December 2013 – Page 78

The Reason For Rituals

Thinking through the function of religious rituals, Dreher grapples with what he’s learned from repeating the sacrament of confession again and again:

I’ve found over the years that eventually I get tired of bringing the same damn thing to my confessor, and that sense of accountability provides a nudge to try harder not to do the damn thing. Most of us have a tendency to hide from ourselves — to rationalize and to avoid. Once you get into the habit of confession, and the habit of mind that confession creates in you, it becomes a lot harder to hide from yourself. Some of us struggle with scrupulosity — that is, an unbalanced preoccupation with our sins. I can’t say I was ever scrupulous, strictly speaking — I’m far too lazy for that — but when I was a pious young teenager, I would pray often for specific sins to be forgiven, but never really could be sure that I was forgiven. The rite of confession, I learned later in life, gave me a sense of security in knowing that my sins had been forgiven. Somehow, I needed to hear it from a priest: “Go, your sins are forgiven.” There’s life-giving power in that.

I can’t imagine an atheist version of confession. What would it look like? How would it work, if you don’t think there’s any such thing as sin? What standards would you use to measure whether or not one had missed the mark? If you see no man (or woman) with actual spiritual authority over you, or at least as the channel of real supernatural grace, how would the ritual work to relieve the psychological burden? Of course there is a secular version of examination of conscience in the presence of a trained professional; it’s called therapy. But it’s not really the same thing as confession, as Rabbi Rieff explained to us all. Confession is about helping you achieve sanctity; therapy is about easing anxiety about your condition, which might entail changing your behavior, or might not.

Previous Dish on the subject here.

Holy Harmonies

Laura Davis contemplates what makes music sacred:

The Catholic Church makes its definition of sacred music pretty clear, stating in Musicam Sacram that music for the mass must “be holy, and therefore avoid everything that is secular.” It goes on to say that sacred music must also be “universal in this sense.” … I think it’s fair to say that the music has to be about God. The word sacred by definition must have to do with God or the gods, and most of the music of the contemporary worship movement fits this criterion. Perhaps then we should consider the purpose of sacred music: to function as part of the mass or service, most often as a part of worship. Worship derives from Old English weorthscipe ‘worthiness, acknowledgement of worth’. So if sacred music is intended to worship God, then such music must be of worth.

Kenan Malik suggests an alternative definition, one that operates “[n]ot so much as an expression of the divine, or as a set of rules and taboos, but, paradoxically perhaps, more [as] an exploration of what it means to be human”:

From the late medieval period on, ‘sacred’ art became increasingly humanized. The German critic Eric Auerbach called Dante, in the title of a famous study, a ‘poet of the secular world’. Dante’s Divine Comedy, despite its focus on the eternal and immutable features of heaven and hell, is at heart, Auerbach insisted, a very human exploration of this world. The human takes centre stage in The Divine Comedy, in way that had not happened previously in Christian thought. In this, Dante looks forward to the poets and artists of the Renaissance and beyond. Eventually the sense of transcendence in art came to be detached from religion entirely as in twentieth-century works such as Stravinky’s Rite of Spring or in Rothko’s paintings, in many of Barbara Hepworth’s figures or in Pablo Neruda’s love poems. It makes little sense to call such works of art ‘sacred’. There is, yet, a transcendent sensibility that links these to, say, works such as Bach’s Cantatas or Giotto’s frescoes or Dante’s Divine Comedy. To lose sense of that is to diminish both what is ‘sacred’ about sacred art and what is transcendent about much non-religious art.

(Video: performance of Bach’s cantata 184 “Erwünschtes Freudenlicht” (O welcome light of joy))

Fighting For A Place In The Church

Nick Ripatrazone reviews the new anthology Unruly Catholic Women Writers:

A woman, single or married, can never become ordained. Many lapsed women have told me the Church’s treatment of women is the reason they have drifted from Mass and never returned. The anger the women in this anthology feel ranges from those who have sprinted from the Church and never looked back to those who long for a return home, even if that house feels broken. My gender precludes a complete understanding of this anger, this distance.

In that vein, when I posit that the best pieces in Unruly Catholic Women do not consider the Catholic hierarchy as a formless omnibus, I do not mean those words as an apologetic retort. One can hold such an opinion, of course, but it makes for thin creative work. Sustained critique is not possible with straw men.

Consider Kaya Oakes’s excellent recent memoir, Radical Reinvention. Oakes finds spiritual direction from both women and men in the Church; she notes its imperfections while finding its ultimate perfection in Christ. There are pieces in this anthology that perfectly capture the paradox of distaste and desire. Place a complaint of the Church delivered through caricature next to the earned wit of “Exile” by Colleen Shaddox: “To be raised Catholic and switch denominations is a lot like giving up Haagen-Dazs for broccoli. You miss the richness, even if you know it’s bad for you.”

Oakes reflects on her decision to remain a practicing Catholic:

[A] female Episcopal priest [told] me that the great feminist theologians are all Catholic for a reason, “because they’re still fighting. Because they’ll be fighting for some time to come.” We can’t bless the bread, or tear it with our hands. But look closely—in the pews, in the back, some of us are lifting our hands. We can’t read the Gospel. But we read everything else. We can’t baptize the children we might bear, lay our dead to rest with those words of grief and consolation; we can’t preach, we can only offer a “reflection” once in a great while. We can’t. We cannot. …

But in that “cannot” I have heard in my church, in the church I freely choose when it tells me all of the things I can’t do, I’ve never felt denied to the point of resentment. Because, vocation? My vocation isn’t behind an altar. My vocation is putting my ass in a pew, week after week. My vocation is the vocation of billions of people, in nearly every religion. It is the vocation of showing up.