Abstract
This paper explores the experience of an affectively charged healing worship service comprised of mostly working-class parishioners. It suggests that they seek healing from a feeling of being worn out by the precarity of daily life and by their efforts to reach the “American dream.” The ensuing discussion is framed by Lauren Berlant’s (2011) cruel optimism: we are attached to ideals that both define our identities as productive members of a capitalist society and at the same time necessitate our failures at reaching those ideals. The work of relational psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell is utilized to describe how affective worship builds a co-created relational space of vulnerability and care that subverts this dominant ideal. The paper concludes with Emmanuel Ghent’s suggestion that religious surrender leads to an expansion of the self.
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Notes
The congregation is a small, rural parish with an average Sunday attendance of approximately 60.
I had 2 years tenure at this parish before our first healing service. It was organized at the request of my parishioners. Our small praise band played at the service, and so it was advertised as a praise and worship service with healing prayer. My parishioners often simply call it “the healing service.” We have since provided a healing service twice a year.
The following summarizes Berlant’s use of Freud as a starting point to her reflections on political depression. For more contemporary perspectives on the many implications of Freud’s treatment of melancholia, see Glocier Fiorini et al. (2007).
“. . . he came up to me. / It was all as it had been, / except for the weight of the present, / that scuttled the pact we made with / heaven” (quoted in Berlant 2011, p. 29).
Lauren Berlant describes slow death as “the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence . . . the phenomenon of collective physical and psychic attenuation from the effects of global/national regimes of capitalist structural subordination and governmentality” (2011, p. 96).
For instance, in Playing and Reality, D. W. Winnicott (1971/2001) says, “I have found that the patient has needed phases of regression to dependence in the transference, these giving experience of the full effect of adaptation to need that is in fact based on the analyst’s (mother) ability to identify with the patient (her baby)” (p. 136).
References
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Waters, S.E. I Surrender All: Subverting the Cruelty of Capitalist Optimism with Affective Expressions of Worship. Pastoral Psychol 63, 749–761 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-014-0606-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-014-0606-4