Virtual Sacraments? I Beg To Differ.

Paul S. Fiddes, who I looked at with some skepticism based on what he wrote down below, is a very smart man, David Opderbeck assures me.  I trust that opinion and must confess that even though a lot of us are wicked smart, we still often write things that just don’t quite add up (I am sure you can find some thinking like that on this blog).  One of the necessary elements of theological or any other thinking person’s inquiry is that sometimes we have to push the bounds into things that will just never make sense, a brainstorm or thinking game to stretch our minds.  That being said, I feel it is important to bounce off of Fiddes resent burst of provocativeness on the Eucharist:

Summary of "Sacraments in a Virtual World"—An avatar can receive the bread and wine of the Eucharist within the logic of the virtual world and it will still be a means of grace, since God is present in a virtual world in a way that is suitable for its inhabitants. We may expect that the grace received by the avatar will be shared in some way by the person behind the avatar, because the person in our everyday world has a complex relationship with his or her persona.

An avatar, for those who don’t know, is the visual representation of one’s self in a virtual world.  Most often these are the pictures you have in Yahoo! chat or in a game like Second Life.  First, Fiddes makes an overall excellent point about the boundlessness of God, and he really pushes us to see God present everywhere, even in the virtual extensions of computing, because all computers and the Internet has a physical base to its virtualness.  There is light and pixels and servers running on electricity behind every virtual world.

What is lacking in this understanding of the Eucharist, and Fiddes hints at it himself when he writes that the Eucharist performed virtually is "an extension of the church sacraments," thus separating the virtual sacrament from the physical sacrament of the Eucharist.  Physicality is the key here, for the bread and wine of the Eucharist are properly a symbol of the incarnation to all of us, as it is both spiritual and physical food.  Part of the problem with an understanding of virtual worlds is that they are too often equated with the spiritual or supernatural world, because they are both unseen or "other-ly" worlds, but this is dead wrong.  The spiritual world we live in is extra-dimensional, in the sense that it is real but beyond us in many ways, whereas the virtual worlds of computers are simulations: extensions of our own physical world and are never "other" by any ways or means other than what Tolkien called suspended disbelief.  We enter into virtual worlds like we enter into novels or movies.

The spiritual world meets the physical world in the Eucharist, and as such the physicality of the sacrament is what makes it sacramental.  Just as Christ was fully man and fully God, so to is our experience of the sacraments: it is both fully divine, a gift from God, and fully physical, prepared from dust to dung to fertilizer to seed to plant to crop to harvest and then to bottle, or then for bread from harvest to millstone to flour to dough to oven to loaf.  Hands touch these things, the weather and the climate touch these things.  Truckers and shippers and boxers touch all these things.  The Eucharist is a feast of new creation, of our salvation, and this must be always held before us as an immensely physical happening.  N.T. Wright can only sound the alarm so many times that heaven is not a disembodied place but instead a real, physical New Earth and New Heavens.  Going down the road of Fiddes thinking separates physicality from the sacraments and begins to blur the lines between spirituality and virtuality.

Or:

When Jesus turned water into wine in Cana he physically changed it.  It was not a gnostic charade.  It was not the glimmer of pixels on a monitor showing a picture of a jug transforming from watery colors to wine colors.  This was the real thing.  The physical happening of miracle.  We must not forget the physical nature of miracles.  They don’t happen here.  They don’t happen in some far of heaven.  They happen when heaven, the kingdom of God, kisses our earth.  And new creation begins.