Phenomenologies of Grace: The Body, Embodiment, and Transformative Futures

This book explores the place of the body and embodied practices in the production and experience of grace in order to generate transformative futures. The authors offer a range of phenomenologies in order to move the philosophical anchoring of phenomenology from an abstracted European tradition into more open and complex experiential sets of understandings. Grace is a sticky word with many layers to it, and the authors explore this complexity through a range of traditions, practices, and autobiographical accounts. The goal is to open a grace-space for reflection and action that is both futures-oriented and enlivening.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: May 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030406233

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© The Author(s) 2020

M. Bussey, C. Mozzini-Alister (eds.)Phenomenologies of Gracehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40623-3_1

1. Phenomenologies of Grace: Introduction

Marcus Bussey¹   and Camila Mozzini-Alister¹  

(1)

University of the Sunshine Coast, Sippy Downs, QLD, Australia

Marcus Bussey (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Camila Mozzini-Alister (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Many things about our modern world may seem graceless . Where is the grace in climate change, geopolitical insecurity, strident nationalisms, fractious and violent fundamentalisms; the destruction and pollution of our environments; the ongoing maldistribution of wealth; and the selfish, short-sighted, egotistical strutting of our political leaders? Such questions are characteristic of all generations. They are what propel people like us to undertake, or pick up, a book like this. Where indeed is grace to be found? We will argue that it can be found whenever we pay attention; when we open to encounters that expand us; when we commit to living gracefully. It is not to be found in churches, temples and mosques—though it can be. Nor is it to be found in movie theatres, shopping malls or lecture theatres—though again, it can be. This search for grace has been the provocation for this book. We are curious about grace. We are interested in how the quotidian provides the context for what John Caputo (2013, p. 17) calls an event of grace that arises in response to contingencies such as those listed above. We are also interested in human practices that invite grace in to shake things up.

This collection of chapters explores the space between the graceless and the grace-full. We are interested in charting the intersection of the body with grace through embodied practices and the drive to transform our ‘realities’, and thus generate new, potentially more graceful, futures. This is a plural endeavour. The thinkers, seekers and activists represented in this collection of chapters are all pilgrims on the via gratia ,¹ part of the sangha² of seekers committed to embodied, aesthetic, personal, social and cultural experiments with the transformative potential to generate inclusive, rather than exclusive, futures for this planet. They are workers with what Nadia Seremetakis calls ‘border-knowledge’ (2019, p. 5). This border-knowing is uncanny and makes the work of Phenomenologies of Grace hard to categorise. What is here for the phenomenologist? The theologian? The activist? The artist? The strategist? The answer is both a lot, and not much. What you have in this collection of chapters is a constellation of inquiries into grace that deals with the body as a vehicle for grace, embodiment as processes that can induce and also express grace and insights into grace-processes that ‘hack’ our conditioning and open us up to alternative, transformative, futures.

Radical Phenomenologies

We see this mix as offering radical phenomenologies of praxis. The praxis of grace involves individuals stepping out of the collective category of being/experiencing that phenomenology addresses and into our individual skins. From here—the dasein of it all—we can throw back into the deliberative and collective domain of Being unique insights and practices that can inform our responses to the perceived gracelessness of our given realities. So, we agree with Alan Watts’ insight that:

We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience—a feeling of what it is to be ‘I’. (2019, p. 12)

Understood this way, grace becomes a way of pushing back and resisting. Every moment becomes remarkable and generative of new possibilities. This ‘feeling’ Watts is referring to is key to understanding the micrological at play in pluralising phenomenology, which, subject to the solvent of embodiment, is no longer a singular category, seeking (but never succeeding) to grasp the Wholeness of things. Instead, phenomenologies of grace offer us fractal experiences that respond to encounters with sets of variables within the Whole that both incorporate and transcend our abilities to describe them. This ‘new experience’ of Watts’ is a feeling of existence as a unique being that is part of greater things that flow together, experimenting with new identities and challenging old habits. Working from this borderland we encounter new horizons. Seremetakis captures this insight when she notes:

The border marks transitions in space and time. It is the shared topos of the historian, the anthropologist, the archaeologist, the artist and the poet, all of whom are translators of the past and future to the present, of the inside to the outside, of the particular to the general. Borders are the meeting points of mind and body, ideas and sense, science and literature. Borders are points that release vision. (2019, p. 4)

Yet language lets us down. It is not fully up to the task. How is it possible to articulate the minimal silences of language? Can we create space to talk about the empty void where words fail us? In order to allow the mute to speak, we need embodied intuition; fine tuning between heart and mind: flow. Flow is the key condition to bend life into aliveness, syntagma into poetry and, of course, grace into gracefulness. Nonetheless, books are products of language, traditions and minds. Flow works in time, across time, with disruption. Flow is suggestive of movement, dance and play. Disruption introduces a new rhythm—a new dynamic—and then flow takes it up and plays.

Radical phenomenologies seek to address the limits of language and our turning towards flow and disruption as evolutionary drivers. Dance and movement are key themes in this book. Many authors come from dance and movement traditions and draw on their experiences as practitioners and teachers; for them, movement is definitional of our humanity. The radical in their practice is to see in movement the flow of becoming that is at work, both bodily and culturally, when we dance, play and sing. Movement has a deep history that goes back to the origin of life itself. Kimerer Lamothe speaks directly to this point when she notes:

No human exists whose bodily movements do not channel streams of movement potential reaching back through generations of humans, animals, and elements to the beginning of what we can know. No human exists whose movements do not express the vast matrix of relationships in relation to which it is presently moving. Without this dance, there would be no human life at all. Every human bodily self is a microcosm of the whole, and a macrocosm of the smallest movements made. (Lamothe 2015, p. 91)

Politics of Joy

Such an embodied sense of grace links self-becoming to action in the world where we are constantly bombarded by a politics of distraction and disillusion. Grace, as a phenomenological experience, invites us to follow a via gratia and walk lightly in the world; to play, laugh, cry and love together as embodied beings with deep creative reserves of culture and spirituality. It is an invitation to blur the lines between self and other, I and thou, spirit and matter, culture and nature. Grace messes with us in delightful ways that elicit joy and connection in a manner that rejects closed futures of diminishing returns. This is a dangerous business, of course. It posits a politics of joy as the antidote for the collapse of the narratives of progress and exceptionalism that have been the hallmark of our emergent global civilisation. This collapse has been ongoing and piecemeal, but with cumulative effects. The stories of renewal have been equally piecemeal and cumulative and there is no clear response as yet. We are between stories, running script-less into the future. This is not good enough!

What phenomenologies of grace offer us is not a single script: the saving narrative of Bible or Creed! Rather, it offers us modest and bite size insights into a way forward that is human scale, but not human centric. We are interested in pathways that are inclusive and flexible enough for a transitional period like the present. Civilisation, so dearly wedded to violence, can perhaps look to transformational processes lost in the past, draw on creative traditions such as dance and play to offset the darker tendencies of our species. This urge to find different ways forward is an evolutionary driver, always present as a yearning to transcend the given. This was noted decades ago by the visionary futurist Rajni Kothari who wrote:

The widespread discontent with existing reality among large numbers of sensitive persons round the world can lead to a sense of futility, but it can also produce a desire for action. (1975, p. 5)

Yet, as Kothari knew, action needs a vision. In our view that vision is local and dynamic; not seeking a one-size-fits-all, but rather the embracing of the multiple; the diffuse; the open, in which relating is layered and playful. Transformative futures require transformative practices that evoke the body wisdom denied in modern settings. Play, dance, silence, improvisation and collective body work all offer the chance to reimagine our lives and reclaim our personal and collective voices. Such practices promote alternative futures that reframe ‘reality’; they call forth deep realisations and a creative, regenerative optimism that relieves the spirit of the burden of being ‘modern’ in a world still magical and alive, if only we could see it.

Grace

Grace, therefore, is a disturber of the peace. It is a source of regenerative optimism and, as we understand it, the dynamic in a politics of joy. Certainly, we cannot avoid the religious and theological associations the term has. They complicate our approach in delightful ways, requiring all of us to question our assumptions. This matter is further complicated when we speak of phenomenologies of grace, where the multiple in the philosophical and the theological are equally invoked! Grace is a pre-condition for Being. Perhaps we could say: In the beginning was Grace, and this Grace was embodied? John Caputo, in speaking of prayer, sums this situation up perfectly:

Prayer is older than theology and it is not the private property of the long robes who make a profitable living out of saying ‘Lord, Lord’. (2013, p. 17)

We will rephrase Caputo’s proposition thus:

Grace is older than theology and it is not the private property of the long robes who make a profitable living out of saying ‘Lord, Lord’. (2013, p. 17)

For us, grace is a process to be cultivated; it is a path to be walked, whilst simultaneously being an outpouring of potentiality. Either way, in its broadest sense grace is the deep experience of being connected, as Parker Palmer (1999) reminds us, to greater things. It arises relationally, having a social as well as an intimate place in our Being. It problematises the inside/outside dualisms we take for granted. Grace has a social dimension because, as many of the authors in this volume argue, it arises in social settings where movement triggers embodied responses. Grace arises between moving bodies. There is a physicality in this. Our DNA ‘knows’ we are all connected in the lifeworld, yet as our culture emerged, we lost that deeper awareness of knowing connection. It is as if we stepped out of the world of magical connections and into the world of the monad. We lost the awareness of relationship. As Timothy Morton puts it:

Awareness is like hunter-gathering. But post-Neolithic humans keep telling themselves that they aren’t Paleolithic beings any more. (2017, pp. 185–186)

In becoming ‘modern’ we have left behind essential elements of our humanity. Or, to put it another way, to become modern we had to look away from—turn our back on—relationship. Phenomenologies of grace are part of the revision of this state of affairs. These chapters help us chart the space between two stories; not the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic—that journey is still ongoing—but between a story of solitary splendour and nested selves. Certainly, this emergent narrative is hybrid, spanning—perhaps encompassing—the Paleo-Neolithic chasm. We are all finding our way, together; pilgrims on the via gratia ; members of the sangha exploring our traditions, looking for the gold in them, rejecting what does not work for us: testing, experimenting and playing. We all have skin in this game. Vilém Flusser pointed this out years back when he stated:

Man [sic] is in the world to experience it, evaluate it, and know it. He can only know what he experiences and evaluates. (Flusser 2013, p. 50)

This experiential dimension is essential. How we evaluate the experience is highly contingent, depending as it does on the rules of the game: the epistemic calculus applied to the assessment. When grace is invited in as a disruptive energy, we engage an uncanny epistemology of the between where becoming is what matters. Grace-filled becoming is process oriented, pragmatic and spiritually open to relational meanings. From such meanings we draw strength, both as individuals and as collectives. In this sense grace moves us to love. It stretches—expands—our capacity to love. This capacity to love is central to any vision of a future worth living. Yet how to love in a generous way that empowers all involved? This question is what the contributors to Phenomenologies of Grace seek to explore. This sense of gracious loving, even when in pain, turns the world upside down and sends us on pilgrimage along the via gratia .

As a research problem this pilgrimage led Mozzini-Alister, co-editor of this book, to explore those dynamic tensions between meditation and mediation in her PhD thesis (Mozzini-Alister 2018) and then in her publication Impressões de um Corpo Conectado (Mozzini-Alister 2019). For Bussey, working with Mozzini-Alister on this book, the research problem led him on an inward journey in which the academic conventions opened to wider aesthetic, cultural and spiritual possibilities of what can legitimately be researched by an embodied scholar and futurist. He broadly approaches this expanded research agenda under the dual banners of ‘anticipatory aesthetics’ (Bussey 2017a, b) and ‘spiritual pragmatism’ (Bussey 2014), in which he explores the graveyards of culture as the immanent source of material for re-imagining the possible. One of the fruits of this work is, of course, this book; another is his poetry in which theory, experience and grace emerge in a synthesis both intimate and social (Bussey 2019, p. 6).

The Next Big Thing!

To be human is to both love and fear,

To rush in with open hearts where fools fear to tread;

To flee in terror at the shadows that haunt our dreams.

To be human is to bear this contradiction

As the pilgrims wore the shell-badge on the road to Compostela.

Yet my humanity is tight on me,

I feel our skins cracking with the need to love more, fear less.

I am called to trust in Greater Things, cast off the weight of the past

And seize new opportunities to love and work in love

For richer futures, where a new humanity can breathe clean air.

When I love I am expanded!

Fear cuts me off; diminishes me

And then I fail to see the pattern,

Fail to connect the dots and taste

My connection to all that is.

To move beyond fear is the next ‘Big Thing!’

To take up love as the challenge that enables,

To realise the power of collective movement where

The most mundane of experience reveals itself in a myriad of ways

To be a message to me, and you, that we can be so much more.

Charting Phenomenologies of Grace

This book is organised in three parts: The Aesthetics of Grace; Walking with Grace; and Dancing with Grace. Each part hinges on an aspect of grace work. Firstly, as a cultural tool, grace generates a range of aesthetic phenomenological fields in which bodies, meanings and forms offer radical possibilities to rethink the ‘rules’ that frame any given reality. Secondly, such fields in turn generate affects that we characterise as ‘walking’. Walking connects nicely to the image of the pilgrim—a grace-operative, to use Winton-Henry’s phrase—walking and working with/in/alongside grace in the world. Thirdly, the embodied and transformative takes form in practices, processes and experiments in active lives. Dancing with grace looks at how musicians, dancers, activists and mystics translate grace into shared and dynamic action in the world. This is a ‘dancing on behalf of’ planetary futures that ties together the aesthetic and walking that has gone before, offering insights into practices that celebrate the plural and open, and place the body at the heart of transformative futures.

Phenomenologies of Grace opens by considering The Aesthetics of Grace and lays out a range of approaches that embrace grace as an active agent in our lives. Marcus Bussey in Chap. 2 sees grace in terms of cultural hacking. From this perspective grace draws on an uncanny epistemology to destabilise any given reality we are conditioned to inhabit. Grace-hacks, he argues, can be sparked through a range of embodied practices, which generate the open consciousness needed to recognise and then enact alternative futures. José Ramos in Chap. 3 follows this line of thought by describing his journey with his Mutant Futures Process (MFP) as an expression of ‘messy grace’, in which he discovers that it is one thing to develop a marketable tool and another to align with it in his inner story. His chapter offers the process, yet reaches beyond it to the journey he took when he ultimately discovered that [t]he world is asking us to be a piece of the puzzle and make it whole, it is asking us to participate in its mutation and to give ourselves to a new future.

Claudia Eppert takes us into her ‘forest school’ and connects to the sense of grief felt over the impacts of the Anthropocene on her environment. Chapter 4 is a meditation on place, identity and the difficult mix of grief and joy. Joy makes life habitable she asserts, yet there is always grief to accompany this. As an educator she is concerned with ‘difficult knowledge’ and its communication as an expansive, educative act in the face of the ecocidal tendencies of modern culture. Molly Quinn, like Eppert, is an educator who weaves a relational reflection on grace via an inner dialogue with her mentor William Doll (1931–2017). In Chap. 5 she posits a pedagogical grace that involves the invitation to play, the posture of openness, the dance of interaction, the art of appreciation, the joy of interpretation, the aesthetics of expression, the patience of listening, and the ethics of care. Both Eppert and Quinn are aware of the paradox that sits at the heart of action, on behalf of grace that is both present and absent; intertwined with being, yet apart.

Camila Mozzini-Alister in Chap. 6 helps us understand this fractal nature of grace by looking at its linguistic adventures as it moves between her native Portuguese and English. Here grace itself eludes capture, for language is never enough: it’s not up to the job. David Jardine in Chap. 7 makes a similar case in his discussion of the stubborn particulars of grace that elude, just as we seek to capture the event. As he notes:

[t]he manifest character of the topic we are investigating only arrives once our grip on it (one might better say, once its grip on us) has failed and faltered, only once we stop simply living captive in our presumptions and start, instead, catching glimpses of what has been often-secretly at play all along, glimpses of its make-up, its dependent co-arising.

For Mozzini-Alister, the grip ‘on us’ is, at one level, the opacity of language itself, whilst at another level involves the mediated digital interface that promises the grace of omnipresence. Yet she points to the trap, the illusion that the phenomenological longing for the Great is not to be mediated but is a grace (graça ) itself. Yet grace slips in and out of focus—not only as an experience, but also as a translation; a movement between worlds that must accept the risk of betrayal inherent to any process of translation. And, at one level, as Jardine points out, we are betrayed! We face something greater than we can comprehend thus, mixed with the ‘joy of recognition’ comes a ‘learning through suffering’. To return to Bussey’s chapter for a moment, this is the learning of Tiresias, in which rupture and recognition go hand in hand and produce an uncanny epistemology that is as much in the body as in the earth and the light and shadows of our days.

An aesthetics of grace therefore involves us in singing and dancing with Eppert to the words "Ich freue mich³", whilst standing with Jardine ‘untethered’, listening to the sound of bees.

The second part of this book involves Walking with Grace. We begin the journey with Chap. 8 with Ananta Kumar Giri’s reflections on grace as a medium for walking and working with truth, travel and translation. Each of these domains requires an attunement to grace as an enlivening force that engages both the ‘senses and the supra-senses’. As such, Giri is walking the very embodied path with his explorations of Truth, his ongoing project of global travel and his experiments with translation (he is multilingual). Simultaneously, he is also walking culturally and spiritually in the company of the Bhaktis, with Gandhi and Thoreau, Devy, Aurobindo, Foucault, Vattimo and many more. As he notes, Truth is not only a regime but is a field of walking together with self, other, Nature, Divine, society, culture, cosmos and the world. In this walking, Giri recognises the relationship between Truth and power and he turns, as both Bussey and Ramos do, to grace—a ‘messy grace’—as the disruptor that bursts in from all sides, as a multidimensional force, to challenge dominant Truth regimes. For him, Grace as it emerges from across, below and above and is incarnated in our lives in manifold ways can help us in overcoming the total servitude of Truth to power or to the idols of state, community and marketplace. Giri amplifies elements from previous chapters, picking up on the link between Truth and joy that both Eppert and Quinn touch on in their work. Similarly, Mozzini-Alister, in her long meditation on translation, touches closely on themes that appear in Giri’s subtle insight: that travel enacts forms of translation—linguistic, cultural and physical. The interpretive act in moving across or walking beside is perhaps, as Jardine notes, a kind of ‘fumbly grace’ that ‘leaves the door ajar’ for new experiences.

Susan Pudelek in Chap. 9 also walks with grace. She is certainly aware of the ‘fumbly’ nature of grace, speaking to its locus in the body as a mystery: The grace of our breath is always with us, she asserts. This awareness invites a new experience, one in which a new humanity is emergent, not bound by creed, but by a sense of the physicality at the heart of grace that reminds us that we are all connected. This is body wisdom in both being and action. But we need to be attentive. To invite grace in requires practice, patience and love. As she notes, Our world sparkles with joy and energy, if we notice. Learning to notice is an imperative in today’s uncertain world. Caroline Kisiel in Chap. 10 picks up on such themes as she examines her journey with grace as an educator. Kisiel’s focus is on the design, implementation and rationale for bringing embodied practice into her undergraduate classes, where she needs to build bridges between her ‘degree-seeking adult learners’ and the expressive and open terrain of embodied practice. She is aware of power dynamics that constrict learning, and of the possibilities of hacking such through open and embodied, experiential learning. Life for her is the syllabus, and the body is a principal instrument for overcoming the culture of fear that most of us are reared in.

Joining Giri, Pudelek and Kisiel in this walking with grace is Meera Chakravorty who works between her understanding of Western philosophy and her Indian traditions. In Chap. 11 the focus is the Bhakti movement within India, which consisted of a galaxy of reformists and spiritual individuals dedicated to a faith and love in higher principles, cutting across class, caste, ethnicity and gender. She takes a comparative and social justice approach in which the disruptive nature of grace is evidenced in both the lives and teachings of the fifteenth- to seventeenth-century Bhaktis (poet ‘saints’) and in the philosophy of Westerners such as John Locke and Karl Marx. Reason, an analogue for Giri’s Truth, is seen as limited and incapable of bringing a seeker to grace. What was needed in such circumstances was the kirtan (devotional songs) and dance, such as that promoted by fifteenth-century saint, Chaitanya. The collective and individual dancing and singing of kirtan has deeply liberating possibilities. It is very much about what Carl Leggo in Chap. 12 describes, using Ted Aoki’s phrase, as ‘playful singing in the midst of life’. Doing so, the body experiences bliss and the mind challenges dogmas such as castism, as Chakravorty argues: Kirtana becomes imperative as it challenges the existing structural inequality of the society by the individual’s unfolding of being because there is a degree of conceptual singularity in Kirtana. This unfolding of being through Kirtana contributes to the expression of freedom which consequently becomes a dynamic process. Singing and dancing in public spaces symbolise a culture of freedom.

Carl Leggo (1953–2019), in his chapter, looks to the quotidian as a site for reflections on grace: the everyday, which is remarkable. He leans on Don Domanski to say: the ‘everyday’ is the grand act of the human imagination. Nothing that we have constructed comes near to it in terms of sheer inventiveness. There is no ‘everyday’, no ‘normal’ day (2002, p. 249). His ‘playful singing’ has real pathos, as he was to die before his chapter appeared in this text. He felt finitude and transcended it through the grace of poetry. As he asserts, My main way of ruminating, investigating, and questioning is to write poetry. This poetry is attentive and restrained. The everydayness of it peers into our many storied lives where grace is in abundance, should we pay attention. Thus, Leggo quips in a poem:

‘if we don’t see the value in our lived stories,

we won’t see the value in others’ stories’

For Leggo, a poem is a doorway to those penumbral places where elements of understanding and sweetness linger, still harbouring memories of the before and the to-come.

The third section of this book concerns Dancing with Grace. The book began with an exploration of a broad aesthetic that underwrites the multiple phenomenologies of grace offered here. It then turned to a consideration of grace as a lived phenomenological set of experiences encountered in everyday works of resistance and gratitude, joy and sorrow. Now it turns to practices that generate ‘grace-spaces’ in our lives. In this the authors follow Kisiel’s classroom example by reflecting on and sharing specific practices. The section opens with a discussion between violinist Aaron Brown and one of the editors for this book, Marcus Bussey. The discussion (Chap. 13) revolves around Brown’s music making, and his journey as both a performer and recording artist. The embodied work of music making is a key element, especially in improvising, and Brown emphasises that both the embodied performance and the embodied consumption of a performance have real—though different—phenomenological dimensions.

Matthew Noone, in the following chapter (Chap. 14), delves into similar territory as a musician who has ‘been around’. His quest took him from grungy guitar to the sarode master in Kolkata Sougata Roy Chowdhury, and then into Zen meditation and finally to his roots in Ireland. Whilst Brown sees grace as an element of what can happen in music making, Noone identifies it as a key driver for his musical journey, stating:

All of the music I have studied has attracted me because of its ability to act as a catalyst for heightened states of consciousness or moments of grace. This cathartic body-based knowledge is what makes music so meaningful for me and I imagine for millions of other musicians, dancers, singers and listeners.

Noone engages with the body-based knowledge that a musician’s craft instils to explore the ‘world of feeling’. Part of this process involves explorations beyond the comfort zone of a given musical culture. Chapter 15 by Arnab Bishnu Chowdhury and Karen Miscall-Bannon extends this exploration by looking at the confluence of ‘two rivers of yoga’. Chowdhury (India) and Miscall-Bannon (USA) collaborate regularly, running embodied workshops and classes that synthesise a vision of yoga as unity involving musicality, rhythm, movement and consciousness. This synthesis they describe as pranic flow, which runs through all aesthetic configurations. Metaphorically their work together can be understood as the confluence of two rivers. As they say: "In our collaborative essay, we will attempt to present two rivers of Yoga which we practice and teach. In the first river, Arnab (author 1) will explore his experience with Music, Musicality, Rhythm and Mantra, and in the second Karen (author 2) will dive into the waters of Hatha Yoga in order to find a third person voice, a ‘we’ where these two waters confluence in the Great Ocean of Ananda or ‘Divine-ful’ Joy." The result is a rich exploration in which, not just their voices, but also those of Brown and Noone, converge in a sangha—or collective movement involving aesthetic configurations with walking and dancing—that draws human striving into a sense of purposeful movement towards something like grace that is beyond reach, yet constantly at our side.

The following chapters take a closer look at embodied processes in which dance and movement are key elements in processes of grace-elicitation. Joy Whitton, for instance, offers us a personal account of her explorations of self via the Authentic Movement process. As she notes, this process is healing and grounding in a world that is so often cerebral, allowing space for me to return to my embodied self. Whitton’s chapter (Chap. 16) explores what it means to grow through movement; at times finding it to be transgressive, at other times healing. She becomes aware of the constructed nature of her sense of self and is able to identify, and at times resist, the hold conditioning has on her being. An important aspect of her reflection is her account of witnessing. Whitton writes beautifully of a witness experience she had where she was confronted with the sense, watching her partner, that if this is humanness, it is not the way I usually think of it. For Whitton, her long journey with Authentic Movement has allowed her to discover, and express, myriad riches of what it is to be humanly embodied.

The following chapter by Sophia van Ruth is the first of four that deal with the body movement process known as InterPlay. Chapter 17 by van Ruth is the perfect bridge to get us here because, like Whitton, she embeds in her account personal reflections on work she did around the nature of grace itself. Yet before doing so, she grounds her entire approach in a thoroughly researched and reflexive introduction to complexity and embodiment. Her argument is that complex systems challenge conventional epistemological processes. When it comes to the forms of tacit knowing that complexity requires, embodied practices can bring new levels of awareness and understanding. To demonstrate this, she provides the case study of The Democratic Encounter. In this way van Ruth’s chapter sets up—and builds upon Kisiel’s earlier chapter—a basis for understanding how body wisdom practitioners in the InterPlay tradition dance with grace.

In Chap. 18 by Prashant Olalekar we are taken into the life of a Jesuit priest working in India. Olalekar trained in InterPlay in order to better engage with a range of poor and marginalised people in Mumbai. He was, and is, seeking solidarity with them by dancing and playing. As he notes, Such Play fosters the grace of compassion. It is mutually enhancing; no judgment: no right or wrong; no hierarchy: no superior, no inferior, no urge to compete at all. It offers us an egalitarian mode of relating to the poor. Olalekar’s stories are moving and quite personal in nature as he shifts between sites such as hospitals and slums. His work with embodied grace opens all involved to new discoveries of self and other. They aptly set the scene for Phil Porter’s chapter (Chap. 19) on Grace-Moves.

Porter was one of the co-founders of Interplay. Cynthia Winton-Henry, whose chapter follows his, was the other co-founder. They have appeared a number of times in previous chapters and now together comprise the final two chapters of this book. They are both dancers who have grown with their practice over four decades. Porter offers the reader insights into the nature of relational grace that emerges when bodies move together. His is an approach that draws together his own embodied insights into short statements on grace-eliciting elements such as noticing, improvisation, mutuality and physicality. He also touches on impediments to grace, before noting that The physical experience we have named ‘grace’ is powerful and expansive. It transports us beyond ourselves. It seems to be an endless resource with mysterious origin. This brush with the infinite can stop us in our tracks. And yet it can begin anywhere, in the smallest of moves between one person and another.

This sense—that in the smallest of moves lies the grace of great things—propels us into the final chapter (Chap. 20) from Cynthia Winton-Henry. Here she throws aside caution and takes us on a wild ride through both the future and her own—and our shared—past. Being aware of the unfolding tragedy of late modernity, she looks to Grace Operatives (such as those contributing to this book) and weaves a visionary narrative, both prophetic and challenging. She touches on forms of resistance that hinge on the spiritual and the mundane, for it is in the little things that resistance begins. Temporality itself is no barrier to reflection in this chapter. Ultimately it is the invitation to dance and invite grace in that lies at the heart of Winton-Henry’s work. We are all body-wise and it is this latent and emergent property of our humanity that she is banking on.

Phenomenologies of Grace is an attempt to chart an area of praxis in which the body acts as a locus for meaning, movement and at times magic. The scholarly endeavour to ground this work in the domain of phenomenology is plural in nature. There is no monolithic, philosophical aspiration to capture and harness a single path to transformative action or synthetic understanding. The common thread is a love of the world we inhabit; an optimism based in the body; its wisdom and its creative potential. What emerges in these pages is a journey in the company of academics, educators, dancers, musicians and poets, activists and dreamers. A grace-sangha. We have framed this journey as a pilgrimage in which it is the path, the thinking, the walking and the dancing that is the purpose of our inquiry, not some terminus on the horizon where we ‘get it right’ and arrive at any ‘answer’ or ‘Truth’. The complex and rich nature of this community of travellers is perhaps best exemplified in the wonderful richness in choices of adjectives applied to grace. You will encounter messy grace, fumbly grace, fierce grace, deadly grace, social grace, relational grace, grace sparks along with grace-hacks, grace-operatives, grace-moves, grace-events, grace-landscapes and grace blindness. This is not a complete list, but an indication of the complexities that arise when we consider the phenomenologies of grace in the context of embodied practice, the unique and internal experience that accompanies such, and the broader socio-cultural implications of grace-work on behalf of future generations.

References

Bussey, M. (2014). Towards a Spiritual Pragmatics: Reflections from the Graveyards of Culture. 3D: IBA Journal of Business and Management, 6(1), 37–49.

Bussey, M. (2017a). Anticipatory Aesthetics: New Identities and Future Senses. In J. Clammer & A. K. Giri (Eds.), The Aesthetics of Development: Art, Culture and Social Transformation (pp. 49–70). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Crossref

Bussey, M. (2017b). Anticipatory Aesthetics: The Senses and the Body in Anticipatory Theory and Practice. In R. Poli (Ed.), The Handbook of Anticipation (pp. 1–14). Berlin: Springer.

Bussey, M. (2019). The Next Big Thing! New Delhi: Studera Press.

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Footnotes

1

Latin ‘path of grace’; inspired by the Medieval Christian movement ‘via moderna’.

2

Sanskrit word meaning: community, company, confluence.

3

I am joyful.

Part I

The Aesthetics of Grace

O que te escrevo não vem de manso, subindo aos poucos até um auge

para depois ir morrendo de manso. Não: o que te escrevo é de fogo como

olhos em brasa.

What I write to you does not come tame, slowly rising to a peak to go on dying softly.

No: what I write to you is of fire as red-hot eyes. (Clarice Lispector)

Etymologically, aesthetics derives from the French esthétique, which in turn comes from the Greek aisthêtiké, formed from the adjective aisthêtikós that means which has the faculty of feeling or understanding; that can be understood by the senses. That is, understood by our five senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. As portholes of experience, the bodily senses articulate gateways for the perception of the world we live in and how we, as beings, are affected by what is shaped as reality in order to build singular relationships between the self and the other. An aesthetic experience can be to feel the touch of the wind on our faces; to experience the taste of an apple; to hear the voice of silence; to grasp the words of a poem; or to smell the perfume of our beloved ones. But it can also be unpleasant, painful, uncanny and unwanted like the scars left by life in the tragic condition of its course. No matter how, aesthetics is directly related to the ways in which we relate, perceive and sculpt our own modes and models of sensing the materiality of our collective imagination. In this perspective, the questions that remain are how could grace sculpt an aesthetic process? Is grace a metaphysical event beyond our body sensors? Or is it perceived through the sophisticated animality of our instincts? How do we, as humans, embody our perceptions of the quotidian and the sublime? These are the questions that the first part of Phenomenologies of Grace will address.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. Bussey, C. Mozzini-Alister (eds.)Phenomenologies of Gracehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40623-3_2

2. The Heirs of Tiresias: Grace, the Uncanny and Transformative Action

Marcus Bussey¹  

(1)

University of the Sunshine Coast, Sippy Downs, QLD, Australia

Marcus Bussey

Email: [e-mail]

There is something tantalising about the title of this edited book: Phenomenologies of Grace. My mind responds to it like a bee might respond to the opening of a wonderful flower in early spring. A phenomenology of grace, a gathering of phenomenologies of grace, is an aesthetic proposition. My body also responds. It sways a little, like a reed caught in a sudden gust of air. A phenomenology of grace is also a corporeal proposition. Yet to mention the body in this way is also somewhat rebellious in academic circles where phenomenology, as a philosophical pursuit, is about the head inquiring of the body about its claim to validity in the academy. The body, in this space, is usually a philosophical problem as it is the link between the cogito and the sum. For me, an embodied consciousness, this is an exciting problem and to bring ‘grace’ to the question just amplifies the uncanniness of the inquiry.

This chapter explores the potentiality of a phenomenology of grace to deepen our appreciation of the roles of both body and grace in scholarly engagements with culture, alternative futures and epistemologies beyond the mainstream. It also inquires into what I call ‘grace-hacks’: the strategies I call upon when seeking to invite grace into individual and community processes of reflection and transformation. I acknowledge, and spend a lot of time engaging with, the fact that grace can erupt into our lives in shocking, violent, confusing ways. Ultimately, I map out a grace landscape in which we can place both the dramatic and the mundane types of grace that structure a form of uncanny epistemology inspired by a phenomenology of grace. Uncanny knowing acknowledges the transgressive nature of consciousness beyond the linguistic.