"I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world."
-Teilhard de Chardin, "Mass on the World" collected in Hymn of the Universe
In the Translators Note from the 1971 edition, the translator apologizes to the reader for the poetic and mystical style of writing. Theology, he says, should be a scientific language to provide precise and detailed accounts about reality. Mystical and poetic language is used only to communicate reality through imagery, evocation, tone and ambiguity of paradox and symbol.
The problem was that de Chardin did not just write a poem or a short story or short non-academic essay. What de Chardin did was even more terrific: he wrote a Mass. While in the Chinese wilderness, de Chardin found himself cut off from his usual means of spiritual nourishment, the Eucharist. After a while the notion came to him that as a priest in the world, what he had to offer God was to find the presence of Christ in all the day's living, all the day's work and the bounty of creation. From this revelation he wrote his "Mass on the World," collected in his short book Hymn of the Universe.
It is hard to believe the translator, but for him, the Mass -- the worship experience of the community -- is unfit for consideration as theological reflection due to its being poetry. As poetry the Mass only communicates reality. Theology is supposed to play a more scientific role of delivering absolutes truths to us.
Living in a world after 9/11, we have all been confronted by the actions of absolutists, be they fundamentalists Muslims who blew up the towers or the fundamentalist Christians who started wars and illegal prisons over the destroyed towers. When we make religions about absolute truths then we freeze them in the past instead of recognizing them as living traditions that grow and breathe in the present.
In Thorton Wilder's Our Town the Stage Manager is asked who understands the nature of death and eternity. He responds, "None but the saints and poets." Wilder's brother was a biblical scholar and theologian who wrote the book Theopoetics. Amos Niven Wilder argued that theology must be poetic, or articulated in the images, contexts, hungers, desires, questions, passions and concerns of the current age. Niven Wilder wanted a theology of the cross that spoke to the "believer, skeptic and secular mystic".
During the last US election controversy erupted around Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor, and his comments. What we were seeing was a Black Liberation Theology that was rooted in the lived and true experience of the African-American community. What he was doing was constructing a theology that was poetry -- reflecting on Christian images in light of the African American experience.
In her book Wisdom and Metaphor poet and philosopher Jan Zwicky argues for a poetic form of doing philosophy, one rooted in an understanding of metaphor. As she sees it, metaphor teaches us to see "X (as Y) and at the same time X is not Y." In her introduction she says we are not wise in a vacuum but are wise about things: people, situations and contexts. People who think metaphorically think truly, as their thinking follows the shape of the world.
Zwicky says that metaphor, as a philosophical device, is a form of seeing-as. Out in the Chinese wilderness de Chardin may have agreed. The poem -- in de Chardin's case his "Mass" -- opens up our longing and asks us to hold together a variety of images in their contradictions and similarities. Theologically it means that the theological task is less scientific-philosophical but more an act of seeing-as. The Mass de Chardin performed did not challenge Catholic liturgical authority, reform the church or introduce sweeping panentheist theological directions. But as a poem it drew its readers into a form of seeing-as that allowed a reimagining of the relationship between God and creation, and a meditation on the real presence of Christ in the elements as the story of God's relationship with all of material creation.
Too often we hear clergy complain about the pulpit-pew gap when it comes to theology. We do a good job of educating our clergy but are unusually poor when it comes to educating our laity on various theological methods. Most laity get the majority of their theology from worship -- hymns, liturgies, praise songs -- than any other source. In this de Chardin's "Mass" is not a deviation from theology but a true expression of it. It does theology with the congregation and not against the grain of it.
Poetry and metaphor are important as ways of doing theology. In a world so divided by absolute claims, using metaphor and poetry allows us to have room for flex. It allows congregations to see-as as they wrestle with the vagaries and uncertainties of life. To see-as theologically means to enter into Zwicky's ideas on metaphor and create poetries that mark our progress on the way of Jesus. We seek less to tell the absolutes of what we must believe and more to articulate the poetries that express how we believe and which draw us deeper contemplation and discipleship.
Jason Derr: A New Conception of the Trinity for Post-Trinity Faith
Hmm. The key word is "absolute" isn't it? When removed from that negatively anti Islamist sentence (and make no doubt, everything is about Islam), we realize that we don't like the truth i.e. those of 'us' who refuse to acknowledge that there is a right way and a wrong way.
Poetry as a spiritual process is one thing (and perhaps the only thing) but to say that it has any ability to 'educate' when dictated by the confused....well. It is no wonder that Christian religious poetry is defunct. It confuses the reader.
A young poet that I know was deliberating on the complexity of the dual nature of "Christ" and "God" and when I told him they are not one and that is what perplexes him.....silence ensues and then anger. Until those who are confused start listening to those who are not confused there is only going to be more error.
"Religious knowledge" is an oxymoron.
J.B.
7/8/10
nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on nothing; it proceeds by no
authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing and admits of no
conclusion."
-- Thomas Paine
Theology is the study of gods. The difficulty is that there is no evidence to study. The whole thing is a humanly manufactured fantasy requiring faith.
Go figure.
peace
The apostle John had a vision of kings sitting on thrones and animals that had several pairs of wings etc...This event happened in the same place, in the pineal glad in the limbic system of the brain. When one crosses over, in the physical realm Rumi, the poet puts it this way: I have been waiting for you, behold, your house is furnished.........Symbols are all around us yet we can't see, and this is why Jesus said, "It grieves him to see people live in poverty.." Again of creation, or the change from the spiritual to the physical is that fire is in water, and water is in fire, creation. You can witness this when you see a lightning bolt come out of a cloud, [Creation]. :)
This whole topic is beyond me, and after a couple of my silliest comment efforts, I vowed not to post in the Religion section of HPOST. And this one does not count, because it is historical background. From the invention of musical notation in the 8th Century or so to the first musical setting of the Ordinary, the Mass of Notre Dame, by Machaut in the 14th Century liturgical music climbed a steep, steep road. And the Church fathers often looked askance at the sensuous excess of this or that innovation. Show biz. Tacky, ungodly. Enter Machaut with the first complete musical mass, a string of ballades that set the Kyrie, the Credo, and so on. Very pretty. Unprecedented. Soon after, a Council of Avignon committee of censors tossed all "complicated" music out of the Catholic
service. It was to remain so for a century, if I remember my music history 101--been a long time--
correctly. Respectfully submitted to this discussion
Unless you're making the point that progress in bringing theology in synch with liturgy usually comes in glacial speeds in the catholic church. So that the difficulty concerning Teilhard de Chardin's mass aren't news in the sense that not even Joe Bach himself could have gotten into a church a century before himself.
dressed in art getting 86'd from the Church as untoward. The Counter Reformation of course
did discover show biz, and the history of written European music is dominated in
the Renaissance by the modal polyphonic Roman Catholic masters. In the Baroque, the Protestants, to the extent that they could evade their own censorship in such as the Pietists, struck back in a manner of speaking, culminating in the cantatas, masses, and oratorios
of Bach and Haendel. And Monteverdi's giant vespers in 1610 was an unprecedented breakthrough that sported musical experiments that brought in his own revolutionary work with opera. Here the Baroque era musical tradition of high drama and knife edge contrast, unknown
to the Renaissance,was almost single handedly invented by one man. Think Caravaggio
turned into music.
But, when a metaphor is powerful and seductive it also becomes easy to forget that it's a metaphor... and that can be problematic. By its very nature, a metaphor highlights certain aspects of a complex concept and diminishes others. That makes the metaphor useful and accurate IN a particular context and FOR a particular goal, but it also means the metaphors are by their very nature only A way of viewing something.... not THE way of viewing something.
When you become too devoted to one metaphor, you lose sight of all of the other different metaphors that are JUST AS TRUE.... but in different ways, capturing different aspects or attributes of the thing you are trying to understand.
So I'm all in favor of metaphor -- both religious and non -- but like any enticing tool it must be used with cautions and caveats.
In 1914, on the eve of the First World War, Carnegie founded the Church Peace Union (CPU), a group of leaders in religion, academia, and politics.
He donated huge sums to and towards universities, libraries, institutes, churches, foundations, etc.
He was a member of the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York when he died in 1919.
The church's most important care for the folk is ritual in my opinion. We mark some of the most important events in our lives there: we bury people, we marry people. Many an atheist and agnostic occupy pews for the art and ritual alone.
So I create special events for churches to help them celebrate themselves. A new kind of ritual that does not require the mindless repetion of dumb phrases and the tedium of lectures.
"Me,
We."
-- Muhammad Ali
On the Antiquity of Microbes
Adam
Had 'em.
For others among us here, poetry is itself suspect, since it lacks mathematical precision or strong truth-conditions. I am thankful not to be in this second group.
I agree with the author on the primacy of religious practice over religious theory. But for me the theory (theology) is itself nothing but poetry of a peculiar kind.
Now if we could all express our preferences (or lack thereof) with civility and thoughtfulness...
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.