Four Dimensional Eucharist
The Eucharist as Theatre: Place and Space
This session thinks about ‘place’ as it plays out in a piece of ritual theatre constructed partly around absence – how vital physical gathering and genuine communal eating might (or might not) be for the realised Eucharistic drama of communal feast and remembered loss. It considers the ways that liturgy makes things happen, as an event in a particular space with particular performers. It asks how ‘real’ representation can become if we are physically absent from one another, and what influence the deniability of symbolic acts has on our ambivalent relationship to acts of communion.
This lecture will take place in person in the University Church on Tuesday 18 May 2021 at 10.00am. It will also be livestreamed on our social media channels.
The Eucharist in Time
This session asks about the nature of memory in Eucharistic action - not only in its bringing together of Jesus’s fleshly present with our own, but in the smaller and more particular meetings of personal past and present which happen for worshippers. It thinks about the meetings and partings, the presences and absences, of private lives and loves, which are part of the power of liturgical reiteration. It finishes by pondering what is different, and what the same, between the connections of love set up in non-eucharistic memorials or records of the vanished past and the relationship which Eucharistic liturgy establishes between loss and meeting.
This lecture will take place in person in the University Church on Tuesday 18 May 2021 at 11.30am. It will also be livestreamed on our social media channels.