Week 59: Worship Chapter in Full draft

Most of the week I have been off colour and this weekend it snowed again so I did get slightly more reading done that I hoped. This meant that yesterday I had only a chapter to read of a book. There is an interesting phenomena in much anthropology; anthropologist seem to often write the theory very separate from the book. This is kind for me as quite often all I need to gather is the theoretical bits and I can ignore the descriptive bits which are often of very different cultures and done by people with a very different relationship to the culture than I had to the congregations I am studying. They may also be interested in very different things.

The problem is that I need to process things very quickly in order to integrate them into my thesis. Now I could sort out what the two authors I were reading were doing, which was really to describe two ways in which we can distinguish public ritual. However I then had to apply this to the worship carried out in the congregations and the way it was understood. The problem I suspect is that a lot of the knowledge of worship in the congregations is implicit and therefore they are not always able to make it explicit. I am suffering from much the same sort of experience.

Anyway I had some extra time yesterday, I suppose I should have changed my bed, sorted the washing etc. I was not going to go out as it was snowing heavily. So instead I decided to paint a labyrinth. It is not a particularly complicated one but it is the first one I have painted.

Today I have had quite a successful day, I have edited the stuff I wrote last weekend and put in another 1,500 words which draw on the models I was exploring and Reformed Worship theology to create a synthesis that looks at what is going on in worship. The intriguing thing is that there are some many binary formations that seem to almost line up: Visible-Invisible Church, Christ-Culture, Divine-human, the struggle is to make clear the subtle differences and the way this leads to an oscillation.