REVIEW OF “BEHOLD WHAT YOU ARE”
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Eleven years ago, I remember exactly when this was because it was that time between Christmas and New Year’s when all responsible seminarians are cramming for the General Ordination Exams (GOEs), I went to Disney World with my family. My philosophy then for the GOEs, as it is now for life, was “pay attention and stay loose.” After a day or two of play in the Magic Kingdom, I remember scrawling out a small cartoon on Disney stationary that featured a sinister Walt Disney, with his World and Mouse, saying, “Everything is liturgy.”
Lisa Fischbeck makes the same claim in her wonderful guide Behold What You Are. Everything is liturgy; every act, whether public or private, sacred or profane is a liturgy, a series of actions that forms us into a kind of person. What kind of person we are shaped into is dependent on the liturgy. Civil society, sports, commercial concerns, and even Christian worship are liturgical expressions that shape us.
Behold What You Are is not a typical book on liturgy. While Fischbeck certainly has a clear point of view, it is not as polemical as many recent liturgical screeds. Instead, the tone of “Behold” is as if Lisa is at your elbow asking: “Have you ever thought of this?” or “Have you considered that?” She helpfully asks questions as she guides and reminds the reader of the full breadth of official resources within the Episcopal Church, the opportunities of the season, how different physical and online spaces invite different liturgical thinking and, most of all, the gifts of each individual parish.
To be sure, her stories are very much centered on the experience of the parish she founded nearly twenty years ago, the Church of the Advocate in Chapel Hill, NC, which enjoys a reputation of scrappy welcome. However, one never gets the sense that her suggestions must be tied to exactly what the Advocate did. Instead, she shares one invitation after another to recognize that each parish in its diverse parishioners, has all it needs to authentically express the story of its congregants within God’s story.
Behold What You Are is a reminder of our first love: that our worship of God can be lively, well considered, spontaneous, responsive to life as it is, and beautiful. Reading it was inspiring, and yet, in coronatide, akin to reading a seed catalog in the dead of winter; though I’m sure that Fischbeck would absolutely not want that reaction, but instead would ask, “Well, what can you do now, even with the limitations on gathering that the pandemic is presenting?”
Indeed, I was glad to see stories and ideas about worship in the age of Zoom and YouTube. I was even more glad to see that Fischbeck is not uncritical of the perils and promise of streamed services. I’ll admit to being rather aghast at many in the church who have taken up new technologies hook, line, and sinker what with “being church,” without considering the implications of multinational corporations’ bottom lines, or as social critic and technopreneur Wendy Liu says regarding the Metaverse: “virtual reality with unskippable ads.”
Caveat Ecclesia, I say: the pandemic has certainly moved the church into the realm of the online metaverse at an unbelievably rapid rate, a world, as technology and urbanism critic Drew Austin says, which is “a more regimented simulacrum of public space where a wider range of interactions are easier to monetize — a virtual environment in which we’ll finally have digital walls where we can hang our NFTs, and where we can rub elbows with Marvel’s embodied IP.” One question I have that Fischbeck gets close to is “what actually is a recorded Holy Eucharist?” She for sure tangles with the question but also understands the opportunity of streamed and recorded services for justice and hospitality. In the patiently pluralistic way she works through this and other thorny issues, Fischbeck reveals herself to be an unrepentant Anglican.
As this pandemic has raged on and changed shape, I have been keenly watching for good art being produced because of Covid. There have been a few good examples so far: Bo Burnham’s Netflix special Inside, the film Don’t Look Up, and Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ staggering album Carnage. Behold What You Are, while generally a good guide to expanded thinking on liturgical expression, is also an invitation to thinking of all liturgy as a response to life and a reorienting to God. Could our liturgical life be a response to Covid and life in general? Fischbeck says, “Oh yes!”
Finally, the title encapsulates the conceit of the book: “Behold What You Are” is a statement of what the liturgy says about us. Wendell Berry tells us that “there are no unsacred places, there are only sacred and desecrated places.” All liturgies, sacred and desecrated, shape us. Did the liturgies of The Advocate shape the people there into Christ? Only the people of Chapel Hill could rightly answer that; but this little book is an invitation to the power of liturgical expression utilizing the full spectrum of our patrimony as well as the serious incorporation of our lived experience.
