Sacred Drama and Temporal Tapestries: Invoking the Divine by Performing the Past in Contemplative Christianity

American adherents of Wisdom Christianity have performed historiopraxic sacred drama to weave a politically charged experiential and conceptual tapestry of ancient, contemporary, and potential time. This chapter draws from ethnographic research of practitioners’ innovative liturgies to illustrate how performative rites both invoke history and make history. Comparable to some cultural forms of spirit possession and “in-body” acting techniques, Wisdom Christians invoke history through contemplative practices of attention and “self-emptying” that invite saints to dwell within their bodies so that wisdom may be drawn from the past to illuminate and strengthen people now living. They work towards a production of “performative knowledge” and presence to communicate vital, healing energy that unifies people across time and space. Further, these contemplatives use sacred drama to make history by seeking to correct what they perceive as historical errors of scriptural interpretation. Scholarly study prompts them to favour a Christianity based on the Love Mysticism of Hebrew scripture and medieval mystics over historically dominant motifs of sin and atonement. Wisdom Christians’ historiopraxic sacred drama thus includes both intellectual strategy to upend certain aspects of history and performative prayer techniques to draw other histories into their sphere, thereby creating new forms from ancient temporal threads.