Of Margins and Mangers, Continued
Okay, you know how I said in my last posts that Esther de Waal quotes tend to crystallize whatever I’m thinking, writing, and talking about? I found yet more connections to her “margins” quote when reading Victor and Edith Turner’s 1978 classic Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture.
The Turners discuss how, in the later Middle Ages, the Church began to centralize control over pilgrimages, even making pilgrimages to Rome obligatory for archbishops and diocesan bishops. As the Turners describe it, “Structure, not communitas, is made central to this pilgrimage obligation.” However, they note, “one result of structuring the center is that communitas breaks out, like solar coronas, all over the peripheries, in spontaneously engendered pilgrimages, crackling with charisms [manifestations of grace].”
That not only makes me think of the de Waal quote, but of Browncoats vs. the Alliance in “Firefly”/Serenity as well–there’s certainly a strong sense of communitas on board Serenity.
5 comments August 17th, 2006