Holy Eucharist, Holy Trinity, Real World: On Liturgy and Ordinary Life (Essay‪)‬

Among the varieties found in the musics of the world, the practices of an "integrated music" profoundly accord with the best characteristics of a liturgical assembly. The clear song, the cohesive communal force, and the multilayered tensions and resolutions of such a music really are that assembly come to expression acoustically, in its ordered noise. The very structure of this song may be seen as bringing to expression what that assembly believes about God. Such, at least, are some of the profound insights that Mark Bangert has taught us. (1) Might something of the same be said about the visual arts in the service of a Christian assembly? What if we regarded, among the visual arts of the world, the practice of icon making, or "icon writing," to be something like Bangert's "integrated music," and what if we thought about what it might say about the assembly and God? In this essay I explore only a single example, but I mean to suggest that such culturally disciplined visual art, while not nearly so central to the identity of the Christian assembly as music, can also be clear of voice, communal, multilayered, and theologically significant, and that it rightly finds a place in the room where the assembly meets.