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· OMG, there’s actual religiosity in Trollope’s spirituality?

AFTER EASTER, IT’S BACK to the humdrum expressions of minimal spiritual awareness – things like ‘OMG’ and the time-eroded contraction of the Jesus Prayer: ‘Jeez’. Try the 71st Psalm with an OMG and see for yourself. Jeez, have mercy.

By GREGORY WOLFE [Images] – The older I get the more suspicious I am of spirituality as something ethereal, exotic, and otherworldly—something found elsewhere. The poet William Carlos Williams coined the phrase “No ideas but in things” to express a poetic that preferred concreteness to abstraction. By the same token, I know of no spirituality outside the relationships that constitute the daily life of my community.

This is where Trollope’s genius lies in The Warden. For in making Septimus Harding a liturgist he emphasizes that the quintessential activity of a religious community is not the purveying of doctrines and ideas but the worship of the presence that has called the community into being. In common prayer and song we lay aside the burden of self-consciousness; we recount the story of the encounter that brought us together. In worship we become participants, living members of a body, rather than observers and connoisseurs.

Liturgy is where art and community life meet. Where spirit is not thought but made flesh through hands, knees, and vocal chords. In worship the stuff of art is offered up in the name of the community, not the ego of the artist—or the clergy. Ingmar Bergman, one of the great film directors and an artist capable of rendering dysfunctional religious communities with unrelenting, devastating accuracy, nonetheless wrote late in his life: “Art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God.”

Continued at Image | More Chronicle & Notices.

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