Embodied Liturgy

Virtual Reality and Liturgical Theology in Conversation

C. Andrew Doyle

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781640654365
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

Can the 'reality' of the Eucharist be maintained online?

Author C. Andrew Doyle, in a well-researched and thoughtful study of both virtual reality and liturgy, argues that the Eucharist is not a formulaic rehearsal of words and rituals but an embodied and lived experience. This requires a shared place and presence. While the church should not shy away from virtual ministry, we should be wary of using the technological realm for the celebration of the Eucharist, an act that is an outward and visible sign of our spiritual union with God and one another. It brings us closer to friend and stranger for the transformation of individuals into unity in Christ. The context of the ritual–with people, objects, words, and all sorts of nuance–creates intimacy with God and each other.

This unique book is especially timely and will be of interest to scholars, liturgists, and those interested in sacramental theology in the digital age.

CHAPTER 1

LOCATING LITURGY

The liturgy and the Eucharist are located within creation. We Anglicans speak of sacraments as outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace. The outward sign is necessary and it conveys grace. Water, oil, bread, and wine are perhaps the first that come to mind. It is also true that such spiritual grace may indeed be imparted through other means, but those are not sacramental. The difference is that liturgical life occasioned by the sacrament is part of creation itself. Gathering in one space, in a particular time, sharing in liturgical actions like reading, singing, and praying are also part of creation. The elements and the liturgical world that surrounds them come from the natural world and participate fully in that world. Liturgical rites and elements are part of Christian sacramental life.¹ In sacramental theology it is agreed there must be a material sign. Jesus came and broke simple bread, shared common wine, and sat at a regular table in an unremarkable room. Regardless of your thoughts on the liturgical history about the last supper, Jesus did what people do every day. Yet, as sacramental Christians we claim that he took the common and made it holy and invited us to do the same. My emphasis here is upon the common, the natural, and the created. Christ, the Incarnation of God, came into the world and became as every human and in the end had a common meal with his beloved friends. In so doing, Jesus set the first Eucharist firmly within the created world, as is all liturgical action. So, the first important liturgical consideration that helps us locate the sacrament is the material sign, which comes from, exists in, and is part of the created world.

The second principle that helps us locate the liturgy and Eucharist is the notion of ex opera operato. This Latin phrase literally translated is “from the work performed.” The principle means that sacramental efficacy originates neither with the celebrant nor the participant, and the efficacy of the liturgy or sacrament cannot be based upon either the intentions of the celebrant or the participant’s intentions, nor their experience. Making the common holy is very complex. Anglicans themselves have tried to keep from locating this efficacy in too pointed a way. Whether we are speaking about the individuals becoming community through common worship or are unified by a shared sacrament (one bread, one cup, at one table), we recognize the complexity.² Yet, despite this complexity, there is a suggested unity of presider and participant. Our unnecessary attention to this relationship alone reveals the constant inward orientation of the modern mind, but there is more than meets the eye. The unity here speaks of the unity between the material object and grace, the material object and creation, the human participant and the material object and creation. Liturgy is very much located within a unified created world—a natural world: a world that is itself created through the Incarnation,³ suggesting that the complex nature of liturgy as a whole in some way reflects the Incarnation and not just the sacramental elements themselves.

Here then the very quality of liturgy and Eucharist reveals something more than a mere psychological process; it is a process of word spoken, written, heard, and read. These are all physiological systemic actions rooted in the embodied world. The art of the written word, the occasion of speech, and the sound of voices become part of the sacramental action. Indeed, we will see that there is an embodied participation beyond physiological action; humans read communication through a body’s position, eye movement, smell, and touch. This deserves more exploration. The simple proposal here at the beginning is that liturgy and sacrament are part of a whole complex woven web of materiality. All of these reflect the Creator and Son through whom such complexity comes to be. We reject the notion of meaningless matter or meaningless physiology. God’s action through the sacrament is not an act of the mind or spirit alone but speaks to the whole person’s being and, importantly, to the body’s being within the whole communal body’s being.⁴

Since the time of the first Christians there has been an interest to remove this process of imparted grace from the nature of humanity and human community that exists within a very material world. Irenaeus of Lyons is perhaps the most important theologian on this point. In his work against the Gnostics (the Valentians, specifically) he sought to contradict an idea that Christ came to redeem humanity by freeing the spiritual from the material.⁵ They argued that salvation came when the light within each individual was freed to leave the material body so the individual could gain union with the fullness of God. The argument appears to be affirmed later by theologian Clement of Alexandria.⁶ The continuing argument is that we cannot separate the spirit from the body, nor can we create the infinite God in the image of our finite being. From Paul’s writing to the Corinthians forward we see the church’s continued battle with gnostic desire where an elite few have access to the mysteries.

What we argue is, while a finite human cannot impart grace and love through the material, God does. And God does so in the reality that all things come to be through Christ. Yet, the sacramental Christian also proclaims that through particular material objects God does more than reflect God’s economic outflowing of love. God has chosen to imbue grace through the common liturgical expression of sacramental materiality. In participating in the sacrament of common elements, we become accessible to God.⁷ This is not up to the individual but rather is part of the communal expression of this narrative and the meaning-making language of liturgy.

I am suggesting that our understanding of sacramental unity between God, the material elements, and humanity is also present in the natural complex nature of the broader liturgy. We do not isolate the blessing of elements; we understand they take place within a broader liturgical context. This broader liturgical context itself is revelatory of God as it is part of the liturgy—a liturgy located within creation itself. It is true that there is a want, as ever there has been, to separate the physical from the spiritual, the political from the spiritual, and the economic from the spiritual. When this happens, God, God’s imagined community, God’s creation, and the notion of God’s mercy, spirit, love, and grace become separate from creation as if God has no place in creation at all. Far from being a sacramental theology that exists in the mind alone (divorced from the body) the liturgical life has become segregated from its work of justice in the universe as well. In the words of theologian and Anglican Archbishop William Temple, this makes God’s presence in the liturgy and sacrament of common material things an “alien sojourner in this material world as in some way gross and unworthy.”⁸ We might consider how gnosis suggested such about God and the Incarnation. Such an inability to remove spirit from body rejects not only the embodiment of God, but the embodiment of Christ on the Cross.⁹ Further, such embodiment denies personhood—as in the Black body, the Brown body, or in the LGBTQ body. When the spirit is separated out from the common earth materials it enables a commodification of the body and creation. We need bodies, tactile and anchored in space, living and breathing, dying and suffering; we need matter to matter to us.¹⁰ We might consider M. NourbeSe Philip’s poem of the Middle Passage, Zong, which reveals the disembodiment of slaves by their captors. We are entering the age of the noosphere (the age of the mind) and as we do so we are faced with a separation from the material (the geosphere).¹¹ Science and theology have always gone astray when separated. In our theology of liturgy we claim the two are joined. The spirit and the material are “demonstrably insoluable.”¹²

I think that it is all too simple a thing to quickly focus and then fixate upon the words of institution as the primary concern of this debate about liturgy, sacrament, and virtual reality. To do so oversimplifies liturgy altogether and frames the rest of the liturgical act as ancillary. Consideration of space, time, action, rite, liturgy of the word, common prayer, supplication, and confession, for instance, are potentially spiritual. Yet, in all these parts much is happening. Rooted in the natural world, the complex nature of surface, word, sound, and book have an impact upon the nature of the liturgy itself. It is not as if God swoops in for the anamnesis and epiclesis and the rest is inorganic accoutrement. The liturgy itself is a whole system in which presider and participants are acting and experiencing. It is not an event located within the mind alone. To say otherwise is to lean towards the idea that the world is of material nature only and devoid of the spirit. The rest of the liturgical act either moves towards immateriality except for the epiclesis or becomes merely an exercise of the mind. Yet as Christians we believe that God is present and participating in the whole of the liturgy irrespective of a sacramental offering.

The liturgy itself makes use of material things. I am not speaking of bread and wine only. We could take inventory of all the things involved from pews and cushions to candles and vestments. It would not be an exhaustive list even if it were one confined to liturgies that take place in a church. Liturgies that take place outside of a church building engage other parts of creation. If at a summer camp it might be the natural surroundings, if it were in the midst of a protest in Portland, Oregon, it would engage still other material elements. We need to remember that humans make liturgy within time and space. These liturgies leave a mark upon both those who participate and the space itself. I am arguing for the complexity of material engagements that are part of the liturgical act. It is true that many who have a high regard for the sacrament may be narrowly focused upon their comprehension and faithful response to the meal itself. Yet, not unlike the first meal, the natural world swirling around each liturgy is an essential part of the whole. To broaden our vision to the wider material and spiritual reality of the liturgy may well be difficult because of our tendency to objectify those things outside of ourselves. There are many voices that suggest that the whole of the rest of life is made up of inorganic or profane things. Yet, Christians suggest that God is the ground of all that is. God’s fingerprints are upon the whole of the complex creation in which any given liturgy is taking place. This is not to place God as a prime mover or first cause, but to suggest that God is rather ground of all things—ground of all being.¹³ Liturgical acts do not make room for God in creation. I am not suggesting that God interrupts creation, thus requiring a suspension of scientific belief. Rather, I am suggesting we engage God intentionally through liturgical action (in the midst of creation), plumbing the depths of a divinity that is proximate.

We can fathom then how, when two or three are gathered in God’s name, God is in the midst of the company.¹⁴ This is a mutual engagement between God and humanity through liturgical expression. It is true in the daily prayers of gathered Christians and in the Eucharist. In the midst of creation we engage God’s action when we are gathered. There is mercy, love, and grace in these embodied moments as there are in the eucharistic sharing between common people and common elements. Our theology of prayer suggests that the spirit of God fully participates in and among the community as it gathers in situ, as the ground and life. Our sacramental theology speaks of an even deeper integration of the human with the quality of “essential relations of spirit and matter in the universe.”¹⁵

A kind of unity and depth becomes apparent when we consider the union of spirit and matter. Rather than a two-dimensional observation of sacramental theology, we must also consider the material world in which liturgy and sacrament take place. We are challenged to be attentive to the context and manner in which liturgy takes its shape, which moves us beyond the notion of the descriptive nature about God and prevents us from discussing liturgy, the Eucharist, and virtual reality within an ecclesial vacuum. We must endeavor to draw from nature and science those contingent factors at work in the creation so as to reveal the complex character of liturgical meaning-making itself. We are plotting the aspects of a liturgical frame as it is shaped by creatures in the midst of creation.¹⁶ Moreover, we are suggesting something more than noticeable causality.

Jesuit philosopher Erich Przywara helps us to understand that there is an interconnective web at work. There is no knowing without being. He draws from Aristotle and suggests that the “noetic,” or knowing, encompasses the making of the beautiful, the meaning of science, and habit. For Plato and Aristotle, suggests Przywara, both define the “ontic” or being as pure being—the good, the beautiful.¹⁷ The objective observer does not exist; neither does pure language. They are intertwined. We cannot observe as if we are not part of a greater whole. Przywara’s perusing of the background and foreground of being challenges the buffered mind and the notion of a consciousness separated from the embodiment of the person rooted in a material/organic world. We lift his work and apply it to the nature of liturgy and Eucharist, and we realize quickly the enmeshment of being and knowing at work in the liturgy as well.¹⁸ There is a conjunction or union between objects and subjects in the world. I am poking at what philosophers will tend to see as a two-way manner observing and speaking about the “intelligible form of something,” as Williams describes it. Such descriptive action has a way of limiting that which is being observed.¹⁹ Here we might return to the poem Zong. Philips used the language of the legal contract between slave ship and owners of the cargo to describe the African bodies within the hold. We begin to grasp how the observation of one human has limited the nature of another human by act of law. The way the enslaved bodies were commoditized as cargo reveals the underlying dehumanization of the free human. This understanding of language and observation reveals the not-so-subtle and subtle ways in which object and subject relations are commingled. Another way of thinking about this is churchgoer within the liturgical context. There is a kind of “agency” and “home territory” at work. Yet, liturgy can itself take advantage of multiple spaces, times, and happen within different configurations of relationships. When this happens there is a kind of shifting in our perceptions that allows us to see the home territory of liturgy is creation itself, which suggests something more. We must seek to understand not only how consciousness fits within this wider piece, but also how the complex nature of schemes where matter + spirit and being + knowing participate to make up our experience. Given the interconnectivity of creature as part of creation, we need to stay away from a notion of buffered minds or monads interacting with each other.²⁰

Returning to Przywara, we see a kind of potency to meaning-making liturgy, not merely because it connects us in a metaphorical sense, but also because it roots us in the depth of the Divine. It is in the manner of philosopher Martin Heidegger, we might call this an act of potency that carries with it the subject’s “own most possibility” an “essence beyond existence.”²¹ Przywara continues by noting how this will lead to the notion of virtues in Aristotelian thought and therefore into community. What we have here is a notion of a dynamic interrelation between subject and object. It is not a “closed circle” of interaction, where each completes the other. I have chosen “dynamic” here to represent a continuing relationship—a continuity of proximity. This dynamic continuity of proximity establishes a becoming. Przywara suggests a penetrating relationship that results in a movement “in and beyond.”²² This may feel like abstraction upon abstraction, yet what he is working out is the idea that through creation we are able to grasp the Crucified Christ, the logos, icon, and mirror. In the midst of creation we find a relationship with the creator and the Christ. We are dealing with the God who has not been seen.²³ We have a Christocentric starting point. Moreover, this is not an abstract analogy but the incarnate Logos made flesh—the one through whom all things are made. Przywara writes in his commentary on John’s Gospel, “This is the message of ‘John the theologian’: how God and cosmos are correlated in the ‘logos-lamb who was slain.”²⁴ I suggest that Przywara is offering a rooted “material permanency” that has as its natu...