What is in Kelvin's Head?

Every Eucharist is a Virtual Eucharist

05/08/2020

Every Eucharist is a virtual Eucharist. Of course it is.

We know this.

We experience this.

We forget this.

Christianity – at least the bits of Christianity that are worth taking seriously – takes time and space so seriously that it knows that the particular cannot ever express the ultimate. Indeed, time and space are playthings in the hands of the religiously inspired.

Over the last few months it hasn’t been possible for my congregation to celebrate the Eucharist together in one space. But when we used to do that, we were never entirely in one space anyway. The very building itself is designed to transport people from the knowledge that they are a few yards from a busy thoroughfare in the Second City of Empire. Taking a few steps inside we find that we are in another place altogether. And in another empire, where the Emperor is servant of all and love is the essense of the law. The conceit that going into church takes you into a divine, heavenly realm is not an idea exclusive to the East. Coming into St Mary’s you are supposed to feel that you are stepping into heaven. It has been built to make you feel that. It has been decorated to make you feel that. It does make people feel that.

Whenever I take people into church I almost always hear them express a sense of wonder. We have the wow factor. It has been created by human skill to make you feel that the reality that you experience as you stand in the street is not the only reality that you can experience. It is a space that conveys that love, joy and peace might be possible and it does that without words. It is done with beauty and it takes people a few steps up the stairway to heaven.

And it is the church playing with reality.

That experience of going into a holy space and feeling part of something bigger is something common to religions that are divided on all kinds of doctrinal matters. It points to things that are best expressed through virtual reality and religious people are so used to virtual reality that they sometimes forget that it is all around them.

When people come to the Eucharist in St Mary’s they are at once in Glasgow and simultaneously elsewhere. And elsewhere isn’t even singular either. At the Eucharist in Glasgow we are at one and the same time in an Upper Room in Jerusalem rather a long time ago and at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb at the ultimate consumation of all that is. The Last Supper and the Breakfast at the End of the Universe happen at the same table. At the same time.

And as we gather at our table, we gather at every table and eat in communion with those who share in the same meal. Our fellowship with them isn’t prevented by circumstance. Our Eucharistic fellowship has never been prevented by circumstance or lack of physical proximity.

We couldn’t keep the Triduum in Holy Week without virtual reality.

Without virtual reality it would just be a way of making feet smell less.

Without virtual reality it would just be a bonfire that would die.

Christ is the celebrant at every Eucharist no matter which particular celebrant is standing there. Virtual reality becomes interwoven with the reality of the lives that we bring to the table and we are formed and changed and made new. It is how God’s love is expressed.

This is virtual reality. Every Eucharist is a Virtual Eucharist. Cyberspace is one of the most powerful metaphors for prayer that human beings may ever develop.

Our bodies are bound by physics.

God’s love in this world isn’t.

This is why religious buildings are important. It is also why they are not important.

Every Eucharist is a Virtual Eucharist.

Every Eucharist always was a Virtual Eucharist.

Of course it was.

cyberspace, digital theology, eucharist, online communion, virtual reality

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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