty v. clean. These are the earliest terms of survival, the nuclear structure of experience.
Trying to understand all this took me into the thought of the Rev. Robert Schreiter, a priest in orders who tries to understand how the Christian communion can be conveyed to cultures that have neither bread nor wine and maybe not even group meals. The early Blackfeet ate when they had opportunity. One chief was noted for eating alone. Soup was always simmering over coals. Dry meat could be carried in a pouch, sometimes pulverized with berries. So the sarvisberry soup served at Bundle Openings was NOT communion. Schreiter would want us to go to the primal concept, which for the prairie people was subsistence. The sarvisberry soup marked both abundance and scarcity, the longing for an abundant crop and maybe the generous use of the last of the dried berries saved over the winter. It was the warmed breath of the people on the chilled glass of the end of winter. Proof of survival.
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