Presence, space and mind

Where is cyberspace? Where is our conversation when I'm sending signals and receiving them in a spot in north east England whereas you might be holding up your end of the conversation in ... well ... it could be Antarctica. So where is the conversation? Presumably in both places and in the medium of signal-travel. More precisely 'in' our minds mediated by sound and light waves, radio waves, electronic processing, bio-neural processing ... a conversation isn't such a simple thing and nor is presence. We all know of times when someone (perhaps we ourselves) have been present physically but not personally or relationally. And we can, to some extent, be present relationally /personally  but not physically -though some way of linking minds/persons is needed as it is hard to conceive of relating without some exchange of information but that can be done at a distance. Physical mediation cannot be entirely withdrawn.

And so I found myself musing on a sentence from John M Hull's article in the last Church times (non-subscribers won't be able to see the whole article for a couple of weeks or so). "The Reformers, in opposing transubstantiation, insisted that the real presence of the body of Christ could not be on earth, because it was already in heaven, at the right hand of God." And of course, the Roman Catholic antecedent is a very physical understanding of the presence tied as it was to the 'accidents' of particular pieces of bread and wine. And as I read the paragraphs in which that sentence appears, I felt that the whole argument was misconceived and missing an important dimension.

Perhaps the main difficulty was not exploring more fully what presence might mean beyond physical proximity. To be fair it was probably hard to conceive of relating or personal presence aside from physical presence when technologies for extending communicative reach were relatively unsophisticated. Our technologies enable us to experience and so to conceive of relating at a distance and so can help us to reframe the way we think about 'the real presence of Christ'.

By that I'm not suggesting that we should have a technological understanding, but to take hold of the conceptual space opened up by ICTs to recognise presence not merely in physical terms. So we can take seriously the idea that God is all about relating and that relational presence is not fully dependent on physical presence so much as personal presence and that personal and relational presence isn't always dependent on a bodily presence. Physical and bodily need not be the same thing, we now understand.

Once we understand relational presence as more to do with signalling -that is exchange of information having a bearing on the maintenance and development of a relationship- than with simply the medium, it reframes the whole issue. For example, a note or letter, or email can be a relational presence. (And let's just pause briefly to note that these are in a sense more tactile and permanent forms of signalling than speech, gesture or expression, but essentially the same sort of thing in respect of relational mediation). In appropriate circumstances a token can be a relational presence. A prearranged signal can mediate a presence and sometimes more -the song 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Old Oak Tree' illustrates just such a token.

So, I'm proposing that we don't need to try to conceive of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist in physical terms (and therefore we don't need to get into discussion about whether Christ's body can be in two 'places' at once and how heavenly placement might co-ordinate with earthly placement and so forth). What might be more useful is to think about the way that relationship can be mediated by tokens and the conditions for successful mediation of relationship which might be relevant to the Eucharist.

That's the exploration of the next post on this topic -which I hope to do in a little while. This one was about laying down a re-framing of the issue in principle.

Dear tokens of his Passion