Abstract
Latter-day Saint (“Mormon”) liturgy opens its participants to a world undefined by a stark border between the transcendent and immanent, with an emphasis on embodiment and relationality. The formal rites of the temple, and in particular that part of the rite called “the endowment”, act as a frame that erases the immanent–transcendent border. Within that frame, the more informal liturgy of the weekly administration of the blood and body of Christ, known as “the sacrament”, transforms otherwise mundane acts of living into acts of worship that sanctify life as a whole. I take a phenomenological approach, hoping that doing so will deepen interpretations that a more textually based approach might miss. Drawing on the works of Robert Orsi, Edward S. Casey, Paul Moyaert, and Nicola King, I argue that the Latter-day Saint sacrament is not merely a ritualized sign of Christ’s sacrifice. Instead, through the sacrament, Christ perdures with its participants in an act of communal memorialization by which church members incarnate the coming of the divine community of love and fellow suffering. Participants inhabit a hermeneutically transformed world as covenant children born again into the family of God.
Highlights
Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA; Abstract: Latter-day Saint (“Mormon”) liturgy opens its participants to a world undefined by a stark border between the transcendent and immanent, with an emphasis on embodiment and relationality
Lacoste’s remark is apropos: “Re-presented as we re-present the past, the projected future—a future from which, in a sense, memory is made, the future available in the present—is the object of a donation of meaning which is an anticipated donation of reality”
The closeness of the finite and the infinite may be inapparent to others with whom the ideal Latter-day Saint lives and works; like other Christians, she may live “as-not”,11 seeming to act as society at large expects but in actuality living according to the understanding of herself and her community given her by God through her liturgical experience, including the temple rite
Summary
Though the cosmological significance of the temple liturgy is crucial to its understanding, that significance must not be misunderstood as otherworldly. The other is the fact that Latter-day Saint belief and practice is heavily weighted toward embodiment and relationality, to which phenomenological studies have devoted considerable time and print space, much of it in response to the work of thinkers such as Heidegger and Levinas These two points of parallel, transcendence as phenomenological going-beyond and the insistence on embodiment, mean that the line between the liturgical and the quotidian will not be obvious. The closeness of the finite and the infinite may be inapparent to others with whom the ideal Latter-day Saint lives and works; like other Christians, she may live “as-not”,11 seeming to act as society at large expects but in actuality living according to the understanding of herself and her community given her by God through her liturgical experience, including the temple rite Most often, she is like Kierkegaard’s burgher, someone who lives in the world differently than others, but only visible as different in exceptional circumstances How that new life differs from life otherwise may not be immediately obvious
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