Money on the Table

I went to lunch with a friend today and we, as usual, ranged through any number of topics in the church. One that we covered was the trendy option of leaving the offering plates on the altar during the eucharistic prayers.

And I think this is wrong. Not because the money is not a offering to God, it is, but because it is in fact of a different kind than the bread and the wine. With the bread and the wine, we are offering something to God, who transforms it immediately into something different for our immediate use. The gifts come in, the gifts go out, in what can and ought to be a beautiful and seamless stream of grace.

We come to the rail and are given back the bread and the wine. I have yet to be handed a quarter.

I suppose for me, it just feels a little too much like brunch, as though, perhaps, God is our waiter. It comes back, I think to my problem with ritual.

Got Ritual?

"Got Ritual?" is a pretty clever catch phrase. I've seen it used in a wide variety of contexts, church and otherwise. It appeals, I think, to our sense of relevance. We feel sort of hip to ironically reference a popular commercial.

But to what purpose? The 'Got Milk" campaign is older than my marriage, so it's hardly fresh - no offense Dairy Council. And more importantly, if doesn't say anything about ritual, it just asks if you have one. Since a ritual is hardly more than a habit with style, I expect most people have plenty of ritual. 

Now, there is a new advertisement that I absolutely love that references ritual. And the beer isn't bad, either.

"Good to know there is a ritual, so when you come across it, you can enjoy it properly."  Spoken, of course, with a contested accent. 

What I really like about this ad campaign, and in particular what it says about ritual, is that unless you know it is a ritual, it's just some weird bartender showing off for a pretty face.

What I really wonder is why we think that ANY ritual is identifiable, or definable, by our mere presence at it's performance? 

Tit for Tat

I'm reading Pareto's little monograph called New Theory of Economics, or something like that. And I am struck not so much by the Pareto principle (aka the 80-20 rule) as I am by his disgruntlement that people don't get his point - to wit, that it is a different thing to reason from scientific, aka, mathematical principles than it is to reason from what he calls art, aka, philosophy.

He is writing at the turn of the 20th century, and what I seem to be reading is a fairly concise explication of the modernist conception of specialization. What I notice is that he isn't saying that morality has no place in economics. Or vice versa. He is saying that they specialize in different places. And he is trying to say that figuring out the most objective truth we can, about how things actually work, is a separate endeavor from what to do with that knowledge. But he isn't saying that one or the other is more valid. And I don't believe he is saying that there isn't a place where those two fields intersect (I'm not done reading it quite yet, so here begins my speculation.)

It seems obvious to me that the place these intersect ought to be the public sphere, the place of public discourse, but what I mostly notice, in whatever is passing for the public sphere these days, is that we are arguing one specialty against the other.

And one side can yell "how" all they want. And another side can yell "why" all they want. But as long as the how and the why can't talk to each other, we are never going to figure out the "who," the "what," or the "when."