Habitations of Spirit: Remediating Excarnation

by David F. White

One day in 1942, two buses of Vichy French police pulled into Le Chambon, a little village in southern France, to round up Jews who were given refuge there. The police captain rousted everyone into the village square and warned the Protestant pastor, Andre Trocme, “that if he did not give up the names of the Jews the village had been sheltering, he and his fellow pastor, as well as the families who had been caring for the Jews, would be arrested.” The pastor refused, and after a thorough and frightening search, the police could find only one Jew. They loaded him into an otherwise empty bus. Before they drove off, “a thirteenyear-old boy, the son of the pastor, passed a piece of his precious chocolate through the window to the prisoner, while twenty gendarmes who were guarding the lone prisoner watched. Then the rest of the villagers began passing their little gifts through the window until there were gifts all around him—most of them food in those hungry days of the German occupation of France.”1

Christian educator Craig Dykstra relates this story from Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed by Philip Hallie in his own book, Growing in the Life of Faith, because he deems it singularly important for Christian educators. Haille’s book is subtitled, How Goodness Happened There. But he never quite explains these people and their goodness—what we might think of as an embodied habitation of the Spirit—a vital point which Dykstra addresses. During World War II the Chambonais gave protection, shelter, and food to approximately 5,000 Jews fleeing the Nazis. This community’s acts of kindness, done at great risk and at considerable cost, were remarkable. But, Dykstra makes clear, random they were not. Many years of liturgical and tactile practices trained them to show hospitality to friends and strangers. In worship they learned stories, images, and gestures that created an open space in their hearts for hospitable acts. They were trained in habits of generosity by ordinary practices of welcoming each other into their homes and providing shelter for travelers and food for the sick. These gestures of worship and practice prepared the Chambonais to answer that knock at their door with steely resolve and offers of gifts. As Dykstra comments, “In the midst of their practice, the people of Le Chambon found that it was not really their practice. It was the practice of Another.”2 Worship and Christian practices turn out not to be mere dutiful efforts, but places in the contours of communal life where a habitation of the Spirit is able to occur.

David White, The C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Professor Emeritus of Christian Education, retired in 2023 following almost twenty years teaching on the Austin Seminary faculty. He is the author of several books including Tending the Fire that Burns at the Center of the World: Beauty and the Art of Christian Formation (2022) and Joy: A Guide for Youth Ministry (Wesley’s Foundery Books, 2020).

As Karl Barth recognized, “the Christian life is a spiritual one, that is, a life which in its distinctiveness is, from first to last, conditioned and determined by that special movement and act of God in the work of the Holy Spirit.”3 Today, it has become common to set “empty rituals” in opposition to the supposed “vibrancy of the spontaneity of the Spirit,” as if these were inherently contradictory. But this is largely a false dichotomy for, as in Le Chambon, tactile practices of liturgy may cultivate habitations of the Spirit. In our current context this can sound odd, but the significance of an incarnate spirituality may be best grasped when contrasted to our culture’s predominant tendencies of “excarnation,”4 a de-emphasis and distortion of the relation of our body to matter. This article explores the concept of “excarnation” as developed in Charles Taylor’s genealogy of secular modernity,5 William Cavanaugh’s critique of neoliberalism,6 and Albert Borgmann’s analysis of technology.7

Excarnation

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor contrasts the premodern self, porous to an animated creation, over against the modern self, buffered from the cosmos by mental effort, by ratiocination.8 In modernity, meaning-making is primarily a mental achievement instead of a felt sense of a living cosmos. In Taylor’s account, the premodern world constitutes an essentially spiritual reality, alive not only with danger and risk, but also with wisdom and grace. The modern “immanent frame” closes in upon itself and evacuates transcendence, undergoing a kind of excarnation, “a transfer out of embodied, ‘enfleshed’ forms of religious life, to those which are more ‘in the head.’”9

Taylor attributes excarnation to various sources, including Descartes’s reduction of the human self to the cogito (a thinking thing) and the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on scripture and theological reasoning—in this way the Reformation itself contributed to a loss of spiritual connection. Because it has come at the price of a loss of a felt connection to the cosmos, modern rationality, for all its goods, is a source of excarnation.

Another source of excarnation is neoliberalism, which champions market-oriented policies such as eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers, and reducing, through privatization and austerity, state safeguards for vulnerable populations. By rendering profit and consumption as proper human ends, neoliberalism has weakened traditions that value the intrinsic goods

Habitations of the Spirit

of the material world. Neoliberalism came to the fore in the 1980s as an economic model, but it quickly became a determinative cultural force and is now orthodoxy, not only for businesses, economists, and politicians, but also for ordinary families and individuals, many of whom have no idea of neoliberalism as a theory even though they have been conditioned to live by its tenets. Neoliberalism emphasizes material goods but devalues matter by reducing all material goods to commodities, obscuring the natural world, ignoring and exploiting laborers, and facilitating vast inequities in wealth. Neoliberalism excarnates by evacuating material things of their mystery, goodness, and spiritual profundity, diminishing the meaning, joy, and gratitude that should flow from our connections to material things.

William Cavanaugh suggests that neoliberalism—its mythology, transvaluation of the material world, and relations—constitutes an idolatrous spirituality.10 According to Cavanaugh, we imagine that magic was a primary feature of the ancient world, while today we are concerned with hard facts and realities. Still, neoliberalism has its own aura of magic—e.g., a confidence in an invisible hand of the market (magical, wise, and good) or the magical aura advertising imbues into commodities (which are purportedly able to make us happy and content). With JeanLuc Marion, Cavanaugh observes that commodities function as idols that arrest our gaze and mirror to us our own egos, as contrasted with icons that draw our gaze into the depths of the infinite made visible in the material.11

Albert Borgmann suggests a third source of excarnation, technology. Borgmann distinguishes between focal “things” and technological “devices.” A focal “thing is inseparable from its context, namely its world, and from our commerce with the thing and its world, namely, engagement.”12 Because “things” are characterized by our engagement with them, they produce more than one good. For example, a wood-burning stove produces a commodity, heat, but it also comprises its own world of engagement. The stove requires skills for correct use—knowing how to get firewood and learning which kinds of wood burn best and how properly to build and stoke the fire. These practices bring one into interaction with natural things and involve extended human interaction. Since the stove is often in a central living space, it can encourage gathering and order the pattern of life in the home. Its maintenance can order family chores, the timing of meals, and the gathering of family and friends. The more we reflect on the “world” of the wood-burning stove, the more we see it offers far more than economic value, since it stimulates a web of interpersonal interactions that order rich relations in daily life.

On the other hand, a thing may provide a particular commodity and cut us off from communion. Borgmann says such devices rob us of “focal practices”—routine but rich ways in which we engage the world in our daily lives. Focal practices, such as maintaining a stove, preparing nightly meals, or even carpooling to work, even if they are tedious, provide consistent, multivalent patterns of engagement with the world. Certain technological devices provide a consistent source of disengagement with living others and the world around us. Tragically, as Staffan Linder explains, when goods are reduced to commodities which do not provoke social engagement or connection with the natural world, the paradoxical result is a decreased capacity for enjoyment.13

If the Western world has suffered a dramatic excarnation in which we are buffered from a felt relationship with creation, distracted by neoliberalism’s commodity fetish from creation’s ordinary goodness and profundity, and alienated by technological devices from manifold engagements and organic wisdom, how might the Christian tradition involve a spirituality that restores joyful engagement with God’s world? Building upon Dykstra’s notion of practices and drawing from James Smith’s analysis of worship’s materiality, I will suggest an understanding of Christian worship and practice that constitutes a spirituality mediated by materials, bodies, and senses capable of remediating the excarnations of modernity.

Incarnating Spirituality

What is the church’s response to the excarnating forces of secularism, neoliberalism, and technology? According to Smith, the Christian tradition points to liturgy as a “hearts and minds” strategy that “trains us as disciples precisely by putting our bodies through a regimen of repeated practices that get hold of our heart and ‘aim’ our love toward the kingdom of God.”14 Christian faith involves our kinesthetic senses, instantiated by worship’s gestures, images, and narratives, a kind of knowhow by feel for what faith demands. He observes:

Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it’s a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly— who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love … We are made to be such people by our immersion in the material practices of Christian worship.15

The gestures of Christian worship are akin to children bicycling in their neighborhoods, who absorb a sense of its geography into their bones with each pedal stroke. Smith states, “Because our hearts are oriented primarily by desire, by what we love, and because those desires are shaped and molded by the habit-forming practices in which we participate, it is the rituals and practices … that shape our imaginations and how we orient ourselves to the world.”16

Smith considers humans as homo liturgicus, innately liturgical and doxological beings. So, culture is replete with its own liturgies, involving shopping malls, football stadiums, college campuses, social media, and the like, all of which demand patterned gestures and narratives that recruit our desires and habits. Smith draws from the work of Pierre Bordieu, who describes “pedagogies of insignificance” as occasions in which micro-practices instill entire cosmologies.17 A cultural anthropologist, Bourdieu discovered that a difficulty in cultural research resulted from the fact that he couldn’t rely on what was available at the level of people’s consciousness. Instead, he learned to read their practices. He realized that within cultures there are micro-practices—as for example, when a child is taught to “sit up straight” or to “hold your knife in your right hand”—that instill a whole cosmology.18 These seemingly insignificant things constitute a covert pedagogy. In posture and cutlery, a whole way of life is taught.

Habitations of the Spirit

Likewise, worship’s formation, extorted by its micro-practices, happens largely beneath our conscious awareness, and its embodied know-how is not easily articulated in words or concepts. According to Smith:

[I]n the same way that the “understanding” embedded in the paintings in the Sistine Chapel is not just a substitute for a treatise on Pauline theology, or vice versa … the distillation of the Christian worldview in terms of creation-fall-redemption-and-consummation can never adequately grasp what is understood when we participate in communion and eat the body of Christ, broken for the renewal of a broken world … The rhythms and rituals of Christian worship are not the “expression of” a Christian worldview, but are themselves an “understanding” implicit in practice—an understanding that cannot be had apart from the practices.19

Narrative, the Heart’s Milk

According to Smith, “A liturgical anthropology is rooted in both a kinaesthetics and a poetics—an appreciation for the “bodily basis of meaning” (kinaesthetics) and a recognition that it is precisely this bodily comportment that primes us to be oriented by story, by the imagination (poetics).”20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty concludes “that our body is comparable to a work of art. It is a nexus of living meanings.”21 The truth of a story is understood on the register of praktognosia—a kind of practical wisdom we absorb in the betweenness of our incarnate existence. Smith states, “The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing—which is just to say that the heart has a story to tell and loves to hear one told. The heart drinks up narrative like it’s mother’s milk.”22 The shape of our character is determined by the stories that captivate us by narrating a “good life” complete with values, behaviors, and authorized versions of self. Smith asserts, Liturgy is the shorthand term for those rituals that are loaded with a story about who and whose we are, inscribing in us a habitus by marshaling our aesthetic nature. Liturgies are “cunning” pedagogies that extort what is essential while seeming to demand the insignificant, precisely because they are stories that are told by—and told upon—our bodies, thereby embedding themselves in our imagination, becoming part of the background that determines how we perceive the world. Liturgies are those social practices that capture our imaginations by becoming the stories we tell ourselves in order to live.23

In Christian worship, the narrative of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ infuses each physical gesture—passing the peace, prayer, eating at table, baptism, song—in their liturgical enactment. Worship does not only tell a story, it illumines a tradition, a communal habitus into which we are absorbed that now orients our disposition to the world. Thus, the social body of the church recruits my body through the most mundane means: through bodily postures, repeated words, ritualized cadences that effectively “deposit” an affective orientation within. Christian practices stand in continuity as “liturgy beyond the liturgy.” As Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass remind us, Christian faith is lived in a rhythm of prac- tice, such as honoring the body, hospitality, household economics, saying “yes” and saying “no,” keeping sabbath, testimony, discernment, shaping communities, forgiveness, healing, dying well, and singing our lives. In these and other practices the gestures of liturgy are elaborated and extended in concrete historical contexts. In Christian liturgy and practices, forms of life defined by them represent possibilities for knowing ourselves, God, and the world, enlarging and deepening our spiritual senses.

Conclusion

In the face of the powerful forces of excarnation, I am striving to highlight an understanding of Christian spirituality that emphasizes a spiritual role for things which, when mediated by liturgies and focal practices, can serve as habitations of the Spirit. This understanding affirms that our concrete and habitual practices constitute a material home in which the Spirit can bear witness as an icon of God, sustain and encourage human virtue, and contribute to the world’s healing.

Just as goods procured through focal practices are inseparable from the practices themselves, so the grace of liturgical action and Christian practice cannot be reduced to non-material spiritual impulses isolated from the concrete action of ministers and communities. As focal practices, liturgical rituals demand “manifold engagement” and thereby draw us into a richly varied encounter with the “other world” of worship (the actual shape or architecture, the sights and sounds of the worship space). The ritual postures and gestures (standing or kneeling, prayer posture, kiss of peace) and sacred symbols (water, oil, bread, wine) concretely connect us to the assembly of the koinonia and to our own bodiliness. Moreover, these Christian practices generate “worlds” of manifold engagement—with stories, gestures, demands, and imaginaries—which create space in our hearts to open doors and offer gestures of greeting, food, shelter, and safety. Such Christian worship and practices can help to address our culture’s idolatry and restore the fragmentation of our attention with a “long, loving look at the real.”24

Modern excarnating trends which inhibit manifold engagement in the world and foster egoistic idolatry can be remediated by Christian worship and practices and put the lie to secularity’s abstractions, neoliberalism’s idolatry of individualism, commodification, and profit, and technology’s distractions.25 While Christian faith at its best has always included a role for creativity, we must not forget traditional practices that constitute a habitus for virtue. In a world grown increasingly excarnate, we are tempted to cater wholesale to impulses of convenience or novelty, but to do so would risk evacuating the friction of liturgies and practices which sustain habitations of the Spirit and bring the joy and wisdom of manifold encounters with the created world and its people. A slow and incremental, but vital, part of pastoral work involves learning and teaching the church to live rhythms of Christian liturgy and practice. This not only brings—but powerfully embodies—the good news of the gospel in an excarnated world that hungers for tangible expressions of love.26

NOTES
1. Philip Haillie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 3; As told by Craig Dykstra in Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices (Louisville: Geneva Press, 1999), 56.

2. Growing in the Life of Faith, 64.

3. Karl Barth, The Christian Life (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), 139.

4. Charles Taylor’s defines excarnation as “… a transfer out of embodied, ‘enfleshed’ forms of religious life to those which are more ‘in the head’” (554, A Secular Age). Excarnation involves a shift away from embodied ways of knowing—kinesthetic, aesthetic, affective, practical—and toward a reduction of meaning to pure reason or mental production.”

5. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

6. See William Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).

7. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).

8. A Secular Age, 32-35.

9. A Secular Age, 554.

10. Being Consumed, 50.

11. William Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 65.

12. Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, 41.

13. See Staffan Linder, The Harried Leisure Class (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

14. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009), 33.

15. Desiring, 32.

16. Desiring, 25.

17. James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013), 138.

18. Imagining, 98.

19. Desiring, 69-70.

20. Imagining, 29.

21. Merleau Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2007), 175.

22. Imagining, 38.

23. Imagining, 138,139.

24. Walter Burghardt, “Contemplation: A Long Loving Look at the Real” in: George W. Traub, An Ignatian Spirituality Reader (Chicago, IL: Loyola Press, 2008) pp. 89-98.

25. A critical reader may consider these liturgical re-enchantments as hopelessly naïve, luddite, or obscurantist. This article is not so much a rant against modern reason, commerce, or technology as a reminder of the stakes of these various forms of excarnation and the promise of Christian liturgy. We should always extend grace to an exhausted mother who microwaves a meal so she can have time to read a book at her child’s bedtime.

26. See Hans urs Von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, translated by D. C. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004).

David White, The C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Professor Emeritus of Christian Education, retired in 2023 following almost twenty years teaching on the Austin Seminary faculty. He is the author of several books including Tending the Fire that Burns at the Center of the World: Beauty and the Art of Christian Formation (2022) and Joy: A Guide for Youth Ministry (Wesley’s Foundery Books, 2020).