Читать книгу Living on the Border of the Holy - L. William Countryman - Страница 11

The fundamental priesthood belongs to all of us by virtue of our humanity. The only preparation or authorization for it is what comes from living our common human life honestly and attentively in the presence of the HOLY. There are, of course, some people who turn out to be exceptional priests, in whom our shared priesthood becomes particularly clear and who help the rest of us become aware of who we are. But there is no formula for producing such priests. Our priesthood—like the rest of our human individuality—is the result of unpredictable encounters among temperament, social definitions, personal history, and the uncontrollable will of GOD. For better or worse, we cannot make the necessary encounters with the HOLY happen at our own bidding. We can make ourselves available to them, but we cannot command GOD’S presence.³⁹

There is an element of surprise that is integral to our every experience of the HIDDEN. We can treat this surprise as a gift and delight in it. But, often, its very unpredictability strikes us as a problem. Human beings are not content simply to wait on the unpredictable HOLY. If we cannot control it, we at least want some map of it. We want to celebrate the HOLY, to hand on our knowledge of it. And so we commemorate our encounters with GOD by composing songs and stories about them, by reenacting them in ritual, and by constructing models of them in the form of sanctuaries. This process is the creation of religion, with all its traditions and sanctuaries and ritual observances—and the priestly orders that serve them.⁴⁰

Religion is not the same thing as the encounter with that HIDDEN TRUTH that is within and under all our days, the encounter with the HOLY, with GOD. “Map is not territory.”⁴¹ Religion belongs not to the border country, but to the everyday world, the world of surfaces, where it reproduces the pattern of our most profound spiritual experience in the concrete, everyday terms of rites and doctrines and sacred times and places. What I have called by such names as GOD, TRUTH, or the HOLY in the preceding chapter, religion represents in terms of “the sacred” and “the pure.” It contrasts these with “the profane” and “the unclean,” which function as images of what I have been calling “the everyday world.” “Sacred” applies to places, rites, things, and people set apart as symbols of the HOLY.⁴² “Profane” (literally, “before/outside the shrine”) signifies the opposite of the sacred. “Clean” or “pure” refers to whatever is in accordance with the sacred, what can safely enter the sanctuary; “unclean” and “impure” define the people and things that are to be excluded from shrine and rite.⁴³

I am using this terminology in a quite particular way in order to give some clarity to these pages. The words are susceptible of many meanings, of course, and others will use them differently. I am not claiming to define them for good and all—only for purposes of the present discussion. My usage is not without foundation in ordinary language, particularly the distinction in ancient Latin between sanctus and sacer, but ordinary language tends to be muddled on these matters. Religion, it turns out, models our encounter with the HOLY so successfully that we often fail to distinguish the original from the copy. In what follows,I will use the arcane names, particularly GOD and the HOLY, to refer to what we encounter in the border country. I will use “sacred” to refer to the institutions of religion that serve as models, images, or maps of the arcana.

This does not mean that religion is completely divorced from the HOLY. Like everything else in the everyday world, religion may, at any moment, surprise us by opening onto the HOLY. GOD may—and often does—meet us through it. Religion prepares us to recognize and interpret the HOLY when we do encounter it. The young Samuel, for example, heard the voice of GOD in the Temple at Shiloh, but the old priest Eli had to tell him what he was hearing (1 Samuel 3:1–18). The rites of religion accustom us to certain patterns of encounter with the HOLY. Religion maintains the language and patterns and traditions of spirituality that help us interpret what we encounter in the border country. Still, we should avoid confusing the sacred with the REALITY it stands for. Such confusion constitutes idolatry and can cause profound harm.⁴⁴

Religion is almost as inevitable as our fundamental priesthood.⁴⁵ It is not hard to understand why. The HOLY that we keep bumping up against in our lives is both all-pervasive and also hard to find when we want it. Our experience of it, the experience that grounds our priesthood, is elusive. Because we are creatures of time and space, we feel the need to settle this omnipresent but ungraspable REALITY into the concreteness of a sanctuary, a fast or feast, a rite—in short, in religion. GOD, TRUTH, ULTIMATE REALITY, the HOLY—these we cannot see or hold or visit at will; but we can make pilgrimage to a sacred shrine, perform sacred gestures, recite sacred texts, sing hymns, and join together in celebrating sacred occasions.

If these rites are of more than the simplest sort, if (for example) they require the combined efforts of many people or take several days to perform or involve many different activities, they will probably require the services of religious specialists. The approach to GOD, remember, is dangerous. If our shrines and festivals and rites are to be good images of the HOLY (their very purpose in being), they, too, must be presented as foci of power and danger. Otherwise, they are of no value. We grant them power ourselves, through our reverence for them; and then we seek help to deal with their ascribed power without endangering ourselves. The power we grant them is real power, for it represents the culture’s or community’s collective extension of authority to the designated signs and rites. The power of those appointed to help us in the presence of the sacred is equally real.

Hence the creation of priest-specialists, whom we might also call “priests of religion.” Their office comes into being in order to replicate or reproduce, on the level of religion, the role of the fundamental priest in life itself.⁴⁶ As we live out our fundamental priesthood on the margin between everyday life and the HIDDEN REALITY, so the priest of religion (in serving that role) lives on the margin between the profane world, with its spaces, times, and people, and the separate and sacred sphere of religion. The worshiper lives, for the most part, in the profane sphere, all those aspects of life defined by religion as non-sacred. She or he approaches the boundary of the sacred as if a stranger, seeking guidance from someone more at home there in order to enter the sacred realm and depart unharmed. All this replicates the experience of the fundamental priesthood in the presence of the HOLY—an experience that is too diffuse, too scattered throughout our existence, and too unpredictable for us to maintain a clear grasp of it. Since we cannot afford to lose sight of such important things in our life, we create maps, icons, and images to point us toward them.

Religion and its priesthood have as many different forms as there are different conceptions of the HIDDEN HOLY and different methods of mapping it. We are concerned here, ultimately, with the life of the church and its priesthoods—the priesthood of the whole people and the priesthood of the ordained. But if we are to understand how Christian religion deals with priesthood, we have to pay attention to its roots in the ways the people of ancient Israel ordered their religion and its priesthood. Much has been written on this topic by historians of Israel and of religion in general, and no doubt much more remains to be said. We do not need a detailed account, however, or a complete history of how the institution developed and changed in response to changing times—only a broad sense of its basic outlines and its particularity.

I do not want to overemphasize the uniqueness of the religion of ancient Israel. The sacrificial system at its heart was, in fact, broadly the same as that of other Mediterranean cultures.⁴⁷ Still, each religion is significantly unique, significantly different from all others. Each takes materials from a common stock of human religiousness and fashions them into its own unique essence in an effort to reflect a particular experience of the HOLY. In learning and living with our faith, Christians, like other people, have to learn and value the specificity of our own tradition. It gives us our ongoing character and provides the building materials with which, under the guidance of the SPIRIT, we create our future. Even elements in our tradition that no longer have living force are still part of our collective memory and therefore of who we are. They live on as powerful metaphors and symbols even now. And the roots of our identity, without doubt, are in ancient Israel.

The religious rites of ancient Israel were largely centered on sacrifice and the altar where it took place. Given what we have said about meeting the TRANSCENDENT at the boundaries of human life, it is not difficult to see why the ritual killing of an animal might effectively symbolize the encounter with GOD. We do not have to find these rites to our own liking in order to grasp their potential power. Probably they seemed quite natural to farmers and pastoralists like the early Hebrews. In their world, human life depended in part on the life and death of animals, a process with which they were directly involved.

The Israelite tradition was of two minds about the altar, the place of sacrifice. On the one hand, the nomadic element in the tradition militated against a fixed, localized sanctuary. This element continued to be evident in the rule that the altar must be built of unaltered stones, which were not reshaped for the purpose with human instruments (Deuteronomy 27:6). In other words, it was the sort of altar one could build anywhere in the stony pastures of Canaan. On the other hand, by the time the documents of the Old Testament were reduced to writing, most Israelites were settled farmers and strongly attached to their local “high place” and to the great pilgrimage shrines such as Shiloh, Dan, Bethel, Beersheba, and, above all, Jerusalem.

The more nomadic strand of Israel’s traditions probably did not place much reliance on a separate order of sacred priests, since a small traveling band could not afford to take them along as it moved from one pasture to another. Nomads might make use of the settled sanctuaries that lay along their path; but in the main, the elders of the nomadic group were their own religious experts. The settled farmers of Israel, however, could create settled sanctuaries with more elaborate religious rites. With that practice, an important niche for the priest of religion appeared. The high place of a small village, to be sure, might still make do with the wisdom of the village elders or the expertise of an occasional visitor—like Samuel when he came to Bethlehem in search of David (1 Samuel 16:1–5). If the village grew to be a town, however, it could support its own resident priest. A great pilgrimage center could do better yet, eventually supporting a whole corps of priests in its sanctuary. In due time, sacrificial worship was limited, at least in theory, to a single temple—the royal sanctuary in Jerusalem, with a very large body of religious officials.

While some of the older documents in the scriptures of Israel reveal the gradual development of this priestly efflorescence, documents that lay out the priestly role in detail, such as Leviticus, are relatively late. They reflect the highly developed religion of the Jerusalem Temple. For these texts, Jerusalem and its one Temple were GOD’S residence on earth, the place where GOD’S name dwelt. Here the HOLY comes dangerously close to being collapsed into the sacred place of religion. There was still an awareness that one could not control the HOLY through the rites of religion. Yet to worship at the Temple was at least the religious equivalent of approaching GOD. The worshiper had to purge the self of all uncleanness and to leave the profane world behind in order to draw near. The only thing to bring along was the sacrifice, and it had to be of the very best that the profane world could offer, an unblemished specimen of an animal considered clean for human consumption-along with lesser offerings of flour, oil, and wine.⁴⁸

The priest met the worshiper at the Temple, not so much to kill the sacrifice—the usual rule seems to have been that the worshiper did the slaughtering—as to offer it or consecrate it by splashing some of its blood around the altar and burning the assigned portions of the flesh. These actions bridged the gap, as it were, between the worshiper’s profane status and the sacredness of the sanctuary, and so brought the worshiper symbolically into contact with GOD.⁴⁹ One of the ways of bridging this gap was that the worshiper gave the priest certain parts of the sacrificial animal. In one sense, this was a fee for the priest’s specialized service. In another sense, what went to the priest also served to consecrate the sacrifice, for the priest was a part of the sacred more than of the profane sphere.⁵⁰

Israelite priests, accordingly, lived under various restrictions designed to separate them from the profane world that might defile them. They had to be male. (Women were particularly prone to impurity, in the Israelite view, because of menstruation.)⁵¹ They had to be from a single tribe, that of Levi. Those of the first rank had to be from a single line of descent in that tribe, the house of Aaron. They had to be very certain to eat no unclean food. They had to maintain their purity in order to avoid eating the sacred gifts in an inappropriate state. They could marry only the purest of pure Israelite women and take no chances on the legitimacy of their offspring. They were not to mourn for any but their closest blood relatives, not even for their own wives, since contact with the dead rendered one impure. Even those who enjoyed correct descent could not serve at the altar if they had any physical imperfection.⁵²

This stress on purity fits with what we have already said about the nature of the worship in which these priests served. They took part in a ritual focused at a particular place, a place whose sacredness imaged the transcendence of GOD. By the time Leviticus reached its final form, it was taken for granted by most Israelites that there must be only one sanctuary for sacrificial worship in the land of Israel and perhaps in the whole world. This reemphasized the singularity of the Temple and its remoteness from the profane sphere. Even a person who lived in the very shadow of the one Temple had a long way to go in traveling from the everyday world at the foot of Mount Zion to the sacred sphere at its summit.⁵³

The priests were indispensable to anyone who wished to make this journey. For one thing, they dared to enter into the innermost court of the Temple, where no layperson could safely go. One of them, on one day of the year, even entered the innermost chamber (Leviticus 16). That their identity and their daily life lay within the Temple and that they maintained a high level of purity authorized them to move through the sacred precincts with relative freedom. In addition, since they knew the parameters of safe behavior, they could instruct the outsider in matters that were beyond his or her profane knowledge. In the sacred world, the wisdom of the profane seemed of little use.

The work of priests, however, was not limited to the Temple and its rites. If the sacred drew people to itself, it also reached out to shape the life of the profane world. We are apt to think of the offering of sacrifice as the priest’s principal job—and there is a great deal on this topic in the scriptures of Israel. But another major aspect of the priest’s work was to give instruction in the right way to live. The Hebrew word for such instruction is torah, often (but perhaps misleadingly) translated “Law.” It means direction for the kind of life that, even in the profane world, would accord with the sacredness of the Temple. Not that the same degree of sacredness would be required (or even possible) in the profane world, but that the ideal of daily life should stand in relation to what the sanctuary represented.

This extension of sacredness into the profane world took place primarily through the observance of purity. The network of purity connected Israelite people to their sanctuary through the very substance of the profane world. What they ate or avoided eating, what they wore, how they planted their fields, how they cleansed themselves after sexual intercourse, how they dealt with the dead or with lepers—all these served to connect them with the sacredness centered in the Temple. Purity also served to set Israel apart from the far more profane world of “the nations,” the Gentiles, who lacked even the most basic connection with the sacred center of Israelite religion. It was the priest, originally, who taught these things.

The sacramental priests of ancient Israel thus had a pivotal role in the religious life of the people as a whole. This did not mean that their priesthood simply replaced that of the people as a whole; the scriptures continued to assert that the whole of Israel is a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). Nor did the priests of religion monopolize all access to GOD, for it was accepted that GOD would also speak with kings and prophets and had a special relationship with the poor. Their priesthood had a critically important role, however, in that it served as the religious model for interpreting the more fundamental priesthood of the whole people.

As we have already observed, our understanding of the fundamental priesthood will always be closely connected with our understanding of the HIDDEN. Both the one and the other belong to that category of things to which it is hard to give definitive expression. We can know them only tangentially and in fragments, never face-on or whole. Our language has no direct, ordinary vocabulary for these two concepts. To give enough specificity to them that we can at least begin to deal with them, we make concrete models in the form of religion and its priesthood. Thus, for example, the Temple created an image of the borderlands. Its sacredness was an image of GOD’S holiness, its purity an icon of the distinction between the HIDDEN and the everyday world. Its rites and traditions offered a concrete model of how one might approach GOD, through offering something valuable and shaping one’s life with reference to the sanctuary. The Temple’s priests were an image of the fundamental priesthood by which we sustain one another in the border country.

Such models of things ungraspable and inexhaustible are called “sacraments.” One classic definition of sacraments is that they are “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace.”⁵⁴ They put us in touch with that grace in a tangible way. They may even be said to convey grace, for behind them stands the boundless generosity of GOD.⁵⁵ Yet they hold no monopoly on grace, which is an uncontrolled and uncontrollable gift of the HIDDEN REALITY itself. Rather, they point toward grace; they map it for us; they remind us of its pervasive (and therefore ungraspable) presence by creating images of it in concrete rites, objects, and persons.⁵⁶

Sacraments do not exhaust grace, as if one had no access to grace except through these sacramental rites or objects or persons. Grace always remains free of human control. GOD is always free to address us by any means whatever. If an Israelite made a pilgrimage to the Temple and there made use of the sacramental priests to guide him or her through the appropriate rites, and to carry the blood and choice portions of the sacrifice to the altar, that did not mean that that person had no other avenue of access to the HOLY or that GOD could not deal with that person directly. The lay Israelite, though not a priest of religion, continued to be a true priest and to participate in the priesthood of the whole people. Such a person might be surprised by an encounter with the HIDDEN ONE at any moment. For the priesthood of the people of Israel was and is the fundamental priesthood bestowed on all humanity—in the particular form shaped and conditioned by Israel’s particular encounter with the HOLY. If the fundamental priesthood of the people of Israel were to disappear, the sacramental priesthood would lose its significance, having nothing to signify.

What the sacramental priesthood of the Temple did for the Israelite was to set forth in visible and tangible form the shape of every Israelite’s priesthood. The one Temple, with its rites and priesthood, figured GOD’S oneness. The purity rules of the torah figuredGOD’S graciousness in choosing Israel and in instructing the people in clean behavior and so separating them from the nations. The worshiper’s purification and the cautious and obedient ascent of Mount Zion alluded to Israel’s acceptance of the covenant at Mount Sinai. The sacrifice shadowed forth the danger and cost of our approach to GOD—and also its bountifulness, for most sacrifices culminated in a sacred banquet.

The purpose was not to replace the ordinary Israelite’s priesthood—that fundamental priesthood which he or she exercised in the way uniquely possible within the called people of Israel—but rather to illuminate it, to help the worshiper remember and interpret the truths that informed it, to guide each person living and ministering in the border country that is the very presence of the HOLY. The sacramental priesthood was a secondary priesthood, derived from the priesthood of the whole people (which, after all, went back, in the biblical story, to a time when there was no distinct priestly caste in Israel) and representing that priesthood to itself. The grace to which this sacrament points and which, in appropriate ways, it nourishes in the worshiper is the fundamental priesthood itself. Without such sacraments, there is a real danger that the people would lose sight of their shared priesthood amid the everyday preoccupations of life. What is everywhere is hard to see anywhere. The sacrament refocuses attention on the almost unnoticed pervasiveness of grace.

Of course, the religion of ancient Israel did not always work this way. There is nothing human, including most certainly the works of religion, that cannot be turned to evil purpose. Our hankering to compete, to make much of ourselves, to protect our sense of self-importance, to place TRUTH, if possible, in our debt, is always looking for an opportunity of self-aggrandizement. The sacramental priest finds such an opportunity by reversing the relationship between sacrament and grace, so that the sacrament appears to be primary and the HIDDEN HOLY merely a backdrop to it. In this way, the Temple came to be seen not simply as sacred (in the sense in which I have been using the word) but as HOLY in its own right, not just as the sacrament of GOD’S presence, but as its guarantee.⁵⁷ In the same way, the priesthood of the Temple came to be not just the sacrament of the priesthood of all Israel, but a superior religious caste.

There are protests against this state of affairs throughout the history of Israel. Prophets objected to an excessively high opinion of the Temple and its sacrifices. They found that some Israelites had so literalized the metaphor of GOD’S presence there that they imagined the city could not possibly fall to an invading army.⁵⁸ Others had such confidence in religion that what they did in the profane sphere seemed to them irrelevant; they assumed that, as long as they maintained the prescribed religious rites, they were free, under GOD’S protection, to grind down the poor.⁵⁹ They mistook sacrament for the ultimate REALITY behind it.

In the language of scripture, this error is called “idolatry” The first of the Ten Commandments is to have no gods but GOD; the second is to make no idols. We are apt to think of idols as being equivalent to “foreign gods” and to treat the second commandment as little more than a reiteration of the first. But one can make idols of the real GOD, too. And the most dangerous idols are those made from the best materials. Whatever can serve as a true icon of GOD can serve as an idol, too. Whatever can serve as a true sacrament of GOD’S grace can also serve as a convincing idol to be worshiped as if it were the grace itself. Thus the Temple, the sacrifices, and the priesthood went, at times, from being sacraments to being idols and drew down on themselves prophetic condemnation.

All this leaves us in something of a quandary. There is no religion without sacraments. And there is no sacrament that cannot be perverted to the uses of idolatry. This statement applies to modern Christianity as much as to ancient Israel. The fundamental priesthood is the central thing; but, because it is so universal and inevitable in human life, it forgets itself if it is not represented in concrete and accessible fashion. Yet when it does create concrete sacraments of itself, it is apt to forget that they are images and to take them at face value. We may even so far forget ourselves as to suppose that the fundamental priesthood is derived from the sacramental one, that only the sacramental priests enjoy real intimacy with the HIDDEN, that the priests of religion are the real priests, and that the rest can only be humble worshipers.

The ministry of Jesus resolved this problem in a striking way. Jesus did not, of course, manage to resolve it once for all; in every age, people must struggle through its difficulties once again. He did, however, resolve the problem in principle by reasserting the dignity of the fundamental priesthood in his own person and by setting a decisive question mark against the excessive claims of religion and its sacramental priesthoods.

39. “We resist living with the doubt, incompleteness, confusion, and ambiguity that are inescapable parts of the life we are called to live. Living by faith means living in unsureness. . . . We cannot bear having to take a risk that this is the way to go. We cannot bear our inability to know absolutely. So we hurry up and create some certainties that will relieve us of the anxiety. The temptation in the Garden of Eden is that ‘you will be as gods,’ knowing all things, and we succumb to that temptation all the time.” Verna Dozier with Celia A. Hahn, The Authority of the Laity (Washington: Alban Institute, 1982) 8.

40. The point of religion is always what it points toward, never itself. “We seldom recall that being religious means that our whole life is so ordered that every moment we are aware that we are not the final explanation for ourselves. It means that the ethics that control our work are the ethics of a servant, because we are not our own masters. It means that our relationships to our fellow human beings are under the lordship of our Creator. . . . We do not have to stop and think about being religious because that is the way our lives are lived.” Dozier, The Authority of the Laity, 7.

41. I would argue that the map is inevitably incomplete and imperfect because of the uncontrollable quality of the HOLY. Hence I would echo, though for different reasons, Jonathan Z. Smith’s statement: “We need to reflect on and play with the necessary incongruity of our maps before we set out on a voyage of discovery to chart the worlds of other men. For the dictum of Alfred Korzybski is inescapable: ‘Map is not territory’—but maps are all we possess.” Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978) 309.

42. “Ritual is not an expression of or a response to ‘the Sacred’; rather, something or someone is made sacred by ritual (the primary sense of sacrificium). . . . The sacra are sacred solely because they are used in a sacred place; there is no inherent difference between a sacred vessel and an ordinary one.” Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 105–6.

43. Religion is not confined to the purposes I have suggested here, though I believe it originates from them. It may also become a way of organizing all reality, including political and ideological as well as spiritual concerns. Speaking of the complex “maps” of Jerusalem and Israel found in the later chapters of Ezekiel, Jonathan Z. Smith writes, “Ezekiel, by employing complex and rigorous systems of power and status with their attendant idioms of sacred/profane and pure/impure, established structures of relationships that were capable of being both replicated and rectified within the temple complex. Being systemic, they could also be replicated without.” J. Z. Smith, To Take Place, 73.

44. “. . . the institution, since it represents the element of stability in life, does not give, and must not be expected to give, direct spiritual experience; or any onward push towards novelty, freshness of discovery and interpretation in the spiritual sphere. Its dangers and limitations will abide in a certain dislike of such freshness of discovery. ...” Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today, 121.

45. The oldest evidence for religious rites is usually said to be the burial practices of our Neanderthal cousins (E. O. James, From Cave to Cathedral: Temples and Shrines of Prehistoric, Classical, and Early Christian Times [London: Thames and Hudson, 1965] 38–39). It is possible, however, that some sort of mortuary rites go back beyond Neanderthal times; see Paul G. Bahn, “Treasure of the Sierra Atapuerca,” Archaeology 49/1 (January/February 1996): 45–48.

46. The exact nature of institutional priesthood varies greatly from religion to religion, but the common features are involvement in rites and a special relation to the community’s tradition. The community remains priestly in its own right. Joseph Kitagawa has pointed out that the notion of a priestly people is very widespread in the major religions and that it is the religious communities that “ultimately play the priestly role of mediating between concrete human experience and the sacral reality, no matter how it is called” (“Priesthood in the History of Religions,” in To Be a Priest: Perspectives on Vocation and Ordination, ed. Robert E. Terwilliger and Urban T. Holmes, III [New York: Seabury Press, 1976] 52).

47. Royden Keith Yerkes, Sacrifice in Greek and Roman Religions and Early Judaism. The Hale Lectures. New York: Scribner, 1951.

48. For a good survey and interpretation of the Jerusalem sacrificial system, see Richard D. Nelson, Raising up a Faithful Priest: Community and Priesthood in Biblical Theology (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993) 55–82.

49. Nelson, Raising up a Faithful Priest, 59–62, 83–85.

50. Eli’s sons, in 1 Samuel 2:12–17, violated the traditional way of collecting the priest’s portion and treated it simply as a fee, and therefore as purely at their own disposal. Their innovation was greeted by the worshipers with great indignation.

51. For fuller treatments of the subject of purity and impurity in ancient Israel, see L. William Countryman, Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988) 11–4, and Nelson, Raising up a Faithful Priest, 17–38.

52. For restrictions on the priests, see especially Leviticus 21.

53. “Ritual is a relationship of difference between ‘nows’—the now of everyday life and the now of ritual place; the simultaneity, but not the coexistence, of ‘here’ and ‘there.’ Here (in the world) blood is a major source of impurity; there (in ritual space) blood removes impurity. Here (in the world) water is the central agent by which impurity is transmitted; there (in ritual) washing with water carries away impurity. Neither the blood nor the water has changed; what has changed is their location.” J. Z. Smith, To Take Place, 110.

54. The Catechism of The Book of Common Prayer.

55. “Remember the church exists to foster and hand on . . . the spiritual life in all its mystery and splendour—the life of more than this-world perfection, the poetry of goodness, the life that aims at God. And this, not only in elect souls, which might conceivably make and keep direct contacts without her help, but in greater or less degree in the mass of men, who do need help. How is this done? The answer can only be, that it is mostly done through symbolic acts, and by means of suggestion and imitation.” Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today, 129.

56. “Uncreated grace, the loving self-giving of God to all men and women, exists long prior to any sacramental action. . . . But, as with the boy who does not recognize the girl’s love for him, so neither do men and women always recognize the presence of the God who is grace. To realize the possibility of grace, they need to make grace, as he needs to make love, in some symbolic action.” Michael G. Lawler, Symbol and Sacrament: A Contemporary Sacramental Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1987) 56.

57. Biblical Hebrew does not seem to have had the vocabulary to distinguish “holy” and “sacred” in the way I am using the terms here. Instead, the prophets attacked these distortions by asserting that GOD does not care about sacrifices and other religious observances.

58. E.g., Jeremiah 7:1–15.

59. E.g., Hosea 6:5–10; Amos 5:18–27.