Nehemiah Blake
restoring England’s Christian literary traditionArchive for spirituality
Fiction as liturgy
What is liturgy but a plot along which a story can be strung. Yet the story being strung is not a mere story. It is a story in the aid of worship, and hence a story of spiritual import to both the individual and the community, for liturgy is, after all, a personal act of worship publicly enacted with others that leads to a communal restatement of belief. The liturgical plot is what governs the pace and drama of the story, both for the individual and the community. By tying its varying movements to the calender, the liturgical plot brings our participation to the story.
Can fiction enact this same liturgical same function? It is towards this ideal that Apocalypse of Jude strives. Its liturgical structure melds together the pagan liturgical calendar with the Church’s, beginning at Easter and ending at Christmas, while taking in Whitsuntide, Spring Equinox, Halloween and Midsummer along the way. On the side of the Church liturgy, Jude and Caul somewhat unknowingly work through a liturgy of the sacraments, thereby bringing the reader into participation with the liturgical story. Furthermore, the biblical texts of Jude and Revelation that are mixed into the overall text will hopefully drive a communal discussion of the fictional use of these texts, which should in turn encourage a collective restatement of belief on the part of readers (the double entendre on restatement is intended, for a restatement is always one made anew). Also present in Apocalypse of Jude, however, is the pagan liturgy of the vegetation ritual in which the reader is invited to participate through reading the integrated text of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland. Here Paul acts as high priest, not in pagan worship of the god Dionysus however, but rather of himself.
This focus on the self as centre of worship is the travesty of liturgy. This travesty however, Jason Clark notes, is the primary liturgical plot that people in the UK participate in today. Clark calls it the liturgy of consumer culture where “our weeks are organised around the consumer calendar” and our participation driven by a “demand for obedience from our wallets,” all in the service of identity formation through the aesthetic acquisition of ever more desirable goods which will attach to us the mediated attributes of a godlike status. Clark goes on to note that the liturgy most discredited and forgotten in the UK is the Christian liturgy, in which is told the story of Christ in aid of the worship of Christ, a man who eschews everything about consumer culture.
It is odd then, that much Christian spirituality today reflects more the values of the consumer-culture liturgy than its own. And if the consumer-culture spirituality is a new-age spirituality that piggybacks on the pagan liturgical tradition, then much Christian spirituality is mere new-age spirituality. Jason Clark argues however, that Christian spirituality should rather be seeking for a reconnection with a liturgical tradition more closely connected with that of the Book of Common Prayer, and which can act as “the door way to the living out and forming of our lives around the reality of the universe that is the life of [the counter consumer-culture] Jesus.”
English literature began and founded many of its roots in serving a Christian liturgical function for both the individual and the community of believers. If those are the roots of English literature, there is no reason to believe that fiction cannot serve that same function today, and help both the individual and the community of believers reconnect with a life that celebrates love of God and neighbour above self. It is Nehemiah & Blake’s desire to publish such works, of which Apocalypse of Jude is humbly put forward as an imperfect prototype.
If you would like to know more of Nehemiah & Blake’s vision, please email nehemiahandblake@yahoo.co.uk.
