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 behaviour 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, destabilising 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
​

Christmas Eve (Christ candle)

Introductory rights

In reframing the liturgical season, we have for the last four weeks performed rituals to decenter us. In so doing, we have transformed the season into a time of waiting and preparing ourselves to a renewed commitment to the practice of subjectivity. We took a step back from ourselves and considered how our religious beliefs function in our lives. Let us remember that the natural world around us comes to life through death. Let us begin to allow life to break us. Like Mary’s body faced entropy to create life, so to, do we face death to enter in. Only with the emergent Holy Spirit can we find the courage to face this abyss.
 
 
Opening prayer

Oh, Master of The Real, grant that we may never seek, so much to be consoled as to be alienated. To be surrounded by a void than the totalizing force of some solid understanding. It is in the living out of this alienation that we come into the death we are all already living. Make us a channel of this alienation. Unfurl our hearts and open our minds so that we may hear the good news, anew. The good news that God is dead. Let us prepare ourselves for the enigmatic and contradictory birth that divided God into this Holy Trinity. The birth that broke the ideology of the monotheistic God. A God that could only be viewed as an almighty being. For through Christ, you went from one, to not one. A split and divided God. This is the message of the birth of Christ; that we are to hold God as otherwise than being. We cannot overcome this alienation. It exists in everything. One can only embrace this contradiction. And in so doing we bring our broken and contrite spirit to enter in, to this Holy Trinity.  

Thanks be to the contradiction of the Holy Trinity
 
 
Christ Candle

O split and divided God, whose birth tore through the ideological veil of Mary and Joseph. The flame we light tonight will represent our desire to intimately know this same spiritual death. The ideology we have, comes with power over us. To understand how the death of our big other brings us new life, we write our beliefs on a piece of paper. Instead of lighting a candle, we set flame to the corner of the paper. Let us sit and watch the words of our perceived understanding burn. And as the flame goes out, let us sit and slowly allow ourselves to plunge into the darkness of our contradiction. A place where there is no belief. A place where we are divided and alienated from our ideology. For in this place, we enter the event horizon where we enter the abyss.  

Thanks be to this alienation

 
Let us pause here, in this dark place. Perhaps a little longer. And longer still. Instead of thinking of what you think you know, stay with the anxiety of what you do not know. Move from this external desire toward your own internal contradiction. The place within you where you acknowledge you don’t really know. Instead of going with the tendency to make a whole of these two things, move into the contradiction. Negate what you think you know with what you don’t know. This, the negation of negation can bring forth something new. Advent, through the lens of death of God theology, can offer us another way to see ourselves and the world around us. To become aware of the contradictions inherent in everything.

Thanks be to the negation of negation
 
 
The collect.
O split and divided God, this flame that has gone out represents our desire to tarry with contradiction; to truly dwell in a place of alienation. Help us, during this season to remember the true meaning of readying ourselves to participate in the negation of negation. Give us the courage to move into this decentering and grant us the estrangement this practice brings.
 
 
Benediction

Contradictions and unknowing exist all throughout the universe. Let us consider that even the absolute might realize its own incompleteness. Let us engage with a religion where God through Christ comes to know that God is riven with unknowing. That not only do we commune with others who lack, but with a God who might lack as well. And that when we serve the god of our beliefs, we serve and love what we think we know of the God in The Real. In truth, we don’t know, and perhaps neither does God. Let us all take a step back and sit in this alienating thought. Let us experience the unknown of Das Ding and be transformed by its sting.