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5 The Hospitality of Listening A Note on Sacramental Strangeness K A R M E N M AC K E N D R I C K Among the most promising-seeming possibilities for an ethics linked to theology—always a risky proposition—is that of regarding the world as sacramental. A sacramental sensibility seems, potentially at least, a way to a valuing of some aspects of the world, but not a way particularly welcoming of the strange or the stranger. But fundamental to such a sensibility, I want to argue here, is a discipline of attention, of a carefully open listening , and such an attentiveness in fact requires that we listen to what we do not already understand, what sounds in our ears and appears to our eyes as something foreign. Most briefly: attention must be paid. Or, as Jean-Luc Nancy has it, ‘‘The first hospitality is nothing other than listening .’’1 Listening, though with all of our senses, is at the heart of the sacramental. A glance at the history of sacraments, both in language and in practice, seems to make rather improbable the relation of sacramental to hospitable . Sacramentum first means ‘‘[A] pledge of money or property which was deposited in a temple by parties to a lawsuit or contract’’ and ‘‘later . . . an oath of allegiance made by soldiers to their commander and the gods of Rome.’’2 The term seems to have been first used in its ecclesiastical sense by Tertullian around the year 210, roughly to render the Greek ‘‘mysterion’’ by which writers like Clement of Alexandria designate the ‘‘representations of sacred realities in signs and symbols . . . which only the initiated could understand.’’3 In his influential early discussions, Augustine offers a useful pair of terms: sacrum signum,4 making the 98 sacrament a sign of the sacred; and verbum visibile (visible word), making the given word a sensible one as well.5 Most of his theory, and sacramental theory generally, has focused on operant rites, but these very terms suggest the reasons that it is hardly novel to regard other things as sacramental— Christ, most frequently, but sometimes creation itself, and it is on this last that I want to dwell. As I get started here, I will specifically note what will be obvious, that I am taking and reading, in part because it is the tradition to which I am least a stranger, a specifically Christian, indeed rather Catholic, notion of sacrament6 —but precisely in the service of seeing if it opens up at all, or if reading such signs necessarily closes off any other reading of the world—and so any other readers, too. Sacramental rituals require some community within which their meaning is read, into which the rites themselves may initiate or further bind—in which the signs and words are shared, as if in a language. They set ‘‘us’’ off, it seems, from those who are not us, both those who are not initiated into the mysteries and those who cannot read the signs.7 Lewis Mackey points out in his discussion of Augustine, ‘‘It is faith that constitutes the sign as sign. . . . How do you know that what you see or hear is language, that is, meaningful marks or noises? . . . The ambiguity of signs . . . which makes it possible for faith to regard them as such, also permits their deradication from significance.’’8 Faith, then, sees signs; it is in itself a kind of semiotic will. But this would seem to close off any community of the faithful more than ever, at least if faith has already interpreted the signs, already constructed a system of propositional beliefs impervious to evidence and outsiders. If sacraments have meaning only among those who have faith in them, how could they be other than communally hermetic , deeply unwelcoming? Perhaps fortunately for faith, or at least for those wishing to engage the sacramental philosophically, this version, whatever popular currency it may have, is hardly exhaustive. Augustine’s own conversion, we might recall, is a matter not of belief—he is intellectually convinced by Ambrose ’s Neoplatonic readings of Christianity years before his conversionary drama—but of desire. Augustine seeks desperately not to be convinced of facts, but to be faithful in desire’s direction. This is faith in the sense of fidelity, with its willingness to live in the question and uncertainty, its knowledge that all could be otherwise, its own place in the promise—and its own possibility of...

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