Tag Archive for ‘sacramental imagination’
This, from a Commonweal blog post on the topic of the loss of the old-school Catholic culture and what that means for the future:
“Every single 60-ish or 70-ish year old Commonweal Catholic can tell you of memories of various thick, ‘ghetto’ practices that imprinted Catholicism into their DNA. The felt banners and coloring books of my generation’s Catholicism neither inspired nor repelled; they just made Catholicism trivial and easily surrendered, for they never made a substantial claim in the first place. The irony is that such a culture–which is ‘given,’ automatic, un-self-conscious, atmospheric, osmotic–now has to be intentionally and consciously constructed so that it can be organic and automatic in the future.”
How do we go about that, constructing something that is automatic and not self-conscious, in an intentionally self-aware way? It seems impossible on the face of it. Yet we have a model.
Think about the way we treat traditional, ethnic music, like for example how the Chieftains play Irish music. They play all the old tunes in an authentic way, but do it consciously. They don’t play Irish music on traditional Irish instruments because that’s all they know or because they only have one fiddle. They do it because they want to. They have many alternatives but choose to make this music. They’ve learned about it and play it in a way that’s both authentic yet unique to our time, with other artists like Sting or the Rolling Stones, Sinéad O’Connor, and Tom Jones (in their album The Long Black Veil), or fusing it with other musical styles to create something new yet recognizable as part of the tradition.
We can never recreate the “thick, ghetto practices” (and who would want to) that gave us the old school atmospheric, osmotic Catholicism of old, but we can understand and take from the riches of the past to recreate the best of the past today, in a way that is true to our time yet yet recognizable as part of the Catholic tradition.
These new traditions may never be “un-self-conscious” but there’s no reason they can’t be atmospheric: as rich in metaphor, aura and beauty as anything in the past.
Tags: loss of the sacred, power of the faithful, sacramental imagination, self-awareness, tradition recreating itself
What is sacramental imagination?
From Andrew Greeley:
“Religion… is imagination before it’s anything else. The Catholic imagination is different from the Protestant imagination. You know that: Flannery O’Connor is not John Updike.”
“The central symbol (of religion) is God. One’s “picture” of God is in fact a metaphorical narrative of God’s relationship with the world and the self as part of the world… The Catholic “classics” assume a God who is present in the world, disclosing Himself in and through creation. The world and all its events, objects, and people tend to be somewhat like God. The Protestant classics, on the other hand, assume a God who is radically absent from the world, and who discloses (Himself) only on rare occasions (especially in Jesus Christ and Him crucified). The world and all its events, objects, and people tend to be radically different from God.”
More at: http://www.alyosha.com/si/index.html
And here’s from another article at:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/august-5-2009/the-things-of-this-world/3846/
“Theologically, Christianity provides a language—and some doctrinal and historical metaphors or benchmarks—for two such imaginations: the sacramental and the dialectical. The first is broadly linked to Catholic ways of seeing and understanding God and the world, and the second, equally broadly and generally, to a Protestant sensibility.”
“Drawing on the work of Catholic theologian David Tracy, University of Notre Dame theology professor Mary Catherine Hilkert, in her book NAMING GRACE, gives a useful and succinct definition of the two imaginations: “The dialectical imagination stresses the distance between God and humanity, the hiddeness and absence of God, the sinfulness of human beings, the paradox of the cross, the need for grace as redemption and reconciliation…and the not-yet character of the promised reign of God. The sacramental imagination…emphasizes the presence of the God who is self-communicating love, the creation of human beings in the image of God…the mystery of the incarnation.”
Tags: loss of the sacred, sacramental imagination
I think the thing that’s missing, and the thing that would very much appeal to young people, are rituals that are more rich in what Andrew Greeley (hardly a conservative) calls the sacramental imagination. The Vatican II rediscovery of Scripture was marvelous but I think an unintended consequence was the thought that “Meaning could be conveyed better in word than in gesture, better in print than in procession, better in concept than in image.” (The Four Cultures of the West – John O’Malley, great book.)
As a result, church turned into a didactic exposition of texts rather than an experience of the sacred. In a play, rigorous adherence to the rules of drama, and the audience’s understanding of those rules, lead to the willing suspension of disbelief. I would likewise think that rigorous adherence to the rubrics of liturgy, and the congregation’s understanding of those rubrics, would lead to the creation of belief and to an entering into the liturgy which would allow the individuals in the congregation to let their souls be touched by and enriched by the grace of the goings on. This is exactly the involvement that the constant talking and chumminess of too many liturgies so effectively destroys.
Archbishop Gotfried Danneels has a great article on this and other thoughts on the liturgy in an America Magazine article:
Another good article I found a while back also struck me as capturing what has been lost. The philosopher and liturgist Romano Guardini visited the basilica of Monreale in 1929, and told this story in his “Voyage in Sicily.”
“There are different means of prayerful participation. One is realized by listening, speaking, gesturing. But the other takes place through watching. The first way is a good one, and we northern Europeans know no other. But we have lost something that was still there at Monreale: the capacity for living-in-the-gaze, for resting in the act of seeing, for welcoming the sacred in the form and event, by contemplating them.”
Tags: loss of the sacred, sacramental imagination
