EVOCATION

“God sends us these gifts of bread and wine” - But we know exactly how the bread and wine reached the altar. The late James Michener could have written an eleven hundred page novel called Mass about it, starting from the Big Bang, describing the formation of stars, galaxies, planets, this planet, the evolution of life on this planet, of various kinds of grains and vines, the cultivation of same by a species of ape, the industrial production of wine and bread, the purchase and delivery of the bread and wine by two members of the church, and finally the moment these are brought by parish stalwart Mrs. Muriel Krumple (whose turn it is this week) to a particular altar in a particular church to be consecrated. God is not necessary to account for these gifts. Maybe in some sense “behind the scenes” God has been influencing the process, such that it would not have happened without this influence, but unless one can define exactly how it as necessary, it seems a superfluous hypothesis.

Which of course is absolutely irrelevent, because worshipers actually are not reacting to the literal meaning of the words (even if they think they do) but to what the words evoke. What they evoke is the sense of deep goodness that undergirds everything, a ‘givingness’, a sense that this Goodness is not a passive ‘thing’ or ‘state’ but an active Person. The significance for Christians is that this ‘givingness’ became manifest in the person of Jesus Christ, especially in his death and resurrection.

The history of religious thought is of a slow process of projections of a society’s desires and anxieties (generally represented as gods) coming up against this underlying reality (I will call the Other) and being dissolved by it. “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.” Then a new set of social projections are created that are supposed to represent the numinous Other but are in turn fall short of it and fall apart. But each such failed attempt lends strength to the growing, genuine perception of the Other.

One could certainly argue that there is no stopping point for this process, it will go on as long as humanity exists. Or one could argue that ultimately, reality is finally nothing more than the mathematically elegant wriggling of insensate primary entities (quarks, strings, whatever) offering no hope or comfort whatsoever. However, it is worth at least considering that there may have been at least one historical moment which represents the terminal point of the process – which, of course, in Christian terms, is the Incarnation.

GODS ONE GOD NO GOD

I am going to define a god as a focussed expression (or a projection) of a given social order, or of various aspects of that order. Survival of the social order is the first commandment.

I would define the One God as the focussed expression of what is exactly not the social order, or any given aspect of it. That is, ultimate reality. That reality which we can’t escape.

The distinction between ultimate reality and the social order is the beginning of wisdom. The social order always seeks to incorporate the divine reality within it, reduce God to a god. One must read the Bible alert to the fact that often the God being portrayed is in fact a “social” God – a God who allows the Israelites to carry out their centuries long nurtured dreams of vengeance against the treacherous Amalekites by telling them it is His vengeance alone, and not their own, that they are accomplishing. But the very fact that the Israelites felt a need for distancing themselves from their own violent desires in this way tells us that something else is going on. Eventually people would take “Vengeance is mine” to mean “Vengeance is simply wrong”. This is a misreading, but a telling one.

In the present day we are no longer dealing with God as opposed to gods, but God as opposed to no god. The monotheists said, “There is only one God.” Today we can only assert, with vanishing conviction, “There is a God.” That is in no way the same thing.

Accusing the secular world of being idolatrous –worshipping money, sex, power, consumer goods, rather than statues of Baal and Astarte – has become a cliché among present-day Christians. Yet the Bible hardly ever refers to idolatry as anything other than the literal worship of wooden or stone gods.

In fact, formal or casual atheists are as “monotheistic” as believers. They believe in ultimate reality, a reality they can’t escape – it is impersonal, unconscious, uncaring. Utterly meaningless. They don’t worship this – that would be pointless. It is much easier to believe in this version of reality than of the other – a conscious, personal, caring, God. (So much whistling in the dark!) Money, sex, and power are merely distractions, an endless series of Pavlovian stimulations that temporarily stave off despair, not false idols.

We have all been gripped by the fear of this Lord – the Lord of Oblivion, the King of Nothing, whose majesty and power show us up as utterly insignificant and worthless. The fear of the Lord in the Bible is exactly this fear. It is the fear of Death. That is always our first apprehension of ultimate reality.

But it is an apprehension that begs a question. “Is that all there is?” Instead of defensively and loudly asserting one’s belief in the traditional God-against-the-gods, one may quietly assert an alternate possibility – that the “all there is” might contain some germ of hope. “All there is”, in the Peggy Lee sense, is not enough – but “all there is” in the cosmic sense is so much, so vast, so fantastic, that it becomes all but impossible to believe that it is all for nothing.