The divine is latent in everything. Its truths are brought forth through various media, not just devotional ones. We acknowledge this when we participate, with others, in the sacraments.
As so often happens, my personal search for God has thrown up certain ideas I want to explore further. Here I am revisiting the concept of enactment.
For me, the word means both a process of actualisation and its product. In other words, enactment consists of calling forth, and achieving, an embodiment of an idea so that it becomes more substantial, more intelligible and more ‘real’. More than mere depiction or static representation, enactment is dynamic, participative and productive: in a phrase, ‘making it’.
‘Making it’ is an idea that is to be found in several fields, especially in play, the arts, ceremonial and religion. Children do it best. Watching grandchildren at play is an instructive delight. They think nothing of grouping some chairs and boxes together and designating the pile a spacecraft in which they propose to journey to Jupiter. Adult family and friends are emphatically told to subscribe to this assertion and are enrolled as crew. It’s not long, however, before a new and better visualisation is created and substituted for the rocket; or it is time for tea or bath.
Laden with messages and metaphor, the arts are past-masters of enactment. Their range stretches from music, where every individual performance is a separate work of art brought to life from the score, through our ancestors’ paintings of the demigod animals racing over the walls of the caves at Lascaux and Guy Fawkes burned in effigy on Bonfire Night, to the prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry V and the annual restaging of Jesus’ crucifixion in the Philippines. By a process of cultivated mimesis, ideal beauty as truth is brought into being through the discovery of perspective and the mastering of the Golden Section or through the pity and terror of Oedipus’s re-appearance on stage after his blinding.
Great drama is the apotheosis of enactment. Through powerful and insistent involvement licenced by our assent it enables us to explore human motivations, strengths and weaknesses, in matchless representation. This is at its most evident when a scenario is proposed and played out to a conclusion, however unsatisfying or painful that might be.
An obvious and relevant example of this experience occurs in Hamlet where the play-within-a-play, The Murder of Gonzago, is edited by the prince, alert to the possibility of revelation it presents, the better to enact his father’s tragic death. Thus enactment can be weaponised and sharpened for its target. Where actors and audience assume that what they are experiencing is a dramatizing and distillation of the ‘truth’, active enactment purifies and concentrates the proposition to the limit.
Another obvious enactment – as a blend of theatre, music and spectacle, usually involving uniforms – is experienced in ceremonial. In our own culture, think of the annual Trooping the Colour or Remembrance Day ceremonies. Its particular focus and intention is deliberately to convey a mood and make sure it is shared between the enactors and the audience, but to do so movingly in rites pregnant with meanings and emotions easily decoded, understood and committed to. The expected product, on both sides, is enhanced engagement in a shared vision, propelled by traditional references, movements and statements. One such shared vision is commemoration: making sure participants remember, but in highly structured ways designed to evoke grief and mourning but also to channel it as propellant for a renewed dedication of nation, community, group, family or self.
Nowhere is commemorative ceremonial more obvious than in religious rites. In the Catholic Mass, for example, it is all there: the shared vision, the traditional tropes and rituals, the stylised mourning and repentance and the familiar cues to rededicate oneself for a better life. All this is dramatised in a ceremony of enactment carefully designed to evoke the presence of the divine in the here and now: “I will thank you in the great congregation; in the mighty throng I will praise you” (Psalm 35:18)
The context is, of course, the problem of engaging with divine ineffability (what Christians call the great mystery of the Incarnation). It needs some form of intermediary endowment or representation that we can understand to be “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”. This is what the Mass deliberately provides. But its meanings are ever evolving.
The days when Christians quarrelled about transubstantiation versus consubstantiation in the Real Presence are long gone, even if the question “what is real?” or “what has to be real?” still lingers. No matter: the Mass understood as a psychodrama packed with meaning survives all such analysis. At its root, its reason for being, the Mass is where, “when two or three are gathered together in Thy Name”, we enact God.
This is not to say that we create God (any God we think we can create is an idol). It is rather that we summon ourselves to initialise and participate together in a rite whereby we take on each other’s burdens, construct for one another a framework of commitment and shared forgiveness, and call it “God”. This thought has occurred to others: “God depends on us”, wrote André Gide, “it is through us that God is achieved.”
The obvious objection to this is that this amounts to little more than fabrication: something confected to call forth various emotions and psychological attitudes. But this is to ignore the dynamic aspect of the basic under-lying transformative chain of meaning enacted as a drive to invoke the latency of it represented by Christ. The final words of the enactment ceremony make up an instruction to go forth into the world and make God happen there. This is a way of making the truth of God evident; “You don’t have to believe God exists”, runs the rabbinical aphorism, “just do what he says”.
Attending Mass twice a week, as I do, does not entitle me to know, let alone stipulate, what my fellow congregants do or do not believe. Some hold a much more traditionalist view of the sacred mysteries – whatever they are – than I do, and probably feel no need – as I do – to interrogate what the Bible and the preachers claim when they use terms such as ‘the saving power of Jesus’, or ‘God loves me’. Whatever they believe I just know I have to ask these questions without expecting some cogent and convincing answers. As a way of surviving this quandary, enactment seems to me to offer a framework for some of my belief in the unbelievable. Gide again: “La recherche de Dieu est une affaire personnelle comme le sont la lecture et la compréhension des Évangiles”. So this is my quest.
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