​A ritual to symbolize the death we are all living
 
The room remains dark
All enter in silence
 
 
The Collect
(Everyone)
 
Nothing lives
Nothing binds
Nothing saves
 
 
The Liturgy of the Word
(Facilitator)
 
John 20:17
Jesus saith to her, touch me not; for I am not yet ascended.
 
For centuries religion has taught God and Jesus as perfect and without sin. And that Jesus, if touched by Mary, would become tarnished and spoiled. Modern biblical scholars interpret these same words as something more like, don’t cling to me. This differentiation is important.
Have you ever lost someone? And after they are gone, has their presence ever met you in their absence? And has this presence at times felt more real to you, than their physical presence ever had? Perhaps at the tomb, this is the presence in the nothing that lived. That what Mary experienced was a proximity, without a physical presence.
 
 
(Everyone)
One only touches the infinite
from a finite position.
 
 
(Facilitator)
John 16:7
But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the helper will not come to you.
 
According to this passage, in order for the Holy Spirit to come, Jesus had to physically leave.
This was hard for the disciples to accept. From that point on in history, churches went from a temple with a torn curtain to a steeple. Our drive to imagine big others beyond the veil, and to erect a phallus is much stronger than our ability to tarry with alienation. But the Holy Spirit creates a new social form. A networking not based on physical presence, but rather, alienation. A form of nothing, that binds.
 
 
 
(Everyone)
We ask, what does a church without a steeple look like?
 
 
 
(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!”
On good Friday we learned that radical theology, it is not no God, but the death of God.
The casting of our voice into the nothingness, that is God. A guttural cry into the place where all our beliefs suffocate and die.
In that moment when Christ called out, did a big other he imagined come crashing down? To comprehend the nothing that saves, one must realize how an ideology can never save. That in reality we need salvation from what we have believed was our salvation. A church without a steeple seeks this salvation from salvation.
 
(Everyone)
Oh Nothingness, we repent. We surrender our lives to your insistence. There is no big other that is going to come and save us. Grant us salvation from salvation.
 
 
(Facilitator)
 
Many religions promise wholeness and completeness, while atheism offers determinism. Both are clever ideologies to help us disavow shame and alienation.
A more radical theology discovers a truth in the contradiction between theism and atheism. It does not wish to return to the womb. Nor does it disavow. It comes to understand that we are cursed or blessed epigenetically in the womb before we are birthed onto a bed of nails. This theology tarries with the fact that our wish for singularity is not all its cracked up to be.
Our modern world has seen the symptom of religion as a problem, and rightly so. But atheism torn down the structure only to realize the efficacy of our religious symptoms as a solution to our problem. You might ask, how else are we to survive? Perhaps the emancipatory move is to feel our shame, allow ourselves to split and in so doing, become more aware of how our symptoms hold us together. To enjoy these symptoms and not use them to bypass our shame and alienation. This, in death of God theology is grace.
 
(Everyone)
Our religious symptoms are not the problem. They are a solution to the problem. It’s not about overcoming them. It’s about enjoying the nothing that lives, the nothing that binds and the nothing that saves. When our rituals lose their meaning, we must let them go. New wine cannot ferment in old wine skins. Let us make new skins from the nothing that insists.
 
 
(Facilitator)
 
Go now: wait and work for the coming of nothing. In the religious places prepare a crooked path for the nothing that insists. Lead lives of holy godlessness, strive to be decentered, and speak freely of the big other’s inexistence. And may the nothing that insists gather you. May the absence of any physical resurrection bring you a presence in an absence; And may the Holy Spirit network a new life within and around you. Go in pieces to love and serve your fellow human beings. In the name of nothing, we pray.
Amen
 

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
​