The game of the stone: A sermon on 1 Peter 2.1–8

Abstract

This sermon addresses the question of the bodily senses and how they are related to one another, in connection with a eucharistic interpretation of 1 Peter 2.1–8, and an analysis of G. M. Hopkins’s sonnet, ‘As kingfishers catch fire’. These discussions are related to the tradition of the spiritual senses and to a reappraisal of presence and absence. A link is made between concrete presence and particularity, on the one hand, and participation, on the other. Real presence is aligned with a perfect virtuality, and immediacy is seen as paradoxically borrowed; it always arrives from elsewhere, and yet this affirms rather than compromises its specificity. In this way, that which might be ‘stone-like’ and visible cannot be entirely commanded, and yet its visibility and lapidary quiddity, or thingness, is in no way derogated.