WHAT IF EVERYTHING is holy? What if ritual is about remembering that? What if when a priest consecrates bread and wine, she is reminding us that all bread, all wine, all eating, all feeding, is already sacred? Take. Eat. This is my body. And yours. And yours. And yours.
In Vibrant Matter, a book to which I keep returning, the philosopher Jane Bennett writes about enchantment, the vitality of all material, the “shimmer and spark” of gloves and pollen and sticks. Rather than dividing the world into beings (animate) and things (inanimate), Bennett insists that everything is alive—rock, human, river, bird, plastic. And if humans were to remember that aliveness, she argues, then the world and how we choose to Vries) “the absolute.” She breaks the word into its component parts: (off) and (to loosen). “The absolute,” Bennett writes, “is that which is … on the loose.”
