The Assembly Beyond “the Brink of Chaos”: Signs of Hope among those Re-gathered in Christ’s Name

Abstract

As Christian assemblies—along with everyone else—now embark on a third year of praying together through a pandemic, the prophet Jeremiah’s promise to the exiled Israelites remains today, as then, a distant hope. Latter-day prophet and Episcopal priest Pauli Murray’s description of hope as a “song in a weary throat” is both literally and liturgically more accurate. Zoom fatigue, absent families, and disagreements within assemblies about how to pray have sapped some of the original energy that accompanied attempts to maintain common prayer online. And the shape of prayer after the pandemic remains unclear, from whether digitally mediated prayer will remain a permanent feature of church life to ihow and whether assemblies may resume sharing from a common loaf of actual bread and a common cup. Yet, weary throats continue to sing—a sign of hope’s endurance reflected both in the resilience of assemblies’ commitment to gathering (as they have been able, given pandemic restrictions) and flexibility in adapting received forms of prayer to online environments. Resilience signals the enduring faith that has sustained communities through disasters greater even than Covid; flexibility is the hallmark of ongoing “traditioning” that adapts what has been handed on to the demands of God’s mission in the present time. Both evoke Aidan Kavanagh’s famous definition of the church’s “primary theology” as the “adjustment to deep change caused in the assembly by its being brought regularly to the brink of chaos in the presence of the living God.” Although both chaos and change have been hallmarks of the pandemic, the adjustments they will yield are not yet fully apparent. For that reason, it seems wise to begin with a note of caution. While I celebrate with many the resilience and flexibility that has emerged in this unusual time, I concur with Gordon Lathrop and others that there is no equivalence between the assembly convened at the same time and place, and the variety of mediated gatherings made possible by interactive digital technology. While these latter have value, and even make possible new forms of gathering, they cannot replace the signification possible only when the assembly is physically and publicly present with one another. Digitally mediated gatherings are always in danger of “context collapse,” identified by Ryan Panzer as “a process of reduction, in which digital environments ‘flatten’ multiple distinct identities into an oversimplified form.” Such collapse, in my view, profoundly undermines liturgy’s fundamentally symbolic mode of communication, with the primary symbol being the assembly itself engaging its liturgical work. As Hannah Lyn Venable writes, “There are certain practices of liturgy that either cannot be reproduced virtually, such as