July 17, 2007. 2nd Month of The last Sabbatical

Tomorrow we leave for England. For me it is a pilgrimage to places of sacred enchantment. I anticipate revisiting dreamscapes, “vast, domed space/So hollow, so intensely hollow…” (Beneath the Cathedral, 1988). I anticipate revisiting Muir Woods and Grace Cathedral, while remaining half a world away from California.

What I do not expect is to find anything like St. Gregory of Nyssa, San Francisco, because I have the impression that such vigorous community life is rare in the C of E. It is not so rare in the Episcopal Church here. What is rare is to find places where the “vigorous community life” coincides with “sacred enchantment”.

The most popular forms of religion in our culture are almost entirely devoid of sacred enchantment. They are correct in their perception that most people do not seek exposure to the mysterious, the unfamiliar, or the “sacred”. I suppose Pentecostalism is an exception.

What I mean by “sacred enchantment” is an interior awareness before it becomes a theology or a set of conscious beliefs. As I have said, it involves dreams, childhood memories, sexuality, feelings of belonging and rejection, safety and threat, love and repulsion, guilt and forgiveness, fascination and vulnerability, ecstasy and dread. It involves the awareness of death and oblivion, as well as powerlessness and dependence, and a primitive sense of justice and the appalling wrongness of much in the world. Finally, it involves a child-like awareness of gladness, gratitude, and wonder. For me, all this gets caught up in the gestures, rhythms, rituals, and “vast, domed spaces” of catholic Christianity.

But without a healthy community to cherish, sustain, manage, finance, and be transformed by “it”, the “sacred” quickly loses its power to enchant. It is ironic that the recurrent effort to maintain the Tradition requires us to risk it in perilous forms of Mission. In reality, we cannot bring ourselves to actually take such risks (any more than could the original disciples of Jesus), so the Mission comes and finds us, drags us “out of the oratories and into the streets”, as our Theology Professor at Nashotah House used to say.

As I say, most people do not want such a paradoxical form of religion or of community, so they shroud their practice of it under layers of familiarity: football stadiums, theater-style seating, soft-rock music, etc. Of course, “vast, domed spaces” can become “familiar” too, a caricature and even perversion of the Gospel. In secular culture, anything like sacred enchantment comes disguised under layers of either violence or satire. Nothing is less enchanting than bland sentimentality, just as nothing is less sacred than stiff, formalized worship with no healthy community behind it, or intimacy without trust.

This is where “sacred irreverence” comes in. To be real, worship and community must have the capacity to laugh at themselves, as well as weep.

WHERE IDOLS ABOUND

For Herb Gunn

Where idols abound

Worship is common

Products are plentiful

But vision is rare.

Where idols abound

The landscape is littered

With discarded scraps

Of old vestments and prayers.


Out in the desert
The cities have crumbled
Discarded chemicals
Poison the sod.
Out in the rubble
Children are playing
On broken-down idols
And the bones of old gods.

Gross is the profit
Fat is the toy
Played with at markets
In Greece, or at Troy.

Wherever the desert
Wind blows it cleanses
The ruins of cities
That once there were found.
Blasted with insight
The prophets they wander
Like owls in the wilderness
Where idols abound.


High as the Spirit
They fly in their hunting
The word that escapes from from the
Cracks in the ground.
Blest with night vision
They write in the darkness
The wind is their weapon
Where idols abound.