Interview

Insights Editor William Greenway Interviews David F. White

First, what is a habitation of Spirit?

“Habitations of Spirit” point to the fact that the Spirit can be experienced in relation to material practices as home or habitat. The Spirit cannot be manipulated or exhausted by these practices, but is mediated by them. These practices have their roots in the church’s experience, but they are fluid and should be mediated anew in different contexts.

Christian educator Jerome Berryman uses “bounded freedom” to speak of the way Christian liturgy and practices have structured activities and gestures but also always surpass themselves, evoking new meaning and wonder. Another Christian educator, Maria Harris, talks about the ways in which we create the forms and then they, in turn, shape us in new and unexpected ways and yield a knowledge that can’t be attained apart from these practices.

I’m a (very) amateur jazz guitarist, and something like this happens in jazz performance. Jazz begins with chord structure and melody, but then it plays with that melody, experiments with it. This is the freedom of jazz, but it is not unbounded freedom. All of these creative moves remain faithful to the melody even as they elaborate upon it, so we come to know the melody in a new and more comprehensive way. One of my favorite jazz guitarists, Pat Matheny, says there is something mysterious and unintended in improvisation when the musician’s consciousness is totally absorbed in the music. In such ecstatic moments of improvisation, boundaries are exceeded and something new is expressed. Musicians often look back surprised when they hear their own recordings. So, improvisation gives expression to something that we might call Spirit.

Christian liturgy and practices provide structure like a jazz melody that invites elaboration and improvisation. The Spirit is mediated by these material forms and points to new ways of meaning and wonder. In these ways Christian liturgy and practices provoke habitations of Spirit.

What concerns led you to focus this essay on habitations of the Spirit?

We’re living in a historical moment where it seems any meaningful notion of spirituality has been obscured by Christians on the right and the left. Too often Christians on the right adhere to doctrine or systematized thought while Christians on the left adhere to their own sort of moralisms. Both sides not only oppose the ideology of the other but also tend to obscure the dynamic core of the Christian faith, which is spirituality. This way of thinking makes dogma determinative. In my view it’s not fixed or static ideologies or grammars that makes Christian faith true, good, or beautiful, it is this mysterious something, the Spirit, that gives expression to the forms. We risk a kind of idolatry when we do not embrace a faith that is more alive, more creative. That prompts me to think about spirituality.

Are you naming some risks in Christian liturgy and practice?

Yes, the risk is that they get flattened by familiarity that only reflects to us our own egos and obscures what is more dynamic and alive. We must improvise new forms without rejecting the melody of the gospel or the gift of past practices, for they provide a basis for the church’s improvisation. Such dynamism brings the church alive and makes it beautiful. The intransigent rigidity of both the right and the left is flattening, sometimes leading us to render each other as unmitigated enemies. But none of us is finally reducible to our ideologies or abstracted identities, for we are created in God’s lively image. Good liturgy and practice remain open to what is contextually appropriate while never forgetting the core memory of grace and love and forgiveness which involves us loving even our enemies.

You begin with a very dramatic story of the citizens of the French village of Le Chambon, who hid Jews during the Nazi occupation at considerable risk to themselves. How does that relate to habitations of the Spirit?

Christian educator Craig Dykstra says that the heroism of the Chambonais was not a random act of kindness, but was cultivated by their liturgies and everyday practices of hospitality. Their hospitality began with learning a melody which was elaborated in their lived practices in their community as they welcomed travelers in need. And thus they came to be disposed to improvise upon the melody by opening their doors to Jews fleeing the Nazis.

You speak of liturgy and practices, and I suspect by practices you mean, in part, what John Wesley referred to as works of mercy, such as feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, engaging in struggles for justice …

Yes, Wesley is trying to name practices like works of mercy as a subset of practices or means of grace, but which are not just the fruit of faith, they are ways we meet God and are formed in Christian faith. So, we need to teach not just the rhythms of liturgy, but the rhythms of such practices that elaborate the liturgy, what the theologian Dan Saliers calls the “liturgy beyond the liturgy.” In this way we recognize a continuity between the life of worship, the life of thought, and the life of lived practice. Many churches today are unable to maintain this continuity between worship and life in the world because of what I am calling “excarnation.” With “excarnation”

I mean to name ways in which our daily activities have been colonized by dynamics that remove us from material embodiment in which the Spirit is mediated.

You name three forces of excarnation: secularism, neoliberalism, and technology …

Yes, Charles Taylor characterizes secularization in part in terms of a fundamental shift in our way of experiencing reality. Premodern folks experienced themselves as porous to spiritual realities which suffuse creation, open to a world in which everything was alive with meaning and mystery. But now we have a modern understanding of ourselves as isolated, thinking things essentially separated from the world that we seek to master. Taylor says this turns us into “buffered selves,” mental agents in a disenchanted, material world. In his terminology, this is a form of excarnation. Of course, some of what we moved away from was oppressive superstition, and that should be affirmed, but Taylor thinks it is not good that we’ve lost a felt sense of interconnection with a world alive with Spirit and meaning.

William Cavanaugh thinks neoliberalism exacerbates our excarnation. Neoliberalism is an economic political vision in which production of wealth is the chief human end, and the building of wealth and consumption of the things of this world is idealized as the greatest good. The tradition of neoliberalism, which is so powerful today across the world, obscures the goods emphasized by religious traditions, such as love of God and neighbor and care for the world. Cavanaugh wants Christians to lament, name, and resist the excarnation sparked by neoliberalism.

Albert Borgmann focuses upon the ways in which technological devices excarnate us from what he calls “focal practices,” by which he means practices which engage us in concrete and intimate worlds of inter-relations. Consider a family having dinner at a table in contrast to a family having microwave dinners in front of the TV, or each member of the family eating their own meal in front of their own screen. All the steps of growing and selecting, preparing and cooking the meal, setting the table, eating and socializing together, cleaning up afterward constitute a whole world of interconnection with creation and one another, a world that focal practices cultivate but which can be obscured by technological devices. We gain access to volumes of information and “enjoy” a vast increase in speed at which we can get things done, but we lose the friction of working with things and with one another by which our knowledge of matter and bodies is deepened and virtue fostered.

Now, Borgmann is not against technology, and neither am I, but he is right in wanting us to be discerning about the ways in which technology can cause us to lose touch with the cosmos and its wisdom, not to mention certain virtues. I am thankful that when Covid hit there was technology like Zoom. Nonetheless, I think many of us had a sense that something was lost, and when we gathered together physically again, that something was restored—that “something” which was lost is what Borgmann is describing as the concrete, intimate “world” of focal practices with its myriad internal goods.

You’re saying that Christian worship, liturgies, and practices can help us to resist the excarnational forces of secularism, neoliberalism, and technology?

Yes, the gestures of worship, passing the peace, singing together, reciting prayers, coming to the Table: all of these are ways in which we, together, concretely embody a narrative of the world and our place in it before God. Christian liturgies and practices attend to matter with reverence and prompt us to live differently before the created world and people. Moreover, liturgies and practices don’t function on a purely intellectual level; they train our bodies, hearts, and imaginations, and extend beyond the sanctuary into the world, as we saw happen dramatically in the actions of the villagers of Le Chambon.

Now, I know it is usual these days to say that the church is not attentive enough to efforts on behalf of justice, and that is surely true in some cases, but I want to suggest that in other quarters the opposite is true. Too often churches don’t take worship seriously enough as a source for justice. I am troubled by congregations that minimize the significance of worship and normative tactile practices while they uncritically embrace social movements. Social movements have their own integrity that may or may not reflect the fullness of Christian shalom. I’m suggesting there are problems with both extremes, with churches who only take worship seriously but divorce it from the social witness of people, and with churches who only take seriously engaging in social action without the formation of worship and practice.

What concrete difference do you hope your essay will make?

We live in a time when for many people the idea of engaging in the Christian tradition with its practices is seen as a kind of affront to human freedom and authenticity. To be sure, some make Christian tradition into an idol, weaponizing rigid, received forms against anything that’s new and living. I urge us to celebrate both tradition and creativity, to respect the wisdom of the tradition and to be willing to adapt to new ways of bearing witness in new circumstances, to engage traditioned Christian liturgy like a jazz artist elaborates a familiar melody. I’m reminding us that a Spirit breathes through these material forms, that if we will engage creatively in liturgy and “liturgy beyond liturgy,” we will find ourselves enlivened by the true and living source of theology, ethics, and spirituality. I hope people who have been wounded by modern forces of excarnation will be inspired to creatively engage in these practices and will find themselves healed in communions enlivened by habitations of the Spirit.