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129 I Turn Now to a Second and Interestingly The Working Church 129 Theo-Dran : Ikon's Postmodern Liturgy I turn now to a second and interestingly different case study. McNamee says he is a displaced medieval man who finds himself walking the streets of North Philadelphia, and he makes no men- tion of "postmodernism." True enough; but I would argue that while the high theory of deconstruction, the names of Derrida or Foucault or "postmodernity," are nowhere to be found in his text, its tropes and movements are everywhere at work. That contrasts with my second case study, which is the work of a small grassroots group in Belfast named Ikon: young men and women dedicated to addressing peace and reconciliation issues in Northern Ireland, whose "manifesto," as it were, How (Not) to Speak of God, was recently published by its founder Peter Rollins. 5 Rollins is trained and literate about postmodern and especially Derridean theory, and he embraces the idea of a postmodern "emergent" church. So the two cases converge and diverge in complementary ways. Let me emphasize, for the sake of clarity, the change of scenery in these two cases. For all its radicality, St. Malachy's is a parish in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and a traditional ministry, with a rectory, a weekly schedule of masses and the sacraments, parish committees, a parish school, a parish bulletin board, and all the usual outer trappings of institutional life, with a Cardinal Arch- bishop overseeing the whole operation. "Ikon" is nothing of the sort. It is an independent avant-garde assembly (but remember that "assembly" is a perfectly good translation of the Greek ecclesia) of young laypeople, intellectuals, church and community activists, including non-Christians, who all meet in a bar. It has no build- ings, assets, hierarchy, ordained ministers, seminaries, or bulletin boards. These people are making it up as they go along, not out of whole cloth, but out of the memory of Jesus and the promise of the kingdom. St. Malachy's is an institution that struggles against institutionality; Ikon is hardly an institution at all, a more literally and visibly deconstructive quasi-institution. It is relatively new and no one knows how long it will be around. For all his radicality, McNamee is a deeply traditional man, an ordained Catholic priest who tries to celebrate a traditional liturgy in the debris of capitalism and late modernity. He is disheartened by the low numbers of people who attend St. Malachy's, by the low regard for the Mass and the Eucharist, and by the fact that he can- 130 What Would Jesus Deconstruct? not compete with the passion, impromptu, and improvisations of the black Baptist churches in the neighborhood. Still he does the best he can with a traditional liturgical service, and he works hard to do it as well as he can, even if nobody shows up. Ikon is not a parish but a decidedly postmodern paraliturgical undertaking, an attempt to produce an avant-garde liturgy. No one is ordained, there is no ethical or theological consensus, only a concerted effort to be inclusive, both liberal and conservative, Catholic and Protestant, theist and atheist. Its members meet in a Belfast bar and create experimental liturgies or performances. Again, while McNamee condemns a church preoccupied with sexuality even as Rome (so to speak) is burning down all around it, he never addresses questions of gay and lesbian rights, in or out of the church. Were he pursued on this point I think he would strike a completely tolerant attitude, while likely considering it the sort of problem that comes up only if you are no longer drugged out, starving to death, or homeless. For Ikon, however, homophobia is one of the questions that needs to be addressed, and it does this in an interesting way. St. Malachy's is a church, Ikon not quite. On the margins of the church, far removed from the center of ecclesiastical power, St. Malachy's is still an archdiocesan church. Ikon is not so much a church as an experimental group in which an alternate church and a paraliturgy are being reinvented in a postmodern mind set. Or else Ikon is simply a working church without a Big Church, a central authority, theology, or any buildings of its own, that is, without a hierarchical church of which it is the subversive un- derbelly. Or else it is simply not church at all, not religion {Speak of God, 44-46), but a kind of religion without religion, moving out beyond the traditional borders of religion, in a way that Jesus himself might be understood to have done, where the ministry of service to the despised and outcast cuts across the borders of Jew, Samaritan, and Roman centurion. To illustrate this point, Rollins refers us to the Costa-Gavros film Amen, in which a Catho- lic priest living in the Third Reich proposes to his cardinal that all Catholics convert to Judaism on the grounds that the Nazis would not then dare to carry out the deportations against so large and prominent a population. When the cardinal not surprisingly declines the novel suggestion, the priest tearfully renounces his beloved faith, becomes a Jew, and boards the train to Auschwitz (Speak of God, 63). The Working Church 131 As the title suggests, How (Not) to Speak of God—adapted from the title of a famous essay by Jacques Derrida on negative theology6—is written in a spirit of mystical modesty and religious unknowing. It proceeds from a strong sense of what McNamee, following Rahner, would call "the mystery that we call God," which elicits a multiplicity of interpretations, of ways/nonways to speak/ not speak of God. God is precisely the one of whom we cannot speak (adequately) and so cannot not speak, cannot stop speaking about. As Meister Eckhart said, God is unnameable and (there- fore) omninameable, and so Meister Eckhart prays, "I pray God to rid me of God."71 pray (the unnameable) God to rid me of (the idol I have named) God. Whence the figure of the "ikon": words that respect God's transcendent excess as opposed to the "idol" of thinking we have captured God with our limited words and concepts, a central distinction derived from the Catholic thinker Jean-Luc Marion, whose work pervades the book.8 The postmod- ern God shatters our concepts of God—this in line with a very ancient tradition of negative theology. Idolatry comes in many forms. Literalizing the truth of the Scriptures is idolatrous in a way that parallels the idolatry of the church in Catholicism, of which McNamee complains throughout his text (without using that language). Orthodoxy is idolatry if it means holding the "cor- rect opinions about God"—"fundamentalism" is the most extreme and salient example of such idolatry—but not if it means holding faith in the right way, that is, not holding it at all but being held by God, in love and service. Theology is idolatry if it means what we say about God instead of letting ourselves be addressed by what God has to say to us (iconic). Faith is idolatrous if it is rigidly self- certain but not if it is softened in the waters of "doubt." How (Not) to Speak of God offers an interesting and fertile foray into postmodern theory in the first half of the book, but it is its descriptions of an experimental liturgy in the second half, titled "Orthopraxis," that constitute a kind of applied postmodernism— postmodernism on the ground—that interest me here. The mem- bers of Ikon are not academics but activists. Ikon is a concrete, community-based, practical, and paraliturgical undertaking, less interested in theology than in "theo-drama." The second half of the book describes ten sample services, or experimental liturgies, of which I single out two, the first and the last, which model how to reinvent the church in the unforeseeable future. 132 What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The point of the first service, "Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani" (My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?), is to revisit Holy Saturday, when Jesus, having lamented his abandonment by God, lies dead and buried, the disciples are scattered, and no one knows anything about a resurrection. These events pose the question of imitating Jesus in radical terms, the figure of kenosis I described earlier, with no promise of a payoff. This is quite like McNamees conviction that "there is no payoff," that one takes care of business in the street because one is there and it needs to be done, even if one is done in by so doing. One does what one must do, outside an economy of exchange. The scene is the Menagerie Bar in Belfast, lit by a hundred candles. As a disc jockey plays music while occasionally chant- ing "Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani/' a woman writes the English translation on a canvas set on a nearby easel, and a projector casts the image of Hans Holbein's "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb" on a space on the wall. A young man takes a microphone at the foot of the bars stage and tells the story of a community founded by followers of Jesus who, dispirited after the crucifix- ion, went off thousands of miles from Jerusalem to live their lives guided solely by the teachings of Jesus, while knowing nothing of his resurrection. After three hundred years of isolation they are discovered by Christian missionaries, who tell them of the resurrection and ascension. On hearing this news, the elder of the group is anguished. While conceding this is cause for celebration, the elder is also worried.
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