Excerpt from
Bodies of Worship
Explorations in Theory and Practice
Bruce T. Morrill, S.J., Editor
© The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced by any means, without the written permission of The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321.
Contents
Contributors
Preface
Introduction
Part One Exploring a Liturgical Theology of the Body
Chapter OnePart Two Pastoral Practice: Bodies at Worship
Chapter Six
Paul Covino, associate chaplain and director of liturgy, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts.
James L. Empereur, S.J., parochial vicar, San Fernando Cathedral, San Antonio, Texas, and lecturer, Our Lady of the Lake University, San Antonio.
Andrea Goodrich, adjunct chaplain for liturgical music, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, and director of liturgical music, St. Teresa's Church, Sherborne, Massachusetts.
Colleen M. Griffith, director of formative spirituality program and adjunct assistant professor of theology, Institute for Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.
Leo Keegan, director of liturgy, St. Maria Goretti Roman Catholic Church, San Jose, California.
Margaret Mary Kelleher, O.S.U., associate professor of liturgical studies, department of religion and religious education, School of Religious Studies, The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.
Bruce T. Morrill, S.J., assistant professor of liturgical theology, department of theology and Institute for Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.
Preface
That a more concerted reflection on the bodily aspects of liturgy might contribute to the theory and practice of both liturgical theology and pastoral ministry was the prospect taken up by theologians and pastoral ministers at the week-long "Liturgy and the Body" conference offered by the Institute for Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry at Boston College in July, 1998. The chapters of this present book, as well as the book's overall scheme, have their origins in the lectures and workshops presented at that conference.
The book's two main parts, while related, are nonetheless distinctive in their structure and content. Part One systematically explores the various bodies engaged in the Church's worship—ecclesial, ritual, personal, and cultural—all with a view to how this humanly sanctifying work continues Christ's mission in the power of the Holy Spirit. The five chapters are purposefully arranged so as to unfold the multivalency of bodies at worship. Thus, a certain theological coherence is the goal. In Part Two, on the other hand, the four chapters describe and analyze specific liturgical, physical, and spiritual practices in the pursuit of further insights into the irreducibly bodily nature of the celebration of the Christian life as worship of God. The differences in subject matter and experiences of the body are respected by not constricting the chapters into any forced thematic sequence. The entire book is introduced by means of a narrative describing an actual liturgy which took place a few years ago. A brief conclusion reflects back across the landscape of the chapters to the narrative and symbolic basis for liturgical theology insofar as it is, at origin and end, practical and pastoral.
In offering this book in service to Church and academy I owe at least some brief words of thanks to several among the many people who have helped bring it along its way. The idea for this project—both the summer conference and the book—came to me while hiking in the mountains of Vermont. Upon returning to the Institute for Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry my proposal for a "Liturgy and the Body" week was welcomed with immediate, enthusiastic support by the director, Claire Lowery, whose warm encouragement never failed throughout the project. Sandy Hurley, the institute's business administrator, navigated numerous logistical and financial challenges with unflappable patience and grace. Kara Tierney-Trevor, one of the graduate assistants at the institute, was of great help through all the phases of the conference week. To these and the other staff and faculty of the institute, and on behalf of my fellow authors in this book, I give heartfelt thanks.
For my own part, I am grateful to these authors for taking on the specific tasks I proposed to each and seeing them through in presentation and print. I also thank Don and Jane Saliers for continuously making their second home in Vermont available to me as a writer's getaway, as well as Jim Collins, S.J., minister of the Jesuit Community at Boston College, who finds the wheels for me to get there. My brother Jesuits in the Barat House Jesuit Community are an invaluable source of companionship, wisdom, prayer, and laughter.
Bruce T. Morrill, S.J.
Boston College
INTRODUCTION
Initial Consideration: Theory and Practice of the Body in Liturgy Today
Bruce T. Morrill, S.J.
The basic premise of this book, the wager of its authors, is that an exploration of the various bodily characteristics of human living can heighten our awareness and deepen our insights into what we Christians do together when we celebrate the liturgy of the Church, the sacraments of our living in Christ. The term "body," of course, carries a number of connotations ranging from the physical to the metaphorical (e.g., the body of a human or animal, an assembled body of delegates or legislators, the body of a text, a body of knowledge). It is precisely this multivalence of the concept that can provide us several distinct but interrelated approaches to how it is that liturgy relates us to God and to one another as a church in this world.
The move away from thinking about the sacraments as objects that dispense grace to perceiving them as relational events, as personal encounters among God and people, has been the hallmark of sacramental theology in the second half of the twentieth century. In his classic text, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter With God, Edward Schillebeeckx, through his constructive retrieval of ancient Christian sources and the work of Thomas Aquinas, helped us to discover the Church and its sacraments as genuine, human encounters with God in the Spirit of the Risen Christ. In so doing, Schillebeeckx, as well as Karl Rahner and numerous others who built on the monumental theologies of those two, opened the field of inquiry concerning sacramental liturgy to the profound range and depth of human experience, including the embodied, symbolic ways in which we meet God now through our relating with one another in the world. In returning to Schillebeeckx's early text, one discovers that the concept of the body pervades the work, developed as integral to human salvation in Christ through not only the principle of the incarnation but also the resurrection. Arguing anthropologically that there is no such thing as a "free spiritual act" that is "achieved in pure interiority" prior to or independent of the body, Schillebeeckx posited the entire Christian life as a sacrament of the encounter with God. The Church's official sacramental liturgies function as "markers, milestones on the way" of the believer's life becoming increasingly united with Christ; they are "flashes of light within the whole of Christian life" as it is engaged in wider society. Schillebeeckx's concluding insistence that the credibility of the Church's liturgical reform depends on its members being in active solidarity with all peoples in their struggles, anticipated the turn in his later work, wherein his identification of the biblical God of Jesus as the God of suffering people shaped his description of the Christian life as fundamentally entailing both mystical and ethical (political) dimensions.
There is something remarkable, even scandalous, about the Christian tradition's claim that God has in Christ Jesus taken on the human condition (body and soul) and, through Jesus' faithful mission to broken humanity unto death, raised our condition to a new convenantal relationship with the Divine, one another and all creation. The scandalousness arises in our only too persistent awareness of the sinfulness of our selves and societies, of the ambiguity and suffering we experience as bodily persons, and of death, which places the whole in question. Taking a different critical tack, feminist theologians have come to perceive the scandal precisely in the theological and practical Christian history of distrusting the ambiguities of bodily human existence and, more specifically, of associating the temptation to sin with women's bodies. Susan Ross has argued that while Schillebeeckx and Rahner are to be commended for asserting the embodied nature of the human person and developing the point in significant ways, "neither offer[ed] an alternative to the traditional application of embodiment to sex difference." Furthermore, Ross's evaluation of the subsequent generation of sacramental theologians found them committed to embodiment as a principle without considering its implications in depth.
While the shortcomings, unfortunate consequences, and even tragic results of historical attitudes towards the body have received a growing amount of documentation and reflection in recent theological literature (as shall be noted at times in this present book), we nonetheless can positively acknowledge that the church has never ceased to be amazed by its tradition which proclaims that God saves humanity right in our very material actions and circumstances. French sacramental theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet develops the point philosophically and historically in his magnum opus: "Faithful to its biblical roots, ecclesial tradition has attempted to discern what is most ‘spiritual' in God on the basis of what is most ‘corporeal' in us. This is especially the case in the liturgy. But it is more widely the case in the whole of Church life." Even when, for various reasons, the faithful have had little direct access to the symbols and actions of the sacramental rituals of the church, other forms of "popular piety" have emerged and flourished. One has only to think of the pastoral effectiveness of St. Francis's creation of the Nativity scene (the "creche") and promotion of the Stations of the Cross, let alone the myriad cultural renditions of the crucifix. All of these symbols have flourished since the Middle Ages, for they represent and foster faith in God's identification with and presence to people in their very bodily experiences of joy and wonder, struggle and suffering. For Christians, the most spiritual of realities can only be experienced or known in and through the materiality of our bodies.
Contemporary sacramental theology's conceptualizing of the sacraments as dynamic relational events joining people with God has led over the past twenty years away from abstract discussions of the principles involved in a given sacrament to increasing attention to liturgical action itself. The methodological shift to liturgy itself as the theological source—the study of its texts and ritual actions and their relationship to other ecclesial and theological issues—has resulted in a further crucial stage in the development of the discipline: the emergence of liturgical theology in its own right. This is a necessary consequence of the theological commitment to the embodied character of our sanctification, for there is no disembodied realm where we are being saved. Neither can we merely reason to our salvation as if it were, to borrow a phrase from Johann Baptist Metz, happening "behind the back of the human history of suffering." The sharing of stories, symbols and rituals is essential to a life lived in the paradoxical yet promising concreteness of the Gospel. Nor can we romanticize that the Church possesses some perfect ritual enactments of its divine worship. Not only do clergy and laity often fumble in their efforts to appropriate the revised rites, but the actual local celebration of liturgy is always charged with bodily tensions encompassing gender, race, age, ethnicity, as well as the needs and gifts of the physically, intellectually, or emotionally challenged. The practical ways these questions and tensions are actually approached in real pastoral settings has everything to do with whether a given community is embracing the diverse complexity of our bodily living as opportunities for sacramentally encountering the gracious favor of God or suppressing the body as an obstacle to what is "truly" holy and spiritual.
With a view to advancing the pastoral work of liturgy in the Church today, this book is an invitation to think about liturgy—its structures, content, participants, and performances—in terms of the various, interrelated types of bodies engaged in its practice. To introduce what is meant here by "types" of bodies in relation to liturgy, as well as the potential benefits for thinking in such terms, we can best begin by turning to one of the actual rites of the Roman Catholic Church: the Order of Christian Funerals. The funeral liturgy is helpful to consider because the body is so undeniably central to it. By this I am, obviously, referring to the corpse, the human body which has expired, and whose ex-spiration places into stark relief the mysterious relationship between body, mind, and spirit in all human persons.
When one considers the enactment of the funeral rites for any particular deceased person, however, one quickly becomes aware of what I am calling the multivalence of the body, of the fact that the body is never merely a physical body (although the irreducible importance of the physical body of each person is not to be dismissed). The description and analysis of any specific funeral leads to the recognition that what happens with and to the body of the individual deceased person is a function of that person's relationship to and location within a number of other bodies: the Church as the body of Christ, the ecclesial body which is at once social in its members, traditional in its beliefs and practices, and mystical in its relation to the Risen Christ; the ritual body of the assembled participants and ministers, who enact the liturgy by entering into its symbolic mode of word and gestures; and the cultural body, which entails familial and other social relationships, customs and practices concerning dress, deportment, the expression of emotions, age and gender roles, as well as economic decisions. The participants in the funeral rites must negotiate all of these aspects of bodiliness or corporality in the process of their finding meaning (or not) in this human event.
What I have briefly outlined here about the body in relation to the church's funeral liturgy could, of course, be introduced in relation to any of the other rites of the Church. One might, for example, prefer looking to the beginning of the human life cycle and the rite for baptizing infants, starting from a recognition of the beautiful, vulnerable physicality of the baby to consideration of the social-cultural, ecclesial, and ritual bodies in which she or he now plays a part. I have chosen the funeral liturgy, however, because of a significant pastoral experience I had with it several years ago. A description and analysis of this particular instance of pastoral praxis is offered as a stimulus for the readers' theological imagination and thought, leading to the chapters that will follow.
Theology as Practice: A Liturgical Narrative
The person calling was Sister Alice, the associate pastoral minister at Sts. Peter and Paul, a mostly black parish in southeast Atlanta. I presided at liturgies there from time to time, and knew the parish as one where the pastor and staff made a concerted effort to inculturate the liturgy in its African-American context through music, art and environment, and approaches to ministry. Sister Alice asked if I were willing and able to preside at a funeral on the day after next, as the pastor was out of town. The deceased was a forty-one year old woman named "Betty," who after years of struggle had finally succumbed to a debilitating disease, leaving orphaned her eight year old son, "Tommy." With the exception of Tommy, Betty's last years had been spent in relative isolation. She was alienated in various degrees from some of her family. One of the sources of tension, it seemed, was her having left the Baptist Church many years ago to become a Roman Catholic.
Sister Alice explained that Betty held a special place in her heart in that Betty was one of the first people she had visited when she began her ministry at Sts. Peter and Paul some seven years ago and had continued to do so regularly over the years—more often still in the last months. Alice described Betty as a woman of courage who had suffered a great deal. Alice expected only a handful of family to attend the funeral and explained that she would be contacting parishioners who could be free on a weekday morning to come to the Mass. She hoped to recruit about a dozen, some of whom might remember Betty from years back when she was still able to attend services herself. There would thus be at least some small assembly of the faithful at the funeral liturgy. Listening to Sister Alice it became clear to me that she should speak at the funeral. Not only was she the pastoral minister amidst that community of faith but, given her clearly special relationship with Betty, she would be able to make the personal connection between the Christian story celebrated in the liturgy and the story of this poor woman. After a bit of coaxing, Alice agreed to provide a reflection at the close of the Communion Rite, as the Roman ritual allows, while I planned to keep my homily after the Gospel more brief. This raised, nonetheless, the question of the content of that homily and, given the integral role of the homily within the entire liturgy, it required my focusing on what I hoped for in this funeral mass.
What I brought from my conversation with Sister Alice into the subsequent hours of preparation for the funeral liturgy was the conviction that I should allow the ritual of the Roman Rite to function at its fullest. This meant that I, in the office of presiding minister of the rite, wished to proceed in the confident desire of giving myself, the assembly, and the deceased over to the inherent power in the liturgy, the paschal mystery, so that it might do us. Any death occasions a renewed awareness that we rely on the power and mercy of God. All the more in this situation of a painful, early death and, further still, the gathering of strangers across the omnipresent, if not conscious, lines of race, gender, generation, religion, and ethnicity. All of these aspects of human identity contribute to what Chauvet calls our corporality, the "triple body" of culture, tradition, and nature, in which each of us realizes ourselves as "person-bodies" through our decisions and desires. Thus, the preparation and performance of the Church's liturgy carries with it the dual pastoral (and thereby, theological) commitments to, on the one hand, confidence in the liturgy as a privileged place where we may indeed expect God to "speak" in symbolic action and, on the other hand, sensitivity to issues of human dignity and difference concretely operative in its enactment.
What this meant was that I would carefully let the ritual movement and gestures, the signs as well as the words, all together function as symbols into which the assembly might enter, creating a liturgical "space" that would serve the reality of the paschal mystery manifesting itself in that particular situation. We would vary in or personal knowledge of Betty—I would number among those who knew her least of all—but we could all enter anew into an awareness, an experiential knowledge, of our lives as a participation in the mystery of Christ's dying and rising.
More specifically, the preparation entailed my reviewing the ritual and choosing the scriptural readings in such a way that the two key elements of Christian liturgy, namely, word and sacrament, might mutually form each other, with the explicit and extended articulation of that relationship occurring in the homily. Turning to the Lectionary, Romans 6 (v. 3-9) was the obvious choice for the first reading, as well as the primary source for the homily. It would afford the opportunity to preach on baptism, a sacrament that Betty's kin, as Baptists, could appreciate. The presence of the religious "other" in these Baptist sisters and brothers would, in turn, challenge me and my fellow Catholics to a greater awareness of the mystery of our having died with Christ in baptism as that which fundamentally identifies all Christians. The common heritage of baptism needed to serve not only as a point of identity but also difference. Identity and difference both carry possibilities for comfort and challenge. While preaching could provide at least a basic ritual genre common to Catholic and Baptist, extensive liturgical symbolism was the tradition that could well be alien, if not distrusted, by the Baptists (but many modern Catholics, clergy and laity alike, distrust it too!).
There were two ritual elements of the Mass of the Resurrection that I decided to exploit: structurally, the opening rite and, more pervasively, the use of incense. With its welcoming of the assembly gathered at the entrance of the church around the dead body of their loved one, the opening rite would be an opportunity to articulate from the start the baptismal hermeneutic of the entire Christian life now coming to poignant completion in this sister's bodily death. The articulation would come in the form of brief commentary in conjunction with covering the coffin with the white pall and then inviting the assembly to process behind crucifix and coffin so as to bring Betty's body for a final time into the church in a pattern reminiscent of the way those to be baptized are first welcomed therein.
The other ritual element I would exploit would press even more concertedly the difference in religious practice between Roman Catholics and Baptists. I chose to do so out of the conviction that the explicit recognition of difference, not merely in a passing word but in embodied performance, actually serves such an assembly better than seeking only ideas and gestures that are comfortable. My decision was to use the ritual gesture of incense to the maximum extent in the liturgy—at the Gospel, Preparation of the Table, and the Concluding Rite of Farewell. This would need to be done purposefully and beautifully. The homily would be the place to link baptismal images and the purpose of the incensing—the dignity of Betty, who in life and death shares the very dignity of Jesus, the Christ to whom she belongs, the very child of God.
As for the actual performance of the liturgy, things went as I and Sister Alice had planned, but in ways that far exceeded what we could have imagined. As the hour for the funeral Mass arrived, the church space was indeed dotted by about ten parishioners who had responded to Alice's call. When the acolyte and I went, however, to the narthex of the church, where I had instructed the morticians to place the coffin, I discovered a crowd of more than one hundred family members sharply dressed and lined up in single file out the door and along the sidewalk. I could see that they were lined up in expectation of their own religious custom of filing past the open coffin one last time before taking seats for the funeral service. I, however, decided to stick with the Roman liturgy of meeting the body in the coffin at the entryway, with family and friends assembled all around. I greeted the people warmly and expressed sympathy to them in their grief. I then moved into the opening ritual by making an explicit connection between Betty's death with Christ in baptism as her entry into the life of Christ in the Church and the entry now of Betty's body into this church for the community's ritual of commending her to God's promise of her sharing in the glorified body of the risen Christ. For this reason, I concluded, we blanket the coffin in white in reminiscence of her white baptismal garment, and we sprinkle the coffin with water symbolic of baptism. Having done that, I led coffin and congregation behind the symbol of the processional crucifix, carried by the acolyte.
I had done something different than this group of Baptist guests at a Catholic church had expected, but the responsiveness in many of their eyes and the nods of several heads assured me quickly that we were together in this liturgy. That sense of connection was confirmed in the people's vigorous participation in the music, led by the parish's young black cantor at a baby grand piano. The hymns were from the repertoire of the black gospel tradition, and the refrain of the responsorial psalm was of a genre in which these guests could and did readily join. Even more gratifying for me as a preacher and presider was the spontaneous responses of "Amen" and "Preach on" that welled up from the people during the first part of the homily, my exposition on Romans 6. All together, this responsiveness of Betty's family assured me that I was not, as I feared might be the case, off the mark in my pastoral planning, that I, a white Roman Catholic priest from the North, was able to serve and join these Southern black Christians in and through this act of worship. At that point in the homily, I drew confidence from my sense of connection with the people as I moved to my final and large point about the Roman ritual's use of incense.
I noted how I had used the thurible to incense the Book of the Gospels, which had been standing on the altar table from the start of the liturgy. I explained this gesture as a sign of deep reverence for the Word of God which comes alive in the proclamation of scripture in the liturgy. I went on to explain that I would once again avail myself of the thurible at the preparation of the gifts at the beginning of the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The gifts of bread and wine, brought forward by members of the community of faith, the Church which is the Body of Christ, hold a great dignity not only as products of the earth and human labor, and thus symbols of the people themselves, but also by the fact that they were now about to become the eucharistic body and blood of Christ. That dual identity of the body of Christ would become explicit in a solemn ritual gesture. I would incense both the gift-laden table and the assembled people of the church, symbolically proclaiming the one dignity all share together in Christ. But finally, it is that very dignity that would be further manifested in the incensing of Betty's body in the coffin at the conclusion of the funeral Mass. The use of the very same gesture of reverence afforded the embodied presence of Christ in word, sacrament, and assembly would bespeak the reverence in which the church holds Betty, who had so faithfully shared in the Eucharist, and the confidence with which the Church now entrusts her to the eternal banquet with Christ and the saints in heaven.
The Liturgy of the Eucharist followed as I had explained in the homily, but Betty's loved ones surprised and moved me beyond my own expectations for how the Spirit of the Risen Christ might act in the Mass of the Resurrection. During the Sign of Peace I quickly reviewed with Sister Alice my intention to invite as many as would like to come forward in the Communion Rite to receive a blessing from me. Alice once again demonstrated her pastoral wisdom by suggesting, rather, that after I explained the opportunity and purpose of the blessing, she walk among the guests during Communion to ask who might wish to receive it. She would stand by each at their places, and I would come to them. This would not be difficult, since the church was furnished with amply spaced rows of chairs, allowing for flexibility and movement.
As the Communion Rite unfolded, several women and men did indeed ask for the blessing. Still holding the dish of consecrated bread in my left hand, I placed my right on each person's head, tracing the Sign of the Cross on the brow. When I did so with the first person, one of Betty's sisters, she raised her hands in prayer. We remained together in this posture for nearly a minute, with me praying silently while she voiced prayers and acclamations of praise. The others prayed in similar fashion, variously lifting up their arms, swaying rhythmically, speaking or singing their words of gratitude and praise. I was deeply moved as I realized that these Baptist sisters and brothers were entering into communion in a way consonant with their own tradition of ritual prayer. Communion was taking place for and among us in a way I had never experienced, and it was an embodied, incorporated and corporeal, form of communion, indeed.
After the Communion Rite, Alice delivered a reflection on Betty's life that was consoling in its honesty, directness, and graciousness. The Rite of Farewell went as planned. As I slowly circuited the coffin with incense, I sensed an intensity of prayer among us all that I do not think was merely a projection of highly invested emotions on my part.
The Narrative's Invitation: Toward a Liturgical Theology of the BodyAs mentioned above, Chauvet conceptualizes each of us as an "I-body," a human subject whose corporality is, nonetheless, a "triple body" comprised of culture, tradition, and nature. The key to this notion is recognizing that each of us does not have a body but, rather, is a body. The body is natural in its physicality, sharing in the rhythms and forces of the entire physical universe. In this sense, the human body is cosmic, for each person continuously projects oneself into the universe as a macrocosm of one's own physical bodiliness, while also introjecting that universe within oneself as a microcosm of the world. While there is a "giveness" to this ongoing dialogue of our physicality in the universe, the way in which people consciously reflect upon and give meaning to themselves as a body in relation to the cosmos comes about through the mediation of culture and tradition. Each human subject as body constructs meaning for one's life, uniquely according to one's own desires, through a myriad of symbols. Thus, the body is the fundamental functioning symbol of all human experience, shaped through each one's participation with others in the symbol-systems of culture. Chauvet identifies culture with the network of current social customs, values, symbols, and practices of a people as these, for example, are inculcated by parents and other rearing figures to their children. Tradition is the term he uses for those elements of culture that situate a people in a historical relationship to a more or less mythic past, functioning as a living memory that connects them to their ancestors through symbol, story and ritual.
If we return with Chauvet's theory of the human subject as a "triple body" to the narrative of Betty's funeral, we begin to have a way to understand something of how the participants in that liturgy found it personally meaningful. Each came to the liturgy with her or his own felt needs and desires, which were a function of each person's relationship with not only Betty but also God, the Church, and the other participants there. The unique experience of each participant, nonetheless, was only able to come about through our bodiliness, in its social, traditional, and cosmic aspects. The stark reality of the finitude of the physical body, both within its own cycle of aging, health, and illness and as part of the greater cycles of life and death in the universe, was undoubtedly evident to all in our awareness that the body of Betty now lay as a corpse in the coffin. Individuals' reflections on this natural reality might well have been conditioned by their own physical health or age. Awareness of one's body during the funeral liturgy could variably be heightened or numbed, depending on numerous factors, both internal and external to the given person. Different people clearly felt the need to be close to loved ones, even held by them, while others had less physical contact. The space and ritual entailed an array of sights, sounds (especially the music), and smells (notably, the incense), as well as movement and postures (including the raised hands in prayer). These and much more contributed to the physicality of the liturgical experience. They also point toward the roles of culture and tradition.
As a group, we shared the common tradition of our Christian faith as mediated through the books of the Bible, the ancient and ongoing ecclesial practice of assembling for worship, and the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. Still, we cannot simply speak of tradition here, for Christianity has long been comprised of numerous traditions, themselves conditioned by cultural elements. Crucial to the black Baptist worshiping tradition of Betty's siblings and wider circle of family and friends are practices of hospitality, dressing in one's "Sunday best," a vibrant style of preaching that elicits verbal and gestural responses from the congregation and, perhaps of greatest significance, the ample, full-bodied performance of a powerful repertoire of gospel music. It may well be that the music at Betty's funeral provided the deepest resonance (literally) with their own bodily ways of experiencing worship that is "done right." In my own desire as pastoral minister to honor Betty and serve her people well, I made conscious efforts (along with the other ministers involved) to create an hospitable environment for these guests, one that connected at least in some ways with their culture and traditions. On the other hand, in the initial preparations I realized that the ritual gesture from the Roman Catholic repertoire that I believed could powerfully "speak" in the funeral was the use of incense, an action I considered at once to be most risky and most promising. The repeated incensing carried so much promise and risk precisely because it is so bodily, because it leaves the liturgy's participants no choice but to be engaged on many bodily levels. The use of incense during the Rite of Farewell at the conclusion of the Roman funeral Mass is optional. In order for it not to have been merely an arcane decoration or a "Catholic" ritual curiosity, the incense had to be used at its appropriate places throughout the liturgy, connecting the economy of Christian tradition through the Word of God, sacrament of the Eucharist, and lives of the believers assembled.
That latter reflection indicates how any one liturgical gesture can lead us to recognize the different aspects of bodiliness, the various "bodies of worship," that together constitute the practical sacramentality at the heart of living the faith of the Gospel. The work of liturgy entails our coming to know God, the world, and ourselves in the light of the One who has created and redeemed us. The assembled person-bodies together constitute the unique members of the body of Christ, the Church. The ritual body, in word and sacrament, obtains a knowledge of the Church and the world in relationship to God, but always within a body of culture, a social context wherein the story of salvation is mysteriously coming about. The Church takes confidence in a multiplicity of bodies and histories as the very "place" of humanity's redemption on the basis of the Gospel, wherein the Holy Spirit creates, guides, and raises up the body of Jesus as Christ, animates the Church as Christ's body for the life of the world, and sustains believers with the eucharistic body of the Lord at the center of all the ritual sacraments. A theological exploration of these bodies of worship is the task of the chapters that follow.