The Role of the Arts in Worship

This is an excerpt from Postmodern Worship and the Arts, to be published by Resource Publications, Inc.

Art has always had a major role to play in giving life and meaning to faith communities everywhere. Without the arts, religious experience can become caught up in a form of literalism that makes no allowance for the depth dimension in religious practice. But when art is incorporated into the worship and spiritual practices of a community, it evokes an experience of the sacred that is beyond rational thought. Art discloses a deeper level of meaning than that normally called forth by other modes of language. It has the power to do this because art is symbolic in nature. An important key to understanding how visual art can function in a spiritual context, then, lies in an understanding of the nature of symbols.

Paul Tillich describes the nature of symbols by identifying six common characteristics:

1. symbols point beyond themselves to an absent reality
2. symbols participate in the reality to which they point
3. symbols open up levels of that reality which would otherwise remain closed
4. symbols unlock dimensions and elements of one's soul which correspond to the dimensions and elements of reality
5. symbols cannot be produced intentionally
6. symbols grow and they die (2)

The first two characteristics are commonly referred to in any discussion of symbols. The first identifies the one element that symbols have in common with signs, and the second discloses what sets them apart from signs. Arbitrarily chosen, a sign functions on the surface pointing to an absent reality. It is the nature of a symbol to penetrate the surface and to make accessible an otherwise absent reality.

The third and fourth characteristics are not easy to explain in print. They are easier to understand at the level of experience in which one comes to "know" on an intuitive level that which is difficult to articulate on an intellectual level.

These two characteristics, functioning together, give a symbol its transforming potential. But while a symbol opens up new levels of reality, those levels are only accessible when there has been a corresponding unlocking of the dimensions and elements of the soul that correspond to the dimensions and elements of those realities.

The two final characteristics set out by Tillich are also interrelated. The sixth and final characteristic, that symbols follow a natural pathway of birth, maturation and death, is a consequence of the fifth, that symbols cannot be invented or arbitrarily chosen. They come into being when the time and the situation are right for them to emerge, and they die when they lose their force. But, as Tillich cautions, "symbols do not grow because people are longing for them, and they do not die because of scientific or practical criticism. They die because they can no longer produce a response in the group where they originally found expression." (3)

A grave danger is posed when symbols that are no longer efficacious are allowed to remain in force. When symbols no longer "symbolize," they can lead to a literalistic world view in which their surface or literal meaning becomes mistaken for the reality itself.

A crisis in symbolic meaning

This crisis in meaning is attested to by Jake Empereur: "In moving away from the identifying and comforting symbols of the past, we have found ourselves no longer able to make use of the old, but have not been able to integrate the new. There is even some question whether these new symbols exist." (4) Based upon the growing unrest that is surfacing in many spiritual communities today, it seems safe to say that all of the new symbols needed to connect the worshiper with the sacred are not yet in place; they may only now be entering the gestation period.

It is important to recognize, however, that failing symbols provide us with a creative potential as well as a dark side. Symbols that have lost their force as beliefs can indeed be replaced by new symbols. However, what is needed are not symbols whose references are direct and specific; what is needed are symbols that are so elemental that they can move beyond subjectivity and into the depth dimension beyond all surface concerns; what is needed are symbols so elemental they move beyond doctrine and a set of specific beliefs. (5)

It is on the level of elemental symbols that the arts can make their greatest contribution. They invite those who are willing to enter the symbol's realm into an encounter with reality that is not restricted to an intellectual assent of a particular dogma or creed. The result of this kind of encounter, because it is deeply experiential, is transforming. Caught up in the symbol's power to transform, the individual experiences a new ground of being that affects every area of his or her life. To open the way to that kind of transforming encounter is the task and calling of a spiritual community as it gathers in worship to reenact the Christian myth in all of its richness.

The worship game

In many ways, worship is like a game -- a game with sacred space and sacred time as important constructs. It is a valuable game in which the worshiping community sets out to rehearse and practice, work and act and then play its way into the "Kingdom of God." Human beings begin in early childhood the process of rehearsing their way into new states of being, for as Tom Driver, former professor of theology and culture at Union Seminary, reminds us, "the necessity to act or rehearse one's way into a new state of being seems to be imperative for our entire species … the being of humanity is a becoming. We become what we learn by doing. (6) In other words, we become what we experience through a form of playing it out, by opening ourselves to experiment or, as Driver says, "to produce and reproduce, invent and repeat, try things this way and that until a response, either from oneself or from outside, gives satisfaction." (7)

One of the impediments to this kind of ritual exploration comes about in part because the possibilities that reside in "kingdom living" are so far removed from the realities which surround us. Each of us lives in a world of practical everyday realities -- one that often results in a pre-occupation that takes extraordinary means to break through. When allowed to function as symbols, the arts have the power to disengage those lost in self-absorption. The arts do not guide an observer to something tangible and practical; they invite the setting aside of the everyday world and its concerns in favor of a world of possibility and newness. In Empereur's words, "They provide us with a window on reality … an alternate world which we can enter to find there the meaning of our usual ordinary world." (8) They do this because in their role as symbols, the arts create a detachment from actuality -- an otherness that Langer labels as "virtual reality," a reality that is for perception only. It is this aloofness from reality -- a kind of psychical distancing -- that gives the symbol its transparent nature, inviting contemplation and an entertaining of alternate ways of being in the world.

Driver reminds us of ritual's role in this symbolizing process: "To ritualize," he says, "is to make or utilize a pathway through what would otherwise be uncharted territory." (9) But there is also an inherent danger in ritual action. When any given act of ritualizing becomes so familiar that its action becomes rote, it ceases to serve as a pathway and becomes merely a shelter. Its symbolic power to open up multiple, ever deepening layers of meaning becomes trapped in proscribed rules and traditions that no longer have meaning for the individual engaged in its action. The question for us, then, becomes: Are we sensitive enough to leave in place those that still serve as guides, courageous enough to open to new forms those that have become only shelters for the status quo, and wise enough to know the difference? Driver encourages the attempt when he says:

"Ours is an age that needs both the marking of known ways that are worthy of repetition and the groping for new ways in situations with scant precedent. Humanity's ritual traditions are rich but they were not devised to deal with the split atom, nor space flight, nor the hole in the ozone layer. Neither were most of them fashioned to uphold sexual, racial, cultural, and social-class equality … never-the-less, rituals have a kind of "ideal" character. They tidy up what is messy in ordinary life. They celebrate not the quotidian actual but the once-upon-a-time or the one-day-some-day potential. In the ritual mode … tomorrow is another day." (10)

To enter into that tomorrow requires new ways and forms. Ways that can empower us to entertain new visions for the future; worship forms and ritual actions that will make it possible for us to suspend -- even momentarily -- your disbelief; forms that will free us to dwell in the imagination where we can experience possibility and freedom. All forms of imaginative constructions -- whether they be works of visual art, drama, music, rituals, storytelling, poetry or dreams -- have the power to lead us into a new world of possibility. They invite us into the "world building" realm of our imaginations.

What is the imagination that it can be such a powerful vehicle? Imagination is a God-given faculty for gathering isolated fragments of information and integrating them in ways that allow new realities and meanings to emerge. The imagination is an incredible tool for transformation. It supports the creation of the sacred space and sacred time of religious rituals, the kind of space and time that are themselves imaginative constructions or, as Victor Turner called them, "rules of the game." And, as with any game, the rules are critical to the playing.

Campbell touched our hunger and our thirst when he wrote:

"The spirit of the festival, the holiday, the holy day of the religious ceremonial, requires that the normal attitude toward the cares of the world should have been temporarily set aside in favor of a particular mood of "dressing up." For the whole purpose of entering a sanctuary or participating in a festival is that one should be overtaken by the state known in India as "the other mind" … where one is "beside oneself," spellbound, set apart from one's logic of self-possession and overpowered by the force of a logic of indissociation, where A is B and C also is B." (11)

The arts along with ritual action can and should lead us into this 'other mind' state and its fruits.

To have the power to transform, the enactment of the Christian myth must move into the realm of our experience for it is on the level of experience that the kind of meaning that grows out of our encounter with the symbolic power of the arts takes roots. Stephen Larsen says this kind of experiential meaning does not show itself to the critical scientist, nor to those stuck in logical, analytical modes of secondary meaning. "It simply presents itself to the receptive consciousness, and we can only truly know it in that moment of experiential impact. This, then is the moment of meaning that takes us beyond ourselves." (12)

It is possible to store old wine in old skins, but new wine, young and effervescent, bubbling full of life and possibility needs new skins … skins capable of allowing that effervescent quality to do its work. 

Is it possible that the time-worn symbol of the mask, efficacious in so many ways throughout the history of humankind, can now serve us in the Christian community as a symbolic vehicle into another world? As the Shaman was led by the mask into worlds that he or she experienced as outside of this reality, can the mask be made to work in an analogous way for both the Christian mystic who seeks the spirit of Christ in an inner world and for the everyday Christian who can only approach the Kingdom of God as a world created by and in the imagination; a make believe world that holds the promise of coming to reality in its performance or acting out?

For those who feel concern over the notion of performance or acting out in worship, it is important to draw a distinction between theatrical performance -- which at times can be experienced as sacred -- and performance in the ritual mode which carries with it an efficacy that has been recognized in all cultures and arenas of life. It has been said that one who has been given a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he or she has performed the vision on earth for the people to see <^>13<^*> and that human beings are by nature actors, who cannot become something until first they have pretended to be it. (14)

There is an immensely important sense, in which "who we are," waits upon who we say we are. When we perform ourselves, we do not simply express what we already are; we perform our becoming, and become our performing. As Tom Driver says, "there is fate in this, and freedom, too, and something of mystery." (15) The mystery and efficacy of becoming our performing is therefore unbelievably powerful. 

In ritual performance, we act out a what-if possibility and in the acting out, it has the potential to become a reality in our lives. If we in the worshiping community can somehow manifest a love for one another that transcends judgment and conditionality, a love that seeks to copy God's graceful act toward us, then maybe, just maybe, that same act can become a part of the way in which we live our daily lives.

This notion of ritual performance is closely connected to drama for drama, like ritual, moves toward something beyond. It deals with commitments and consequences by creating a perpetual present moment … one that springs from the past while at the same time is filled with its own future … a virtual future. (16)

Drama concerns itself with hard issues such as death, injustice, betrayal, and exile. The challenge for the playwright, the director and the actors is in finding ways that enable the viewer to get close enough to them and yet stay far enough away from them to carry through on the removal from the exigencies of the everyday world that the entertaining of possibility requires. Many have given expression to the notion of distancing as a necessary requirement. Philosophist Susanne Langer talks about psychical distancing; psychologist T. J. Scheff about under distancing and over distancing. Numerous others have developed theories regarding the aesthetic distance.

Edward Bullough defines psychical distance as that which is "obtained by separating the object and its appeal from one's own self, by putting it out of gear with practical needs and ends." He extends his statement by adding, "but, [that] does not mean that the relation between the self and the object is broken to the extent of becoming 'impersonal' … on the contrary it describes a personal relation … of a peculiar character. This relation of a peculiar character is … our natural relation to a symbol that embodies an idea and presents it for our contemplation, not for practical action but cleared of the practical, concrete nature of its appeal. It is for the sake of this removal that art deals in illusions, which, because of practical concrete nature are readily distanced as symbolic forms." (17)

Langer seeks to make it clear that the kind of illusion that art creates has nothing to do with delusion, nor does it have anything to do with self-deception or pretense. While delusion aims at the greatest possible nearness, illusion permits and even celebrates the distancing that gives rise to and empowers symbolic action. (18)

The confirmation that art can serve as a distancing symbol comes from many disciplines. Among them, art historian Kenneth Clark, notes that "art, above all other forms of human activity, has the potential for creating a balance between intense participation and absolute detachment." (19) A work of art is more than its objective form. In Langer's terms, it is "a glass and a transparency … a symbol." (20)

But this transparency is what is obscured when in imitative art, our interest is distracted by the meanings of the objects being imitated; then the art work takes on literal rather than symbolic or metaphorical significance. (21)

Playwright Kenneth Macgowan in an article titled, "The Content of the Future," applauds what he sees as this same kind of movement away from realism and toward symbolic representation in the theater in this century. The movement from imitative to symbolic art restores transparency in both its visual and its dramatic forms. Creating a powerful synthesis, this new symbolic theater draws upon the ancient theater of ritual, pageant, masque, commedia dell'arte, and masks for its form, imbuing that form with relevance by taking its content from this century. "It will," he said, "attempt to transfer to dramatic art the illumination of those deep and vigorous and eternal processes of the human soul." (22)

In this kind of symbolic theater, experiments with masks have yielded some exciting results. Through their use, Macgowan was able to successfully create a "group-being," that is a group of actors who, in place of and consequently more than an individual, could speak for all of humankind. To attempt to speak for all of humankind seems presumptuous, but the concept is a viable one. Macgowan believed that the group-being, rooted in the traditional antique drama yet voicing the modern unconscious, provided a viable solution to the problem of how to dramatize the content of the future.

In a similar attempt to transcend the limits of individual action, T.S. Eliot and his director, E. Martin Browne, in Eliot's play The Rock were able, through the use of half-masks and stiff robes, to pose a group of impersonal, abstract figures, as representatives of the church. They designated this group as "the chorus." (23) To their surprised delight, the masks worked better than Eliot and Browne had hoped. They found that through the mechanism of the chorus both a spiritual community and a social one could be addressed. (24) Drama critics reviewing the play verified the success of their method.

As a result of his experiments, Macgowan recommends the mask as a tool of the theater of tomorrow because, "as inanimate devices animated by art, they capture the necessary mystic quality … one can conceive," he says, "of a drama of group-beings in which great individuals, round whom these groups coalesce, could be fitly presented only under the impersonal and eternal aspect of the mask." (25)

Not all of the theater models appropriate for our consideration are Western models. Many of the Noh theater plays of Japan with their striking masks focus on spiritual, metaphysical, and moral problems. Like images in a mirror, the Noh masks are experienced as symbols of these emotional and moral states. For example, the Noh masks of demons are intended to represent human passions. In a revealing "pre-ritual" ritual, the Noh actor before donning his mask, first sits before that mask for sometimes an hour or longer, silently contemplating its spirit and meaning. Then, and only then, he places the mask upon his face. He then continues to study his masked face in the mirror until he himself becomes its reflection. To put the mask on and take his place on stage without this ritual would be unthinkable. (26)

The Noh Theater has directly or indirectly influenced many of this century's dramatists and playwrights. Among them is William Butler Yeats whose experiments with masks can provide valuable insight for any exploration and experimentation in religious ritual drama. For his work Yeats chose a Noh type of mask. He had some specific reasons for doing this. First, he believed the Noh mask helped focus attention on both the actor's voice and the content of his words. Second, the mask as an artificial and symbolic presence could keep the audience at an optimal distance. Yeats asserts that "all imaginative art remains at a distance." (27) Third, and Smith believes for Yeats the most important, the Noh mask elevated the actor, releasing him from a merely human realm.

Bringing his discoveries from the Noh tradition to bear upon his work with Gaelic folk tales, Yeats attempted to created an Irish theatrical tradition. In a letter to his friend T. Sturge Moore, Yeats expressed his yearning: "I hope to have attained the distance from life which can make credible strange events, and elaborate words." (28) The mask, he believed, was essential to producing that required distance from life. The mask, as an unalterable sculptured image, could focus the audience's attention and resisting individual emotional response could fix in place a universal dramatic conflict. (29)

In speaking about Yeats' play Calvary, Smith says:

"[T]he masks of all the characters remove them from their mere humanity, making them symbols, not men. Signaling [the characters] isolation from each other, [the masks] stress the theological and philosophical meaning of the play …. Aside from the general effects of the masking, each character's unique role is suggested by his mask. Christ's mask, the emblem of his isolation and loneliness, indicates his double nature: he is at once man and god …. The stasis of the mask underscores Judas's stony indifference and Lazarus' deathly hue. The soldiers, fixed in their indifference, are also beyond Christ's help." (30)

Smith claims that when the masked actor is removed to a spiritual state, so too is the audience. That's a difficult claim to confirm or even to measure but what a wonderful thing it would be. There must, however, be times when that kind of natural and sequential entry into a spiritual state occurs. Proponents of the use of masks in ritual drama believe that it is the mask that effects the possibility of that transformation. They assert that the mask which "protects the audience by advertising the unreality and checking the illusion of passion before it becomes too moving" (31) allows the audience to become vulnerable enough to make that transition into a spiritual state.

Over and over, the statements of dramatists, directors, actors, critics, philosophers, psychologists, and art historians claim that the single most important criteria necessary for opening the door to transformation is the presence of the kind of distancing from reality that variously gets described as psychical, aesthetic, and optimal. It is this kind of distancing that lets us step back far enough from our anxious involvement to entertain new possibilities.

These same voices stand together in their faith in the ability of the mask to help effect that element of distance. I join them in believing that the mask can allow, even create moments full of mystery in which we are quite literally beside ourselves. Masks, taken seriously as metaphors/symbols/vehicles of transformation can begin the yawning, stretching process that stirs imaginations from their slumber, exciting them into the dancing movements of full engagement. 

"The distant being, perceptible only far off, flows into our presence through the mask." Kerenyi

Notes

1. Susan K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), 403.
2. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 41-43.
3. Ibid.
4. Jake Empereur, Exploring the Sacred (Washington D.C.: The Pastoral Press, 1987), 21.
5. Ira Progroff, The Symbolic and the Real (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1963), 176 ff.
6. Tom F. Driver, The Magic of Ritual (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 16.
7. Ibid.
8. Jake Empereur, "Is Liturgy an Art Form?" (unpublished essay, April 1996), 16.
9. Driver 16-17.
10. Ibid 58.
11. Joseph Campbell, "The Historical Development of Mythology," in H. A. Murray, Myth and Mythmaking, 40, as quoted in Stephen Larsen, The Shaman's Doorway (New York: Harper & Row, 1976; Station Hill Press, 1988), 32.
12. Stephen Larsen, The Shaman's Doorway (New York: Harper & Row, 1976, Station Hill Press, 1988), 31.
13. Black Elk. Oglala Sioux Shaman.
14. Attributed to W. H. Auden.
15. Driver.
16. Langer 307.
17. Edward Bullough, "Psychical Distance As a Factor in Art and An Aesthetic Principal," British Journal of Psychology (June 1912).
18. Langer xi.
19. Kenneth Clark, The Nude, Bollingen Series XXXV-2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 130.
20. Langer 58.
21. Ibid.
22. Kenneth Macgowan, "The Content of the Future," in The Theater of Tomorrow (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1921), 248, as quoted in Susan Harris Smith, Masks in Modern Drama, 65.
23. E. Martin Browne, The Making of T. S. Eliot's Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 20, as quoted in Susan Harris Smith, Masks in Modern Drama, 61.
24. Susan Harris Smith, Masks in Modern Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 51.
25. Macgowan, Theater of Tomorrow, 275, as quoted in Susan Harris Smith, Masks in Modern Drama.
26. Noh: The Classical Theater of Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1966), 19, as quoted in Susan Harris Smith, Masks in Modern Drama.
27. W. B. Yeats, Certain Noble Plays of Japan as quoted in Susan Harris Smith, Masks in Modern Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 55.
28. Ibid.
29. Harris Smith 56.
30. Ibid 59.
31. Clowns and Pantomimes (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 28, as quoted in Susan Harris Smith, Masks in Modern Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

Joan Carter is a professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. She is a contributing author to Postmodern Worship and the Arts, forthcoming from Resource Publications, Inc.