Weeks 55 & 56: Filling a gap

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	92,759
Words typed these fortnight:	1,681
Words lost these fortnight:	0
Total increase:	1,681
Days I managed to write this fortnight:	2

Apologies for the lack of Triskele in this blog, I have run out of time to add the bits and anyway I need to finish this section and then do it. What I have been doing is trying to put together a section on using the sociological theory that I am doing to understand worship. In this I am not looking at the standard theories of ritual but am picking up ideas of identity. The intriguing thing is that the Reformed Tradition actually is honest enough to suggest that this is precisely what is going on in worship. That is that worship is the fulfilment of what we were intended to be. Humans were designed by God to be worshipping animals, it is due to the fall that we fail to do this regularly and that society is not designed around worship.

It must be remembered that Reformed Worship is also centred on God, worship is done because God and God alone is worth worshipping. The iconoclasm is not centrally about destroying pictures, images or such that are there, it is about removing that which attract false worship. That can equally be success,  money, social norms  or a celebrity. That which attracts what rightly belongs to God is an idol and needs destruction. As such it is a very ascetic tradition and nowhere is this more seen as within the ritual of worship. It means building theory onto what the ritual is doing rather than developing a much broader analysis is a bit like trying to work out how a car works by reading the highway code instructions on maintenance.

However the tendency within the tradition is to turn the whole thing into a matter of theology and to concentrate on the sermon and what is preached. It is thought if you get your theology of worship right and have sound sermons then you have things sussed. Again this is reductivist and fails to take on the many and varied ways people interact within the worship. The sermon is the start of the process as far as the congregation is concerned and people are interacting internally with it.


Anyway the piece needs another few hours on it before it is ready to be sent to my supervisor. Then there is sorting out what I will do over Christmas. The task is to take something I can do without carrying a huge number of books around. The introductions sounds like a good idea.

So you have theoretically a twin poles pulling at worship. Worship is in some ways the apotheosis of what it is to be human and yet at the same time it stretches out towards the divine.

December 12 Supervision: I am officially writing up

The photo was taken as I was leaving Birmingham University Edgebaston Campus. The tree was a casualty of last winters storms and has since been carved. Today it worked as a focus of this photo in the increasing dusk as after 4:00 pm I headed to University Station. I rarely see the dusk in Birmingham as my supervisions are middle of the day, so this and the January ones are the limited.

Actually this supervision was a lot harder work than many of mine since I started writing up. That is not to say my supervisor thought the work was not good enough. If anything he thought that what was coming was good but there is a huge gulf been good as an idea and right for submission and he wanted to go through the ways what I was doing was not right on the page. This included my need to interact more with the theorists. It now appears that it is only some theorists that I need to do that with and those are the crucial ones. I can do it with a couple a lot better than what I have done quite easily and that will make it a stronger thesis. Then there is developing what the thesis is dealing with. Part of me wants to go back and do that right now but I think I have other items that need removing off the to do list..

This chapter as my last substantive actually means that I am now officially writing up, and  that means the finishing line is in view. The only snag is that due to changes with my home congregation, our minister is leaving, my decision to return to the eldership no longer looks as if it is soft but as if it is hard. I also may have other responsibilities that may come out of this event that may need fitting in around what I am already doing although I suspect they will not start until the Autumn if they do. Therefore I am really needing to get this in a state to submit around Easter. This I know is optimistic given the work involved. Some of it is still drafting, indeed I have a piece of drafting that I need to do before Christmas. This unfortunately means that I will give less time to St Andrews Sheffield at present than they would like. This is coming particularly hard for them as we are going through a period of other losses and expect will continue to until our minister leaves.

So this year Christmas will be another working Christmas. I still have to decide what work I will take up with me at New Year but I know I will need to as I have a supervision on 9th January.  Before I stop for Christmas I need to write a piece on what the Reformed tradition "thinks" it is doing in worship. This is intriguing mix of theology and sociology but I think is possible to pull off. The problem being that most sociology of worship concentrates on ritual. Reformed worship is not without ritual and symbolism but the style is Rational, which makes an analysis based on the ideas of ritual difficult to use as analytic tools. So if it is not ritual, what are we doing? I think I have an answer but that draws on theology.