Fencing Bear at Prayer

It occurred to me about halfway through our service this morning, just after the baptisms and the Peace, but before we began preparing for Mass, that the whole point of ritual is not, pace Durkheim and therefore almost every social scientific argument since Durkheim, something to do with "making society" or, pace Turner, something to do with liminality or, pace nearly every other theory that I have read or heard about that tries to "make sense" of ritual as if it were some kind of great phenomenological, sociological or anthropological mystery, but rather and quite simply, if not also profoundly, wait for it..."making holy." Now what do I mean by that? It has something to do with power, but it's not power. And it has something to do with beauty, but it's not beauty. And it has something to do with becoming conscious of the presence of God, but it's not (or not only) the presence of God. It is a transformation of reality and the everyday...

Sitting in church yesterday morning, I started to think about how I would explain what I believe to my friends and family who are not Christians. The obvious place to start would seem to be the creed, that is, the trinitarian description of God as the creator who became incarnate, died and rose again for the salvation of humanity and then sent His Holy Spirit upon those who believed in Him, but this is rather like describing the point of fencing as hitting one's opponent with the tip of a metal stick. It is true, but almost laughably inadequate as an account of everything that makes attempting that action meaningful and worth years, perhaps even a lifetime, of practice. Yes, from the outside, all that seems to be happening in fencing is that two people are moving backwards and forwards along a narrow strip of ground, taking turns extending their arms towards each other while holding said sticks, sometimes hitting those sticks together, at other times landing the points of the sti...