One February morning in the art studios, I stand beside Mr. Edgar, a faithful Circle participant. Weaving at his loom, he shows me how the shuttle fits through the open spaces he calls “the warp.” He ponders aloud the multiple meanings of “warp.” It’s a funny word, he says. Warp can also mean stubborn. And the sun warps things. He takes pleasure in following a strange thread of divergent meanings. (Later he will do the same with the word shuttle, creating laughter in the room with a joke about Henry Kissinger and his shuttle diplomacy.)
Mr. Edgar’s musings have triggered my reflection on the multiple meanings of warp. When I get home, I search the web. An online dictionary tells me that “a full definition of warp” means:
1 a: a series of yarns extended lengthwise in a loom and crossed by the weft
b: foundation, base <the warp of the economic structure is agriculture—American Guide Series: North Carolina>
2 a rope for warping or mooring a ship or boat
a: a twist or curve that has developed in something originally flat or straight <a warp in a door panel>
b: a mental aberration.1
The warp appears as structure and anchor as well as deviation or abnormality. Using these three definitions, and following the thread of Mr. Edgar’s free associations, I reflect on how the warp of perceived mental aberration affects the warp of the liturgical structure. Once gathered into Christian liturgy, disability must twist and curve the standards of participation and nonparticipation of individuals. The challenge is to identify liturgical forms for mooring a community to one another and to God that are also warped or idiosyncratic in their departure from the formal expectations of communal gathering.
What might such flexible and adaptive liturgical forms look like? In the case of Sacred Family, I observe that liturgical forms require those performative artistries of social interaction, improvised by congregants that tether to one another those gathered for common prayer. For art is more than texts and objects; it includes performances by individuals or groups that assume the possibility of a relation or connection with an audience—much as theater and dance do. Thus, we might say that liturgical forms make possible the art of communication with and through God as well as with and through the worshipping assembly.
The novelist and literary critic Ali Smith explores the concept of form, making sense of the work it does for art. Smith imagines the hostility that might occur between different forms or between form and formlessness, until there is a word, in the beginning, that traces a relationship, a new form:
Until, that is, God, or some such artist, starts throwing weight around. Form, from the Latin forma, meaning shape. Shape, a mold; something that holds or shapes; a species or kind; a pattern or type; a way of being; order, regularity, system. It once meant beauty but now that particular meaning’s obsolete. It means style and arrangement, structural unity in music, literature, painting etc.; ceremony; behavior; condition of fitness or efficiency. It means the inherent nature of an object, that in which the essence of a thing consists. It means a long seat, or a bench, or a school class, and also the shape a hare makes in the grass with its body for a bed. It’s versatile. It holds us, it molds us, it identifies us, it shows us how to be, it gives us a blueprint in life and art, it’s about essentiality, and several of us can sit on it at once.2
Shared forms of communication and the work of deviation from common forms are both vital for good art and good liturgy. Forms are pleasing to us because we can share them, and we desire different forms to work our minds differently and to offer different means of identification. Thus, the forms we rely on to mold us, that offer a shared benchmark for identification, also require deviation.3 While form is a matter of rules and expectations, it also frequently bends those rules, and emerges through dialogue and “crossover between forms”: “Through such dialogue and argument, form, the shaper and molder, acts like the other thing called mold, endlessly breeds forms from forms.”4 Bending the rules makes the viewer reconsider how they see and understand the art in which they participate. Moving creatively through deviation, forms have an inherent affinity to the apparent edges to which they respond. Art forms often take shape in response to sharp edges of difference that can wound us but can also form border spaces where the magical resides.5 The warp that both anchors and is an aberration is necessary for good art to engage our minds.
We can apply this understanding of art to the liturgy of Sacred Family; when the Spirit of God moves around the edges of community, giving fleshly form to the worship of a local assembly, there must be forms for different embodied minds to communicate with one another. Love, refusing any coercive uniform pattern, weaves the perceived periphery into the warp of community through forms of their own co-creation. Not always recognized as liturgical forms, these unconventional shapes take their cues from the edges of those shaping the gathering, weaving into the fabric of community those at the perceived margins.
In this chapter, I identify relational art forms that weave those who gather into a community across difference. Conventionally, common prayer assumes certain common forms, and those forms typically assume particular bodies and abilities. How then to figure those who are unable to participate in the same way in common prayer? How to think of their presence, their belonging, their connectedness or disconnectedness from the other worshippers? During my time as a researcher, the metaphor and image of “weaving” became central to my understanding of how a community of difference is held together across persistent hierarchies and divisions—without ignoring the differing abilities, statuses, and resources of members. Using the metaphor of weaving, I evoke liturgical art forms by which congregants create more flexible and adaptive relational patterns of belonging that are not premised on conformity to one liturgical practice or norm.
There is a beloved song sung once a month at Worship Live. Its high point, a moment of emotional release in the vocal sounds and faces of those who sing, is the chorus: “Weave, weave, weave us together, weave us together in unity and love.”6 One of the gardeners, Joshua, first sings this song to me at a plant sale. We are talking about the upcoming Worship Live when, faltering, a tentative smile on his face, he tries to sing this song alone. I later recognize the melody at Worship Live when some people dance in the aisles, and the rest of us hold hands and sway back and forth in rhythmic time. Congregants move their bodies to this chorus with a force of participation rarely found at other moments of communal gathering. During the after-service dinner, another community member, Alexander, tells me how much he enjoys this service. He was disappointed last week when he didn’t get to weave. “My roommate just doesn’t understand that I can’t weave alone in my apartment,” he jokes.
In a Circle newsletter, a staff person, Eve, employs the concept of “weaving” publicly to honor the memory of a relationship between two Circle artists. The story, entitled “Woven Together,” recounts an unconventional kind of love story:
Grace Jones, long red curls wild like in a fairy tale, suffering from schizophrenia, the effects of homelessness and medical neglect, the champion of 83-year-old artist, Mr. Cornelius. He, quiet and undemanding, smiling, his eyes cast down, could easily have been disengaged but Grace took him under her wing, encouraging, praising, and cajoling, seeing that he was noticed and provided for in and out of the studio, his seat belt fastened, his meat cut up. Her New York accent resounding across the Parish Hall: “Mr. Cornelius needs more bread,” “Get Mr. Cornelius some tea,”—and woe betide a driver ready to load up a van before Mr. Cornelius was finished eating.
Grace died last August. We miss her dearly. Mr. Cornelius is still painting and weaving. One of his works stands in the sanctuary, part of Sacred Family’s banner, a weaving by several of the Circle artists. We are all woven together—unintentionally, but here we all are, together. Some sent to the Circle by our personal care homes, some sent by a less discernible hand, all woven together in unexpected mutuality.
Weaving, the author observes, is often unintentional or unexpected when it takes a concrete form: something happens between Grace and Mr. Cornelius that makes more space for both within the church’s liturgy.
Sacred Family is a place that makes space for differences by multiplying the spaces of its weeklong liturgy. At the same time, the dangers of divided spaces, arranged in a hierarchy of value, can segregate congregants one from another rather than unfold in relationship to one another. Across these power lines, community members, with very different backgrounds and resources, claim and perform a belonging to Sacred Family as community. They improvise forms through which they weave themselves and others into the fabric of community. The weaving is both active and passive as the stories at the beginning of the chapter reflect. Alexander comes to the church in order to weave because he is not able to weave alone. Joshua holds hands with others and beseeches God, “Weave us together in love,” implying that the church is unable to weave without a divine accomplice. Eve describes the weaving as something that inevitably happens to those who gather as they spend time together. Weaving entails and assumes both ability and inability, both agency and passivity, confusing these categories without dissolving them.
If weaving is an embodied art of holding community, one of the rules of this form is clear: weaving happens with and through particular others, not so much in the shape of a gift, one to or for another, but in the complex pattern of artful relationships. I could argue that Grace helped Mr. Cornelius, or that Mr. Cornelius allowed Grace to be his advocate, but I read their story as one in which she participated in Sacred Family through a desire to watch out for him; in turn, his engagement was altered by her presence. His desires and needs drew attention in a different way than if she were not around. Their presences interpolated one another. Now Grace is gone, and Mr. Cornelius continues to be woven into the community with and through others. He was not dependent on Grace; rather, while she lived, they created something together for the community. Weaving depends on who is beside whom and what this accompaniment creates for good or for ill.
Disability organizations like L’Arche, an international network of communities with intellectually disabled persons as core members, emphasize accompaniment as necessity for communities of difference. Jean Vanier, Catholic theologian and founder of L’Arche, describes the power of accompaniment for each one of us. To find one’s way along a path to freedom and to grow in one’s vocation requires another’s proximity: “One of the most important factors for inner liberation is how we are accompanied. We must ask ourselves: Who is walking with me?”7 Vanier writes of accompaniment as an intentional relationship and a mutual exchange: the accompanied and the accompanier give and receive from one another as they journey together, growing one another into the truth of the sacredness of human life, which is always both verity and unfathomable mystery. The person who accompanies us is one who “can stand beside us on the road to freedom, who loves us and understands our life.” Vanier names those who often fulfill this role—a parent, a therapist, a teacher, a friend, a minister—again evoking intentional relationships over time as necessary for the freedom to love ourselves and others.8 While Vanier emphasizes the profound importance of intentional accompaniment as mutual gift, accompaniment at Sacred Family also takes shape through another form: fluctuating, elusive, emerging for a time only to disappear again, and less a gift than a shared creation that arises from occupying a particular space and time together.
At Sacred Family, some congregants benefit from intentional accompaniment as part of their everyday lives, but mentoring and advocacy are also privileges that not everyone’s circumstances allow for in the same ways. Within the liturgy of Sacred Family, less organized and stable forms of accompaniment are equally important and more readily available. Improvised forms of belonging shift among different persons. They often involve more than two. Two or three people happen to share a bench; together they shape the meaning of a moment or gathering for those who are beside them. Their sitting together may be intentional or unintentional.
I become aware of this pattern when I intentionally choose to occupy different spaces in the sanctuary. I experience the same liturgical forms, such as scripture reading, prayer, and communion, differently depending on the people with whom I navigate participation. The same prayer prayed next to a person who is exhausted, bored, or in pain sounds and signifies differently than if I pray alongside an excited or attentive person, or if I happen to sit beside a person intent on filling the small space between us with commentary, regardless of the authorial voice of the one presiding over the liturgy. My co-participants and I shape the liturgy through our divergent responses to each other and to the forms at hand; together we improvise access to the standard liturgical forms through our interaction. In this way, even a conventional liturgical form is constantly morphing through relationship to those who sit or stand nearby.
For example, when I sit next to Annie on the left side of the sanctuary, she is more likely to sing some of the hymns because I am near. I help her navigate them, my finger running across the page, so that she can follow words she struggles to read at the pace of Sacred Family’s liturgical time. Annie almost never stands, and so if I am to hear her voice, and she is to hear mine, I must sit to experience the service with her even if many around us are standing according to the expectations of the liturgical form. Annie sings with me for a time and then turns away from the hymn and back to her portfolio of poems and drawings. Turning, she invites me into her devotional form, and so I spend part of the service reading the rhythmic prayers she writes in the notebooks she carries. Our communal worship involves helping her spell the words of her prayers. While singing, I acknowledge the portfolio of human and animal faces that also accompany her.9 Through singing, lining hymns, whispering, drawing, and spelling, we shape one another’s experiences of the liturgy. We both distract and focus one another. We mold Christian worship through our encounters with one another. I cannot get to God by another way.
Such encounters rely on the premise of incarnation, the possibility of bodily encounter within the assembly. This significance of relationships liturgical theologians Andrea Bieler and Luise Schottroff emphasize in their descriptions of Christian sacramentality: “sacraments are not things we possess; rather, they are relational events and personal encounters among people and God. These encounters are always embodied.”10 If, as theologian and sociologist Nancy Eiesland observes, “a body, perhaps especially a disabled body, is not a space one occupies alone,” the challenge is to account for how bodies encounter one another, incorporating others into their own sense of flesh, without losing their particularity.11 “This alternative understanding of embodiment,” Eiesland suggests, “is a social accomplishment, achieved through attentiveness to the needs, limits, and bounty of the body in relation to others.”12 Confusing clear categories of autonomy or dependence, relational encounters illumine the art form of one beside another.
For example, Roy shows up for yoga every Tuesday but initially chooses not to participate directly in the movement and breathing that joins the encircled group together. Rather, he occupies a pew near the yoga circle and frequently distracts the group with stories from his childhood that seem irrelevant to the postures the group is assuming. Aware of Roy on the periphery, the yoga teacher, Laura, weaves him into the circle as she engages his stories and often brings them to a conclusion. As she weaves him into our common yoga practice, she taps into his vivid imagination. Laura suggests that we imagine stirring custard, as we move our arms in a great circular motion in front of us. Roy joins in by changing the imagined custard to applesauce. Roy brings up sawing wood, and Laura uses that image to guide our stretching motions. She explains that these concrete images help our brains communicate with our bodies so that we understand what we are supposed to do. While Roy’s presence often interrupts us, distracting us for a time, he inevitably morphs the form of yoga for us; through Roy and Laura’s co-creation we move and breathe yoga into a form that fits this community.
On a morning that Roy misses yoga, we worry about him and are grateful when he rushes in, breathlessly, halfway through the session. Apologizing for his lateness, he sits faithfully beside the circle, both participant and nonparticipant, as important to the group as any of us who sit within it. After many months on the periphery, Roy explicitly joins the circle, sitting inside it although he still participates intermittently in poses and breathing practices.
Artistries in the yoga circle also include Marvin, a blind participant, who often worries aloud that he is not able to follow the verbal commands because he cannot see the motions we all make together. He asks Laura to repeat phrases, which she finds difficult because she wants to create silent pauses for the circle to meditate within. One day, Marvin occupies a chair next to Laura to make way for a person joining the group halfway through the session. He discovers that sitting beside her, closer to her voice and her body movements, alters his own participation and, therefore, hers, enabling her to instruct less than when he sits further away from her. Rearranging the relationships in the circle rearranges the shape that easy yoga takes at Sacred Family. Marvin beside Laura, and Laura near Roy artfully make space for a different form of chair yoga, just as sitting beside Annie changes my prayer and Annie’s poetry.
The literary critic and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reminds us of the importance of prepositions and stresses the possibilities of the preposition beside, conjuring what work this word can do for our perception, in place of the behind or before of most interpretation:
Beside is an interesting preposition also because there’s nothing very dualistic about it; a number of elements may lie alongside one another, though not an infinity of them. Beside permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking: noncontradiction or the law of the excluded middle, cause versus effect, subject versus object. Its interest does not, however, depend on a fantasy of metonymically egalitarian or pacific relations, as any child knows who’s shared a bed with siblings. Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations.13
While we may be tempted to interpret relationships in terms of what came before (what makes these two similar or different? why does one respond in a certain way?), or what is behind such relationships (who does what to or for whom?), beside instead focuses attention on an expansive range of possibilities and interactions that emerge when one, several, or many reside near others.
Sacred Family’s art forms evoke the liturgical possibilities of beside and with and through. They involve individual abilities but are not premised on a similar capacity in each individual. The proclaimed, capitalized We of the liturgical participation assumes a unity that is impossible for Sacred Family or any church community to achieve. In different ways, the I of Grace or Mr. Cornelius is able and unable to be part of the We. Between this We and I occurs the small we of Grace and Cornelius or the we of Laura and Roy and Marvin, or the we of Annie and me. This small artful motif warps the community at a certain point in time as the we of each constellation of social interactions weaves itself into the Circle liturgy. This we becomes an art form because of its functions in the community, the individualism and communalism it disables as well as the individual differences it recognizes and the community it enables.
The we that shapes liturgical form is difficult to recognize because We tend to speak of the diverse gifts of community as distributed across individuals: Grace has certain gifts and Mr. Cornelius has others. As gifted givers, they each offer something to God and to each other. Truthful from a certain vantage point, such language does not render how Grace’s activities are elicited, contained, and recognized within the responses, resonances, smiles, and silences of Mr. Cornelius. He is implicated in what she can and cannot do. When she dies, his presence and participation are rearranged and reinterpreted through the others who now participate in Sacred Family through him. There is no one-to-one correlation with such gift giving, where some are able to give and others not, but a pattern of co-creation. Through a theological lens, I might identify God as the One beside us, who makes room for the smaller configurations of persons that improvise the access that good liturgy requires.
Christian theology often interprets good human interactions in terms of charitable dualisms. Givers and receivers are divided, even if the givers also discover something in return. “I came to give but I received so much” is the sentiment I hear from newcomers to Sacred Family. Such a way of dividing human participation resides within Sacred Family’s own liturgy: congregants are often encouraged to give thanks for those who give to the community. Such thanksgiving explicitly recognizes the gifts of those who are financially and physically able to sustain the liturgy through liturgical leadership, making food, financial support, and volunteer work. Givers also have mental capacities that enable their giving. The ability to give is highlighted in liturgical forms that name God as the one who has given so much for us that we want to offer something in return (even if what we return to God is already God’s). Such descriptions of human interaction inevitably divide some from others. Recognized forms of participation judge the merits of different contributions to liturgical form.
The arts, religious scholar Anthony Pinn argues, are valuable to religion and to theology in part because some forms of artistic expression evade the modes of judgment and discipline with which we divide some forms of embodied life from others. Pinn highlights particular visual art forms, such as abstract expressionism, outsider art, and pop art, as “an important way of viewing and exploring intersections between experience and representation, including exchanges between the body (material and discursive) and the social body.” Such art possesses the possibility to interrogate existing social structures while not abstracting the human body from modes of participation in the art that is created, “uncovering and bringing into question modalities of interaction and relationship” through which we derive the meanings of embodied life.14
Occurring at the intersection of embodied experience and the representation of the body, such artistic expression can help theology to question the fundamental structures of reality and to communicate new meanings and possibilities.15 Pinn argues that certain art forms “require of viewers a surrender of the safety of visual comprehension” because they cannot be understood through the eye alone, which “allows distance and disconnection.”16 Such art forms make no sense without observers altering their relationships to what is communicated; correlatively, they compel the observer to seek an alternate sense for what is not easily understood within shared discourse.17 They are both interrogative and connective, creatively disregarding the boundaries we put around human bodies and possibilities.
In my reading of Pinn, such art forms do what liturgy often fails to do because they invite and create more flexibility and fluidity for complex experiences of embodiment, tracing them without forcing them into one mold.18 Theological discourse regarding the human body tends to sharpen the edges (the structures and frameworks) that divide or reduce the complex experiences of embodied life.19 Such edges are unavoidable because of religious desires to norm those who participate within religious traditions, even if we interpret these forms as divinely intended toward human goodness and freedom. We elevate certain humans as being more worthy of participation than others: some as able to give or receive as others cannot; some as dependent on the autonomy of others. For Pinn, art elicits theological imagination because it can help theologians ask questions and envision alternative arrangements of bodies in time and space insofar as an “artist seeks to give new dimension to reality as encounter by the observer” and at the same time “also pushes the boundaries of what is real about reality, and what is the nature and meaning of relationship between humans and the world.”20
While Pinn thinks theologically through popular art forms, Don Saliers writes of good Christian liturgy itself as holding the possibility of such an interrogative art form, the art of receiving God’s future for the world in an “otherwise way.” According to Saliers, “Liturgy is a common art of the people of God in which the community brings the depth of emotion of our lives to the ethos of God. In these acts we discover who we are, but also and primarily, we discover who God is in this art.”21 This is possible, he argues, in part because of the depth and breadth of liturgical forms that assume and require a spectrum of emotional affect, all of the varied postures of a real human life in discovery of the “mixed texture of the world.”22 An adequate liturgy provides a form for the complexity of human experience to take shape as enacted prayer, as we remember the whole of ourselves and the whole of our world to God, both the beauty and the terror.23 Liturgical forms require complex embodiment through multiple forms of prayer: praising, thanking, blessing, invoking, beseeching, lamenting, confessing, and interceding.24 This diversity of liturgical forms “wait[s] for us” to bring the breadth and depth of what we experience, sharpening and bridging the edges of human pathos and divine ethos. Liturgy as prayer is an art form through which we “receive [our] own mystery back.”25
In this way, Saliers argues that liturgy itself has the potential to counter the dominant perception of the world and its content, raising questions about the adequacy of the language we have for describing our own lives and the divine. The art of the assembly is revelatory when it animates the full “emotional range” of human life, from “ecstatic praise to the depths of lamentation” to “daily struggle to be human” without dividing some possibilities from others.26 Therefore, it requires both discipline and time “to become an artful symbol of the church in communion and dialogue with God.”27 The art of liturgy also occurs through limit. It creates the possibilities that we know and experience more than we can sing, say, know, lament, and confess on our own. At the limits of our individual abilities, the art of the (communal) liturgy takes shape.28
With Pinn and Saliers then, we might ask whether and how the art of Sacred Family’s liturgy resists dividing some from others and represents the full range of what it means to be human. To do so, it must represent the real limits and inabilities of all who gather as well as the real possibilities of connection and interdependence. Rather than new gifts and abilities, a new ableism within the liturgy, I look for a different frame to describe ecclesial relationships and to reconfigure the ideals of liturgical ableism. Such art forms embody an alternative liturgical imagination about what forms of participation and nonparticipation in community mean.
These interdependent art forms do not dispel the normative habits through which Sacred Family orchestrates community life. Instead, they keep visible, audible, and palpable the differences within community while at the same time transforming the possibilities for participation and exclusion. Watching two people walk together, leaning on one another, or playing bingo through the other’s presence suggests an alternate response to assumed liturgical capacity. It reforms a church that often assumes capacities either on the level of individuals or on the level of the community as a whole. To mark this as an art form, rather than as a reciprocal gift between two people, or as the intentional relationship between a dependent person and an independent one, is to emphasize what is created through relationships in the community. Such new creations become possible within particular, shifting configurations of people, threads of lives coming together and then apart. Such patterns would be difficult to prescribe ahead of time. They emerge from this community’s life together as congregants improvise forms that weave each life into another’s. Such art forms have theological significance for a community where God’s presence and transforming love are often claimed through sermon, song, and in conversation.
I think, for example, of Timothy, whom I perceive as a difficult individual and with whom a number of community members struggle from time to time. I could describe him as unresponsive and unaware of those around him, contrarian, and frequently oblivious to the flow of communal activity. I could venture that he does not give much to this community—a nonparticipant in the liturgical life of Sacred Family except that he is always present. During my time at Sacred Family, I find him one of the most difficult people to interpret or understand, opaque in his intentions and forms of interaction, but I cannot discount him in this narrative of Sacred Family because several other people in the community alter my sense of him. Through them, I come to recognize his presence in the ongoing creation of Sacred Family. Timothy often shuffles around with headphones over his ears, isolating himself from others through sound. On a particular day, I find him sitting next to Victoria. He has placed his headphones over her ears. She is moving her body to his music, so she can’t hear me when I greet her.
What is she listening to? I ask Timothy, since she can’t hear me and because I am taken by her absorption within the music.
She doesn’t know, he tells me, and he laughs with pleasure at the musical mystery he has created for her. She begins to move, dancing to the sounds I cannot hear, and in order to communicate with her, I dance, too, following her gestures to music I also cannot hear.
Now I got you both dancing, he says smiling, ostensibly pleased by his work of moving us together.
Timothy does not become an easier person for me to grasp, but somehow through Victoria, I have access to Timothy, or Victoria beside Timothy is no longer able to hear me and I must speak through him to find her, or together Timothy creates the occasion for dancing through which Victoria and I communicate. It seems inconsequential, I know. Such a moment in a parking lot waiting for a van, the form is so brief it can hardly be captured. Still, it alters my perception of Timothy, and my understanding of his relationship through Victoria to Sacred Family.
At another moment, I find Timothy with Kayla. She has enlisted his help in making her art project, so that he hovers nearby to prepare the materials she is using. He comes when she calls out to him.
‘I need you to cut the brown,’ she tells him, pointing to the color of tile she needs.
‘What do you need me to cut?’ he asks, shuffling over to her.
‘Make it look like this.’ She holds up another piece as an example for him.
‘I’m going to try to do that,’ he tells her, willing to work with her.
I offer him my seat so he can sit next to her and assist her in the creation of her art. I am surprised by his sudden attentiveness, his willingness to do a menial task for Kayla, a task she is able to do but has no desire to complete on her own.
What makes Timothy behave this way? we might ask. Are Victoria and Kayla the cause of Timothy’s participation? Do they give him something to do and enable his flourishing at these moments? This interpretation is possible. But it also simplifies the complexity of the arrangement. Sedgwick reminds us that the great difficulty in acknowledging the influences of one beside another is that we desire to determine the world through cause and effect.29 Rather than getting behind Timothy’s action, we can reformulate the question: What happens through Timothy when certain people are beside him? Timothy next to Victoria or near Kayla at these particular times and places alters the colors and textures of Sacred Family, weaving Timothy into the fabric of community at some moments, but also allowing him to isolate himself among the community at others. Timothy does not become an easier, more generous person, but he nonetheless co-creates the fleshly forms of access that are essential to Sacred Family.
The art program at Sacred Family has rooms designating different kinds of art forms: woodworking, weaving, painting, glass mosaic, drawing, and ceramics. Similarly, different artistries of interpersonal connection that I witness at Sacred Family draw attention to different styles and genres of communication. Varieties of each kind depend on the configurations of people through whom and among whom they are created. Each form bridges the edges of a difference in a liturgy that anticipates gifts, abilities, and desires that congregants often fail to exhibit. The forms do not reconcile or unify those differences. They do not erase edges, but foster relational encounters through the deviations that occur. At the same time the deviations take form, creating a warp, a tether, albeit fragile, that invites the incorporation of persons for whom more traditional forms fail or unfold into other forms.
All three of the art forms I describe in this chapter respond to the edges of verbal communication, to the ways disability warps more standard forms of liturgical communication including text, sermon, dialogue, prayer, and confession. Each of these traditional verbal and aural forms contains aesthetic assumptions about fitting modes of participation. While these forms suit some embodied minds, the responses of people at Sacred Family frequently test their assumptions. For example, during a sermon, listeners may not grasp or show any interest in the content. They grow bored and fidgety, or want to speak into the sermon, adding their own voices or stories to a form which finds those voices off topic, a distraction from the function of the form. Or, in a dialogue between congregants, a form which assumes the possibility of sharing and mutuality, balance and/or reciprocity may be difficult to achieve: a congregant might overwhelm the conversation with his inability to stop talking, or alternately appear unable in her silence to propel the conversation forward, exhibiting little or no response to questions asked. As gaps occur between anticipated forms and embodied minds, artistries of interpersonal connection arise.
On Sunday mornings, those who read hymns, prayers, and creeds and participate fully in the explicit liturgy of the community and those who ostensibly cannot read are set apart from each other. Every Sunday I watch congregants refuse to engage the two to three books we use to worship. I watch others begin with the texts and then close them, apparently giving up or growing disinterested. Still others keep the books open without singing or reading. Often one or several people shout out, “What page? What page?” as they try to keep up.
At the same time, other gestures and movements are unique to this liturgy. In moments where written and spoken communication sometimes fail to connect congregants, people often reach out to touch each other, massaging a back or touching an arm or the top of a head, or reaching out to hold another congregant’s hand for a brief period of time. One Sunday, early on in my research, worshipping next to Victoria, here is the way I describe my participation in the liturgy:
As we sing the first hymn “Jesus lives! Thy terrors now” both people on either side of me bow their heads and cradle their heads in their hands, seemingly tuning out everything around them. Then a man sitting behind us reaches over and touches Victoria on the hand, stroking her hand. She looks up and reaches back her hand and takes his hand in hers, holding it for a minute. Then she offers her hand to the other two men sitting beside him, holding each person’s hand for a brief while. Pete, sitting at the end [of the pew] catches my eye, watching Victoria, and smiles at me, waving his hand. I wave back. He waves at me several more times during the service, a big smile on his face. . . . Victoria will also perform her hand ritual with several others. At one point, without any particular prompting that I can see, she will reach over to Shane on the other side of me, as he is huddled over, and grab his hand and shake it. On her way down the aisle, taking the offering, she will touch the shoulder of another man bowed over, and touch this same man again on the way up to take communion, causing him to stand up suddenly and get in line for communion (out of turn).
As she is touched by and touches particular people she knows in the congregation, I observe Victoria weaving them into the liturgy at moments when they seemed least engaged. The people she touches respond to her with warmth and energy. Her hands touching their hands and shoulders creates an alternate form of connection than the unison of voices reading the creed and the prayers.
Waving is another form of weaving. Parishioners frequently, persistently, wave to others during the service and on their way up to take communion or for prayers of healing, waving and then waiting for a reciprocal gesture of acknowledgement. If there is no response, they may wave again. Forest often sits sideways in his pew so he can keep one eye on the front of the sanctuary and one eye on the back of the church, keeping watch as congregants enter the sanctuary. While he greets almost everyone by name, certain people inspire him to traverse the length of the church to wave them into the service or to grasp their hand or touch fist to fist or elbow to elbow. Forest does not prefer sustained conversation, does not look anyone in the eye for long, and often chooses some physical distance from those around him; yet, he also uses gesture and touch to engage those around him. Forest routinely waves and calls out to congregants who seem unresponsive to anyone else around them until they acknowledge him, even when his persistence irritates them. One day, as I sit next to Albie, another person whom I often find it difficult to engage, I am grateful for Forest, as he rushes back down the aisle to claim Albie’s importance to this space and to claim me as well. Forest gestures each of us into this space by saying our names and by filling the silent spaces between Albie and me with gestures.
On another evening, during Worship Live, Jack and Andie place their friend, Travis, between them in the pew. Travis has been struggling with his medications and with severe anxiety ever since I began my fieldwork at the church. He often requires the close physical presence of people with whom he works in the garden, if he is to participate in services or other community activities. Jack and Andie put their arms around Travis and pat his back from time to time. Andie shares her hymnbook with him and makes sure he can follow what is happening in the service. With Travis between them, Jack and Andie’s own postures change within liturgical space; rather than facing toward the altar and pulpit the whole time, they often center their worship on Travis, watching his face and movements for signs of engagement or discomfort. Through their gestures and postures, Jack, Andie, and Travis create an alternate vision of family in a church where many members do not attend with their families and may have little to no contact with their blood relatives. I recall Andie’s description of coming to church as coming “from a dark place to where I wake up in the morning, and there are things I want to do and people I want to see.” Over time, Jack and Andie will both slip out from the regular pattern of interaction that is Sacred Family due to illness, intense physical pain, hospitalization, and their ongoing struggles with addiction. They will require other congregants who weave them back into this community. Yet, for almost a year of my time at Sacred Family, they significantly affect the fragile yet resilient warp within which Travis and others participate within community.
Though they shape the configuration of community, not everyone present embraces the arts of touch and gesture in the same way. Some congregants maintain a physical distance from others and move away if someone gets too close or tries to touch them. Such refusal of touch is also acceptable and does not seem to reflect negatively on the person who desires not to participate through this form. Such responses may also vary from day to day. I learn this early on when a woman named Miriam, one of the gentlest people at Sacred Family, eagerly gestures for me to sit down next to her one morning and engages me in conversation. The next day when I seek to replicate this gesture, she moves one seat away to create distance between us. At first I wonder if I did something to upset her, but I come to understand that she is not upset with me, but this morning requires a different mode of interaction than the previous. I gradually follow such subtle movements toward and away from others, finding assurance in their honest arrangements.
Conflict and irritability are also patterns within Sacred Family’s daily life, as people get in each other’s space in ways that feel disturbing or threatening. A man walks around shouting “You bitch!” to someone we cannot see, and a path opens around, giving him space to move; yet, the community also accepts his need to act out even when they maintain a wide berth from his anger. The subtle navigation of shared space, through touch, often widens the circle so that there is more space for those who sometimes need to remain at some distance from others.
At times, explicit liturgical forms acknowledge and incorporate this art form of touch and gesture, enunciating its importance within the community. On a Sunday morning or Wednesday evening, the passing of the peace takes place after confession and forgiveness of sins, which many do not read or say. Yet, the nonreaders or the ones who could not find the page in time, the silent ones during confession, enthusiastically take time to stand and walk, or to sit and wait for those who seek them in order to shake a hand or bump an elbow. Where the spoken confession fails to establish the relatedness of the community, the physical gestures and movements of the peace do.
The bumping of elbows, too, becomes an art form of interpersonal communication. One evening Father Brian announces that because many people are sick, we will not shake hands so as not to spread germs among us and suggests that we bump elbows. He offers this gesture as a temporary solution to the perils of flu season, but some congregants take to it with great enthusiasm, so that a year later, some still offer me their elbows, forcing me to bend my arms akimbo as we awkwardly touch bodies in a way that often makes us smile. A form of touch to prevent the spreading of flu morphs, takes on another shape within the liturgy, and becomes an acceptable means of offering peace to another and of spreading laughter midservice. Over time the elbow bump is replaced occasionally by the fist bump, which also becomes an acceptable gesture through which peace is spread. Thus, the elbow bump crosses forms and occasionally morphs from an art of touch and gesture to an art of jokes and laughter, another creative form of weaving within Sacred Family’s liturgy.
Jokes I don’t quite get force me to think about the role of laughter in the liturgy of Sacred Family and how this form weaves people into community. Laughter punctuates Sunday morning services with sounds disproportionate to the verbal forms that occasion it. While congregants mention to me how much they enjoy the sermons, I notice that many become restless during this portion of the service, getting up to leave the sanctuary for a time. I also observe that certain congregants seek out opportunities to laugh during a sermon, joining its challenging form to their embodied participation in it. The preacher tells a joke, or makes a comment that isn’t quite a joke, and some parishioners burst out laughing. If two or three laugh together, their laughter is contagious. Even if my mind cannot grasp the joke, I find myself joining in the congregational laughter, feeling the reverberations of human sound around the sanctuary. The jovial vibrations make the room resonate with the breath of people all around me. Such moments feel life-giving and energizing to me, and I observe a similar reaction in those around me. We wake up together! In such moments, I reconnect with those from whom I often feel separated due to differing abilities: whereas my mind easily grasps and fits within some traditional liturgical forms, with their cognitive assumptions, others cannot. When I speak or pray through a particular form, others are silent. Yet laughter defies this liturgical boundary. Such laughter usually begins when one or two people seize the opportunity for participation in the sermon, and their responses spread to the rest of us. Even those who do not laugh smile at those who enjoy participation in a sermon. One’s laughter is an invitation to another.
The joke is an erotic form, one that desires another to accept and find pleasure in what is offered. The joke can go badly and fail to achieve the desire and pleasure it intends, but it is a hopeful genre, desiring connection with another as it intends mutual pleasure.30 The disability activist and comedian Alan Shain emphasizes this invitational quality of comedy. “Using the arts to effect equality,” disability comedy woos a listener to cross bridges of stigma. Meanwhile, the comedian rearranges the meaning of disability, inviting listeners to reconsider their ableist assumptions.31 At Sacred Family, the power and intimacy of a joke are often shaped as much by listeners as the one who intends a witty provocation. These listeners rearrange meaning in order to connect bodily with others, claiming what is spoken as a joke (or sometimes ignoring what is spoken, if it fails to connect), transforming its auditory possibilities within common prayer.
After I notice the effects of laughter in the service, I start noticing jokes in other places. Some congregants use humor, especially when other forms of small talk or communication become tenuous. Wallace and Joshua, for example, encourage each other’s laughter, and they laugh especially heartily when Jack, their fellow gardener in the church gardening program, teases them. Something Jack says might cause these friends to burst forth in laughter that (from my vantage point) far exceeds the occasion that generated it. Such laughter, like much comedy, makes use of disproportion. It becomes something they share as their bodies shake together, an exuberant sound echoing over the church grounds. I do not find Jack’s jokes as funny as they do, but I watch their faces stretch and open with laughter and cannot help but laugh too at the pleasure of watching them enjoy themselves so much. Their laughing bodies become a connective tissue that Jack and I share, even if we do not laugh as they do. While they are laughing, I try to think of other funny things to say. I want to be a part of their pleasure and connection.
Improvised forms of laughter also create connections as part of easy yoga where the powers of formal and informal laughter merge together, bridging differences in physical and mental ability among us and rousing tired, medicated bodies and minds together. Laura often invites us to fake our laughter as we breathe out all of our stress and anxiety emphatically together: Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! The fake laughter invariably leads to real laughter—we sound ridiculous to ourselves and to each other—and to a sense of cohesion as a group. Rather than looking down at our laps or at our own limbs as we stretch, we smile at one another as we listen to the strange sounds lingering among us.
This artistry of connective laughter parallels another form of witty pleasure that frames Wallace and Joshua’s experiences of church together, and my participation in liturgy through them. Wallace and Joshua comment to one another with huge smiles after the sermon, “That was deep!” “Yeah, that was deep!” One time I probe, “What was deep?” trying to get behind the commentary, but they refuse my inquiry into the particularities of the homily. “The sermon,” Wallace responds, in a tone that suggests how self-evident his answer is: What is wrong with your mind? He circles around a question he cannot or will not answer to show me what makes my inquiry irrelevant. I am not catching the function of the form, trying to elicit facts and information instead of recognizing the art of relatedness where communion is at stake. Later, returning from receiving communion from the priest, Wallace and Joshua again share the pleasure of the experience with one another, “That was tasty!” “Yeah, that was real tasty!” Just as their laughter with Jack near the garden shifts the contours of my morning at the Circle, their enthusiastic commentary on the Holy Eucharist occasions a different sense of worship through and with them that day. They create a new connection for me to the dry wafer I just consumed, to the words “The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven.” Likewise, responses to the sermon, exhorting the significance of testimony, shift as they share their impression and thus enjoyment of its profundity with me.
In the first chapter, I introduced loitering with intent as a form of interaction that characterizes Sacred Family and involves an intentional being with others, rather than doing for them. I suggest how difficult a form it is for many interns or volunteers within the Sacred Family community, who are accustomed to more active and goal-oriented forms of community building. Loitering with intent is awkward and strangely unproductive to those who desire to help and serve others in quantifiable ways or to receive something measurable in return. Even after years of loitering at Sacred Family, I still find that shared silences, during which congregants rarely acknowledge one another, often make me uncomfortable even though I can see that many others take them as a matter of course. While these silences are customary to many congregants, those who sit silently also invariably seek an entry point into dialogue and relationships yet find this entry difficult if not impossible to sustain. There is a struggle for forms of communication that bridge difference through interaction and that also respect side-by-side silence as its own form of legitimate communication.
I talk to one of the seminary students, Cassie, a couple of months into her year-long internship at Sacred Family. Like other interns, she initially finds it difficult to loiter among Sacred Family members rather than assuming a particular role or task. She finds the church community overwhelming, in part because she misses the welcoming banter she associates with many churches’ forms of affirmation and belonging. Finding the silences difficult, she worries about being intrusive as she learns to know other congregants. Over time, the visits to Sacred Family that initially feel difficult and disingenuous become a high point of her week. In part, she attributes this change to the discovery of a form that allows her to communicate and to respect those who welcome her in unconventional ways. She starts giving manicures, using touch to create pleasure for people, and then also, simultaneously, finds verbal forms easier while engaging through touch. She becomes more comfortable with silence and with engaging experiences of reality that are not her own. She comes to appreciate the modes through which people at Sacred Family communicate with each other and develop strategies of communication across differing, and daily fluctuating, mental abilities.
When I ask about building bridges across the differences of congregants’ lives, a priest’s wife, Hannah, a quiet, beloved figure in this community, tells me a story that helps to illustrate these arts of connection across perceived barriers of communication:
One day I sat down and two guys were talking, and they were just having the best time, and I just sat down with them. I realized their conversation, what they were saying . . . one would talk and then give pause for the other to talk, and what was said by one person had nothing to do with what was said [by the other]. It wasn’t a conversation, but they were just talking and laughing and giving each other time to speak, and like, one would say, ‘I just sometimes hide things and I can’t remember where they are.’ And the other person would say, ‘That meal over there . . . I just love the spaghetti.’ They were just talking but not connecting at all. So I found myself just enjoying being there because it was so pleasant and we were laughing and talking. Like it would not be if one or the other of them weren’t there, and you were just sitting there by yourself. It was community but it wasn’t connecting. And I just sort of chimed in by saying, “Well, that’s sort of like squirrels. I wonder if they ever find . . . ” and they just went on to other topics that had nothing to do with the sentence before.
For Hannah, this form of conversation has stayed with her as a particular image of what it means to be a church community across and through mental difference at Sacred Family. People at Sacred Family often talk about their lives in more typical ways as well, Hannah is quick to point out, but there is often a need for other forms of communication and connection to create bridges across the differences of mental ability and logic.
In another example of the arts of silence and conversation, Donna, a woman from the neighborhood, only attends Sacred Family on Wednesday evenings in order to sit outside at a picnic bench with another woman, Martha, who can no longer participate in an entire Wednesday evening service. At one time, Martha would become increasingly agitated within church services and would disrupt the community by shouting; she would insist that the priest stop preaching or would make other derogatory comments. While many forms of disruption are tolerated, if not always welcomed, this one tested the patience and abilities of both the leadership and the community. Now Martha is only able to come if Donna is also present, and Donna only attends church if Martha is there too.
Donna first met Martha at Sacred Family, and she describes to me what she and Martha do outside the church while the rest of us are inside the sanctuary, singing and praying. There are always four topics of conversation—cigarettes, food, family, and schizophrenia. “So do you still think of it as worship when you’re outside?” I ask Donna, knowing that she considers Sacred Family her church. “Oh sure, sure, sure,” she responds. “You know, we’re just doing our thing, and it’s . . . God knows where we are.” Donna often brings Martha into the sanctuary just to receive communion and then takes her out again, aware that the voices in Martha’s head might make it hard for her to sit still and listen to a sermon or participate in the service even if she wants to be in or near the church. (Donna offers an explanation for why Martha has trouble participating as others do: “Nothing keeps the voices quiet, you know, we just try to keep the voices laughing. But the way she [Martha] quiets the voices if she speaks out, and says “I’m hungry, Father Brian. Hurry up!”) When Donna and Martha walk to the front of the church to receive communion, holding hands as they go, they create for this church some other vision of what it means to receive and to become the body of Christ. Together they are a reminder of another part of the church’s liturgy, taking place outside the sanctuary at the picnic benches.
One of the deacons tells me another story about an encounter between Albie, who has a reputation for silence and for sitting alone, and an intern, Ben. She recalls a chess game Albie improvises with Ben, when Ben finally catches on to the art of a game on Albie’s own terms. The deacon describes it this way:
Albie was playing with a chess board, and Ben wanted to play with him, so he [Ben] said, “Can I set up the board, the normal way?” and Ben made his opening move, and Albie made his opening move, and it came into being that Albie would just kind of move [a chess piece] in a way that didn’t have anything to do with the rules of chess. Ben was going along with it, trying to figure out what he [Albie] was trying to do, so he finally ended up . . . [with] Albie [taking] almost all of Ben’s pieces off the board, and the change that Ben described [as] from “we’re going to have a game” to “oh I’m gonna try to figure out what’s going on with him, what does he want with this [game]?”
In the deacon’s interpretation, the form of the game morphs from a way to pass time together to a form of communication between them. In the end, a third person helps to configure the meaning of the game: “So somebody came up to say ‘oh you’re playing chess, who won?’ and Albie smiled (and gestured to himself).”
Perhaps the whole point of the game is that Albie wants to win a game of chess on his own terms, but Albie also initiates a repartee by which the two can play and in which the intern, the newcomer to the community, does not control the game in a normal way. Ben is not the teacher of a game Albie cannot play. Rather than either of them telling the other how to play, Albie moves pieces around a board, allowing a nonverbal dialogue on the board to unfold between them.
As in the game between Ben and Albie, improvising artistries of communication often involves different senses of reality and normality. For example, the artist Kayla often experiences her possibilities in the world in a way that differs from those around her. Driving back in the art van to church one day, she announces that she is going to Paris over the weekend. Most of us know that Kayla has no means to travel to France for a weekend getaway. Rather than contradicting her, the van driver and others help her to imagine what her weekend in Paris might be like. What will she eat? What will she drink? What will she do there? Kayla’s desire to visit Paris becomes an occasion for communal interaction.
While many times different senses of reality are negotiated in uncontentious ways, one person’s truth can be very upsetting to another person’s equilibrium, a snag or a tear in the fabric of community. Sometimes this happens when one is speaking angrily with a voice or voices in his head in a way that unravels other interactions in the community. At other times, tensions occur on the level of trust and belief, and test the good faith between friends. One morning Kayla announces to a group of us at morning coffee that she and one of her husbands own two houses, a mall in LA, and a movie theater. A conflict ensues. Rose, who often accompanies Kayla in song and art, shakes her head in disbelief. She stops Kayla; she has never heard any of this before! Kayla shrugs and retorts: Rose doesn’t know that much about her. Rose keeps shaking her head in disbelief while a small group of us listen in to this conflict unfolding between them. I feel anxious about this rift since Rose and Kayla weave one another into community, and I enjoy their friendship. I ponder an intervention but decide against it. Kayla invites Rose out to LA to see the mall she owns; Rose shakes her head, refusing to accept Kayla’s claims. Neither of them wants to relinquish their position. Finally, as the tension thickens, Kayla says with both urgency and flippancy: “Well, what would you do if you had a hundred dollars?! Would you stick with it?” This question about money, the apparent heart of both the initial story and the ensuing argument, is now put to all of us bluntly as a rhetorical question. It makes everyone else at the table begin to laugh. Annie, Miss Carla, Rose, and Kayla laugh and laugh together. I too join in the laughter through their enjoyment, although I am not sure why we are laughing. I then ponder the artwork of the joke as a resolution to the rising tension and as an imaginative bridge in the arts of conversation.
As I perceive it, Kayla has used this joke to turn something that was becoming confrontational (contesting truths about familial wealth) to return the friendly banter to a place where she and Rose and the rest of us can imagine a common vantage point: the indisputable fact that we all need money and would welcome an opportunity to travel or to own a piece of property or to better our material lives if we could. Kayla’s story about her family’s wealth, the mall, and the movie theater in LA align with an opportunity grasped, one that in her sense of reality, at that moment, she had to stick with and could not walk away from; none of us would have if we were in her shoes, her comment implies. We may not agree with her sense of reality, but she jokes us into the sense of her stories and reestablishes communication with Rose. Rose, in turn, brings Kayla back into a more typical conversation with us, leaving the LA property behind. At least, this interpretation is my fragile attempt to get behind the interaction and to analyze my own participation in it. (It is not a Sacred Family form of interaction to offer such interpretations.) What I know with certainty is that Rose and Kayla allow this joke to soften the anxious spaces between them and all of us.
Sometimes contested interpretations of reality are not so easily resolved; they can linger and disrupt artistries of social interaction at Sacred Family. I think, for example, of a rift between Wallace and Joshua that persists for several months and alters profoundly their participation in life at Sacred Family. Such conflicts affect not only their participation but also the weaving into community of people like me, who have come to experience their art forms as essential to my own worship at Sacred Family. I continue to interact with them individually but miss what is possible when they improvise access to community together.
Occasionally, a form of social interaction becomes abusive to one of those participating in it, and a congregant is then asked to stay away from Sacred Family for a time. Roy, for example, remembers a harmful relationship with another congregant, Jason, who deceptively extracted money from him. When staff at Sacred Family discovered what was happening, Jason was asked not to return to Sacred Family. While his departure made Sacred Family a safer space for Roy, Jason was also missed by others at Sacred Family whose participation was altered by his absence. Often, when someone is asked to leave for a time, there are conditions given and possibilities for a return to community. Jason did return during my research but only attended for a short time before leaving again.
By illustrating the arts of touch and gesture, of jokes and laughter, and of silence and imagination at Sacred Family, I have described some art forms through which those who gather weave one another into community and, therefore, belong to a church with and through one another. It is common to speak of belonging to a community as a linear sequence of events; you weren’t a part of the community and then you are taken into it. You were once excluded but now you are included; or, you were part of the church and then are no longer welcome. You came to give something to the community but found you needed help instead. You were an active member and then something happens in your life to change your desire to participate.
Sacred Family troubles this linear logic of belonging by its practices of weaving, through which inviting and being a part of one’s own and another’s belonging is an ongoing art that happens over time, again and again, in different ways. It is a continuous work of incorporation that also entails intermittent departures or distances from the community. Weaving assumes that death and loss, illness and difference, stigma and obliviousness, medications and relationships, continuously affect forms of participation; the forms of communal participation must, therefore, persistently respond to the possibility of change and loss, a topic I will discuss further in Chapter 4 when I describe the art form of naming. Weaving through art forms allows different kinds of participation and nonparticipation to exist alongside one another. The art forms do not displace the sermon, the hymn, the celebration of Holy Eucharist, or the conventional expectations that visitors bring to their relationships with Sacred Family members. Rather, they come alongside able-minded tradition, revealing the belonging of those who might otherwise be relegated to the edges without a bridge into the heart of community. Through these arts, community members consent to share time and space with one another even when interactions are difficult or confusing.
Mason, a Circle participant, describes these emerging relationships of difference at Sacred Family as a gradual shift in perception:
Slowly, slowly, slowly, I’m learning to respect everybody, you know, you can’t say my condition, my mental health is better or worse than anyone else’s. I don’t want to do that or look down or look up at anyone. I look at these people; they’ve been medicated, they’re being medicated heavily, been on medication a long time, ’cause some of these long-term medications cause people to have certain involuntary movements and embodiment, and some of them never had much education, any skills, or any real profession as far as working, but I want to encourage them and encourage myself to continue to live and to have hope for the future. You never know when things may change, when things may get better than I am right now, and I never want to give up hope. I want to encourage people like me never to give up hope; one person no better than another, we’re all human beings, we’re people, we’re persons, whatever, and we may have limitation, but we’re not incapable of doing anything because we have a mental health condition.
Weaving, following Mason’s logic, is slow and persistently hopeful; no one is incapable and no one is worth more than another. This truth, often hidden, must take creative shape within the community’s liturgy. Thus, art forms of touch and gesture, jokes and laughter, silence and imagination carve out the possibility for two or more to sit on a bench together. They weave a loosely held web of relationships with respect for difference together. Each relies on relationships of one beside another so that when we speak of Sacred Family as the church, each pew or section of a sanctuary matters, each table in a fellowship hall has its resonance and web of relationships.
Interpreted as an art, Sacred Family’s liturgy offers an alternative imaginary as it represents, assumes, and questions current social and political arrangements of human relationships by anticipating an arrangement of the world as God desires it. Liturgy as a common art requires communal art forms: the creative activities of small groups within a liturgy who embody such imagination and worship but do so perhaps not in the same way as each other or as other congregations. As they participate in art forms that hold a community of difference together, congregants implicitly raise questions about what social arrangements define Christian liturgy, they anticipate alternate forms of communal belonging, and they interrogate any liturgy premised on ableist assumptions about what counts as participation in the work of a church that gathers to meet God together.
Saliers evokes liturgy as an eschatological art through the expansive nature of prayer forms—all of the gestures and postures and emotions required to remember the world to God and God to each of us. Liturgy is “the ongoing prayer and word of Jesus Christ,” enlivened by the Spirit through all of us together in the world.32 We not only pray as God prays in and through us, but we become a prayer as we enact our hope in divine love for the entirety of creation. We can take up Saliers’s invocation of liturgy as embodied and performed prayer to imagine laughter and the touch of a hand to a head, or the bump of an elbow, or two or three bodies sitting near one another in silence, or sharing an imagined reality with another, as forms through which Sacred Family remembers all of human life as sacred before God.
Alongside liturgy as embodied prayer, I offer two other metaphors that help us imagine the holy work of these art forms: the church as workshop and the liturgy as holy play. Both metaphors help to name the arts of Sacred Family as essential to its liturgy rather than a distraction from or supplement to those actions recognized as Christian worship. These metaphors remind us that worship is not right words about God, nor a set of actions we accomplish for God, but a set of relationships through which humans might encounter together both the beauty and the creativity, as well as the strangeness, of divine love.
In On Liturgical Theology, liturgical scholar Aidan Kavanagh describes church as a “workshop” for city, in which city serves as an icon for world in its modes of diversity and creativity. Kavanagh argues that God gives liturgy in order for humans to make something new for the city through an altered relationship to discourse.33 Because sacraments and rites are primary language through which the church gathers, those who assemble come to engage divine presence and activity in the world in a different medium than in their everyday lives: “In the case of City and Church, the need to image in order to know gives rise to special sorts of discourse which are more necessary than optional. The discourse thickens meaning found in reality and then increments that meaning with style.”34 Because it relies on symbol and sense as much as verbal articulation, liturgy occasions different modes of relating and apprehending than the discourse of City readily occasions.
Because the assembly gathers not for information about God, as an object of human mental capacity, the liturgy invites encounter with God in a style that troubles discursive tendencies to imagine Christian liturgy as informational or educational rather than through relationship or encounter. While Kavanagh posits a traditional canon that shapes Christian liturgy, he also insists that liturgy is never first words about God; rather, it is the occasion for a communal entity to move and discover itself as a body. The church, like a human body, grows into a sense of its own self, as a small child might initially regard some of her own body parts as strangers and gradually grow into their sensation as she moves and discovers herself: “Analogously, a corporate entity such as a church might perhaps be said to grow itself into a sort of envelope of sensation which then forms its own peculiar self-image, its own real awareness of corporate identity which is its own fundamental principle of operation.”35
Such embodied encounters with the divine regularly bring a community to the edge of “chaos” and force that communal entity to make adjustments.36 Through such continual theological adjustments to the possibilities of chaos, a liturgical assembly gradually grows into an understanding of itself and its own norms of life and faith. Liturgy, Kavanagh argues, should offer a new sense of normality, but it does this in a way that is more akin to the flow of music than to a classroom lesson: “Therefore Christians do not worship because they believe. They believe because the One in whose gift faith lies is regularly met in the act of communal worship—not because the assembly conjures up God, but because the initiative lies with the God who has promised to be there always.”37
Ironically, Sacred Family often seems to be the kind of congregation that Kavanagh dismisses as inadequate to a true vision of Christian liturgy: “a commune of friends whose main purpose is to get along with each other, a moral uplift society, a group dedicated to aesthetics or therapy, a sheep-fold of the unsure, a home for the dull.”38 Yet Sacred Family gives a concrete shape to Kavanagh’s strange and sometime confusing descriptions of liturgy. At Sacred Family, worship of God requires a community to encounter the brink of chaos, and make continual adjustments to its creativity in light of these “ecclesial transaction[s] with reality.”39 Liturgy at Sacred Family works through bodily connections, which grow into new sensations—gestures, jokes, silences, strange games and dialogues, different senses of reality—sensations that expand liturgical media in accord with the mental differences and diverse movements of the bodies who gather. The jokes, gestures, and silences may not be “about God” in any traditional sense, but they shape the possibility of relations and encounters within liturgy. Such relations and encounters with others are not optional to a liturgical gathering but fundamental to a community who gathers to encounter God together. Different senses of reality that feel chaotic to some force an adjustment, whether or not this adjustment is explicitly acknowledged. A church community whose liturgical tradition assumes the participation of abled individuals transacts with a reality that worships otherwise.
Such artfulness, as Pinn reminds us, is interrogative, “a creative disregard.”40 Might praise through the laughter occasioned by a bad joke offer as much to God as beautiful prayers read aloud from the book? As Sedgwick reminds us, to put the question like this is to frame our relationships with the divine in the world in terms of cause and effect and in competitive terms rather than the collaborative logic of what might happen when one is beside another. Creative disregard can also be a form of creative regard rather than a competition. We can put these interrelated forms another way. Alongside the prayer book prayers, the raucous laughter also rises so that a beautiful prayer for unity finds its resonance and disruption in the lure of a witty illustration, which weaves together those who laugh their prayers with God.
The priest and liturgist Romano Guardini, who himself lived with mental illness in the form of depression most of his life,41 provides us another metaphor for liturgy alongside that of prayer or creative work. The liturgy, he argues, can be seen as holy play because it refuses the logic of purpose, something we set out to achieve for God and for ourselves. Like Kavanagh, Guardini argues that liturgy is not primarily didactic. Good liturgy is purposeless, which is not to say it is unplanned or unstructured or that it is ineffectual. Rather, good Christian liturgy is purposeless because, according to Guardini, it cannot prescribe particular cures for certain ailments. It reveals human beauty when it does not press humans into a particular shape or toward a foreknown action or end but, rather, allows those who pray to be their beloved selves for God.42 The one who prays “with the aid of grace, is given the opportunity of realizing [her] fundamental essence, of really becoming according to [her] divine destiny” what she “should be and longs to be, a child of God.”43 Guardini imagines the liturgical posture as a wandering through nature. Rather than a pursuit of the shortest route to a proposed destination, the spirit of good liturgy creates space for what may seem to us an idle or circuitous route.44 Its humble gestures make room and give time for that which cannot be known or quantified ahead of time: how a community will make its own way through the songs, gestures, prayers, scriptures of the day, and what it may find along its way. When a liturgical assembly exhibits restraint by allowing the beauty of each person to emerge, it serves as both a form of communal hospitality and a way of humility.
Guardini is concerned with how we become beautiful to one another without instrumentality or objectification, because the beauty of others and the created order often remain hidden from us.45 Guardini imagines that if we take time to play, God will reveal this beauty to us, but he makes a qualification. For someone or something to be true to what or who they are, liturgical language must restrain its desires to improve us. In its restraint, it performs respect for that which it cannot know about the trajectory of any one human life.
The challenge of holy play at Sacred Family is that one person’s form of access, a wave across the sanctuary in the middle of the Eucharistic prayer, affects another’s sense of reverence. The creativity of Sacred Family’s liturgical art forms creates not only connection but also real tension as different forms of prayer and play collide, and as traditional forms interface with improvised forms of access. When Wallace and Joshua or others access liturgical forms through their commentary, their voices might also obstruct another’s access to the priest’s voice. In this potential dissonance, Guardini’s understanding of the interrelationship between holy play and restraint comes to bear. His invocation of restraint echoes a comment Father Brian makes when he reflects on how his own participation as priest at Sacred Family has changed over the years. Even when he struggles to keep this premise in mind, he finds that any authoritarian rebuke of a perceived disruption is always more disruptive than the original activity; unkindness is the greatest disruption to a communal liturgy that seeks to remember God together as unconditional love. Thus, Sacred Family’s holy play also manifests the mark of kindness as a liturgical posture of restraint so that the most creative of liturgical art forms might flourish.
Both Kavanagh and Guardini write about liturgy as “workshop” and “holy play”; yet both emphasize canons and structures passed down to the Church. The sacred and necessary givenness of the church’s traditional forms hold diverse persons together in patterns across time and space. (Guardini describes Christian liturgy as “reminiscent of the stars, of their eternally fixed and even course, of their inflexible order, of their profound silence, and of the infinite space in which they are poised.”46) Neither imagines that improvised forms such as the jokes or the waving at Sacred Family become essential to any liturgical media. Yet Sacred Family creatively embodies and expands the sense of their metaphors of workshop and holy play: its creative art forms illumine the necessity of a liturgical language; its communal performance requires interdependent persons rather than a recitation or reception of facts about God by a unified communal entity of autonomous beings.
In its practice of liturgical art forms, Sacred Family is both unique and just like any other congregation. Individuals gather, and the abilities to pray, play, and work together are always interpolated by the idiosyncratic presences of those who shape artful possibilities of connection and restraint. As one of the Sacred Family gardeners laments to me one morning, in a tone of exasperation, when I ask him how he is doing, “I am doing fine. It’s everybody else. . . .” He intimates that despite his best intentions to have a good day, the struggles of those beside him create and condition the possibilities of how fine he is able to be. His participation in community is inextricably intertwined with theirs. The gardener’s experiences might be more intense at Sacred Family, where moods can shift more quickly and the experiences of daily life through poverty and mental illness are more challenging than in many places; yet, his sentiments apply to any communal struggle.
Sacred Family helps us to notice that liturgical forms fundamentally require artistries of connection and communication among those who gather. They are a necessary craft for any expansive prayer, or creative work, or holy play. The challenges of difference draw as much attention to the forms of communal interaction as to the explicit theologies of liturgical language. When Victoria, as an usher, jokes with a row of us who have no contributions for the offering plate—“Y’all ain’t got any money?”—how does one understand the theological meaning of offering? Do those who dig through their pockets to give a dime to the congregation assume a theological arrangement in which the poorest members must give some monetary contribution in order to belong to a church, or do those who give money raise questions about the meaning of such an act, as they insist on their rights to participation even if what they give has almost no monetary value for the church?
If liturgy is not about gathering to memorize or articulate a set of ideas about God but is about how those who encounter God become beautiful in their relationships with God and one another, then such artistries that improvise the belonging of one to another are not peripheral but essential to any liturgical gathering. The question remains: if such artistries are essential, to what extent can the traditional forms that hold communities across time and space weave the improvisations and creativity of art forms into their own formal senses of prayer, work, and holy play? Can those who assemble acknowledge God’s presence in improvised forms of access to communal gathering, in the artistries of interpersonal connection, and in the differences of mental disabilities?
As I contemplate these complex questions, I allow my imagination to wander, assuming other possible realities at Sacred Family, other arrangements of bodies in time and space that help those who gather to pay attention to the realities of human interdependence. I imagine a priest inviting us not to look to our bulletins as our guide for “everything we need,” but to look and listen to those beside us who will guide us through the service and to rearrange ourselves if need be so that we have who we need by our side. I imagine one of Annie’s devotional prayers or pictures as a liturgical prompt alongside a prayer book. I imagine the words spoken and read from a book always accompanied by a gesture or touch, or by objects and artworks from the Sacred Family gardens and studios. Such concrete images, like the stirring of the imagined custard and applesauce during easy yoga, hold the possibilities of traditional forms moving toward and creating with and through the body-minds of those who enact them. I imagine that those in the front of any space or meeting at Sacred Family continually weave disabled voices into the formal sounds of those spaces, understanding the work that those voices do even if they trouble the perceived conceptual coherence of a gathering.
This is one possible alternate reality that emerges as my mind follows the thread of Sacred Family’s art forms. Such explicit weaving of traditional and improvised forms requires practice. Such weaving may entail difficult work and challenging play for many of our mental capacities. Alternate understandings of time would be required for peripheral artistries to inform liturgical language, a sense of time that does not perceive a liturgical gathering as an efficient set of accomplishments or obligations. Such a sense of time requires an exploration of implicit and explicit theologies of liturgy as work and as pleasure. To the subject of time, I turn in the next chapter.