Saints: Their Immanence and Poetics

Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, 256 pp.

Between Heaven and Earth is an ethnographic and historical investigation of lives forged in relation to sacred figures in twentieth century America. In Robert Orsi's beautiful book, saints connect bodies, pain, and history— lands migrated from and generations living together and now no more. Relationhips between persons and saints shape social ties and make it possible for ordinary Catholic men and women to assess the problems of the day and to anticipate life to come.

As Orsi diligently and respectufully addresses the uncanniness of the ordinary (Cavell 1994), he introduces a hesitancy in the ways we habitually dwell in our concepts of culture, everyday life, religious idioms and inner worlds. He challenges the human sciences to return to religion the uncertainty and angst it holds when it is actually lived rather than merely studied and theorized.

While going deep into the biographies of his relatives and revisiting places that gave him the sense of belonging and doubt, Orsi illuminates the religious craft that integrates social destiny and contigency into life. Through saints the world can be apprehended and personalized. The thrust of the book is that devotion to saints is gounded in crucial intersubjective events and that this matrix makes intelligible major social dramas of immigrant and working class communities. It is only amid religious and social enactments, argues Orsi, that particular domains of affect and agency can be understood. There is also is an economics to these human-sacred relationships. Saints make a difference in the ways people navigate institutions of welfare and health care, put medical technologies to use, and sur-vive.

The text is marked by the contradictory presence of a child moving among his elders and who must divine speech for himself. Here the child learns language and world simultaneously. On the one hand, like Augustine cited by Wittgenstein in the opening scene of Philsophical Investigations, the child witnesses words repeteadly used by adults and understands which objects they might signify or not: "And after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires" (Wittgenstien 1958:2)

But that is not all there is. Rules are not just blindly followed and repetition actually demands the new. So the child in Orsi's religious investigations has, on the other hand, a language of a different kind with which to carve out his future: those untested idioms and practices of sainthood establish a frame within which genuine empirical questions cannot just be raised and answered but also morally transformed (Das 1998).

A skepticism emerges as the child witnesses people styling themselves as men and women and enduring what would seem unbearable without the saints and, at the same, saints scripting lives in such a way that pain and lived reality drain away. As children, crippled and suffering, are sacralized, they also become psychic zones for others, says Orsi, the material and means through which "desires and needs may be chased and found" (79).

A realm of inquiry and care is opened up when the scholar reencounters the child's sense of not understanding the devotion of Uncle Sal who, physically disabled and at the margin of other people's experiences, found in religion a way of living beyond his time. "Meaning-making is not the best way to think about religion," writes Orsi, and the devotional interior is not the only place to look for understanding. As Sal refers to the crippled and blessed Margaret of Castello: "She has a little bit of all things we have." In Margaret, Sal's bodily needs, desire and voice made a difference an found a place. One could thus say that the devotee becomes a physician of himself and of his world.

And so it goes that "the pain of heaven and earth" meet in an intersubjective matrix in which "a kind...