I'm continuing to read Robert Orsi's History and Presence, alongside A Comparison of the Mennonite and Doukhabor emigrations from Russia to Canada, 1870-1920, by Robert Sawatsky. The purposes of each writer become clearer as I read, and my personal feelings and motivations can temporarily recede a bit, to come back later (one assumes) with greater clarity. I'm noting quotations from each as I go, and already have a significant amount of copied text and scribbled citations. I have a pleasant sensation of curiosity that is not fettered to any conclusion yet. I'm also having a flashback to my undergraduate days, when I seemed to have a knack or doom for finding the dustiest, obscurest, smelliest books in the library. Of course the dust on an online text is non-literal, but I think I can still see it out of the corner of my eye.
Anyway. Here is a passage from Orsi that resonated, on the topic of encountering a saint or deity. It references the story of Bernadette at Lourdes.
The testimonies visionaries give of their experiences are not exhaustive [...]. Both those who see and hear and their interlocutors sense that there are levels and dimensions of what is happening to and around them that are not completely within their grasp. To understand an experience, including an experience of real presence, involves relationality, conversation, doubt and ambiguity. It entails tracking back and forth between one life and other lives, as Bernadette and her family and neighbors did in their efforts to begin to understand events in the woods outside the village. But they did not succeed in containing the experience, which was probably not, in any case, their goal. "Life might be understood as precisely that which exceeds any account we may try to give of it," and this includes accounts of our life and the life around us that we give to ourselves, as well as to others. No life is to thoroughly embedded in given structures of meaning, discourse, and power as to be fully accounted for by them, just as meaning, discourse and power are rarely hermetic, coherent, unidirectional, and stable. Narratives of encounters with the saints are simply not isomorphic with experience, just as the holy figure is not completely identified with any one social environment. These stories are incomplete, contingent, and intersubjective. They are shot through with "unknowningness," studded with "opacities." Talk about the Blessed Mother and the saints is contingent upon the unpredictable supernatural figure and the never fully knowable lives of the others with whom stories of what the Blessed Mother has done are shared. Such stories are always in three voices, at least. There is the Virgin Mary, the one speaking, and the one listening. In these exchanges, aspects of one's life previously unknown or unacknowledged may be discovered. The imagination takes hold of the world as the world takes hold of the imagination. This all belongs to the experience itself and to its history. "Human culture, like consciousness itself," Jackson writes, "rests on a shadowy and dissolving floe of blue ice, and this subliminal, habitual, repressed, unexpressed, and silent mass shapes and reshapes, stabilizes and destabilizes the visible surface forms." Bernadette was not an already, once and for all fully formed subjectivity when she entered the grotto where she saw aquero. Her experience of the supernatural other did not arise on securely and fully constituted discursive grounds, nor was it completely containable in the stories that first Bernadette and then others told about their experiences of her and of Our Lady of Lourdes.
The Blessed Mother lived in others' lives and they lived in hers. The apparitional figure standing in the grotto was at once known and unknown. She was an appearance. No story about what happened or happens at Lourdes is ever a secure medium of world making or meaning making, subject formation, or power because the narratives of this experience are never free of the interplay of the known and unknown, conscious and unconscious. There is always an excess of intersubjectivity in encounters with the Blessed Mother and the saints, and there is excess in the narratives that precede and follow from them, too. The experience arises on the shadowy and dissolving floe of blue ice. (pages 62-61)
This is an admirable effort to say in precise language that some stories and experiences cannot be contained inside an interpretation even as they attract people to try and interpret them.
I am particularly intrigued by the sentence "there are always three voices, at least : the Virgin Mary [or other saint/presence, I would presume] the one speaking, and the one listening." This reminds me of the Caedmon story which turns on speaking and listening.
As I read Orsi's accounts of spiritual experiences and the interpretations of them by philosophers and theologians and heretics and all-sorts who wanted to the the ones with answers, I also become curious how and where the Doukhabours fit in. The obvious answer seems to be the Protestent side of things, but I wonder? They very much prioritized personal spiritual experience. But they did not, as far as I can tell, link it with specific locations or objects.
Other entries in this series:
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