In the Current Issue: “The First Day of the Week: The Individual and the Christian Religion.”
The issue of Liturgy entitled “Worship and Formation,” guest-edited by E. Byron Anderson, explores how the liturgy “schools” the assembly through language, ritual, music, shaping of time, and distortion of its intention. This excerpt is from Gail Ramshaw’s essay “The First Day of the Week: The Individual and the Christian Religion” which raises questions about the turn in contemporary society toward “spirituality” and the attendant relationships that are formed or malformed by what Ramshaw terms “personally cultivated and maintained” practices and beliefs. She articulates the alternative embrace of communally cultivated and maintained practices by way of drawing contrasts. The full essay is accessible through institutional and individual subscriptions.–– Melinda Quivik
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One way to trace the development of Western civilization proposes St. Paul as an inventor—perhaps the primary inventor—of the individual. Paul’s revolutionary message was that God loves you—heard as a singular pronoun—as an individual person, and history showed that this alternative worldview was appealing to great numbers of persons in the Roman Empire. Each individual can enjoy a direct personal relationship with God. You personally have moral agency—whether male, female, free, slave, no matter your social status or your ethnic group. You were invited to leave your family, its beliefs and rituals, and, as a converted individual, join with other individuals to become a new creation. Since all individuals have moral agency and are responsible for their own actions, the salvation offered by forgiveness was a personal experience of at least psychological freedom.
Paul was attempting not to dump religion, but to infuse religion with the evolving concept of the individual. The personal commitment of each person—women and men, slave or citizen—would enliven the religion of the community with the passion and power of the self. It is likely that throughout the following centuries, vibrant Christian communities were filled with self-authorized individuals, the churches incorporating each person, despite status, in a religious unit that itself was meant to enliven the wider society.
To the extent that this theory is accurate, it offers Christians much to consider. We can be delighted at Paul’s invention of the individual, the “I” whom we cannot live without. We can rejoice that according to this analysis, it is not accurate to condemn Christianity as more or less all bad. We can acknowledge that only by being populated with individuals could a complex, diverse and free society function. Each believer is baptized by name and grows accustomed to the idea that God knows me by name and saves me throughout life and even after death. Many clergy, disregarding the fact that in Greek the “for you” at the distribution of holy communion is a plural pronoun, now call me by my name when administering the bread and wine. Question: Do you want to be called by name during communion?
Yet we know that too much of a good thing is not good. We hear that the diverse society is singing, not the Sanctus, but Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Too often all things are only about the great me. Memoirs abound: let me tell you about myself. Yet we are aware that countless humans have considerable difficulty in finding a successful way to walk their lonely path. That I live as a solo creature is finally not even true: I did not birth myself, feed and clothe myself. We are not turtles, newly hatched and crawling by ourselves across the sand. As the French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous says, our question must be not, who am I, but who are I. Even as individuals, we are filled with others, without whom human life is impossible.
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Gail Ramshaw studies and crafts liturgical language. A Lutheran laywoman, a past president of the North American Academy of Liturgy and recipient of its Berakah Award, and professor emerita of religion at La Salle University, she has published extensively about biblical metaphors, the Revised Common Lectionary, and parish liturgical practice.