L’année Liturgique #1
ELECTION DAY
(2nd Tuesday in November)
Here is a trustworthy saying: Whoever aspires to be an overseer desires a noble task. Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap.
1 Timothy 3: 1-7
ELECTION DAY
(2nd Tuesday in November)
Here is a trustworthy saying: Whoever aspires to be an overseer desires a noble task. Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap.
1 Timothy 3: 1-7
A SHOW OF HANDS
oil and acrylic on panel/2023
Pat Dougherty
oil and acrylic on panel/2023
Pat Dougherty
Sometimes in her studio practice, Pat Dougherty invites an image to emerge spontaneously from the visible grains and patterns in an unpainted sheet of plywood. She then applies washes of paint to bring-out emerging shapes and narratives, and eventually adds her own embellishments to complete the image. With “Show of Hands”, the plywood offered seven prominent knots that ran horizontally across the top half of the board and a regular pattern of striations that ran vertically. Dougherty saw the seven standing figures immediately, but it was a combination of serendipity, meditation, a half-century of studio experience, and an openness to the zeitgeist of the current cultural/political moment that a visual sense of a narrative surfaced.
The emergent narrative is the moment at the first GOP debate when the moderator asked the seven Republican presidential contenders if they would, by show of hands, still vote for the former president even if he were convicted of a crime. Six of the figures reply with varying levels of enthusiasm.
Dougherty’s image is not intended as an illustration or a snapshot of a moment. Instead, the artist captures a critical moment in our nation’s moral accounting. The debaters on the dais are not personalized. In fact, there is a sameness … or better yet … a nothingness in these contenders to be our nation’s overseer. All are cut from the same bolt of drab cloth. Dougherty intentionally adds arms and hands … in a fluorescent chartreuse … to convey the very public credo of six candidates. These flailing gestures may … or may not … be representative of the individual’s actual moral view because these figures appear animated and controlled by something or someone outside the picture frame. This is political puppet theater … so it’s sometimes hard to establish sincerity.
While Dougherty captures one political party’s moral collapse, the ambiguity of the picture might suggest this moment as a metaphor for our whole nation’s collective ethical conundrum that lies churned-out during these two-year election cycles. We find ourselves in the same season again … in a routine that is neither generative nor reconciling. Election day has become a festival day of losers be damned.
We like to say that we believe in separation of church and state … but that has never been true … ever … or anytime. Politics and religion are the two principal ways that humanity works to structure its life together … impossible to rend asunder.
In our post Trumpian dystopia, our hope and our doom seem to hinge around this new season of sorting. Every two years politics and religion amalgamate … even if our literacy of either may be sorely lacking. Yet, despite election day’s significance as a pivotal moment in our life together, the day does not have a liturgical commemoration. There are no lectionary readings, prayers or hymns assigned to this day. On this day, when the community gathers to participate in the most profound of our public rituals … and a most solemn moment of personal accounting, we are left adrift to publicly (albeit privately) profess our faith … a credo … checking a box to affirm what “I believe”.
This season needs the power of liturgy. Because the goal of liturgy is not to console. Liturgy is intentionally disorienting as it seeks to shift the community’s worldview beyond what it observes in the current condition. Liturgy fosters profound personal and social transformation and moves the community toward works of mercy and justice. Liturgy is the acting out of the world as it can be … not as it is. Liturgy is taking part in a mystery that allows the community to think and live anew. Liturgy is rehearsal for a world as it should be. Liturgy always begins with a personal accounting/confession (what I have done and what I have failed to do) … and the promise of reconciliation … and ultimately transformation.
Abbot Guéranger begins his mystical meditations in L’année Liturgique with the season of Advent … the beginning of the Christian year … a season of hope amid chaos … and the nervous expectation of a new spirit that will usher in an age of love and reconciliation. The scripture texts, euchologies, hymns and devotional pieties are the richest of the liturgical year. Every year we are reminded of the chaos that humanity brings upon itself … and the complexities of the divine and human dance toward its deliverance.
Liturgy must be relevant to both the evolution of human self-understanding, or maybe more importantly, as a counterbalance to human devolution, or else it risks losing its transformative power in community.
I close with an anonymous Prayer for Justice found in Laurence Hull Stookey’s This Day: A Wesleyan Way of Prayer …
Gracious God, let your will for us all be known.
Let us all be partners in shaping the future
with a faith that quarrels with the present
for the sake of what yet might be.
Amen.
The emergent narrative is the moment at the first GOP debate when the moderator asked the seven Republican presidential contenders if they would, by show of hands, still vote for the former president even if he were convicted of a crime. Six of the figures reply with varying levels of enthusiasm.
Dougherty’s image is not intended as an illustration or a snapshot of a moment. Instead, the artist captures a critical moment in our nation’s moral accounting. The debaters on the dais are not personalized. In fact, there is a sameness … or better yet … a nothingness in these contenders to be our nation’s overseer. All are cut from the same bolt of drab cloth. Dougherty intentionally adds arms and hands … in a fluorescent chartreuse … to convey the very public credo of six candidates. These flailing gestures may … or may not … be representative of the individual’s actual moral view because these figures appear animated and controlled by something or someone outside the picture frame. This is political puppet theater … so it’s sometimes hard to establish sincerity.
While Dougherty captures one political party’s moral collapse, the ambiguity of the picture might suggest this moment as a metaphor for our whole nation’s collective ethical conundrum that lies churned-out during these two-year election cycles. We find ourselves in the same season again … in a routine that is neither generative nor reconciling. Election day has become a festival day of losers be damned.
We like to say that we believe in separation of church and state … but that has never been true … ever … or anytime. Politics and religion are the two principal ways that humanity works to structure its life together … impossible to rend asunder.
In our post Trumpian dystopia, our hope and our doom seem to hinge around this new season of sorting. Every two years politics and religion amalgamate … even if our literacy of either may be sorely lacking. Yet, despite election day’s significance as a pivotal moment in our life together, the day does not have a liturgical commemoration. There are no lectionary readings, prayers or hymns assigned to this day. On this day, when the community gathers to participate in the most profound of our public rituals … and a most solemn moment of personal accounting, we are left adrift to publicly (albeit privately) profess our faith … a credo … checking a box to affirm what “I believe”.
This season needs the power of liturgy. Because the goal of liturgy is not to console. Liturgy is intentionally disorienting as it seeks to shift the community’s worldview beyond what it observes in the current condition. Liturgy fosters profound personal and social transformation and moves the community toward works of mercy and justice. Liturgy is the acting out of the world as it can be … not as it is. Liturgy is taking part in a mystery that allows the community to think and live anew. Liturgy is rehearsal for a world as it should be. Liturgy always begins with a personal accounting/confession (what I have done and what I have failed to do) … and the promise of reconciliation … and ultimately transformation.
Abbot Guéranger begins his mystical meditations in L’année Liturgique with the season of Advent … the beginning of the Christian year … a season of hope amid chaos … and the nervous expectation of a new spirit that will usher in an age of love and reconciliation. The scripture texts, euchologies, hymns and devotional pieties are the richest of the liturgical year. Every year we are reminded of the chaos that humanity brings upon itself … and the complexities of the divine and human dance toward its deliverance.
Liturgy must be relevant to both the evolution of human self-understanding, or maybe more importantly, as a counterbalance to human devolution, or else it risks losing its transformative power in community.
I close with an anonymous Prayer for Justice found in Laurence Hull Stookey’s This Day: A Wesleyan Way of Prayer …
Gracious God, let your will for us all be known.
Let us all be partners in shaping the future
with a faith that quarrels with the present
for the sake of what yet might be.
Amen.
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