Good Friday - Johnny Cash

Roman Crucifixion Quotes

"Fashion me with a palsied hand,
 weak of foot and cripple.
 Build upon me a crook-backed hump,
 Shake my teeth until they rattle.
 All is well if my life remains.
 Save, oh, save it, I pray you,
 Though I sit on the piercing cross." - Seneca

"How grievous a thing it is to be disgraced by a public court; how grievous to suffer a fine, how grievous to suffer banishment; and yet in the midst of any such disaster we retain some degree of liberty. Even if we are threatened with death, we may die free men. But the executioner, the veiling of the head and the very word 'cross' should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts, his eyes and his ears. For it is not only the actual occurrence of these things or the endurance of them, but liability to them, the expectation, indeed the very mention of them, that is unworthy of a Roman citizen and a free man." - Cicero

Holy Week at Church of the Redeemer

The GAP and Worship

... as a case of secular liturgy, what vision of the kingdom is implicit in the mall's liturgies? What story is embedded in its practices? What does it envision as the good life? What is the shape of the mall's worship? What kind of people does it want us to become? What does the mall want us to love? 


First, let's keep in mind that the mall is sort of an intensification of a wider web of practices and rituals associated with consumer capitalism. In that respect, one might say that marketing is the mall's evangelism; television commercials, billboards, internet pop-ps, and magazine advertisements are the mall's outreach. The rituals and practices of the mall and the market are tactile and visceral - they capture our imaginations through the senses of sight and sound, touch and taste, even smell. The hip, happy people that populate television commercials are the moving icons of the consumer gospel, illustrations of what the good life looks like: carefree and independent, clean and sexy, perky and perfect. We see the embodiments of this ideal again and again in the icon-like mannequins in the windows of the mall. The mall, you might say, mimics that oft-repeated evangelical axiom that says, "We may be the only Bible that people ever read": that is, the mall communicates its story not through tracts and didactic lectures but through  visual embodiments of the happy life, 3-D  icons that we come to revere as ideals worthy of our imaginary more than our intellect - because they seep into our imagination - they are slowly and often surreptitiously absorbed into our kardia, into our very nerve center of how we orient ourselves to the world. In this sense, they function as very effective liturgies and pedagogies; they are making us into a certain kind of people without us even realizing it." - James K.A. Smith from Desiring the Kingdom