Together, with little or nothing in common, we pray and sing and walk and talk and believe and lose our beliefs, we understand and have no idea, and practice with one another what we have received from the traditions and that which we invent and add to the traditions.
—Cláudio Carvalhaes, Eucharist and Globalization1
One morning in Sacred Family’s art studios, I wander into Kirby’s room, piled high on all sides with his remarkable art. There are paint bottles strewn over the rug and floor, which themselves have become canvases mottled with blotches and swirls of paint. As I stand beside Kirby, he touches a blank canvas, putting four or five globs of each color in a circle moving inward toward the center of the painting—white, blue, green, yellow, and red. He then swirls the paint to create a movement of gentle wavy color; the edges of the canvas are earth tones with brighter colors at the center. He looks down over his painting for a time. Then, surprising me, he dramatically alters it; he dabs black paint around the outside and then swirls dark swaths of liquid around the edges. The mood of the painting has changed. It looks like a storm. Standing up and looking at it from a distance, he discerns what else is needed, then gets down on his knees, close again to the painting, to add an intense and highly textured patch of red here, some green over here, swirling down through the center, some more intense yellows at the center. Occasionally he murmurs, apparently dissatisfied with a turn in his work, but more often he appears satisfied, yet unsure if there is more to add. At one point, he asks if I think the work is done. I find it beautiful, but I cannot say whether or not it is finished. He stares again for a time, and when I ask him if he is done, he tells me that he is still thinking. He props it up so that he can get a different perspective on it. He seems reluctant to judge his creation. Then, abruptly, he is finished.
My experience of the painting changes over the course of the hour I watch Kirby; each dab of color changes the way I interpret the artwork. Yet I am aware of the lack of specific criteria available to me to decide whether the painting is finished or whether a certain color enhances or diminishes the painting. There is a sense that Kirby has developed as an artist, something that makes a change in the painting agreeable or disturbing to him. At the same time, the colors he uses also surprise him. Kirby and I discuss how the changes in the painting affect us, but we have limited language with which to describe or evaluate it.
As I watch Kirby paint, I think of Sacred Family as something like this canvas, a community created continuously as different people and personalities are added to the art of the liturgy and participate in the color, mood, variation, and texture of community. Unlike Kirby’s other paintings—scenes, where lifelike figures sit, read, and converse—in his abstract paintings, forms of life are focused into colors that function by virtue of their necessary relationship to one another. Kirby attends to different corners of the painting, thinking about how a patch of red changes the line of blue beside it. The colors themselves are not able or unable, virtuous or deviant, good or evil, but necessarily constitute the painting. A pattern on the edges shifts the mood of the artwork, what it is able to name or evoke as a whole, and how each part of it fits together.
As I consider the portrait of Sacred Family that I have drawn in these pages, I consider criteria for evaluating any liturgy. Who is to say that any particular rendering of Christian worship is beautiful or inadequate or that its relationships of difference are hopeful or harmful? Who is to say that the liturgy of any congregation is pleasing or troubling to God?
In her analysis of the tensions between art and theology/philosophy, philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch articulates the potentially competing commitments of these disciplines. According to Murdoch, whereas artists are invested in rendering an interpretation of the particular and in conveying the ambiguities of “the whole [person],” theology tends to elevate that which it understands to be good and to be fearful that art might distract from the mind’s pursuit of divine truth or reality. In pointing to truth or wisdom, theology and philosophy render judgment about what is good, beautiful, and real in ways that artists often consider unnecessary. Comparing the “purist” tendencies of theology and philosophy with art as a “shameless collaborator,”2 Murdoch reminds her readers that “the artist is a great informant, at least a gossip, at best a sage, and much loved in both roles. He lends to the elusive particular a local habitation and a name.”3
In focusing on the artistries of Sacred Family, I have rendered one of many possible portraits of the church called Sacred Family. In doing so, I have sought both to capture the ambiguities of the whole congregation and to encourage an appraisal of its beauty and fragility. In describing Sacred Family, I have drawn attention to the subjective nature of my interpretation, of its location at a particular point in time, of its view from a very particular perspective. Yet I also maintain its relevance for other religious communities who seek to inhabit a good life together that names God as the one who makes common prayer and communal love necessary, possible, and hopeful.
I have attempted to show how the particular artistries of connection at Sacred Family give an encounter with God “a local habitation and a name.” Yet that particular habitation and name make Sacred Family no less relevant for those who occupy other particular theological locations. The God who unfolds, weaves, disrupts, and names Sacred Family offers something to other congregations and communities through the gathering and sending of this parish. The questions that emerge from Sacred Family’s life together have vital significance beyond the place and time of Sacred Family, for other religious communities invariably require space and time for the differences and disabilities of those who constitute them. Prayer that assumes the power of a unified choreography of human bodies always emerges from a range of human embodiment and the limitations of uniform participation. The question is not whether such differences exist in other communities but whether these differences can be desired and acknowledged rather than tolerated or ignored there.
I have proposed that an aesthetic frame might help theologians pay attention to a liturgy that does not assume a normative set of abilities or body-minds. This frame might also encourage us to appraise or understand a liturgical choreography on its own terms and in terms of the particular people who gather. It might be used to discuss the adequacy or inadequacy of liturgical forms inhabited by a congregation as it lives out a relationship with the divine in patterns that do not presuppose uniformity or conformity. Furthermore, a theological aesthetic might illumine if and why a particular liturgy is beautiful. And beauty matters because of the faith that difference can be gathered without coercion, for from a theological perspective beauty both accompanies and testifies to the importance of consent.
What does it mean to consent to another? As a researcher, I engage a careful process by which I collect informed consent from those who contribute to the knowledge I gather and create. I must be mindful about consent both as a carefully delineated process that is part of my research protocols, and consent as a fluid, interactive process by which I discern a person’s discomfort or dis-ease in the presence of certain topics or questions or in certain spaces or in the presence of certain other people.
Such a process of research discernment has parallels with the discernment involved in consenting to participation in forms of congregational belonging. There are clearly delineated protocols for joining and belonging as a church member, but there are also subtle practices through which recognition and belonging are performed and negotiated by those who gather. When I discuss my research with people unfamiliar with Sacred Family, I sometimes encounter a stereotype that people with psychiatric disabilities must be joining a church out of either coercion or delusion. Such suspicions raise broader questions about what it means for any human person to inhabit a religious community consensually and truthfully. What does it mean to join a Christian church willingly? How does one consent to time and space and prayer together in light of the challenges of access and desire? How would one track that consent and understand the freedom it entails without losing sight of the constricted choices that any congregation and any congregant encounters every time human differences are gathered into a common time and space?
By choosing theological aesthetics and ethnographic methods as tools for analyzing Sacred Family, I have departed from a frame for consent to community that would mark belonging to a Christian church solely in terms of explicit theological discourse about the identity of Sacred Family, or in common beliefs about God that must be claimed by those who come to church. Rather, I have argued that a weeklong liturgy anticipates God as the one who requires and creates the possibility for relationships and connections between those who gather. The conditions for consensual belonging to Christian community are performed through the amplification of spaces for differences and the disruption of linear notions of time, through artistries that weave congregants together, and through a struggle for language and recognition with which to claim oneself and others. When and where consent rearranges the possibility for relationships at Sacred Family, those who gather find beauty.
For in a strain of theological thinking, the categories of beauty and consent are interrelated in a mutually dependent way. Beauty accompanies transformation as a way to map a person’s consent to their transformation through immediate pleasure or delight that works non-coercively with human embodiment in all its variations and social constructions. For example, in a community like Sacred Family, as one transforms one’s ableist assumptions about the way that productivity and efficiency determine the possibilities for a worthy human life, one is also drawn by divine love through desire and pleasure into the life of the community; such a transformed relationship to oneself and others may entail sacrifice or resistance, but it is not inherently destructive or harmful to the one who engages in it. Beauty marks the possibility that transformation does not entail the destruction or harm of the person one once was; a person might change and still be truthful to who they are in the divine light.
So beauty functions as a witness to the non-coercive nature of God; the divine does not force human transformation or destroy something of the human person in order to make them good. Rather, the beautiful accompanies a consent to an alignment of the desires of the human person with the desire of God for that person. Various theological accounts of beauty name it as an intimate relationship between the accessibility of the immediate pleasures of human life and the horizon of what a person might become.
In order to trace some possibilities of this relationship between beauty and consent, I turn now to three theologians who analyze beauty differently and yet help me to articulate the importance of its presence and absence at Sacred Family. I briefly explore these articulations of beauty first in order to investigate its role in the creation of Sacred Family. Because Sacred Family also manifests aspects of beauty that are not emphasized in these accounts of the beautiful, nor in many theological accounts of a desire for God, I then examine how beauty extends liturgical surfaces and confuses accustomed liturgical borders or boundaries of ecclesial belonging and identity.
My first theological conversation partner, twentieth-century French philosopher and political activist Simone Weil, describes the love of the order and beauty of the world as that which prepares a human person for direct contact with the divine. This is what Weil terms one of four “form[s] of the implicit love of God” along with love of neighbor, love of religious ceremonies, and friendship.4 As Weil puts it, “At the moment when it touches the soul, each of the forms that such love may take has the virtue of a sacrament.”5 Weil associates beauty not primarily with human others in neighbor love or friendship (although justice is beautiful, she claims) or with religious ceremonies, but with the created world. Like the other forms, the beauty and order of the world is a form of love for God because it elicits the creative attention that expands the abilities of a human mind toward God.6
Weil describes beauty as both a surface and as “the mouth of a labyrinth” by which God lures human beings to God’s self. Because there is something infinite and impenetrable to the beautiful order of the world that humans cannot control, manipulate, or use as a means to an end, even if they so desire,7 beauty prepares humans for the love of God by teaching a divine form of renunciation. Such renunciation is the love by which God consents not to manipulate or coerce God’s own creation.8 Thus, we might say that beauty is the quality through which God regards humankind as theological subjects beautiful in their own right rather than as objects to be used as a mere means for divine purposes.
Beauty for Weil is not only readily accessible to all who encounter it but also transformative. It might release a human person from the illusion that they are the center of the universe and so create an opening for divine love to enter the depths of the soul of that person and to admire the beauty of creation through that person’s soul. Beauty is not inherent within matter but is possible through a certain kind of perception. Thus, beauty involves attention to that which is not the self in a way that is also truthful and thus makes the soul more virtuous.9 Beauty prepares the soul for God by helping to increase human virtue.
Another theologian, the eighteenth-century preacher and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, also associates the theological category of beauty with “the nature of true virtue” by which humans consent to the being of any and all others, not only those they know personally or to whom they are related through kinship bonds. Like Weil, Edwards emphasizes a depth that beauty invites because of its impersonal dimension; it is that which cultivates human desire for that which is not us or ours, or immediately related to us, because through it we come to understand our unity with all that exists. As Edwards explains, “Beauty does not consist in discord and dissent, but in consent and agreement. And if every intelligent being is in some way related to being in general, and is a part of the universal system of existence; and so stands in connection with the whole; what can its general and true beauty be, but its union and consent with the great whole?”10 For Edwards this consent is only possible through an intelligence and a love that is like God’s, an indiscriminate love for everything that exists and a benevolence toward it. Edwards contemplates how this kind of love might go against human nature, as he considers human proclivities to protect and love that which is dearest, most proximate, and most familiar at the expense of a more general consent to any and all beings. It is only by loving God, who loves and consents to all that exists, that such far-reaching and public love grows within life.11 Yet God has made the world and humankind in such a way that what is good for us (love for all that exists) is also beautiful to us, bringing some immediate sweetness and gratitude, even if such consent and beauty is also difficult and impossible without divine redemption.12
While Edwards identifies beauty as consent to the lives of all others, Edwards himself participated in the violence of slavery: both enslaving black people and defending slavery. Edwards’s apparent Universalist ethic is called into question by his practice and defense of slaveholding, revealing the logics of white supremacy that mask oppression through the legitimatization of inequality. How can one consent to the beauty of another and still view them as not equal to one’s self? Historian Kenneth P. Minkema identifies:
[a] paternalistic outlook that saw black and Indian adults, before conversion, as little more than children in the extent of their innate capacities. To be sure, both blacks and whites were equally in need of the means of grace and of salvation, but that was as far as equality went. Edwards and his fellow colonists lived in a hierarchical world, including racially, and that hierarchy was to be strictly observed; even in heaven, as Edwards conceived it, there would be “degrees of glory.”13
Edwards’s theology of beauty can support an ideal of unity with all others without interrogating the racist, ableist hierarchies that brutalize or colonize people without their consent. Edwards both baptized black people and welcomed them as full members of his church and enslaved black people throughout his life, including the sale of a Titus, an enslaved person listed under “Quick Stock” in Edwards’s will.14
More than two centuries later, in his meditation on the cross and the lynching tree, black liberation theologian James Cone’s theological aesthetics confronts the sins of white theologians and theologies in perpetuating white supremacy and in supporting either explicitly or implicitly “white America’s crucifixion of black people.”15 If Weil and Edwards trace the pleasures of the beautiful as necessary accompaniments to the challenges of truth, virtue, and justice presented by divine love, then Cone writes of the discomfort and anguish of beauty as an accompaniment to the unimaginable suffering in black existence.16
Describing black artists as “society’s ritual priests and prophets, seeking out the meaning of black experience in a world defined by white supremacy,” Cone writes about the moral imagination to make explicit connections between the cross of Christ and the lynching tree in American history.17 He argues that by conveying the beauty in black bodies lynched and beaten, these artists refused the supremacy of white brutality: “The beauty in black existence is as real as the brutality, and the beauty prevents the brutality from having the final word.”18 Such beauty is made evident through attention to black subjectivity, dignity, communal suffering, and spiritual agency rather than interpreting suffering as the helplessness of black victims.19 Cone rejects atonement theologies that would make sense of white violence or black suffering through virtuous or necessary sacrifice; consent to black suffering is antithetical to the liberation God desires. Yet recognition of the beauty of black people who suffer is imperative. While Cone does not use the language of consent, focusing instead on the deep disruption and outrage that such beauty in brutality brings, he describes beauty as that which must be acknowledged in order to bear witness to the truth of black suffering. The moral imagination required to see the lynching tree as the cross, and vice versa, emerges from the black artist’s ability to expose the hideousness of white brutality through the beauty of black solidarity. Cone links the beautiful in black life with a transformation of perception and imagination that enables black artists to see the world as subversively as God does, whether or not they profess explicit Christian practices or commitments.20
Thus in different and dissenting ways Weil, Edwards, and Cone evoke the power of the beautiful as a relational quality that connects the one who perceives with the one perceived. Consent to the love of God through nature, consent to the love of God for all that exists, and consent to engage the divinity and humanity in black suffering and liberation all require the recognition of belonging to another whose right to existence is marked as beautiful by divine presence. All three theologians describe the work of beauty as a catalyst in the moral transformation of those who consent to their own lives and to the lives of others through the desire of God for what God has created. Beauty animates connection through desire and respect rather than pity or charity. Beauty is thus the principle by which God weaves human desire, wonder, or anguish into divine desire for God’s creation to struggle and dwell together in light of a common life. Following Weil, Edwards, or Cone, we might ask whether the liturgy at Sacred Family affects greater human connection through obedience to and love for God, or compassion for others, or an altered moral imagination that rejects the powers of white supremacy and the ableist logics that it assumes.
The earlier chapters bear witness to Sacred Family as a place of hopeful transformation for some who are a part of it, yet it is difficult to offer a consistent narrative of transformation. As an ethnographic theologian who has spent three years with this community, I find it difficult to map the kinds of transformation over time that some theological or liturgical anthropologies imply, for those who gather were and are complex narrators of their own experiences, as are most human beings. The same person who tells me how much she loves Sacred Family suddenly stops coming or offers a contradictory narrative at another time. Another has little to say about what they find in the community but returns again and again to be part of it. Some who have been at Sacred Family the longest are also the ones most willing to treat others in ways that appear condescending rather than beautiful, even if they are also the most sacrificially committed to the well-being of those who come. Narratives and behaviors may be difficult to integrate into any kind of coherent witness or evidence to a depth of individual or communal moral formation over time. For I have limited access to the range of encounters across ability, race, and class that occur outside the space and time of Sacred Family.
While I do not doubt that the diverse beauty of Sacred Family affects the formation over time of some individuals, Sacred Family’s life together has drawn my attention to a different work of beauty. Rather than contemplating human relationships through metaphors of depth, I have been compelled again and again by the surfaces of interaction that make Sacred Family possible. While these surfaces reveal beauty in ways that resonate with aspects of Weil’s, Edwards’s, and Cone’s descriptions, they also help to capture a different theological aspect of beauty. Rather than focusing on the transformation of individuals or communities through a focus on the interiorities or growing capacities of persons, I have discovered theological significance in the relational surfaces between and among those who gather, as together they alter liturgical choreographies of space, time, and form. I have attempted to convey how social artistries extend the sensory surfaces of a liturgical gathering and stretch out the forms of encounter, making them more accessible.21
For Sacred Family members to create more accessible liturgies requires consent to the differences in the body-minds who gather. Such interactions may not have an ethical or moral intention, or demonstrate a studied self-awareness by those who pursue them, or require a focused attention often attributed to those who most manifest the goodness or virtues of one transformed by love of God. Yet, they are no less important for thinking about the relationship between beauty and consent to a divine love that binds together those who might otherwise not recognize or acknowledge their belonging to one another. In other words, eating hot dogs side by side or sharing a cigarette or talking about pop songs by the church entrance or weeding together in the church garden or drawing pictures together during a church service may or may not make the individuals who partake in these interactions wiser, freer, more generous, or more compassionate human beings than they were before these actions; nonetheless, those actions are significant in the relatedness they bring about and in their creation of access to relationships, which is fundamental to Sacred Family’s life together. The artistries of interpersonal connection are beautiful because they consent to common space and time and persistently invite others into the creation of a life together that I have been calling liturgy.
I think, for example, of a conversation I had with Mother Daria about a sermon she gave on Easter Sunday. She began the sermon with an invitation to name one’s favorite dessert, an activity that would seem to require little spiritual depth, attention, virtue, or moral imagination. She remembers her dessert illustration eliciting an intense and active response from the whole congregation. Through this illustration congregants with and without mental disabilities eagerly identified a point of access to her sermon and actively engaged one another through each one’s sensory experiences. Might then her opening illustration have been as important as the body of the argument, a careful and creative interpretation of the Easter text for that day about the different ways we experience God through different senses and sensibilities? She voices this question to me when we talk about the sermon together. She reasons aloud: “at its core, worship is about common prayer so if the prayer cannot be commonly held, then it’s missing the point. It’s not meeting the needs of the community. I don’t think that means that we do whatever and just anything. It has to be intentional, but I think there are ways it can meet the needs of the community and make sense, ultimately, and if it’s not making sense, then there’s a question.” At Sacred Family, the artistries of interpersonal connection help to make sense of human difference. One consents to particular others within the community through amplifying embodied surfaces through which different congregants are invited, known, and held within the larger common prayer.
At the same time, any beauty at Sacred Family appears fragile in light of the structures outside the church that limit consent to a common political and social good. Thus, any false assumptions about autonomy are called into question by the sending that is assumed to be beautiful in its empowerment of each individual to change their world for the better. There is no beauty in sending if sending does not acknowledge the sometimes brutal or abusive circumstances into which congregants are sent. Beauty attends to such suffering and fosters a dream of rearranging the conditions, the com-modification, and the devaluing of human life, under which such brutality and neglect persists. In this sense, beauty is what black humanist Anthony Pinn names a “creative disregard” for the hierarchies that elevate the worth of some lives over others.22
How then to think about the beauty and fragility of Sacred Family? If the consent to extending the surfaces of common space, time, and form is limited by the violence of surrounding spaces, is it still possible to name Sacred Family as beautiful? To assume that beautiful consent is important and even essential to this church’s life requires faith. It is not evident from the pleasures of manicures and pedicures that very different congregants actually consent to another’s way of being in the world. To use theologian Mary McClintock Fulkerson’s term, “obliviousness” to the hierarchies of wealth, whiteness, and ability persists.23 Furthermore, such hierarchies, and the artistries that interrogate them, occur among people who have very few choices about where and how they can live and with whom; to describe beauty as consent to being together must take this systematic oppression into account. Disability scholar Sharon Betcher reminds us of the challenge to Christian practice if our work is not always pleasurable but also requires us “to live with pain in such a way that it does not sever or cut insurmountable chasms through the city but might support the emergence of social flesh.”24 Any account of beauty must acknowledge the need for dissent from the subtle logic of segregation and degradation that are also fostered through the assumed peace and safety of shared spaces, times, and forms.
As a participant-observer, I have faith in the beauty of Sacred Family. I have also nurtured doubts during the years of my research. I have asked: What makes significant these sensations, enjoyed in common, in light of a city where some are kept at a distance from others, and where cities are made beautiful by obscuring the perceived ugliness of those considered undesirable and unproductive? Is the church another place to hide the sensations of people that others would prefer not to encounter? How does the church reveal the beauty of its congregants? Many at Sacred Family desire to transform public perception, but beauty often remains hidden within the church grounds.
Yet, to use Lloyd’s phrase, “silently raising hell”25 at Sacred Family begins with small, elusive circles of consent to interdependence. These circles trouble the boundaries in cities and churches that mark which kinds of lives and minds are worth loving and protecting. By occupying a rare relation in this city, Sacred Family congregants not only help one another, but sit down and enjoy space and time together. They take uncommon pleasure in the everyday objects, encounters, and relationships they hold up to the light.
When I sit with Pete during a service of Holy Eucharist, he grabs my hand, rocks back and forth, crying and laughing over a familiar hymn. He stares straight at my lips as I sing, standing close to me so that he can feel my singing even though he does not sing. Most of our communication involves gesture because I struggle to make out the phrases he speaks to me. One evening, during the eucharistic prayer, I hear his words with remarkable clarity. “I can smell the beans cooking!” he announces with a mischievous smile. Pete smells the ingredients of a common meal wafting up from the basement through the sanctuary floor and shares his pleasure with me. In doing so, he broadens my own sense of what prayer to God should entail. The arts of becoming a disabled church at Sacred Family suggest that these expanding surfaces of shared relationship and communication are a pleasure and a struggle. The stretching of such beautiful social surfaces requires those with and without disabilities, a work of extending community that is unfinished but possible.26
Sacred Family sheds light on this struggle because of the way its fragile beauty draws attention to the importance of that which might be taken for granted or judged as superficial rather than essential to Christian liturgy: both what may be held in common and the unconventional differences that accentuate common forms. When I recall Sacred Family, the images that first come to mind are sharing a bench, eating across the table from another person, whispering with another during church, holding a hymnbook with another, waving across the sanctuary, or sitting with a vague awareness of another sleeping beside me. Like an attempt to grasp the beauty of the world and hold it, the search for accessible forms is both elusive and essential to community at Sacred Family.
The range of differences gathered at Sacred Family exhibit humanity “at full stretch” to borrow Saliers’s description of Christian liturgy.27 Actions and relations that can be held in common become beautiful even if they do not contain the same associations of depth often used to describe profound and meaningful human interaction or virtuous Christian identity or good liturgy. Thus, as I look forward to conversations or interactions that might have felt strange or superficial to me in another context, these encounters become easy and pleasurable because, through them, those who gather experience and manifest a connection to others. Might God be as present in such interactions as God is in a time of reverent, sustained prayer, or in a complex and attentive theological discussion with a wise friend, or in a contemplative reading of the Bible, or in the gathering of those mobilizing for justice work?
“What do you need in order to have church?” In Holy Things, liturgical theologian Lathrop reminds us that the central rituals of Christian worship—baptism, communion, the reading and proclamation of scripture—are intimately connected to the most ordinary actions and objects in human communities—water, a bath, a table, a meal, a loaf of bread, wine, storytelling, clothing, a candle.28 The liturgical task of those who gather, he argues, is to unfold (or break open) the meaning of common things, common both in the sense that they are ordinary and that they are sacred because they are given by God as a center of human interaction to be animated by divine love through a worshipping body: “The gathering is to do something, to set these symbolic objects in motion, to weave them into a pattern of meaning. People do not gather at water only, but at a bath, and a bath interpreted by words and by other things set next to the bathing—anointing oil, a burning candle, welcoming hands, new clothing.”29 In Lathrop’s understanding the objects gain new depth of meaning as they are juxtaposed and reanimated by other people and objects in a traditional yet creative liturgical pattern.
And so I return to the question with which I began: What do you need in order to have a church that assumes difference at its heart? At Sacred Family the water, the table, the bread, and the word are given life by artistries of connection that expand the surfaces of an extended liturgy. Jokes or commentary interpolate the sermon, which functions better as an interactive story than as a lecture because of these patterns. A service of Holy Eucharist is most often set alongside another meal happening outside of the sanctuary doors, which is as significant as the meal inside the sanctuary to those who gather. What animates these basic actions, these “holy things for holy people” are the differences, both the remarkable and ordinary stories of the lives of those who gather. By drawing attention to such basic objects and gestures, these patterns also suggest the intersections of pleasure and discipline that might help to decenter Sacred Family’s liturgy yet further: the ongoing creation of public spaces for common acts of sharing food and storytelling and the sharing of private home spaces for these same pleasures. The beauty of shared surfaces at Sacred Family both blurs the borders of where liturgy begins and ends and, at the same time, invites the community who gathers to stretch out liturgical time and space in order to nourish and protect the lives of all who gather and are sent.
While Sacred Family is not ostensibly involved in the direct transformation of political and social structures that affect the daily lives of those it gathers, it bears witness in important ways to the value and devaluing of the lives of its congregants. In its life together, it traces the importance of both access and consent in the ongoing creation of space and time for those who gather and in the calling into question of liturgical aesthetics used to mark those not fit for any ecclesial choreography. In this way beauty helps to illumine what liturgical theologian Cláudio Carvalhaes names the “borderless border” of Christian liturgy: that place recognizable to those who worship God within it and to those who seek a place of welcome from outside it and yet a place flexible and creative enough to respond to the differences of those who enter.30
The borderless border of Christian worship is an elusive space because liturgy is always embodied and therefore inherently bordered. Carvalhaes names five different kinds of borders that mark any Christian liturgy, with a particular focus on the eucharistic table: ecclesiastical borders that articulate the norm and standards of who belongs to the church; theological borders which give content to any given definition of Christian church; liturgical borders which locate worship of God in particular time and space and dictate shared rituals; social/economic borders where social class often determines who is found within a given liturgical border; and political borders which reflect economic, social, and political commitments that affect liturgical identity.31
Given these multiple borders in any liturgy, a primary task of Christian liturgy is to work with and around the borders, to negotiate them and breach them continually in memory of God who becomes “our permanent home” and in whom those who might lose themselves in the negotiation of these borders will always be found and held.32 A God who is not contained or limited by liturgical borders is nevertheless found within them and is known in exploration of the borderless border of that which is God, for belonging to those who are God’s is both impossible to define and always defined in some way by the words, gestures, silence, and practices of those who gather. Even if all are welcome, as so many Christian churches proclaim, the theological aesthetics of a community, or what Eiesland calls the “body practices” of a liturgy, create and maintain a “physical discourse of inclusion and exclusion.”33 These borders also provide connection to God and to other Christians across time and space and make possible a prayer to God with other bodies in meaningful, intimate, and familiar ways.
Yet liturgical borders are and always have been contested by the differences of those who gather. Carvalhaes reminds us, “It is within these blurred, complicated, and interconnected borders that liturgical practices and spaces must engage and be engaged. The messy, nervous, and uneasy interrelations of these borders are a challenge to every Christian believer and privileged place for the field of worship.”34 These uneasy liturgical boundaries are also an important place for tracing the work of beauty and disability. Where a liturgical border might result in coercion or refusal of difference, the artistries of relationships and improvised collaborations must emerge to acknowledge and incorporate human variation across these possible divides.
I am reminded of this blurred, messy, beautiful border one Sunday morning when, after almost a month of absence from the congregation, I walk to Sacred Family for the baptism of a young child. I walk past the smoking benches and greet an unfamiliar man standing there alone outside the church. He turns his back to me, refusing my greeting, preserving his right to the silence of that space. Once inside the sanctuary, by contrast Forest rushes back to greet me with a bump of his fist, refusing any distance I might preserve around myself, announcing my return to the church.
I notice that the church is filled with strangers; the family and friends of the one to be baptized fill the front section in places of honor. These honored guests struggle to keep up with the songs, hymns, and prayers in the same way that many of the regular disabled congregants do. I witness a common struggle between guests and Circle congregants to participate fully in the standard forms of the service. At the same time, the dress and comportment of these guests also mark them as distinct from Sacred Family folk; a socioeconomic border appears in the differing aesthetics of those who gather. Sacred Family congregants must share a liturgy with no assurance that those who gather do not regard them with pity or condescension.
As I listen to the sermon and witness to the baptism of a child of God, on one side of me sits Mr. Davis. He tells me he is sick and proceeds to fall asleep. On the other side, Debbie shares a book with me and follows with me as best she can. But when the sermon feels long, she seems to register the restlessness in the congregation, stands up, and begins to sing a solo during the sermon as she might during noonday prayer. Someone from the back rushes up to quiet her. I pat her back.
Debbie is not the only restless one; in front of us four small children, guests of the church, crowd into three seats. One of them covers all the words in the bulletin with a purple crayon, making it impossible to read the order of service. Two others begin to measure each other’s faces with their hands. They whisper to one another; they arrange their toys over the seats and on the floor. Eventually, because they cannot see the front of the sanctuary, they spill out into the aisle to get a better look at the baby; they are then invited to the front so that they can witness the baptism up close. I look at those who surround me, Mr. Davis, Debbie, and the children, and acknowledge that we have no direct access to the sermon, the baptism, and the Holy Eucharist except with and through the border of those who help to constitute the liturgy with us. Such interrelations can be difficult, distracting, or distancing, but they can also become beautiful in a consent to each other’s right to occupy a shared space and time and to do so in a manner befitting each.
Whom do we need in order to have a church that assumes difference at its heart? I have proposed an answer to this question: at the heart of any Christian liturgy are people whom we would not otherwise choose to surround us and a fragile system of human communication by which we consent to or dissent from the relationships that are a given of any religious ritual. At Sacred Family, mental disability makes clear both the fragility of human connection that is a requisite for any love of God and the persistent beauty of this connection as the gathered ones find, create, and manifest forms for communal love and knowledge of God. Thus, access is sacred and essential, not just something it would be good to have if possible and feasible: the access of one to and through another reveals the sacred arts of being human in relationship with the divine. In the creative disregard for certain borders (silence during the sermon, wakefulness as essential to presence in worship), the community consents to the possibility of different kinds of human beings creating and sharing a common space and time. Thus, mental differences reveal the elusive spaces of the borderless border and its ongoing creation and animation through artistries of connection that are essential to any worship of God.
The God for whom human difference is ordinary rather than aberrational makes possible the elusiveness of an accessible life together, one that we share not in spite of but thanks to human differences. The animate border of the liturgy, possible in and through creative, consensual relationships, is beautiful as a community consents to an understanding of divine love manifest not only through what is held in common but through what diverges, distracts, and extends the surfaces of hospitality and community. That the access of one might not limit the worship of another is a testament to the nonviolence of the beauty of God. Borderless borders become beautiful, rather than frightening or irritating, when those who gather consent to one another through their creative disregard of the segregationist charity that would separate them not only from other humans or from the rest of creation but also from access to the beauty of God.
Thus, for example, Kayla’s and Rose’s solo performances at noonday prayer bring the most delight to the congregation when they appear at ease within a form of love for God that fills them with pleasure. Even when this singing appears disruptive to some people in some contexts, it still carries a beauty for many in the congregation because of the way it both creates access for Kayla and Rose to the community’s common prayer and gives access to Kayla’s and Rose’s worship for those who witness their singing. Performances like theirs help to rearrange the meanings not only of noonday prayer but of any space where they assume the roles of those who can offer something pleasing to God.
To meditate theologically on the permeable or borderless border of the disabled God in Christian thought is to follow a Trinitarian aesthetic. Incarnate God takes a particular human shape and time, assuming and requiring an imperfect body. The memory of Jesus led by the Spirit lends a particular shape to worship and informs the prayers and embodiment of a church as the flesh of Christ. At the same time there is no life without the Spirit of Christ, the breath, the flame, the ghost, the advocate, who animates the body of Jesus and the flesh of the church, creating new possibilities for human life and for access to God and human community. The Spirit moves freely and with ease across the permeable border of Christian communal gathering, animates its beauty in the bodies of those who gather, and informs the consent to one another and disregard for the ostensibly impermeable liturgical borders of those who gather. To acknowledge such inspirited, interanimate borders is necessary because Christian liturgy requires an “endless preparation with those who are there and those who are yet to come” as one “made of connections with what we know, what we have and what we find around us. In this sense, to create a borderless border hospitable liturgy is a theological Sisyphean task of creating, relocating, connecting and dismantling borders.”35
What does it mean to consent to participate in a community, parish, or church—to belong to what is both bordered and in flux and in which access is both continually created by those who gather and also frequently denied? Such questions often characterize the Circle community meetings that take place two to three times a year. In addition to welcoming new participants, making general announcements, fielding complaints, and resolving conflicts that arise, at such meetings church staff often facilitate time for a discussion about what it means to be the Circle of Friends of Sacred Family. Such guided discussions are intended to improve weekly programs and to help those who try to raise funds for those programs; the dialogue that emerges is energetic and participatory if also meandering and circuitous. The results, some of which are captured on a whiteboard by a volunteer scribe, are more like Kirby’s process of creating an abstract painting than like a focused mission statement or set of program goals that clearly define the church and its objectives.
Where would you be if you were not here? Neil asks one Thursday morning of the group gathered in the sanctuary. The answers are multiple: in bed, at work, sweeping at Goodwill, watching Western movies, at home calling friends, trying to get out of the house, thinking about coming here to do something, at school learning life skills, at home, reading the Bible and praying, at the library trying to get a job, at an amusement park, visiting friends, going to another church, at a peer center, or bored and helping other people. Such answers do not provide clear evidence that coming to Sacred Family is better than doing something else, although one woman insists that this is the place she wants to be. Will the Circle ever be five days a week? she wants to know, wishing to be here every day.
Neil then asks the community to compare Sacred Family’s programs to other programs they have attended. At first the responses are more focused, moving toward a definition of Sacred Family. Wallace suggests that there are new experiences in life here; you get out what you put in it. Marji talks about nutritious meals rather than the bologna sandwiches. Lucille names church and prayer as unique aspects of Sacred Family. Aisha talks about the fact that although there are no doctors here, she is treated better here than in other places and has more chances for success. Norah suggests that this community is about finding joy rather than meeting goals.
But quickly the discussion turns to the topic of whether or not Sacred Family is a cult, as some outside the church have described it, according to one of the participants. There is then a vigorous refutation of Sacred Family as a cult based on the diversity of those who gather, which leads to a process of self-identifying among those present. Most identify as Christians, but Marji describes herself as an atheist turned deist who really loves Rev. Jess’s sermons. Lucille admits that you could call her a Baptist, but she identifies as a follower of Christ. Chad suggests that God, not people, makes Sacred Family what it is. As participants negotiate their relationships to Sacred Family and to the Christian church in multiple ways, there is no clear definition of who is inside and outside of what makes Sacred Family its own unique place, both a church and not a church.
As we begin to discuss the third question about how Sacred Family has impacted your life, Annie leans over to me and expresses her delight: “I like this!”
“What do you like?” I inquire.
“Everything that they’re talking about. I thought I would be bored but I’m not. Friendship. Love. The clothes closet.” I suddenly notice that she has put her drawings and writings away, those tools that usually help her to access and navigate most church services and meetings. She responds to this community meeting with a direction and intensity that I find unusual. Later I surmise that somewhere in this circuitous conversation, concerning the myriad ways that those who gather consent to a shared community with one another, Annie discovers a space and time for her own mental patterns, for her frame for belonging at Sacred Family, and she is drawn into the energy of this discussion. Through Annie’s delight and curiosity, I witness something beautiful about the controlled chaos of community meeting and the resonance it creates in her and others. Together we marvel at the beautiful opening of an accessible space for bearing witness to what kind of world one comes from and what kind of community one imagines creating alongside others.
In the fragile hope for a capacious and beautiful liturgy that assumes and desires mental differences like those of Annie’s and my own, I offer this limited and imperfect depiction of Sacred Family. It is my hope that this one portrait of Sacred Family, among the many other portrayals that could be rendered, will inspire those who read it to consent to the beauty of shared ecclesial and social spaces with those whose differences stretch their love and knowledge of both human and divine. I hope it may also inspire those with and without mental disabilities to participate in extending the breadth of the beauty of what counts as sacred liturgy, as Kirby’s ever-changing canvas in the opening pages of this Conclusion extended my imagination. My desire is to contribute to the extension, creation, and preservation of spaces, times, and relationships within which we hold one another before God, in our communities, and in our dreams for the future.