I caught a gym ad out of the corner of my eye on the way to work today: “Unleash your sexy beast!” Yet another thing advertised with sex, I thought, and I wondered why. I considered their options. They could, of course, advertise the health benefits of a gym membership (“Reduce your blood pressure!”), but there’s something dreadfully un-fun about such an approach. One doesn’t want to buy a gym membership already thinking about the long stretch of reluctance ahead, going to the gym out of forced obligation. So they chose to promote a fun end goal instead: “Someday, if you get a membership here, you will be fit and tan and beautiful and sex will be more sexy!”
There should be an in-between available, a kind of motivational slogan that comes not from an end goal of static physical perfection (which Americans associate with visual attractiveness and sex) but from the experience itself of engaging the body with obstacles and overcoming them. In fact, this what makes exercise fun (when it succeeds at being fun). This is why hiking is better than watching an HDTV special about hiking that skips all the “boring parts.”
It made me realize that there is a general (but not absolute) lack, in American culture, of language to talk about the mundane pleasures, and especially the endlessly repeated pleasures, of being in a body. For example, whereas 200 years ago in Europe, and still today in most parts of the world, dancing is an embodied pleasure for the dancer, today in the United States it is most commonly thought of as a sexual act that is validated by how provocative it is to others (Unleash your sexy beast!). The other end of this spectrum is artistic dance such as ballet, but this has tended to be class-specific, and the prevalence of eating disorders among ballerinas suggests that it is not indifferent to American body-language problems.
What does this have to do with liturgy? Well, it may help explain an endemic problem in speech about the liturgy after the Enlightenment: we don’t know how to talk about the embodied action of liturgy in a satisfactory way. Take processions, for example. In one of my favorite lines in Jane Austen’s Emma, Mr. Knightley says, “Fine dancing, I believe, like virtue, must be its own reward. Those who are standing by are usually thinking of something very different.” Similarly, watching processions may not, as we perhaps hope, rouse high-flown speculations on the nature of life as a pilgrimage or the hope for an eschatological kingdom. Moving in a procession, however, is an act of human solidarity and progress — and it is, or should be, fun! Probably not the kind of fun that playing Call of Duty may be — rather, something akin to the kind of pleasure that comes from a long walk or a good stretch after a long time seated. An embodied pleasure, the kind we find it so hard to talk about. It’s not an emotional highlight (though these sometimes come), but is rather like pulling on your favorite well-worn sweater or shoes.
And we need to talk about this. Like the gym, we’re caught in a place where we try to discuss the liturgy without being able to express how pleasurable it is, how soothing, how distinctive, how nurturing, in short, what a blessing it is to us. We find ourselves endlessly repeating “It will help you get saved/learn more/be a better person.” This is not wrong, but it’s incomplete, and it leaves out the part where the liturgy comes to be how we live in the body — becomes, like virtue, its own reward.
How can we talk about the joy of doing the liturgy? Where do we find resources for talking about embodied action this way?
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