Web. Event and Liturgical Creative

Be it public, private or virtual, all three sectors (Internet, Event and Liturgy) manage events. Some events have static content like parades, military and civic award ceremonies. Some add interactive content like Citizenship Ceremonies, Web Sites, and Conventions. All three share the same non-linear and non-verbal dynamics ~ all share a basic symbol grammar.

This kind of strategy making aligns intent with live action, uncovers symbol structure and recommends symbols management. To create this strategy requires three steps: research the source documents for the event ~ actual rubrics and texts (script) with constitutional documents (legislation and policy); special event analysis over time with certain fixed and variable elements; and, interpretation of raw data with strategic recommendations.

Senate Speaker's Chair

My work in symbol grammar strategy evolved out of the confluence of liturgy consulting, acting, writing and directing, creative analysis in web design and non-verbal study in theatre. The major influence is event analysis in liturgy. The move to symbol grammar strategy was largely a matter of extrapolating verbal and non-verbal grammatical structures from liturgy work and discovering that the extrapolations have pertinence to non-religious ritual and ceremony as well. Secular ritual and liturgy are closely related at the technical end.

The congruence between liturgy and theatre was pressed home with the help of a version of MS-Word (DOS). As a curiosity, I took an article I had written on non-verbal based Image Theatre for the Canadian Theatre Review. I performed a global search and replace on several words: "liturgy" for "theatre," "assembly" for "audience, "liturgical minister" for "actor/manipulator," and "symbol" for "puppet." The new article read perfectly. It had coherence and validity without need for rewrites save some illustrative adjustments. Thus, the congruence between liturgy and theatre is automatically clear. To my mind, and the journal Modern Liturgy, it was publishable.

Bishop's Liturgical Chair

Canadian Coat of Arms

The further congruence between traditional events and web sites as events was pressed home studying the Canadian Coat of Arms at the Government of Canada Canadian Symbols web site. Here was a device hitherto unfamiliar to the general public as an artifact because it simply did not read in public ceremony. Actual artifacts of the arms are most often too small to be seen. The arms are a complex image and require a pertinent size and space to be properly framed and hence read. A 14 inch computer monitor is the perfect reading device. Here, the viewer can properly interact with the non-linear, multivalent complexity of symbol grammar thereby creating the viewer's own idiosyncratic understanding of its story.

In 1975, Mary Collins suggested that the locus of liturgical theology was the live event of liturgy. ("Liturgical Methodology and the Cultural Evolution in the United States", Worship 49, (1975), p. 85-102)

In February 2003, I published an e-book that demonstrates how to think theologically about the live event of liturgy, on-the-fly, in real time:
Kids Pray The Darndest Things: Effective Liturgy

Click here to go to Amazon.com

And Web Creative