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

9 responses to “Who we are”

Susan Sheppard Hedges

26/10/2012

I have a question… What were the genders of these two persons?

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1. kelvin
  
  26/10/2012
  
  Person 1 was male. Person 2 was female.
  
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Suz Cate

26/10/2012

I arrived here in June, after graduating from the fine institution where you are visiting now and my subsequent ordination as transitional deacon. When I am ordained to the priesthood in December, I will be the first woman to serve as priest at St. James. I have sensed a growing excitement, especially among the women here, about the ministry of a woman priest–not unlike the the frisson expressed in the visitor’s statement: “Really? Wow! All this, and divorce and women priests.” We are figuring out together what difference it makes who we are, and on most days it is exciting!

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Calum

26/10/2012

I think the exchange is completely adorable. But also bang-on accurate. The Piskies are indeed “the ones with woman priests” – it’s not a bad moniker to be known by, is it? Although progress is still to be made in certain parts, I think it’s positive that that might be how some people identify and distinguish Episcopalians.

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Tracey

26/10/2012

The first time I attended an Episcopal church (in California), and they invited me to a picnic afterward on the church grounds. I agreed to stay on, but was kind of dreading it… and then I saw the ice chests full of cans of lager. So yeah, I have to admit that it was at first beer and later, divorce (both of which had caused me to become ostracised from my family) and women priests (i’d been brought up in a fundamentalist church where women were to keep silent in church) that made me become really interested in finding my way into this wonderful, welcoming, non-judgemental, and inclusive group where hell-fire and brimstone and damnation and punishment were never a part of the lovely, uplifting and inspiring sermons.

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NÃ¤dine Daniel

26/10/2012

Well in one way, the lack of awareness is pretty depressing, but the willingness to give the Cathedral a try would be encouraging, where it not for the perception that divorce made a denomination more acceptable. Frankly I don’t care what brings someone into a Church, any Church; just so long as we make them want to stay and discover the love of Christ once they get there.

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Rosemary Hannah

26/10/2012

I come to this from another angle – a liberal church background. It does not come to me as a surprise to hear women preach, teach and lead. I rejoice in it but the equality of women is no news to me

Divorce – well, to me it is never more than an admission of failure. Not something to be celebrated and welcomed, but a sad admission that things which started so very happily and hopefully and with such love, have ended in heartbreak. That my sometime husband left me for another woman in the church came pretty close to breaking my heart, and was one of those knife-edge things. A thing where either there will be just damage and misery and loss, or one day a resurrection, and you do not know which. That for me the balance finally tipped to life does not mean that divorce is something I want to rejoice in as I do in the ministry of women.
That God can turn evil to good is a blessing. It does not do however to continue in evil that He gets a better opportunity at such transformations. I would a jolly sight rather we were known for work for social justice, for respect for the environment, and for really positive things.

Beauty however – whether sound or image or architecture or the spoken word – yes I love us to be known for that and I rejoice in it.

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1. kelvin
  
  28/10/2012
  
  I suspect that what we may really talking about here is not actually divorce, but the question of whether divorce and remarriage bars one from communion.
  
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Rosemary Hannah

28/10/2012

Recently our Government had the stunning idea that ‘victims’ ought to be choosing the sentences of those who had offended against them. This is my idea of a utter nightmare – to have not merely the need to undertake one’s own recovery, for which one is of course responsible, but to then have to undertake some responsibility for the rehabilitation of those who have offended one strikes me as a bridge too far. I could never ask that somebody is turned away from communion because of an offence against me, and therefore I cannot ask that they are turned away because of a sin against others. I don’t really believe in that kind of God.

Yet there is a problem. Of all the bad moments I had over the divorce, one of the very worst was the moment I walked alone into church and saw in a prominent pew my husband, who had left but from whom I was not yet legally separated, sitting shoulder to shoulder with his new partner. I ended in the nearest pew on my knees, helplessly sobbing, unable to hide my distress. That should not happen to anybody and it should not be up to the ‘victims’ (however much we espouse a doctrine of equal blame for marriage failure) to protect themselves from such a thing.

I took communion every week with the lady with whom my husband now lived, and every week I had to forgive her anew in order to offer the Peace and forgive her. It was, to put it mildly, a big ask. That, to me, is the essential reality of divorce, and I really, really, really do have the right to say that we may have divorce and we may have to live with it, but the reality of it is pain and hard hard work. I find no ‘Wow!’ anywhere in it. It was hard and bitter punishment for all the stupid things I had managed to do in 30 years of marriage.

There is always a cost to be borne for such things. We believe in forgiveness and fresh starts, and I must suppose the ‘Wow!’ is for that – but such things are costly. I believe they are always costly for God, and most usually they are costly for humans too. I don’t want humans judged, but – but where the joy of person A is bought at the price of the pain of person B we need to tread exceedingly circumspectly.

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