Dead Christians Society

In the “Patron Saints” class this week we spent time discussing Margery Kempe. Some great questions were asked in advance and as the discussion proceeded. Here’s one that really made me think again about the strong visual and physical/tactile element in medieval devotion. The student’s question comes first, then my thoughts in answer (including a clip on the medieval Corpus Christi festival). The page number reference is to the Penguin edition of Margery’s Book, translated and introduced by B. Windeatt–a wonderful introduction, by the way:

On page 113 Margery witnesses a women who has an image of Jesus. This woman lets some of the other towns women dress it up and revere the image. Was this kind of thing common? I thought that the Western church didn’t uphold use of icons, is this something different?

Medieval piety was intensely visual. I don’t know about “revering images,” but Francis’s innovation of the crèche, the elaborate tapestries often unfurled and used as backdrops by traveling preachers, and of course the story-based stained glass and statuary in the churches themselves all communicated spiritual things in visual ways. On the other hand, at the festival of Corpus Christi, we move from image as instruction or visual aid to the veneration of the Body and Blood of Jesus himself, by way of the theology of transubstantiation:

[clipped from the very helpful glossary of Margery Kempe's Book]: Corpus Christi became a universal Christian feast in 1317. Celebrating the sacramental body and blood of Jesus Christ, the feast day typically involves eucharistic processions.  This was a highly popular late medieval feast; its focus was the Passion and redemptive act of Christ and it brought all of a town together for communal activities. Margery Kempe speaks of a “solemn procession with many candles and great solemnity (that) went through the town” (MK Ch. 45).  [Essentially carrying the consecrated bread and wine around the town in a special receptacle, which was a focus of worship.] Often dramatic performances were associated with it, such as the “interlude” paid for by the city of Lynn in 1384 for the embellishment of the feast. 

A more general observation is that the strongly visual and tactile devotion of Margery’s day is strongly related to the emotional nature of that devotion. Among the different aspects of our human nature, our emotions seem especially closely tied with our physical bodies. We use the same word, “feeling” or “being touched,” for the physical senses and for emotional experiences.

My question is: Where has the sense of “touch,” of “physicality” gone in today’s culture? Does it, can it ever, communicate anything true or spiritual? We have plenty of vision in our TV- and movie-soaked culture. But how often do we experience anything significant through touch? The most intense, ecstatic touch-experiences, those of sex, have been devalued and dehumanized through obsessive attention and being made the commodities of the impersonal marketplace. I think our sex- and violence-saturated culture has contributed to making us leery of committing anything so serious and foundational as our religious lives to this realm of the tactile and the emotional. It’s not that we’re Gnostic, denying the reality or goodness of the physical. It’s that we’re super-saturated by vulgar, meaningless exploitations of the sense of touch, the sense of vision (especially, for males, associated with sexuality), and the emotions.

So it becomes very difficult for us to relate to such practices as pilgrimage, for example. When I described, in a class at Gordon-Conwell during the mid-90s, the huge influxes of eager believers, every day, by the busload, to the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 that launched Pentecostalism, and the long streams of eager “pilgrims” that made their way to the Toronto Airport Vineyard church in the [80s? 90s?] and the Brownsville/Pensecola revivals of the [90s?], one student asked, with obvious disbelief in his voice, the following question: “Why do Pentecostals and charismatics feel that it’s so important to actually go to the place where a revival is supposedly happening, to ‘bring back’ that revival to their home churches?”

The answer, it seems to me, resonates strongly with the medieval practice of pilgrimage: people go where God is reputed to be moving in a special way because they recognize the essentially personal, visual, tactile, and emotional nature of this historic faith of Christianity. God continues to incarnate himself in Christ—in the body of Christ—which is his people, his “living stones,” wherever he chooses to build them together. We may not venerate Saints today or seek out their relics, but we do crave the kind of physically and emotionally mediated contact with Christ that comes to us in special gatherings of his people—his body—where he seems to be doing special things uniquely “for our time and place.” However un-Protestant, or at least un-Reformed-Protestant, that may seem, I believe it reflects a deep truth about the incarnational nature of our faith.