Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

When Liturgy Goes Wild, Worship Happens

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-2394443

2164-0041

Donna Schaper,

Religious Tourism and Spaces

Worship is more often formal than informal, boundary-making rather than boundary-breaking, controlled rather than free. When liturgy goes wild and abandons form and boundaries, it can tell us what free really means.On Easter Sunday at my church we invited a performance artist named Lawrence Graham Brown. He danced in the nude, with braided, beaded, and dreadlocked pubic hairs. He also taught us a little more about what it means that they found Jesus’s grave empty, with his clothes laid on the ground in the abandoned tomb. Here I want to speak some about Easter nakedness and worship, and to go on to name a half dozen other events in which worship left the tomb of formality, boundaries, and control. I want to rejoice in these wild liturgies that brought us to the true in the true.I also want to talk about seeing Jesus and how seeing Jesus is the purpose of worship, at least for Christians like me. The purpose of worship may be to glimpse Spirit or Energy or Force instead of Jesus. Worship often feels like a long list of “have to do” rather than a short list of “must do.” The poet Galway Kinnell says that our first task is to astonish, and then, harder, to try to be astonished. That is what worship is: it is the astonishment that we won’t always be hungry or thirsty or locked up. Pain is normal. Pain is life. Trouble is tyrannical — and everybody has a little of it, and some have a lot of it. Jesus is the refusal to stop the ache and instead the permission to enter the ache. Jesus is the daring speech that we can see through and beyond injury (both our own injury and that of the world). Morning by morning, we see new mercies. Normal is not just a setting on the dryer, as many of us imagine. Instead, normal is misery, followed by mercy. There are so many pressures to tame the text of Jesus, as if it were about the afterworld or the next world, as if gunmen weren’t shooting up movie theaters at midnight or as if global warming were some kind of fiction. When we seek out the wilder sides of liturgy, we are less likely to tame the seeing of Jesus. We especially want to see Jesus on a day like Easter.When Judson Memorial Church (the church in New York City where I serve as senior minister) invited Brown to be part of our Easter Celebration, we did so for five interrelated reasons. First, we had seen him perform a long dance piece called Sacred Space, which involved a Eucharist within itself, and the congregants who saw it were profoundly moved. The show, sponsored by the Gay Men of Color Alliance, took our breath away. Second, we had studied the 350 questions that Jesus asked, according to the Synoptic Gospels, and discovered, to our surprise, that about 20 percent of them were about clothing, nudity, nakedness, and being stripped down — questions such as, “Why do you worry so much about what you will wear?” Third, in studying the three primary accounts of the resurrection, we noted that one involved Jesus being stripped of his clothing right before he was murdered. Fourth, we decided we had a liturgical goal: to surprise people with a resurrected Jesus they did not at first recognize. Thus, Lawrence asked Jesus’s big question after his dance: “Have I been among you this long and you did not know me?” Fifth, and finally, we knew Brown’s performance would cause a stir. We believe in the stir. So did Jesus.Have I been among you this long and you did not know me? Has there been hunger and thirst and sickness and nakedness and imprisonment this long and you did not see it? Have you been fighting strangers off your land this long and not seen me there, in them? Do I have to take off my clothes so you will see me? The Jesus you thought you knew would not ask such questions with anger, right? He would not be a man of color, asking a loud question, right? Right. I think you begin to see why I wanted to talk about Easter, Jesus, worship, and nudity. We need to stir ourselves to see Jesus.The overwhelming response to Brown’s performance on Easter Sunday was positive. However, some congregants who had been in the presence of uninvited nudity before were upset that this happened without warning. Some people were scared. Some merely argued, “It didn’t seem appropriate on Easter.” Others argued that inviting a black man to dance before a mostly white congregation was a politically problematic move that exoticized Brown. These concerns each seemed so important to me that I decided to preach about them afterward and to use them as a doorway to discussion. I learned that, were we to involve nude dance again in worship, we would need to triple the contextualization and to triple the early warnings.Brown’s performance on Easter was by no means the first performance art involving nudity that the church has countenanced. Longtime congregant Grace Goodman writes:The first instance of nudity at Judson that I can recall was Yvonne Rainer’s 1956 duet with Robert Morris in one of the Judson Dance Theater’s pieces. They danced Waterman Switch to a Verdi aria; they were in a tight waltz position, so although they were nude, it was not “full frontal nudity,” as only their bare backs were really visible. However, the New York Times had sent a substitute critic that night who apparently was shocked and reviewed the piece with the sensational headline, “Nudes Dance in the Sanctuary of the Church.” Church folks all over the country phoned and wrote condemning letters (apparently envisioning a social dance by youth with no clothes or something equally outré); the conservative magazine Christianity Today editorialized that the minister should be defrocked and the church censored. In the end, the church board passed a resolution affirming that Judson was attempting to “encourage a new relationship between the church and the arts.”The church board’s resolution continued with an even bolder defense of Judson’s experimentation with the arts: “The important thing is not so much whether the art forms are introduced into our church services or whether they are of enduring value, but rather that we are creating an environment where new forms of the arts can be active.” This resolution set the stage for decades of boundary-pushing art within the church.Worship is the experience of a part of the Jesus story — it’s the experience of the Jesus we can never fully know or understand, just like we can never fully know or understand injury or death, liberation or resurrection. Worship is about God, about the beyond, about the great mystery in which we are held. It is the place people in Aurora, Colorado, were driven to after the mass shooting at their movie theater, even though all they really wanted was a Batman movie. Astonishment is the destination of worship. Astonished is a better word than its overused friend, awesome. It is a deeper, wider place that is more real than reality, truer than truth, freer than freedom itself. As existential psychologist Rollo May puts it, “Neurotics and artists consciously live out emerging trends that others keep unconscious.” Dancers take us to a Jesus we can barely see. Worship is a way to make conscious what we have buried. Worship removes the rubble on religious experience. It de-clutters.Daily we live in a world that is rigged against our better selves. We have future fatigue. We know we counted on the GPS and it got us lost. Then we get mad that we counted on it. Worship is a different kind of global positioning system, one that uses sacred texts, music, art, dance, and sacred space to bring us to something we can count on, even if it is only the experience of that hour as a pedicab to the divine. Nudity can either be a vehicle or get in the way. By itself it is nothing. Through its expression, it is something. Because we were trying to show a Jesus we might not know at Easter — the one who kept asking us why we care about clothing or raiment, the one who doesn’t go away when we are naked before each other — we turned to a certain kind of art.We use art in many ways in worship at Judson Memorial Church and in the wing of progressive Protestantism it represents. Over the years, we have experienced many astonishing things. We took our pews out in 1959 so our great meeting room space could be used for many different purposes. Our ritual “agape” meal, which replaces the formal communion on first Sundays, is meant to surprise people, at table, in an early Christian way. We eat food, drink wine, talk to each other, and “have” communion.One Christmas, one of our members climbed onto our steep roof (totally verboten and do not tell the insurance company). From there he strung 1,865 red chili pepper lights down the front of the building so that they faced the Greenwich Village Washington Square Arch. Gently gathered, one string of lights slightly crossed the other. As seen from the arch, they constituted the Virgin Mary’s cleavage. I was not informed of this artistic adventure until greeted by a bill for $586.00, which had, handwritten on it, “Christmas lights.” I didn’t see the exhibit until I was walking across the park, a little snow flying. I looked up only to realize that there was a two-story light exhibit on the front of the church. There was no doubt that it was a woman’s breasts. It didn’t occur to me till later that the artist was suggesting Mary, the mother of Jesus. I asked him if I was right about that, and he just smiled and said Merry Christmas. It was the softest and loudest suggestion of the Virgin I have ever imagined. Finally comes the poet to teach us how to see.That artist died of a stroke the following year, but his partner has continued to string the red chili pepper lights around the sanctuary each Christmas. Last Christmas he added a centralizing Advent wreath, using the four pillars in our meeting room as candles. The children lit pillars and not just candles in his incredible evocation of light and fire. The wreath in the center of the sanctuary, which we set up in the round so we could be inside the wreath, was lit as well.People have many different ways of using worship to astonish rather than to dull, to free rather than to bind or contain. I remember having communion with the first eleven women ordained, irregularly, in the Episcopal Church. We put the best linens and the most embroidered cloths on the table. And then, when the eleven practiced their first mass, they spilled wine all over the table — not exactly nudity in worship, but a kind of astonishment. Every Sunday at Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco, the priest does something to bother people while doing the mass. He wants to make sure they are bothered and broken before they are comforted and solaced. Why? To show them a Jesus who is capable of anger and disappointment.Once, during the installation of the new Roman Catholic bishop of Western Massachusetts, we Protestant officials were in the front row but were told we couldn’t take communion. Guards were posted. We climbed out when they weren’t looking, got in line, and received the bread and wine. When we moved a cross in and out of Temple Israel in Miami on Good Friday and the first night of Passover, it mattered a lot to me. Why? We wanted to make sure that a certain movie about Jesus that was coming out that day did not represent all Christians. There was something that was more than real going on. That is what worship does; it moves us to the more-than-real. Worship deeply engages the usual.Does all worship need to be spectacular? No. In fact, one of the ways we see Jesus is to be very quiet and very normal, almost pedestrian. You can be normal and pedestrian and still cause a stir. The word regularity comes to mind. Anything you do over and over, like prayer at table, has a chance to finally shake you up. The day you do the familiar prayer after a loved one has died — a loved one who was with you through all the regularity — on that day you will cry. You can be normal and free, uncontained and unbound, informal as well as formal. Spirituality is not just something we have on vacations or at retreats. Spirituality is a drumbeat, a daily touch of life below and within the usual.During worship our moral compass is reset. We move to the deep causation of just how rigged things are. We reset our global positioning system. We come to our senses and believe more deeply what our eyes and ears tell us. Worship keeps us from ordinary senselessness and moves us into a magnificently common sense. Wild liturgy opens to a deep and dense simultaneity of experience. Do we always have to stir? No, but sometimes we do. It is our intention to be in-tension sometimes. Wild liturgy goes for tension in order to tame and frame it. In both ordinary and extraordinary worship, we hold open the possibility that this will be the day that Jesus breaks our hearts so wide open that injury and death are overcome.