Radical Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion (Friday)

A ritual to symbolize the death we are all living

The room is darkened

All enter in silence

Each are given a tiny loaf of bread and a mini bottle of red wine

The Collect

(Everyone)

O split and divided God.

Having bedded our ideology

have mercy on our idolatry.

Amen

The Liturgy of the Word

(Facilitator)

Matthew 27: 45- 47

Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me!”

In radical pyrotheology, it is not no God – it is the death of God.

It is the casting of our voice into the nothingness that is God. A guttural cry into the place where all our beliefs suffocate and die.

(Everyone)

Ideology

A symptom of life.

Like the Israelites in the desert, we build a golden cow. We construct a perverse big other to cover over what threatens us. A symptomatic behavior to the problem of life. We humbly ask, “If Jesus, God incarnate, had a golden cow how else are we to survive?”

Communion

(Music)

(Facilitator)

When we participate in communion, we break the bread, we pour the wine. We don’t just partake of what brings life, we also ceremoniously ready ourselves to participate in the breaking of, and the pouring out.

For it is not the relic we want, but what the relic represents. Have our temples not shown us that God is not an object within human understanding. That God is a disruptive, destabilizing presence within an absence. Philosophy and theology have always begun with disappointment. God begins with a question, not an answer. God begins with the anguish of, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”

Today, we attempt to hold God as otherwise than being. A presence in an absence that insists. We will not eat the bread, nor will we drink the wine. Instead, we will hold space for the breaking of, and the pouring out.

(Facilitator presents the bread, breaks it into pieces and lets the pieces fall to the floor)

As you break the bread, allow yourself to move into the dark spaces of your soul. Tarry with the chaos and the contradictions you find there. Wait for the truth that emerges in the space between.

Refrain from building a big other.

Sit with this lack, like a long and slow crucifixion.

For in this abyss, we find more of God than in all our ideology together.

Pick up your cross and live out your death.

(Everyone)

God works silently

(Allow for a few minutes of silence)

(Facilitator presents the wine, opens it and slowly pours it to the floor)

Instead of drinking the wine, pour it out. Do not disavow the separation. Spill your emotions into the nothingness where you are not drunk; where you cannot avoid the void. Do not lean on your own understanding. New wine cannot go into the skin of your old perception. Instead, lean into the void of your alienation.

Refrain from building a big other.

Sit with the lack, like a long and slow crucifixion.

For in this abyss, we find more of God than in all our ideology together.

Pick up your cross and live out your death.

(Everyone)

God works silently

(Allow for a few minutes of silence)

(Facilitator)

After you have faced that which you fear, look around. Be witness to others. Notice the thing in the other you fear. The void of their anguish. Do not turn your face away from their suffering.

Christ confronts us with the truth of ourselves and the terror of others. Christ showed us ̶ we are all already dead. In this same esoteric darkness may we learn to tarry longer with the chaos of the Real.

(Everyone)

O split and divided God.

Having bedded our ideology

have mercy on our idolatry.

Amen

(Facilitator)

The question, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me,” shows us how subjective destitution functions. That to become self aware, one must split. This is why we say Oh split and divided God. Because, with the death of Christ we witness the absolute coming into knowledge of itself. Christ showed us, that we can let our perception of God die. That the story can remain the same and somehow different. That we can reframe the story every few hundred years and be okay.

(Everyone together)

Like the loaf breaks its singularity, so too do we. As the wine pours, our gods die. Give us the courage that we may know the jouissance of radical acceptance as we traverse the Holy valley of the shadow of death. We pray this in the name of the broken Christ whose death calls us to this very destruction.

(Facilitator)

Go now, and live out your death. Do this graciously, and courageously. Enter the abyss and come into the death you are already living.

Ecclesia collecta

(Facilitator)

Oh split and divided God, we thank you. We thank you for delivering nothing but forsakenness through your word. We hope that each soul in this place has been touched through this nothingness, and that each of you take to heart the something in the nothingness that came forth. We pray that those seeking an answer, received nothing but more questions. Grant us alienation. Amen