I recently attended an online Mass being celebrated on the other side of the world. I arrived and noticed the Zoom camera in speaker view, focused on a woman who appeared profoundly present and prayerful. Her countenance quickly drew me into prayer. Later, I had the opportunity to meet with her and shared this experience. She responded that, as a presider or participant in prayer, she becomes more through the attentive presence of others. Prayer is a reciprocal exchange. As a professor, Christophany group facilitator, and leader of worship, her words rang true, although I had not distilled the experience into such precise language. I realized that in our Christophany groups each of us becomes more through the attentive presence of one another, so that our being is amplified both individually and as a whole.
This realization brings to mind Ilia Delio’s The Not-Yet God, in which she tells us that God cannot become more without our attentive presence; God creates by sharing divine life with us. She explains: “Creation exists because God exists and God exists because creation exists: God and creation mutually co-inhere. The divine is never alone or by itself, Panikkar states, because it has no ‘self’; it is a dimension of the Whole” (p. 16). Further, she writes:
Relationship is fundamental to the God–world unity. Creation is not radically separate from God. Creation is not a mere external act of God, an object on the fringe of divine power; rather, it is rooted in the self-diffusive goodness of God’s own life; it is God’s action in the very actuality of action. We humans are part of God’s own life, and God is integral to our lives (p. 16).
She concludes: “The God–human relationship is an irreducible wholeness that cannot be reduced to either God or human as separate and distinct entities” (p. 17). Thus, we participate in God’s life by participating in one another’s lives through attentive presence in Christophany groups.
Theologian Rev. Dr. Paul Fiddes provides a related insight in a piece entitled “Zoom Ecclesiology: The Church Scattered and Gathered,” written during the Covid-19 pandemic:
Here our gathering online through technology like Zoom gives a special opportunity for ‘re-membering’ (putting together) the body of Christ. The screen offers a new possibility for the face of Christ to be re-membered in the faces on display there, combined with the voices of those who are engaging with us by phone (March 2020, 5).
He continues:
Christ is being embodied again through our online fellowship. We often think of the internet as a ‘disembodied’ medium of communication, just a matter of the mind. But this is not so. The internet is highly physical: there are, for example, silicon chips, computers, servers, keyboards, mice, screens, speakers. Through all this material taken from the natural world, Christ can be embodied, and Christ can become flesh. It is the humility of the risen Christ to make himself accessible, visible, and touchable in this way. As we see and hear others, our bodies are involved and are all part of the body of Christ (6).
And so, I invite you to be mindful of the quality of your presence and to call others in our groups to the same attentiveness, so that together we may re-member Christ and, in so doing, participate in the life and creativity of God, even as God participates in ours.
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