Meaning, liturgy, and the human work of making life sacred
Early in my seminary experience, something opened for me. It was a spiritual and emotional breakthrough, but it came through something quite ordinary: learning to recognize what people are doing when they practice religion.
We were studying ritual in tribal communities whose forms made that activity easier for me to see. What caught my attention was the drum. A beat, a step, people gathering and moving together. A birth could be received into the life of a community through a shared rhythm and dance steps. An event became something people carried in their bodies and emotions, together.
The movement said something. It said something before anyone explained it.
I began to understand dance differently. I had never been much of a dancer, but I could see that people were speaking to themselves and one another through movement. What they were saying somehow exceeded what they could put into words.
That helped me understand what I admired about monastic life. It made life beautiful and creative in the mundane. Daily living acquired rhythm and flow. Work, dress, gathering, attention—all of it became part of a dance.
The habit expresses equality
Consider the habit. It’s a simple garment all monastics wear. They remain different people, with different bodies and histories, but the shared clothing makes something visible.
Their equality.
A value becomes something they inhabit (pun?). It enteres daily life through an ordinary act: getting dressed.
That is part of what all liturgy does. With art, rhythm, honesty, and integrity, people practice what they believe and value. The practice can enter them so deeply that they begin to become what they enact.
People used to speak to me about going to “get” or “take” communion. I would tell them that the point was to become the bread and the wine.
Become nourishment. Become available to the life of others. Carry what happens at the table into the world.
This is where meaning becomes much larger than an explanation.
Meaning gets us up in the morning. It gives us a reason to contribute, to care, to take the risk of loving. It can give us the energy to draw our next breath.
We often describe its effects and call this meaning. But meaning is also what moves us toward those effects. It gives us a reason to face the wall before we have found the door.
The human work of religion
I use “religion” to describe the universal shared practices through which people cultivate, maintain, and transmit meaning.
In that sense, religion does not require the supernatural. We can recognize religious activity wherever people give belonging and commitment a formal expression: in stories, symbols, repeated gestures, collective loyalties, and rhythms of life.
That is why I can speak of the Marine Corps or devotion to the Chicago Cubs as religious. I am looking at how a way of belonging becomes something people live.
Opthē makes that activity conscious.
We make meaning. We give it form. We do it intentionally. Those forms, in turn, help make us.
Theology, as I practice it, attends to that movement. It helps us understand what we are doing and take responsibility for it.
There is no magic
I have always liked Penn and Teller because they help me recognize something about this work.
A performance can acknowledge its own artifice and still astonish us. Knowing that an experience has been crafted does not necessarily empty it of power.
Understanding how a dance gathers people does not prevent the dance from gathering you.
This matters because humanly created meaning is often dismissed as though its human origin makes it unreal. Yet a shared practice can produce real belonging, real courage, real consolation, and real responsibility. The artistry is human. So are its consequences.
In my understanding, there is nothing supernatural waiting to do this work for us. There is just us.
That places an enormous possibility—and an enormous responsibility—in our hands.
It also matters when someone uses mystery to claim authority over other people. We have the ability to examine how that authority is being created. We can expose the craft, challenge the claim, and recover our ability to participate.
Wonder can survive understanding. Exploitation depends much more heavily on keeping people from understanding.
What guides the dance?
Our capacity to make meaning can serve cruelty as readily as care. A powerful sense of belonging can teach people to exclude. A beautiful ritual can conceal domination.
Opthē therefore grounds its work in truth and agape-gratia: love without conditions or merit, directed toward the common good.
We cannot simply declare ourselves faithful to those values and consider the matter settled.
We praxis focus: personal and communal examination. We ask what we are becoming, whom we are failing to hear, and what our actions actually serve. Our understanding remains open to correction.
Consensus belongs within that practice. So does equality. A beginner must have a real voice alongside an experienced member. Experience can contribute insight without conferring greater human standing.
The community learns from the person entering it, just as that person learns from the community.
The people must make their liturgy
At present, Opthē is just me. That needs to be said plainly.
The focus form holds the thinking, conviction, and practice through which I try to live. Much that a community would need remains to be developed.
I will not design a complete communal liturgy for people who are not here.
We must do that work together. As people arrive, leave, or die, the living community will continue to examine and revise its forms.
Its fidelity will lie in its commitment to truth, agape-gratia, and the common good. Sometimes honoring that commitment will require changing the beat of the drum and/or the steps.
We make the dance. In practicing it, we allow it to change us. And we remain responsible for whether the life it forms becomes more truthful, more loving, and more available to the world.