To Desire One Thing

Cláudio Carvalhaes 

Jennifer Lord’s essay gives us powerful questions to probe. What does it mean to go back to the basics so we can keep what we do alive? Those who think and do rituals and theology have to constantly go back to the basics, otherwise we run the risk of becoming too comfortable with the orders of worship we have created and rest on the modus operandi of the ex opere operato, where the doing of the ritual is done by the ritual itself, as if the work itself worked. 

The questions Lord’s article offers are not just rhetorical. They have to do with the very practices we do and the specificities of each of them. Since we don’t have time and space to consider each question in depth, I propose to respond to Lord’s text by answering her first major questions and comment on two aspects of Kierkegaard’s work that Lord brings forth. 

Lord starts by asking a loaded question, one that has received much attention and needs to be revisited time and again: “Are those of us ‘in the pews’ on a Sunday morning spectators at an event?” I don’t think anyone would say we are mere spectators, since we participate by singing, praying, standing, and partaking in the bread and the cup. People also respond mainly by seeing and listening, which are both forms of knowing. Our bodies are always responding to the stimuli around us, and in that way our responses are forms of participation
in worship. 

Theater director Augusto Boal would say that Western theater, religious, and nonreligious performances, have taught us passivity. In the performance of theater, the pleasure is in the pretending of that moment we spend together, but in the performance of the religious, the joy is in the presence of God. Yes, both rituals are performances since both have specific movements, limits, gestures, expectations, a plot, and so on. Students have corrected me many times, saying that worship services are not performances. But in fact, they are! Though worship is often differentiated from theater performances in the role of making-believe, these distinctions are often blurred and contested. In any case, both are performances, just as everything we do with our bodies are performances. As I write this article, I am performing my writing. When I pray, I am performing my prayers. When I talk to you, I am performing. When I wake up in the morning, I perform my morning chores. When I lead the worship services, I am performing the ritual gestures of my community.  

Augusto Boal doesn’t like the word spectator because it connotes passivity. Instead, he uses the word spect-actors, since the people can do something bolder, like change the performance, interrupt the ritual. In his Theatre of the Oppressed, Boal intends to awaken us from dormant rituals and frame performance as a way to dismantle oppressive structures. Any ritual, be it religious or secular, like a performance, can make us dormant, assuming a certain religious framework that will avoid any social markers like politics, gender, race, economics, sex, and so on. The seeing-hearing we do as spect-actors carries an ethical demand, one that makes us responsible for all that happens in our worship service. We are passive worshipers when we go to church to do church as the pastor has prepared and when we feel we have nothing to do with it except to agree to it.  

Let me give an example: in this time of fascism through which we are living, what kind of worship are we offering to God and to one another as we reflect the two main commandments given to us by Jesus? Are we caring deeply for the immigrant and for brown people during these heavy days? If we are not, then we are just going with the flow, and our collective participation, our joint seeing-hearing ethical responses, reveals the deadly politics that have taken over our worship services without our noticing. To continue to do worship from a place of fear without considering our role as spect-actors is to be swallowed by the passivity of the politics of our day, a passivity that is celebrated in Jesus’ name. 

Every worship service must issue a demand for our conversion. Any worship service that does not convert us from our ways we can call something else, but not a worship to God. However, church people, and Reformed people, tend to want to be passive. Within the binary body-mind, Reformed people often chose mind. Faith went from practice to belief, and prayer lost its ora-labora format (prayer-work/action) and became passive, disembodied language or abstract ideas. We may go to church now expecting that the pastor will have cut-and-pasted the order of worship and spoken liturgy into the bulletin for us to follow. A posture of passivity is easier; there is a sense that it will save us from conflict, paradoxes, and complexities. This, for me, is the crux of our constant crisis. Ideally, the worship service is a site for the presence of God, and God’s presence demands change, as we hear in Romans: 

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:1–2, NRSVue). 

Reformed people are known to carry this motto: Reformed and always being reformed. This is not only a theological maxim but a liturgical practice.  

Performance theorist Diana Taylor says this, which can be applied to our liturgical practice: “Performance can call spectators to action, but it sometimes puts them in very confusing, powerful, disempowering, or uncomfortable situations. . . . Performances ask that spectators do something, even if that something is doing nothing.”¹ 

Doing nothing is surely part of doing something. However, if doing nothing means only repeating what we do without bringing it to the needs of our time, then doing nothing becomes deadly or passive. I am not proposing we create different kinds of worship services all the time but that we carry what we have received into our time, responding to the challenges of our time. I gave the example of responding to fascism, but we could also move from passivity to full participation in responding to the challenges of climate disaster. Sadly, we have confused passivity with repetition and repetition with tradition. But the conjuring of these words is what makes some people feel that some worship services are not alive. If we understand that to keep any tradition is to change it, for the love of it, then we will move from passivity to action and respond to the call toward movement, engagement, and transformation in worship.

Lord’s questions also bring Kierkegaard to us in wonderful ways. She quotes Kierkegaard: “God,” he says, “is in the audience” (see p. 2). If we accept this assertion, we can trouble the whole structure of the worship services, and even the questions Lord brings get turned upside down. First, if God is in the audience, does God move from the altar or chancel to where people are? If this is the case, we are all in deep trouble. But if God’s place in the audience means that the whole congregational space is equalized with God’s presence, then those who were consecrated and keep standing on top of the ritual space will lose their symbolic and real power. In this case, how would we understand the leading of the ritual or the presiding over the sacraments? With this statement, I would suggest that Kierkegaard is a liturgical liberation theologian avant la lettre. 

For theology, and liturgy for that matter, start with the poor, with the people. In order to plan and lead liturgy as liberation, pastors and theologians would have to commit to people in a different way and create their worship services with different sources of revelation. Theology would not only rest on Bible, tradition, and God’s revelation in Christ but also in the lives and experiences of the people. Our sermons would have to incorporate other resources, and the prayers of the people would have to be understood very differently. The words of the sacraments could be said by anyone, and the representational format of liturgy would finally turn into what it should have always been: the work of the people. If God is in the audience, we are all equally possessed by the Spirit of God. Our worship experience may reflect more clearly many of Lord’s questions.

Last, I want to focus on the central aspect of Kierkegaard’s main theological assumption, that is, “purity of heart,” which means to desire one thing. This is fascinating! But if we think closely, who is it that can desire just one thing? Perhaps the very reason we worship is to learn how to desire one thing: God, and God alone. This reminds me of Ernesto Cardenal’s five hundred-plus-page poem called Cosmic Canticle. For Cardenal, we long for God as we long for the cosmos. If the cosmos for Cardenal is a song to the Divine, may our desire be a song to the universe, to God. 

But to desire one thing is so difficult to attain. How can we desire just one thing in our capitalist society? How can we desire one thing if capitalism asks for our desires to be endless, stretched to infinity? I remember the day my therapist asked me this question, perhaps the most important one in any therapy session: “What is your desire?” When she asked me, I didn’t know what to say. What do I want? I want many things, and I desire everything! Without knowing, she paraphrased Kierkegaard, asking me about the one thing I desired. I responded with a thousand words, only to realize that what I wanted was everything except what I actually said.

Kierkegaard’s question comes from St Augustine, who asked in the Confessions: “What do I love when I love my God?”² To worship is to ask constantly, “What do I love?” This is the quest for our will, our desire. Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6:21), but today it seems our hearts are so scattered that we don’t know what we want. Capitalism has built in us a disposition that makes us desire everything; desire never ends. Our capitalist forms of living make us want and want and want with no bounds, to the point that we don’t desire anything but desire. This is our spirituality: the desiring of desire itself. Where is God in the midst of all of these desires? Completely lost. 

Perhaps this is my response to Lord’s cluster of questions. If we all went to worship to learn how to desire just one thing, how to respond to the question “What do we love when we love our God?” then one day we would know what love of God and neighbor is all about. But to do that we need constant practice of the devotion Lord discusses. Perhaps over twenty or thirty years we may be able to hint at what it means to desire one thing.

A couple of years ago I put together a play that I wrote and presented it at the New York Theater Festival. To put together a one-hour show, I needed the help of so many people, and I had to rehearse countless hours to the point of nausea. I had to learn to have my body, my heart, and my mind in that one hour. I had to desire only one thing with the fulness of my life. Worship is not a rehearsal of anything; it is the actual doing of our lives, the learning to desire one thing: God. To learn this, we need each other and countless hours to get closer to it. Do we want to do this with our whole being? What do I love when I love my God?  

Notes

1. Diana Taylor, Performance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 82 and 86.
2. For a more extended development of worship and Augustine’s quest for love, see Cláudio Carvalhaes, What’s Worship Got to Do with It?: Interpreting Life Liturgically (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018).