In the titles and subtitles of David Jasper’s ‘sacred trilogy’ the word ‘sacrament’ appears only in his third book, but Jasper adopts the language of sacrament throughout to designate the way that transcendent reality becomes wholly immanent and gives rise to silence. Sacrament is thus no longer understood to be a manifestation of the divine through a material thing but as the silence of what Jasper names as “Total Presence”, instantiated in both the textual body of the world and in human bodies that make a journey into the desert place. This sacramental phenomenon comes to a focus in the text of poetry, novels, the visual arts and music. This chapter reflects on the extent to which this refiguring of sacrament might enable us to re-think the boundary between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’ which seems to persist in our late-modern age. It does so by developing five themes in relation to sacrament: the death of God and universality; the sacred; inside/outside of the text; participating in Christ; and community.

“At the beginning I said there were Personalities in God. Well, I'll go further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self.” / So writes C.S. Lewis towards the end of his book of broadcast talks, Beyond Personality, which later became the last part of Mere Christianity. He regarded this small book as his attempt at communicating (or as he later puts it, 'translating') Christian theology for the non-theologian, and even more for the non-Christian. This is his sustained effort at Christian doctrine. Elsewhere in Mere Christianity he assumes the role of apologist, evangelist and Christian ethicist, but here he puts on the mask of the theologian, though with some hesitancy, and it is in this role that I want to assess him in this chapter. / The heart of the matter - The making of persons / In the short passage I have quoted above, Lewis brings together the doctrines of God, human nature and salvation in a concise way. I hope to show both how they hit the very centre of Christian belief, and yet how they also, ironically, raise some disturbing questions about Lewis's approach.

THE HIDDENNESS OF WISDOM

This question, placed in the mouth of the unfortunate Job (Job 28:12), appears to be an enquiry about a particular place where wisdom might be located. Likewise the answer, ‘Mortals do not know the way to it (v. 13)’, appears on first sight to be a denial of entrance to this mysterious place, and since it is divine wisdom which is in view the questioner is also apparently faced by the remoteness of God. Human beings are, it seems, confronted by an absolute transcendence excluding them from the dwelling-place of God's wisdom, which is nothing less than a dimension of the divine personality. Only ‘God understands the way to it’ (v. 23). However, we shall see that the question ‘where shall wisdom be found?’ is in fact a riddle, and the answer is both surprising and playful as all riddles are. It is not a mere piece of rhetoric, expecting the answer ‘nowhere by human beings’ or ‘in heaven with God’. Wisdom is certainly hidden, but the solution to the riddle is more positive, though cautionary, pointing us towards a ‘place’ which is not literally a place at all.

In this essay I want to show that this quest for a ‘not-a-place’ offers an important clue to the nature of the presence of a God who is hidden, but not absent and inaccessible.