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.