Dazzling Bodies by Valantasis Richard;

Author:Valantasis, Richard; [Valantasis, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781630875435
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2014-10-28T07:00:00+00:00

4

Power and Solidarity in Liturgy and Preaching

The contours of my presentation of corporate spiritual formation through the liturgy has become gradually more complex. We began with culture as a frame for understanding liturgy, then moved to a simple theory of communication and then to a problematizing of the various bodies affected by liturgy, and finally to a description of language formation. At each turn, the theorizing has become more demanding. In this chapter, we move to even more complex concepts of power and solidarity as they operate in a community and affect the corporate spiritual formation of a parish. The chapter will bring together very disparate materials under this rubric and begin to lay out specific practices for community diagnostics and spiritual formation.

Grammar, Style, and Accents in Denominational Spirituality

My discussion of language looked at language only from the level of the denotative and connotative functions within the corporate body. It is time now to look at the larger structures that situate our use of words or signs. In moving toward these larger systems that create meaning, I leave aside the method I have used before, that of beginning with a specific experience and moving toward analysis. This chapter begins to do more explicitly theoretical work.

In contexts other than this book, spirituality commonly is understood as referring to the religious exercises, religious experiences, and moral formation of the individual person and thus generally concerns the personal appropriation and experience of faith.14 As I argued earlier, spirituality has a social dimension because religious people also relate to religious communities of faith, and because members of religious communities speak to one another about their common faith and the means of living that faith corporately. Spirituality may also, then, be understood as part of the communication system within a parish or other religious community, and thus it may be understood as an interior system of communication about the experience of faithful living within a cohesive religious community.

So far in my discussion I have focused on the very local perspective on a community by looking primarily at experiences of people within a local community. This local perspective is necessary for corporate spiritual formation, but it is not the only level at which language functions. To explore only the local dynamics would remain myopic, and so I turn now to larger systems. Those larger systems, however, operate within the purview of the local liturgy; the local liturgy remains the site in which other larger systems, ones that I will call semantic systems, impinge and affect the local spirituality.

Let me step back a little to discuss denominational spirituality within Christianity. This discussion of denominational spirituality will assist us to understand how larger systems work. At the global level, Christian spirituality could be divided into three primary groups: Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. These global groups articulate distinct spiritual traditions. Yet even as we look closely at one spiritual tradition, the Protestant, we realize that under the global uniformity there stands a teeming diversity. There is in fact a

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