I just got back from the 2013 Cov&r conference in Iowa (Colloquium on Violence & Religion). At one point there was a Eucharist, to celebrate James Alison's 25th anniversary of priestly ordination and to commemorate the life of a Cov&r founder, Bob Hamerton-Kelly, recently passed away. With these insistent motives I felt pushed to attend mass, a possibility I had not entertained since my reaction to the revised language of the canon experienced last summer.
I could not undergo again the sacral metaphysics represented by those changed words, those regressive signs. But the moment I entered the University of Northern Iowa campus church I felt touched by a tranquil pang of recognition. Like a scent you have not gotten for years and years, loaded with deep and rich connection.
Classically you could say "That was so weird, I really have no idea where it came from." But in fact I think I do know. Later I returned to the church, to sit in silence and sift through my feelings and thoughts. I understood that what touched me was the church's semiotic stream or flood. And by "church" I mean here both the actual building and the larger institution.
The actual building was well designed with warm red brick and abundant muted light. There were a number of large Byzantine icons scattered around, their flat two-dimensional scheme filled with circular motion, leading the eye and brain in an abyssal space of endless giving. The sacrament was to the side, an understated, materially eloquent witness. And those were just the most evident of the signs and symbols at play.
Here then is what was happening. The Roman Catholic church is a semiotic ocean or stream going back in essence to the signs performed by Jesus--both the obvious ones, the "miracles," but just as important the word-pictures he used and the dramatic performance of the meal "the night before he died," with its nonsacrificial food elements, bread and wine. (To understand this more you could do worse than check the last two chapters of Virtually Christian!)
At any rate it is clear that Jesus left behind a transformed and transformative linguistics grounded in his own absolute reimagining and remaking of relational human life. Because of their gripping power of meaning it was all too easy, within the actually existing world, to twist these linguistics into a imperial structure. Once a crowd is gathered around these signs then certain individuals--whose roles were themselves meant only as signs--could claim legal possession and control and institute lines of power and exclusion.
But by definition a language can have no borders. Signs by nature belong to every human brain (surely the internet shows us this!) Thus part of the present crisis of the R.C. church is its inability to retain exclusive title to its semiotic universe, its weaker and weaker claims to ownership.
The present pope, Francis, is himself an extraordinary sign: he is the first "collegial pope" sharing the office with the "pope emeritus" Benedict. In Francis the vertical papacy has already become horizontal. He also likes to use striking figures of speech. Earlier this year, talking about the ointment or oil used for the sick, itself a sign, he encouraged priests to go out to the "outskirts," the margins, the places where people are suffering in order to bring an anointing in a wider sense. He said, "The ointment is not intended just to make us fragrant, much less to be kept in a jar, for then it would become rancid … and the heart bitter.”
But the whole church has become a closed-up jar, running the constant risk of making its contents rancid. If Francis is serious about his words about anointing, then the walls of the church need deliberately to be broken open and its semiotic stream released to the world, so the world may be healed. The church needs to renounce imperial ownership of its universe of signs, allowing that revolutionary wealth to run like wells fountaining up in each local situation for and in itself.
The semiotic stream I experienced sitting in that church is a transforming semiotics of human nonviolence. That is unmistakable. But by imprisoning that meaning within church walls the world is allowed to continue on its way, and that must be part of the contract the imperial church has made with the world. Yet the world is crying out now for the new language of Jesus. Come on, Francis, break down the walls, undam the stream of Jesus' semiotics!
Tony Bartlett
