Dissertation - done

On Monday I submitted my dissertation - read through it a final time in the morning and shifted some full stops around, printed it with Alex in the stifling computer room and then brought it back home to set it aside while I ate with Becky and Alex and talked about The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Kate Middleton's new baby and Yoga and tried not to think about the fact that the work I'd been perfecting over months and months was about to be out of my hands.

I wrote it on tears in medieval devotional literature, examining their aesthetic treatment and how from something abject they are made, through the paradox of abjection and beauty in the gospel and crucifixion itself, into something beautiful. (Abjection here being Julia Kristeva/Mary Douglas' psychoanalytical idea of abjection as impurity through the crossing of boundaries.) It was a strange process, beginning with me trying to do lots of funky things with contemporary literature and art from Picasso to Rogier van der Weyden, but eventually I realised that in 7,500 words I couldn't cover the whole history of human grief and aesthetic experience. And so instead I decided to write about what personally made sense to me - how the gospel, in my life and in the life of medieval mystics like Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich is the biggest saving grace, spiritually, bodily, aesthetically.

Although I don't engage in fits of public crying, or melt in the heat of contemplation, or see haptic visions of Christ's wounds, there is something bodily in my worship - how movement like yoga or running helps me attune my mind to prayer and meditation in the same way Cistercian monks' used their bodies - usually through crying or mortification - to create intention and attention to reading and understanding scripture. I've begun thinking of affective piety in Church, particularly during communion, and find that in thinking vividly of the Passion during communion, which is all about the body and blood of Christ, I'm reminded more of exactly what it meant - how physically Jesus suffered for my sins, how physically he loved and sacrificed himself for the salvation of humanity.

I remember seeing Mum crying during communion once, and thinking to myself that that kind of contrition was what it meant to really love God, when you see in him your own sin/impurity, and yet at the same time see how he has cherished you into beauty.