There's a fascinating discussion going on at Brownblog about the idea of virtual communion, and spreading out to consider some other sacraments.  The comments and links are all well-considered and cogent, but infused with the passion serious people can have about religion and worship.

One comment took me to a blog post by a person who'd attended a virtual funeral.  It wasn't in Second Life, but was held over the Internet.  The attendee at this BYOE (Bring Your Own Elements) event was truly moved by the power of the liturgy, and it was indeed to her "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace."

Her Host in this case was a Trisquit, which she broke and elevated on cue when the words of consecration came over her computer, which she had set up in her own holy place where, I gather, she frequently went to pray.  Some of the other comments and links from the original Brownblog mention similar cases in which people at home have had Elements consecrated remotely, and the people involved did feel that the Sacrament was efficacious.

That reminded me of my post on Ensoulment, in which I said,

Well, for one thing, "is it possible for God" is kind of a stupid question.  The only thing impossible for God is evil.  Even hate has a place within God's boundless love, and it seems to me that as long as the question isn't "is it possible for God to do evil?," the answer has to be "yes."  All things are possible for God; if we can imagine it, we can be assured that it's within God's abilities.

If God wants to give us the grace of Communion, God can do it whether we're at church, or in the back yard, or on the computer, or wherever.  Much of the Sacrament takes place in the mind of the communicant, and is the communication between God and worshipper.

However, we humans seem to need rules, especially in our relationship with God.  Some of us have chosen a medium for worship which involves a lot of rules (or traditions, depending on how you see them), and if we don't follow those rules/rituals/liturgy, we are no longer worshipping as we ourselves have chosen.  I'm Episcopalian largely because of the pageantry and the ritual - if I suddenly decide that I'm ok with a Eucharist given virtually to my avatar in SL, or with one consecrated over the computer or the phone, taken with no one else physically present with me, am I still Episcopalian?

A number of years ago, when I was still fairly new in the Episcopal church, I asked our associate priest, Bunker Hill, about the Eucharist.  I pointed out that Jesus had told His disciples, "As often as you do this, do it in remembrance of me."  Didn't that mean that *every* time we eat and drink, we should regard it as a little Eucharist?  He said, "Well, you could interpret it that way.  But that's not how Episcopalians do it."

I think this discussion is not so much whether a virtual Sacrament is still a Sacrament, as it is about who we are and how we want to relate to God.  If we feel that the traditional forms are still useful as a framework for this relationship, we are making our decision on that basis.  It doesn't necessarily mean that a virtual Sacrament isn't ever valid, for anyone, under any circumstances; it just means that it isn't valid for us.  (Of course, it might *not* be valid for anyone - that's what we're trying to figure out!)

You can read the first installment at <http://weblog.xanga.com/CarynW/605428606/why-bad-things-happen.html>.  I explored some reasons that I think God might have for allowing bad things to happen.

Since then, I've thought of some other ones.  A few weeks ago on Second Life, I was at Bible Study (you can read about this in my last post), and the conversation came around to why bad things happen.  I gave a short (a sentence or so) version of my post, to the effect that maybe it's so people will have the chance to be nice.  When something like a hurricane, tsunami, war, drought, or other disaster happens, people turn out with love and generosity.  One of the people in the discussion thought that was awful, but it wasn't really the time or place to pursue it.  It's kind of taking what I said in the last post to the logical next step - if the things are going to happen anyway, inspiring people to love and generosity is one of the ways God responds to the disaster or whatever.  Our response is God's response, and the alternative God has chosen to forcing everyone and everything to march in lockstep. (I could have sworn I'd already written that, but I'm not finding it.)

Anyway, that made me think another step - that if nothing bad *does* happen, people get complacent, careless, and selfish.

It's been a dream for a long time to stop hunger, and that's one of the "bad things" people cite when the subject comes up.  How can God allow some people to starve to death?  Well, in America, for all intents and purposes, we've abolished hunger.  I'm not saying it doesn't exist in America, but with welfare and WIC and soup kitchens and school lunch programs and a patchwork of other official and private services, the overwhelming majority of Americans get at least one meal a day.  (If anyone cares, I'll look up the statistics.)  Have we taken our bounty and tried, realistically, officially, and on a real-world level, to get it out to the rest of the world?  No.  In fact, we have instead put enough work into trying to eat it all ourselves that we have become the most obese population in world history.  (Again, I'll look it up if someone calls me on it, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a historical period in which as much of the population was as fat as most Americans are.)  We jam more food into our faces daily than many people in previous times and other parts of the world used to see in a week.  We super-size the least healthy foods, and it's often cheaper to get more food than to get less.  This is not part of God's plan, any more than hunger is.  Whenever there's one of those moronic pie-eating (hot dog-eating, etc.) contests, I think about all the people in the world who would pay everything they had to get that much food to feed their families.  That sort of thing is a lot more obscene than any sex not involving children!

It's not just food, of course.  Although we've always moaned about high gas prices, fuel prices in the US have been among the lowest in the industrialized world, pretty much always.  And we got so accustomed to having this affordable gasoline that we started buying bigger and bigger cars, that slurp more and more fuel.  When we're driving during rush hour here in the DC area, my husband and I often marvel at the size and arrogance of the huge vehicles we see.  No one needs a Hummer, an Escalade, or any of those other house-sized behemouths, to go from one northern Virginia suburb to another.  And, as is the case in most of the US, each of those cars contains one person.  My husband has been led to wonder how many corporals to the gallon they get.  (A friend didn't get the reference, until I pointed out that no generals have died in our war for oil resources.)  People apparently see no connection between their obscene (that word again) choice to send young people to die in an oil-producing country so that they can sit eight feet above the pavement.

If something wiped out the food or oil production facilities of the US, and we had a famine and/or a total fuel shortage, we'd have to eat less, share more, use public transportation, and work together to solve the problem.  So, would that be bad, or good?

A friend of mine writes fanfic (and she's pretty good - check out her Dr. Who-related stories at http://www.whofic.com/viewuser.php?uid=5717), and has a word for story ideas that gang up on her and ambush her in far greater numbers than she can ever actually write: plot bunnies.  Well, that's applicable to why I haven't written here in a while - I've been set upon by so many theology bunnies that they keep running around in my mind, not leaving any of them room to grow.  So I'm going to dump them here - maybe seeing them written down will help me make connections among them and figure out where I want to go with them.  Or maybe (hint, hint) someone will leave comments which will clarify what I had in mind.  These were noted down over time, and I've got bunches more on little bits of paper that may or may not ever turn up again.
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One to a customer

To Americans, death is always the exception, rather than the rule, unexpected when it happens, and always someone's fault.  If an 86-year-old dies in the hospital while recovering from a broken hip, it's the hospital's fault.  If a kid runs out into traffic and is hit by a truck, it's the city's fault, or the trucking company's, or the driver's.  I don't think there's ever been any other society so unable to accept death, no matter what the circumstances.  More and more, safety seems to be the most important, or even the only, value held by society as a whole.

Part of the human condition is, inescapably, that death comes one to a customer.  What is it about us that makes us unable to accept this?  Maybe it's the postwar (by which I mean WWII) feeling that there's nothing Americans can't conquer; maybe that's combined with a more recent feeling that "'impossible' just means it hasn't been done yet."  We need to recognize our condition and our identity, though, and realize that when someone dies, whether it's God's will or not, it's part of creation and part of the plan.

This wouldn't be so odd if America didn't still consider itself mainly a Christian country.  Whatever their other beliefs, most Americans believe in Heaven, and have a belief that they'll go there when they die.  Why are they so eager to avoid it, at any cost?  Most likely, of course, they'd *like* to believe in Heaven, and hope that saying so will make it true, but they aren't really sure there is one, or that they'll get there.  So they'll spend all their money on lying helplessly in a hospital bed for years on end, or stand in line for 2 hours for a flight to fell like they have some control over terrorism.

They must be like that in England, too, though, because on Dr. Who the parents (with whom Companions are, for the first time, copiously supplied) have only one question when their children leave home: Will they be safe?  That's not the first question to ask, even for a parent.  Remaining safe is so far from the best thing to wish a young adult starting out.  Life isn't for remaining safe, and putting off joy as long as possible.
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Ensoulment

Something I've thought about for a long time (at least since the first time I read some of Hans Christian Anderson's stories, like The Steadfast Tin Soldier, or that weepy standard, The Velveteen Rabbit) is ensoulment.  That's the idea that a soulless creature, like a toy or a robot, can become "real," meaning, presumably, gaining a soul.  It's been covered more recently, in slightly different subgenres: Star Trek (both :the Next Generation and :Voyager, with first Data and then the holographic doctor) and Buffy: the Vampire Slayer (with Angel and, later, Spike).  One of the Trek franchise's best episodes, ST:TNG's Measure of a Man, was on this subject.  After a very well-written "trial" to determine whether the android Data was a thing, and therefore property, the question was left open.  Is it possible for God to put a soul in something not directly created by God?

Well, for one thing, "is it possible for God" is kind of a stupid question.  The only thing impossible for God is evil.  Even hate has a place within God's boundless love, and it seems to me that as long as the question isn't "is it possible for God to do evil?," the answer has to be "yes."  All things are possible for God; if we can imagine it, we can be assured that it's within God's abilities.  One of my core beliefs is that God's love is infinite; therefore, I expect it can extend to God's "grandchildren" - the children of Tes children, us.  By the end of each series, Data, the holographic doctor, Angel, and Spike each had a soul; by the end of the stories, the tin soldier and velveteen bunny did, too.  God is love and creation; it's our obligation, as God's children, to try to love and to create as best we can.  If we love our creations, God will too, and they'll be in Heaven with us.
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God, fearing?

The story of the Tower of Babel has always annoyed me.  Whatever reason God had for destroying the Tower of Babel (and whether the story is literally true or not doesn't really enter into it), it simply could not have been that God was afraid we'd join Tir in Heaven and be just as good.  Next theory!

What does Bab-El mean, anyway?  Wikipedia says: "The word bab-el can also be seen to mean "gate of god" (from bab "gate" + el "god")."  The Tower of the Gate of God.  Doesn't explain anything - what is God supposedly afraid of?
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That had better be it for now - I'll have to post more of them later.  If you have any comments, let me know!