Christian Worship is Boring
The
Holy Eucharist is supposed to be boring. So claims the Catholic theologian James
Alison. He says, “When people tell me that they find Mass boring, I
want to say to them: it’s supposed to be boring, or at least seriously
underwhelming. It’s a long term education in becoming un-excited.”
He’s
right, I think. Let me explain.
Alison’s
claim about the Mass being boring or unexciting comes in the course of his
contrasting false worship with True Worship. Alison has a broad understanding
about what counts as worship. In a manner similar to James K.A. Smith’s
arguments about liturgy, Alison finds instances of worship in many cultural
practices: “football matches, celebrity cults, raves, initiation hazings,
newspaper sales techniques and so on,” pretty much any cultural practice that
involves the formation of a group of people. For Alison, all these forms of
worship are part of the warp and woof of the violence of this devastated world.
So, while Christian worship is analogically related to these forms of false
worship, it is more dissimilar than similar. To drive home the distinction,
Alison uses the Nuremberg Rallies as the
example par excellence of (false) worship: worship unqualified is death-dealing
and dehumanizing. In stark contrast, Christian worship is “the un-Nuremberg.”
The thrust of Alison’s talk is to delineate the difference.
read more at http://livingchurch.org/covenant/?p=3858
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