Imagining the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies) by Smith James K. A.;

Author:Smith, James K. A.; [Smith, James K.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: REL067000, REL051000, REL055020, Worship, Liturgics, Liturgy and the arts, Imagination, Philosophical anthropology
ISBN: 9781441240538
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

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Johnson gives us some resources to see anew what’s at work—and at stake—in “liturgical” formations (which include both the sorts of “secular” liturgies I’ve analyzed in Desiring the Kingdom and Christian liturgical formation).[187] On one level, meaningful liturgies will recruit and employ primary metaphors precisely because we are embodied actors. Any practices that are going to be “inhabitable” by us will have to honor the embodied ways that we interact with our environment. Insofar as such liturgies create “worlds” for us, they will have to be worlds cut to the measure of our meaty existence. Because we first and foremost mean the world as incarnate actors, any meaningful liturgy is going to “activate,” as it were, some of our primary metaphorical orientations: touch will resonate with INTIMACY IS CLOSENESS; rhythms of movement will activate our sense that PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS; the presentation of narratives will find tangible ways to build on our primary metaphorical sense that TIME IS MOTION; and so forth. Rather than trafficking in abstract concepts that descend from on high, meaning-full liturgies that “make sense” for us on this deep, aesthetic, metaphorical level successfully meet us in our embodiment and build upon the praktognosia we carry in our bones.

On another level, such liturgies—insofar as they offer opportunity for “repeated co-activation of neural patterns”—will constitute part of our “environment” and thus will build on primary metaphors in order to habituate us to conceptual metaphors that will then seep into our background and shape how we (nonconsciously) intend and constitute the world. In other words, such liturgies are not simply meaningful in themselves; they also become funds of meaning as “horizons of expectation” that then govern and condition the way we constitute the “extra-liturgical” world, as it were. Just as we “cannot avoid acquiring these [primary] metaphors” because they are the oxygen of our mundane experience—“activated automatically and unconsciously to structure our understanding of situations and events” (MB 178)—so too the conceptual metaphors that are “carried” in liturgical practices will, over time, sediment into our background in ways that are more aesthetic than logical, more poetic than didactic. Carried in such practices will be conceptual metaphors that prime us to immediately see God, the world, and others in certain ways. These will not be conscious judgments we make but rather our primary perception of the world that is already evaluative. Different operative metaphors give us a very different world—and different callings within it. There will be secular liturgies, for example, that find their metaphorical power and center in a picture of egocentricity: they will functionally tell the story that I am the center of the universe; that the world—and perhaps even God—exists for my pleasure; that “nature” is a fund of resources available for my use and disposal; that there is a kind of centripetal force tending toward me at the center. There are primary metaphors that can reinforce this take on the world. Indeed, the very fact that I can only ever experience my experience is a powerful embodiment that has a centripetal feel to it.

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