Gordon Lathrop, Holy Things, III

The next section of Gordon Lathrop's work Holy Things (which ends chapter 1) introduces his concept of the broken. In his usage, being broken involves using old material in a way that subverts conventional meaning. He compares this usage to Jesus' use of parables (and thus another term for the broken might be the parabolic). In both, old words, old stories, old images, and old acts are used to illustrate a significant point through juxtaposing them in a way that radically undercuts conventional expectations. Just as a fundamentally unclean Samaritan can be "good" while a priest and a Levite are not, so top can a Byzantine court ritual be used to pay homage to a book, even when it surrounds the reading of a passage emphasizing humility. Thus, even though liturgical words and acts can be themselves quite dated and conventional, they can speak anew to people today, and speak powerfully, most especially when they go against convention. To reduce them to convention, however, is to render them powerless.