Body practices in religious practices

This past weekend I had to attend a funeral for my great uncle, which involved a Catholic mass in Milwaukee Wisconsin. While many of my extended family members are Catholic, I myself am in no way religious, and wasn't raised in any religious tradition. So in effect I am an outsider when it comes to church services, and since I haven't been to one in quite a while I was surprised to notice how many observable body practices were involved in the ceremony.

The body practices most notable to me were those involving movement, gesture, and mannerism. This may be due to the fact that I was unprepared for these practices, and spent most of the service awkwardly watching what everyone else was doing in order to figure out what I was expected to do. At certain times it was necessary to sit, at others we were expected to stand, or sing. And it one point the entire congregation had to kneel on special leg supports, which seasoned parishioners seamlessly unfolded from the pews in front of mine without any sort of prompting that I could see.

Everyone who was used to participating in these rituals conducted them fantastically habitually, almost mechanically. The congregation knew when to sit, or kneel, when to stand, where to stand, and how to stand, periodically adopting a very specific attentive posture. The priest conducting the service also had specific mannerisms. When preparing the bread and wine used in the Eucharist, he didn't simply pour wine into a glass, he carefully and deliberately held the carafe, lifting it up for the congregation to see before pouring. The host (bread) used in the ceremony was handled in much the same way.

Near the end of the ceremony, the priest shook liquid (holy water presumably) out of what looked like a large salt or pepper shaker onto the casket before it left the church. He did this in a very grandiose way, flinging it out of the container with two wide swings of his arm, not simply sprinkling or pouring it onto the casket. There are many other body practices involved in the service, far too many to describe them all.

This ceremony is effectively an example of the docile body, easily readable as a text. The behavior/body practices of the participants in the funeral were all dictated by ritual. And for many, particularly the ones used to attending church services, these practices were completely habitual almost unconscious behavior. Every one of these body practices is a distinctive aspect of the Polish Catholic Milwaukee culture which my uncle belonged to, and which most of the funeral participants were also part of.