Father Anthony’s post on the elusive presence of God provokes the following rejoinder. I have often said that the real question in sacramental theology is not about the real presence of Christ but about the real presence of us. Everything we do at liturgy enables us to become really present to God the Trinity.
I am led to this thought by my reading of C. S. Lewis’s fourth Letter to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (Harcourt, 1964), on what happens when we pray and on God’s knowing us:
“What, then, are we really doing? Our whole conception of, so to call it, the prayer-situation depends on the answer.
“We are always completely, and therefore equally, known to God. That is our destiny whether we like it or not. But though this knowledge never varies, the quality of our being known can. . . . . Ordinarily, to be known by God is to be, for this purpose, in the category of things. We are like earthworms, cabbages, and nebulae, objects of divine knowledge. But when we (a) become aware of the fact—the present fact, not the generalisation—and (b) assent with all our will to be so known, then we treat ourselves, in relation to God, not as things but as persons. We have unveiled. Not that any veil could have baffled this sight. The change is in us. The passive changes to the active. Instead of merely being known, we show, we tell, we offer ourselves to view.
“To put ourselves thus on a personal footing with God could, in itself and without warrant, be nothing but presumption and illusion. But we are taught that it is not; that it is God who gives us that footing. For it is by the Holy Spirit that we cry ‘Father.’ By unveiling, by confessing our sins and ‘making known’ our requests, we assume the high rank of persons before Him. And He, descending, becomes a Person to us.
“But I should not have said ‘becomes.’ In Him there is no becoming. He reveals Himself as Person: or reveals that in Him which is Person. For . . . God is in some measure to a man as that man is to God. The door in God that opens is the door he knocks at. (At least, I think so, usually.) The Person in Him—He is more than a person—meets those who can welcome or at least face it. He speaks as ‘I’ when we truly call Him ‘Thou.’ . . . ”
So Herbert Vorgrimler in Sacramental Theology (The Liturgical Press, 1992) [to bold face is my emphasis]:
“But what does ‘presence’ mean in this connection? Karl Rahner developed the idea that presence, for human beings, is always mediated presence. It always requires a “medium” that is humanly perceptible. This is true also of the presence of God as soon as this presence, passing beyond its silent, abiding being-there within creation, makes a breakthrough within the human heart, and reaches the level of human consciousness. From a theological point of view there is only one presence of God, namely, God’s self-communication to what is not God. But this presence is experienced and consciously perceived in different types of presence, in which God’s presence as grace affects human beings dynamically. This effect may always have different levels of intensity. The goal, however, is always the same: genuine, grace-filled, personal communication between human beings and God.
“The foregoing thoughts on the mediated presence of God require further precision with regard to the liturgy. In terms of Trinitarian theology we may say that the presence of God promised in the liturgical assembly is not simply that eternal, ineffable divine mystery that Jesus addressed as his Father and ours. It would be wrong to think that the liturgy makes God the Father present. Instead, it is we (also) who in and by means of the liturgy are made present to God the Father, are brought before his face: through his Son Jesus in the Holy Spirit. The divine Spirit who is the common possession of Jesus and of the community is, in the liturgy, the medium of the presence of Jesus, his person and the whole of his life and fate. The precise ways in which this medium—the Spirit of God—is active in the liturgy, bringing about the presence of Jesus in his person and actions, are the symbolic actions of the church (or ‘effective signs’—preeminently the sacraments—as the definition of liturgy cited above expresses it), in which Jesus is the real actor, the Word whose voice is heard when it is proclaimed, read or meditated as the word of God, as also in the prayer and song of the assembled community (SC 7).
“It should be clear from what has been said that God’s becoming present through Jesus in the Holy Spirit is effected through the initiative of the divine Spirit, and that initiative is also the author of the faith of the Church, which is celebrating the liturgy. But this making present of God reaches its goal only when the means of mediation, especially the liturgy, are consciously and emotionally brought into awareness. Self-surrender to the liturgy, whose basis and bearer is always Jesus Christ, means in every case (and thus in every sacrament) remembering Jesus. Participation in the liturgy is a celebration of the memory of Jesus, and its intensity depends on the Jesus-mysticism of the human being who is taking part. That participation is always a self-surrender to the will of God revealed in Jesus, and thus its intensity is also measured by one’s willingness to engage in a praxis of life that accords with that of Jesus.” (25–26)
Please leave a reply.