Sacrificial Scene

he biographies of Benjamin Franklin tell us that from an early X age this man, who would become one of the founders of the United States, was blessed with remarkable common sense.He was a most pious child, but he found the long prayers that began and ended each meal to be very tedious.One day, when a huge barrel of salted provisions for the winter was being prepared in front of him, he said to his father: "It seems to me that if you said your prayer right now once and for all over this whole barrel that it would save a great deal of time" (Clark 1983, 13).What is interesting about this anecdote is that, in it, the ritual is immediately placed in relation to time.Moreover, we could not more clearly show a refusal to understand what the ritual expects from us.When we take what the ritual demands seriously, we immediately see that it is not a question of making the time allocated to the ritual but a fragment of time in general.It is not a question of gaining or losing time, but of constructing time itself by means of ritual.What young Franklin also refused to understand is that the prayers which accom pany the meal are destined to transform, to sanctify, if you will, not a given mass of food, but the very act of eating

American Constitutional Law and Politics · Computer Science · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics

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