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.