Bells and Smells

 

Then [God] said, “Come no closer!  Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground.”  – Exodus 3:5

In this post, I want to talk about worship and the environments in which we worship.   

New Oxford American Dictionary (Which came preinstalled on my laptop, huzzah!) defines worship as “the feeling or expression of reverence and adoration for a deity.”

That works alright, I guess.  While writing this post, I’ve found that coming up with a satisfactory definition of worship in practice is not easy.  Sometimes it’s talked about as a psychological state of reverence.  At other times worship is seen as deliberately choosing to do a particular thing (e.g. obey or praise), even when we don’t feel very warm and fuzzy about God.  Trying to synthesize the various ways in which Christians (and the Bible itself) speak of worship is more difficult than it sounds.

I would, however, like to propose the following definition:

Worship is (re)enacting/performing/embodying/remembering/affirming a relationship between ourselves and God.

For example:

Through the Eucharist, we partake of bread and wine to commemorate Christ’s sacrifice and physically reaffirm our acceptance of the salvation offered to us through it.

In Episcopalian churches, most of the Scripture readings each week (there are four) are read from the lectern in the front of the church, but when the Gospel passage is read, the priest brings the words of Jesus into the middle of the congregation and proclaims them there as a way of embodying Christ’s incarnation.

I would like to use this definition of worship to emphasize that we worship in ways that go beyond intellectual assent and inner emotion, we (re)enact/perform/embody/remember/affirm with our whole selves, whether we realize it or not.  This is important, because I want to discuss some of the ways that we engage in worship in an expansive, more holistic sense.  To do so involves creating, recognizing, and using sacred spaces

The place of worship is a sacred space, a place where Heaven meets Earth and humans commune with the divine. 

To be sacred is to be set apart.

Reading the book of Exodus is a bit strange.  You start out with stories about burning bushes and plagues and slavery in Egypt.  Then it starts to get really boring to the average reader.  The narrative pauses, and Moses goes up on Mount Sinai to meet with God, who then gives Moses a ton of commandments (including the special set (the Ten Commandments) we normally think of). 

They cover all sorts of things from civil law to dietary restrictions to some very, very specific instructions about worship, how to worship, and where to do it.

In addition to describing rituals to be performed, God’s words to Moses incredibly detailed instructions on how to build a special structure in which to worship and even about the minute details of the clothes His priests were to wear.  This all seems like a little much, until we realize why God is saying this.

The place where God meets humanity is a scared space and is continually marked out as such. 

The sacredness of the space and the corollary perceived presence of God were to meant induce awe and command worship.

While our modern Christian worship is far different from that prescribed in Exodus, we also mark out the spaces in which we worship as sacred and worship in them because we recognize their sacredness.

I want to examine some of the ways in which we mark out spaces as sacred and how the markers of sacredness themselves motivate us to worship.

To do this, I draw on ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino’s use of semiotics, based in turn on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914).

Semiotics is the study and theoretical explanation of how things are assigned, hold, and convey meaning – in this case, how various things cause us to understand a place, time, or action as sacred and worshipful.

To continue with Turino:

Following Peirce, a sign can be anything that is perceived by an observer which stands for something else and by doing so creates an effect in the observer.  Thus, any sign situation has three aspects: (1) the sign or sign vehicle, (2) the object or idea indicated by the sign, and (3) the effect or meaning of the sign-object relation to the perceiver.  The actual effects generated by signs can range from a feeling to a physical reaction to a thought or idea in the mind…  (Turino 2008: 5-6, 11)

In this case, the object need not be a physical object, it can be an idea, a person, or anything else represented by the sign.

While words themselves are some of the most obvious signs, for the purposes of this post, I will mostly be talking about nonlinguistic signs – in this case, a wide variety of elements of the many ways we practice worship and the contexts in which we worship.

The objects represented are God Himself, His attributes, and the act of worshipping itself.

Some of the effects of perceiving these signs are a sense of the sacred and the presence of God, a psychological state of worship, and conscious thoughts, words, or acts of worship – that is, the (re)enactment/performance/embodiment/remembrance/affirmation of a relationship between ourselves and God.

In this system of semiotic analysis, there are three types of signs: icons, indexes, and symbols (completely set aside the normal meaning of the word “symbol” for this).

Icons

An icon is a sign that represents its object through resemblance.  For example, when we look at a crucifix, we see Jesus on the cross.  We may recognize a building as a church because of its architectural style or display of religious imagery.  Because it looks like a church.

Indices

An index is a sign that signifies its object because our personal experience of the sign and its object together.  Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Because of their dependence on personal experience, indices can be intensely personal and elicit strong emotions.  This can have a huge impact on how we perceive the sacredness of a space or situation and are motivated to worship or not worship.

For example, for me the smell of frankincense is indexical of worship of great spiritual significance.  At the Episcopal church I attended for a number of years, the incense came out when we celebrated some of the most important events of the Church Year, such as Easter and Christmas, times of both solemnity and jubilant celebration.  (A friend refers to it as “bells and smells,” hence the name of this post.)

Symbols (Again, ignore the normal meaning of the word for now.)

Symbols are signs that relate to their objects through linguistic definition.  The most obvious type of symbol is a word, although words can function as other types of signs as well.  Symbols work based on a general social agreement of their meaning.  The word “cat” signifies a particular animal, because we in the English-speaking world have collectively adopted it to signify that animal.  Symbols are used to signify abstract or general concepts, e.g. “cat,” while “this cat” is an indexical representation of co-occurrence. 

Much of the speech involved in preaching or discussing theology consists of networks of symbolic signs.

What do these signs mean for us?

Peirce outlined three basic types of effects created by sign-object relations: (1) a sense or feeling; (2) a physical reaction or response; and (3) “a more developed sign in the mind” including sonic, tactile, olfactory, and visual images as well as word-based symbolic thought. (11)

A single hymn might remind us of a spiritual mountaintop experience or a time of great personal difficulty, we may lift our hands or fall to our knees, or lead us to picture Jesus and contemplate His sacrifice.  Each of these might themselves become signs bringing about other effects, which then may act as signs themselves.

Furthermore, all of these types of signs, especially icons and indices mark out a space as sacred and recognize, represent, and promote worship.

So, what’s the point of all this?  I’m not particularly interested in bringing the language of Peircean semiotics into everyday church use.  What I want is for us to be conscious of how even seemingly small and insignificant things, especially icons and indices, can mean a lot to ourselves and others.  Again signs do a great deal to represent sacredness and can help us to worship in significant ways.

Consider the sacred semiotics in the following two situations:

The Evangelical environment in which I grew up and stayed in through much of college emphasizes a highly personal relationship with God and the joy that results from that relationship.  Cheerful, upbeat worship music in a relatively vernacular style (guitars and drums, etc.) represents that relationship iconically and indexically, (re)enacting/performing/embodying/remembering/affirming the nearness and personhood of God, His love for us, His personal revelation to each of us, and our increasing integration into such a relationship.

There’s a lot of great stuff there, but over time it became increasingly difficult for me to personally worship in such a setting.

I’ve struggled with depression for about as long as I can remember.  My undergrad years were particularly dark days.  Where was there a place for me in a space where the sense of sacredness and practice of worship were so defined by positive emotion?  It was as if a lack of joy was equivalent to a lack of a strong relationship with God.

Many Evangelicals view more liturgical traditions with a suspicion that liturgical worship is little more than empty rituals standing in for a real relationship with God, a sentiment deeply rooted in the Protestant tradition, and I have certainly heard individuals who came to Evangelicalism from liturgical churches describe things in this way.

I, however, found a world of semiotic richness.  Nearly everything represented something about God and His relationship with humanity.  Robes, candles, incense, and ceremony marked out a place of sacredness that wasn’t based on me, a place I could come when I had nothing left emotionally.  When I was barren, the liturgy offered me prayers to lift up, and words said and sung for the better part of two thousand years reminded me that I was not alone.  The (re)enacting/performing/embodying/remembering/affirming was all around me in a way I hadn’t really experienced before.

Of course, my point in sharing this is not to advocate for one type of worship or way of doing church over another.  Rather, I want to illustrate some of the ways that what we often consider incidental can make a huge difference.

As we learn to live and worship together, we need to remember that even the little things matter to someone.

References:

Turino, Thomas.  2008.  Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.