I have to admit that, even as well as I know your tastes, I wasn’t expecting the Smashing Pumpkins to pop up at the end of this post. It helped, of course, that I had no idea who’d written the opening quotation.

The line about healing souls is a powerful one in the mass. It’s a pretty big stumbling block for me, though, in part because of the chest-tapping that has historically been done there.

Nate,

I’m glad that you shared this. I have heard you speak about each element of your second tier but I had not heard enough about it to place everything in its proper place of how you were thinking. I have a question though. Of that second tier, are all three elements of morality, doctrine, and ritual given equal weight in terms of how the parishioners at ASA understand their church? I think what I am trying to learn by asking that question is whether one of those elements is foundational to the others.

That’s a great question, Martin. No, not at all. Ritual is the principal foundation of our parish, in my opinion. It’s a sense of deep, shared beauty that unifies our diverse population. Views of doctrine or morality are vastly more diffuse and, as such, frequently avoided.

Some parishioners are frankly disturbed by the growing lack of doctrinal commonality, or what they perceive to be a growing lack of doctrinal commonality. (I suspect that it may simply be a growing honesty about doctrinal beliefs.) There’s been anguish in recent years over issues like allowing women to serve as acolytes, and a parish conversation where many members discussed their homosexuality in the context of their faiths was a big step for us. And the presence of people like me, who openly declare lack of belief in the real presence of Jesus Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist, has threatened some people.

To me, this is attractive: a group of people united in the common experience of transcendent beauty, bold enough to stick together and deal with the complexity and difficulty of talking about truth and morality. I imagine, though, that this says a lot about my particular personality, too, and which of those second-tier items I’m most comfortable with.

All this is why, in my opinion, ritualism is one of the largest and most persistent shadow sides of our parish’s character. You wouldn’t believe the angst and arguing over any alterations to any of the form of the Mass, for instance. Many will make defenses of the particular practices of our worship without any reference toward the goal of beauty; it is ritual for its own sake, ritual because it’s ours, ritual because that’s how it was when we came here, ritual because that’s how the Church through time and space has done it (no matter that it hasn’t). Such ritualism makes my skin crawl, but it helps me to be patient to understand it as the shadow of ritual, not its evil antithesis.

Nate,

Hearing you give the chief place to ritual I am reminded of sophomore music tutorial in which we all spoke of St. Augustine and his hesitance to approve of music during church. He is thrilled at music’s ability to bring us to new heights of transcendent appreciation of God, but he is frightened that the same ability can lead us to appreciate music more than God, i.e. to lead us into sin. In the end he approves of music but does so with a watchful eye knowing that he must be on guard to keep his true sight on God.

By the thinking of the parishioners of ASA including yourself, is Augustine wrong to think that it is possible for something beautiful to the senses to lead a man astray? If he is not wrong to want to mediate a middle course between no beauty and beauty detached from God, how is the music and other ritual access to beauty guided at ASA?

From the Confessions of St. Augustine in Book X Chapter XXXIII:

The delights of the ear drew and held me much more powerfully, but thou didst unbind and liberate me. In those melodies which thy words inspire when sung with a sweet and trained voice, I still find repose; yet not so as to cling to them, but always so as to be able to free myself as I wish. But it is because of the words which are their life that they gain entry into me and strive for a place of proper honor in my heart; and I can hardly assign them a fitting one. Sometimes, I seem to myself to give them more respect than is fitting, when I see that our minds are more devoutly and earnestly inflamed in piety by the holy words when they are sung than when they are not. And I recognize that all the diverse affections of our spirits have their appropriate measures in the voice and song, to which they are stimulated by I know not what secret correlation. But the pleasures of my flesh — to which the mind ought never to be surrendered nor by them enervated — often beguile me while physical sense does not attend on reason, to follow her patiently, but having once gained entry to help the reason, it strives to run on before her and be her leader. Thus in these things I sin unknowingly, but I come to know it afterward.

On the other hand, when I avoid very earnestly this kind of deception, I err out of too great austerity. Sometimes I go to the point of wishing that all the melodies of the pleasant songs to which David’s Psalter is adapted should be banished both from my ears and from those of the Church itself. In this mood, the safer way seemed to me the one I remember was once related to me concerning Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, who required the readers of the psalm to use so slight an inflection of the voice that it was more like speaking than singing.

However, when I call to mind the tears I shed at the songs of thy Church at the outset of my recovered faith, and how even now I am moved, not by the singing but by what is sung (when they are sung with a clear and skillfully modulated voice), I then come to acknowledge the great utility of this custom. Thus I vacillate between dangerous pleasure and healthful exercise. I am inclined — though I pronounce no irrevocable opinion on the subject — to approve of the use of singing in the church, so that by the delights of the ear the weaker minds may be stimulated to a devotional mood. Yet when it happens that I am more moved by the singing than by what is sung, I confess myself to have sinned wickedly, and then I would rather not have heard the singing.

I’ve always admired Augustine’s seriousness about judging his own experiences and motivations carefully in this passage, even as I am amused by his severity. Rereading this now, I certainly disagree with his denigration of “the pleasures of the flesh” and his elevation of reason.

One of the things I find most attractive about Anglicanism is its affirmation of the fundamental goodness of the world and all that it entails, perhaps most importantly the flesh. All things that are good are God’s, and pleasure is essentially, spectacularly part of that. To generalize a bit, one of the ways some Anglicans see themselves as different from Roman Catholics is that we reject a certain fixation on understanding and personally approving the right-orderedness about all of God’s goods, and embrace a kind of explosive, infinitely rich, super-comprehensible cosmos of divine blessings.

(Father Martin Smith, whom I mentioned in my entry, once remarked: “Christ’s only power is to be attractive.” I found this shocking and, after significant reflection, powerfully true.)

I disagree, then, with Augustine’s requirement that physical sense attend on reason, or follow it patiently. Often, I think, our physical senses know what is holy better than our reason does, or that reason befouls what is holy to the senses. In answer to your question, then, of whether it’s possible for something that is beautiful to the senses to lead man astray, I would give an emphatic no! However, there are many principles of error in responding to beautiful things.

That’s why I prefer the formulation I’ve tried to very briefly lay out to Augustine’s. Ritualism is a kind of settling, a willingness to consume poorer food out of fear or laziness rather than follow ritual’s direction to the richest and best food. It is, as is all sin, I think, a failure of loving something too little, not loving something too much.

Isn’t it more true to say that sin is loving someONE too little and someTHING too much?

No, I don’t think so; I think God means us to love his creation. I think, though, that our difference may be primarily semantic: my vision of love for things properly pointing through them toward the source of their goodness may look a lot like your vision of proper love of their creator. I just want to absolutely insist on retaining the goodness of the thing itself.

Consider it retained. Thanks for sharing all this.

Thanks for your interest!

Nate, I worry about the importance of certain sorts of ritual in church. Because as a child I had such an unpredictable and intense illness that frequently prevented my attendance at my mother’s Presbyterian church, I felt deeply alienated when I still did not know all the words to the prayers and songs that everyone else in the sanctuary seemed to know by heart. When Biblical lessons and discussion built on previous weeks and assumed an understanding of passages I could not read while too busy vomiting to get out of bed, let alone come to service and Sunday school, and no one else seemed to notice or care about this, how could I feel anything but that this communal experience of faith was not meant for me? What beauty could there be in ritual that served to exclude me?

I think that this feeling of exclusion is what drew me in right away about the worship at the Assemblies of God church I attended in high school. There was a sense of ritual, but the rituals were not exact, not predetermined. You didn’t need to have lines memorized or precise motions. There was speaking in tongues, there was singing and dancing, but it was no longer about doing things perfectly and in an ordained way, but however the spirit moved you. Whatever qualms I had about the doctrine (particularly my disagreements with anything they had to say about homosexuality), I finally felt like I was a part of something greater than myself during worship. While the sermons did still build on each other, missing the service while ill no longer mattered since I disagreed with most of what they had to say and was there for the connection with the spirit, not the hellfire.

I’ve often mused that there ought to be a church with that kind of passion without the bigotry, but I’ve yet to find anything like that and will no longer be a part of something that preaches hatred. Or even a church that subtly, though perhaps unintentionally, excludes others like the disabled and chronically ill from feeling anything more than token inclusion.

What I appreciate so much about the way you share your experiences with faith and church is that you are concerned with the ways that worship and beauty can draw us closer to God and each other. Seeing the Smashing Pumpkins as liturgical doesn’t hurt either—I happened to be listening to Machina when I came to read this post and “I of the Mourning” is playing as I compose this. Still, I hope I have given you some things to consider based on my experiences about how certain kinds of ritual, even when they don’t become ritualism, can push some of us away from God and others.

I recently posted a link on twitter to an article from Pajiba about spiritual atheism. I appreciate aspects of the article’s perspective on spirituality and atheism, especially since I experienced a similar shift from being raised Christian to a kind of agnostic spirituality. But I found myself rather dismayed and annoyed by some of the things the author suggests, particularly some of the daft sentiments about the superiority of atheism. “Atheists write some of the most deeply spiritual works because they have thought about it, tortured themselves over it. It’s like how the greatest coaches were always the mediocre players, because nothing came naturally to them, they had to obsess over and analyze every detail, fight for every inch. It’s that struggle that imparts insight and wisdom. Atheists are amongst the most spiritual because they have not found an answer, their struggle for meaning never ends by definition.” I suspect that you would share the concern, Nate, about the kind of things that happen when people stop struggling and start defining. I certainly agree that atheists can be deeply spiritual and that their struggles can create great art or have other profound impacts on the world. But to suggest that all Christians have ceased struggling, leaving atheists with some sort of superior spirituality is just ridiculous!

And as much as I like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dr. Who, this article in general seems to be suggesting that a few TV shows offer some essential perspective on human experience and spirituality that centuries of religious experience lack. What a narrow-minded and unfortunate view of history and dismissive consideration of the past’s role in shaping the present! Let’s hope the article’s author has the blessing of meeting and being influenced by Christians like you who are concerned with the search for meaning and not so set in ritualism, dogma, and moralism that they become mired in definition and fail to experience the sort of struggle with spirituality that he rightly lauds.