In Lviv, Ukraine, Rev. Addriy, a priest of the Ukrainian
Greek Catholic Church rather than the Ukrainian affiliate of the Russian
Orthodox Church, said after a Mass in June 2014 that the European Union is an
“empire of evil” defying the Word of God and spreading sins including
homosexuality and pedophilia. The priest went on to characterize the Ukrainians
who toppled President Viktor Yanukovych as “Godless deviants” and “fools . . .
in the pay of hostile foreign powers.”[1]
Being in the western part of the
state, the eastern-looking priest was not exactly “preaching to the
choir”—meaning he must have known that his message would not be well-received
by his congregation. This disjunction illustrates a distinctly religious
problem that can arise when clerics fly too far afield from the religious
domain onto those of politics, economics, or even social problems.
The problem is multi-level. On the surface, attention to
non-religious matters carries with it the opportunity cost of foregone
attention to religion. To be sure, the priest spoke outside of Mass, and thus
he did not detract from it directly.
However, at a deeper level, he did diminish the religious value of his Masses. His own diminished stature or
credibility in the political matter at hand put his religious role at risk as well.
Anger at an opposing political view inexorably puts distance
in a religious relationship. The latter is not limited to new-found suspicion
regarding sermons or homilies. The transcendent religious experience—communion
with God in Christian terms—involves shifting attention from the external
environment (i.e., what is going on around you) to an “inward” orientation to a
reference point that inherently transcends the limits of cognition and
perception. Feeling “safe” enough to risk shifting attention off what is going
on in the worship context (e.g., the church) is essential to being wholly
invested in the experience itself of yearning for that which is yearned for
beyond the particular mask of eternity. Feeling that the person in the room who
is in charge is in any sense a threat, or even just disliking him or her, thus
detracts from the religious experience, and thus from the religion itself as an
instrument thereof.
So, beyond the point that political ideology is of another
domain than religion, the over-reaching can inadvertently sabotage or at least
diminish the intensity of the religious experience possible in a given worship
context. In other words, a dedicated context, sui generis to religious experience,
is compromised as soon as stuff from other domains is brought in. The inherent
sensitivity of religious experience, owing both to the intimacy in yearning for
“the wholly other” that lies inherently beyond our reach and the giving up of
attention to one’s immediate surroundings (i.e., what is going on in the
church), is violated by the breaking in of stuff from our realm (e.g.,
politics, and even church business!).
In the case of Roman Catholicism, for example, the “presence”
of the sacrificed or consecrated Christ in the Tabernacle on the altar sets a
sanctuary apart as sacred space from the rest of the world. Whether or not such
a presence is actually in the bread in the enclosure is not the point; rather,
that Catholics treat the sanctuary as perpetually dedicated to religious
activity facilitates their entering into religious experience as in communing
with God after ingesting Christ in the Eucharist. A priest or lectern making
announcements from the weekly bulletin, for example, as the congregants are
intensely focused in transcendent yearning disturbs the sensitivity of the
experience itself.
Interestingly, the “pure” or rarified sensitivity that is in
religious experience intentionally devoid of stimuli that can dilute the
sensitivity itself can carry over onto ensuing experience back in a person’s
daily world of quotidian stimuli. That is the religious experience is in one
sense a “sharpener” of a person’s sensitivity, which on return to the world can
“carry over.” Although the heightened sensitivity to the ordinary doubtlessly
fades as a person’s ordinary sensitivity level kicks back in amid its customary
context, regular “religious exercise” may give its more finely-tuned sensitivity
greater staying power, such that the “sensitivity weight-lifting” sessions may
eventually not be necessary for this purpose.
Applied interpersonally in a person’s daily life, the
greater, “microscopic” sensitivity gained through religious experience is
commonly known as compassion. In fact, this byproduct is typically misclassified
as religious rather than ethical in nature, and this error in turn can invite
or provide an opening for interlarding content from the world such as social
issues (e.g. abortion, poverty, social justice) into the worship context. In
the case of Unitarian Universalism, especially when its humanist movement
reached its zenith in the 1970s in the United States, social structures based
on the ideology of egalitarianism are regarded as sacred. Such self-ideology as
sacred can be interpreted in religious terms as a manifestation of
self-idolatry, which snuffs out or blocks outright transcendent spiritual or
religious experience.
Therefore, sensitivity not only pertains to transcendent
religious experience devoid of interfering external stimuli, but is a byproduct
known as compassion that is of value in the world. Though not religious itself,
the ethical principle of what Adam Smith calls “fellow-feeling” in his Theory of Moral Sentiments can itself
thwart the sort of invective inflicted by the Ukrainian priest on his
disheartened flock. “Do not cause your brother to stumble,” Paul advises in one
of his letters to a congregation just a few decades after his Lord’s
crucifixion. If a cleric is not
sufficiently careful in this regard, we can assume that he or she has little regard
for the value of others’ religious experience, and even such experience itself,
relative to more “worldly” agendas.
It is ironic, to say the least, to find religious
functionaries and even institutions oblivious to what is conducive to a
religious experience that is transcendent in nature. Both in being of value in
itself and for one of its byproducts, intense dedicated yearning for that which
inherently lies beyond the limits of human perception and cognition may
actually receive scant attention in most religious services. Even where the
rites are conducive to such experience, clerics may tend to treat the ritual as
an end in itself rather than as preparatory. In how many Masses, for example,
is the experience of communing with God after
the Eucharistic ritual treated as the high point, or core, of the Mass?
In this photo, furnished by the U.S. Defense Department, a bishop consecrates the bread into the body of Christ. Is this moment of the sacrifice of Christ in the Mass its high point even if so in terms of the Eucharistic rite? Behind the priest is the tabernacle, in which previously consecrated pieces are stored. They make the room into "sacred space" continuously rather than merely during a Mass.
Instead, the priest-centric consecration of the bread and wine is said to by
the pinnacle, and the Mass itself is typically quickly ended as soon as the
priest finishes washing the dishes. Unlike any experience oriented to the
external stimuli of a priest holding up the consecrated species, which
admittedly can be quite meaningful to a Catholic, the communing experience
following the ritual transcends even the worshipper’s immediate environment and
thus is more conducive to isolating the eternal (by transcending the external)
and then sensing that of the eternal back in the person’s daily life, including
in other people. This sensitivity is more finely tuned to them, and thus to the
subtle indications of their suffering; and I suppose the experience of yearning
transfers over in a way in the motivation to relieve the suffering. However, the
heightened sensitivity itself may also furnish the motivation.
In terms of
liturgy generally, religious ritual can be thought of as preparation, rather
than as the whole of a religious service—distinctly
religious experience being the immediate objective; as the referent is both
by definition and experientially inherently “beyond,” the intensity can be put
on the yearning itself, especially if the religionist is willing in true humility to transcend even
the given mask of eternity to the raw numinous experience itself. Put another way, the yearning itself, or communing, can extend beyond the human reception of divine revelation into our familiar categories of thoughts and images. To the detriment of such "pure" religious experience wherein the immanence of transcendence demands a heightened sensitivity, the divisive Ukrainian priest had other treasures in mind, and therein in all probability his heart and god could also be found.
[1]
Andrew Higgins, “Ukrainian Church Faces Obscure Pro-Russia Revolt in its Own
Ranks,” The New York Times, June 21,
2014.
