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How, then, can we think about liturgical meaning in such a way that gendered subjectivities are not occluded? I have found theories of culture that focus on cultural production and the processes of meaning-making suggestive at this point. These theories read culture as fluid and unstable, rather than as fixed. Meaning and coherence are seen as always temporary, contingent, and dispersed.8 Following these theories in reading the culture of liturgy, one would have to stress the co- constitutive nature of liturgical meaning and its fluid, emergent, and indeterminate character. One would then have to ask how women's subjectivities are both produced and constrained in liturgy; how agency is exercised; how gendered identity shapes liturgical meaning-making; how material realities, including female bodies, interpret liturgical practices; how liturgy and liturgical meaning may be a contested terrain for women, the site of multiple and conflicting claims. Clearly, such a reading of liturgy confronts us with a multiplicity of liturgical meanings, something we are all, in fact, familiar with in life. Think of these simple examples: the biblical image of God's abundant grace as an "overflowing torrent" (Isaiah 66:12, New American Bible) will "mean differently" for a woman bringing her infant son for baptism, and running through a torrential downpour to get to the church, than for a woman in a drought-stricken part of the world who walks twelve miles every day to fill buckets of water at a well. It will "mean differently" again for a woman in rural eastern North Carolina who, two years after Hurricane Floyd swept through, still has not been able to return to her home. My argument is that liturgical meaning is created by people (in my case, women) conspiring with the biblical texts, the rubrics, the priests—but regularly also "against" them—to discern the presence of the living God and their own lives as graced within that presence. In that sense, every liturgy is a con-celebration: women, as indeed all present, always con-celebrate with the presider. Con-celebration is not a particular priestly "special"; it is the basic form of all liturgy. And liturgy is a con-celebration not only in terms of a multiplicity of celebrants, but also in terms of the material givens of the celebrants' lived lives and the wider cultures they inhabit. Rain or drought, race and gender, our baptismal or our funeral liturgies—all of these mean differently for each of us. What happens when we focus the meaning of liturgy in these particularities and the complex meanings they engender? What if we take as our starting point the assumption that it is "our bodies, women's bodies, into which the story of Christ is inscribed and which perform it, without which the story of Christ can in fact not be performed"?9 Obviously, we are assigning theological meaning to the lived (liturgical) lives of women here. Such a theological move is part of a larger trend in recent theological reflection, which has begun to privilege ordinary sites in the production of theological meaning. Privileging the liturgical meaning-making of women is one way of rendering women more central in accounts of "church"—and of rendering visible the ever-present power differentials in the life of the church and its liturgy which mark women's lives so profoundly. Our gendered identities do inflect liturgical meaning-making in particular ways, and preferential masculinity still dominates both our cultural and liturgical worlds. What has changed in the last few decades is that liturgy has become powerfully visible as that which, arguably, it has always been: a site of struggle over symbolic meanings associated with masculinity and femininity. |
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