The Sacred Community: Art, Sacrament, and the People of God

1. The Bible and Liturgical Space

9 Chapter 1 The Bible and Liturgical Space In memory of my father, liturgist and priest Jean-Yves Lacoste’s book Experience and the Absolute1 presents the reader with a phenomenology of the liturgy and liturgical experience . Lacoste asks what it is to exist liturgically in the “place” of prayer. The question “Who am I?” must be asked concurrently with the question “Where am I?” In this chapter, we will seek to ground this phenomenological discussion in a fresh appraisal of the biblical foundations of Western liturgical “being.” It will offer not so much a revisiting of biblical themes as a meditation upon them, in a fresh proposal as to the nature of “liturgical living” and the space it occupies in the largely postecclesial societies of the West. This theme will be revisited in Chapter 10. But we begin here in a very different place of writing, very far from such Western societies—in contemporary China and in an office in Renmin University of China, Beijing. The place in which we write, the space of writing, cannot be without fundamental importance to what we say and to the community to which we seek to give utterance. I cannot write from nowhere, and the particular place in which the writing occurs gives voice to an apology that you, the reader, must accept as a prerequisite of any possible community of understanding: “understanding” not in any banal sense of mere cognition, but as a condition of “understanding between” those who agree willingly, and even gladly, to meet in the space of literature;2 that is, a capacity to say “we have an understanding between us, you and me.” 10 The Sacred Community ❃ ❃ ❃ Two immediate senses of space now impinge upon me and upon who I am. I have placed myself before my computer to begin to write, while around me is a study, a room that happens to be “in” Beijing— for me a temporary place of work. This has its consequences. Most of the books behind which I would normally hide (I mean this quite literally)—full of their references, their crude identification of “me” as a writer and perhaps a scholar—are not here but “back at home” in Europe. They are behind me, though perhaps also, in some sense, partly within me. We readily identify with places, and in this particular place I am “away from home,” exposed and lonely, dependent as a writer to a high degree on the resources of my memory—dependent on “myself.” In that word, there is found the second sense of space. Not this office in Beijing, China, but the space of myself or in myself, which (who?) is a space in which resides an imperfectly remembered hidden library about which I can warn you, my reader, in advance— for here we will find near the surface though in various stages of decomposition (for texts are composed and therefore must later, after reading and perhaps many imperfect readings, also suffer a process of decomposing) the remains, for the moment, of Martin Heidegger’s half-understood thoughts, Jean-Yves Lacoste, the Church of England ’s Book of Common Prayer (which has inhabited “me” the longest of all), the Bible in various translations, Maurice Blanchot. It would be boring to go on further. It is a strange and mixed community presented through the hermeneutical screen that is “me.” If the first sense of space is, though only for the moment, materially present and familiar to “me” (though not to anyone else, and certainly not to any possible reader who can only imagine it), and shortly to be left behind for another material space, the second sense of space moves together with me, although its absence does make a difference. For I am not simply body (material) but a larger self, a body and soul, an “I” that talks to itself (foolishly and possibly idiotically at times), a tiny community of thought and being unto itself that ever anxiously seeks communion with others through all the complexities of speech, writing, and text—or perhaps even just the Other—in a condition that we ought properly to call the liturgical. Only when we begin to understand each other (an understanding that allows the possibility , and only the possibility, that this writing may eventually evoke The Bible and Liturgical Space 11 understanding as meaning) does that action (liturgy is at its heart, and most deeply a...