Abstract
American adherents of Wisdom Christianity have performed historiopraxic sacred drama to weave a politically charged experiential and conceptual tapestry of ancient, contemporary, and potential time. This chapter draws from ethnographic research of practitioners’ innovative liturgies to illustrate how performative rites both invoke history and make history. Comparable to some cultural forms of spirit possession and “in-body” acting techniques, Wisdom Christians invoke history through contemplative practices of attention and “self-emptying” that invite saints to dwell within their bodies so that wisdom may be drawn from the past to illuminate and strengthen people now living. They work towards a production of “performative knowledge” and presence to communicate vital, healing energy that unifies people across time and space. Further, these contemplatives use sacred drama to make history by seeking to correct what they perceive as historical errors of scriptural interpretation. Scholarly study prompts them to favour a Christianity based on the Love Mysticism of Hebrew scripture and medieval mystics over historically dominant motifs of sin and atonement. Wisdom Christians’ historiopraxic sacred drama thus includes both intellectual strategy to upend certain aspects of history and performative prayer techniques to draw other histories into their sphere, thereby creating new forms from ancient temporal threads.
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Notes
- 1.
From T.S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages”, The Four Quartets.
- 2.
- 3.
Non-dramatic ritual (such as performing the Eucharist in church) certainly has the capacity to do the incarnational work as the contemplatives in my fieldwork here conceive it, but not specifically through sacred drama’s particular techniques of evoking historical-divine characters.
- 4.
See also Corwin and Erikson-Davis (2020), who draw from ethnographic fieldwork with American Franciscan nuns to develop a new interdisciplinary model for the study of presence as a product of perceiver-environment co-determination (rather than either subjectivist or objectivist models).
- 5.
Compare this kind of performative attention to the concept of “absorption,” as described by Luhrmann (2012). As perceptual modes, both absorption and performative attention have the capacity to alter experience of self, other, and environment. However, in the case of absorption, imagination creates so intensive and exclusionary a focus on an object of awareness that one is deeply immersed and single-minded. Luhrmann (2012, p. 198) describes absorption as a “hypnotic ‘talent’” which allows people to “get so caught up in an experience that ordinary life … fades in one’s awareness.” Performative attention, by contrast, is a psycho-physical, sensorial alertness that can make one intensely aware of one’s own being and activity in relation to the world. Performative attention thus has a strong intersubjective quality that binds inwardness and outwardness.
- 6.
In the ritual context of sacred drama, there is no distinction between players and audience; whatever their roles, all present are expected to help generate the invocative energy that they believe draws the divine into their midst. Stage director Peter Brook (1968) feels the distinction in theatre is false as well. Drawing from his experience with touring productions around the world, Brook describes how the openness, engagement, and alertness of audiences profoundly affect the intersubjective energy of performances.
- 7.
This article focuses on the high degree of phenomenological intersubjectivity that a committed and experienced group of Wisdom practitioners was able to foster in a carefully crafted contemplative environment. However, this does not mean there were no awkward moments or errors. Because of space constraints, I do not here describe ritual errors or teachers’ corrections. For discussions on ritual error and degrees of ritual knowledge among this group, see chapter seven of The Monk’s Cell (Pryce, 2018).
- 8.
For more theoretical discussion on my idea of “performative knowledge” in ritual contexts, see The Monk’s Cell: Ritual and Knowledge in American Contemplative Christianity (Pryce, 2018), particularly pages 187–197. Performative knowledge theorizes the variability of ritual participants’ capacity to generate “presence” and intersubjective energy. Compare with Fischer-Lichte’s (2008) notion of performers’ “weak, strong, and radical concepts of presence,” and Goldingay’s (2010) idea of the “technical self” in dramatic action.
- 9.
- 10.
Admittedly, tapestry is an imperfect metaphor, for the experiential manifestations of sacred drama are not an object. The term nevertheless gives a salient image of contemplative Christians’ historiopraxic ways of being that, with practice, can “deepen into the divine” by building strength, intensity, and perdurance. These invocations of temporal realms are therefore not purely ephemeral. Something remains.
- 11.
Interestingly, a Swedish Word of Life adherent who cited T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets during Simon Coleman’s fieldwork (2019, p. 174) ultimately converted to Roman Catholicism, which is the ground out of which American Wisdom Christianity first sprang.
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Acknowledgements
My gratitude goes to The Louisville Institute and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for fellowships that helped fund the ethnographic research for this chapter. I also give my thanks to Simon Coleman, Matt Tomlinson, Robert P. Weller, and Ke** Wu for insightful questions and conversations that assisted the refinement of my thoughts.
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Pryce, P. (2024). Sacred Drama and Temporal Tapestries: Invoking the Divine by Performing the Past in Contemplative Christianity. In: Hermkens, AK., Coleman, S., Tomlinson, M. (eds) Christian Temporalities. Contemporary Anthropology of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-59683-4_6
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