By "sacramental drift" I mean how the narrative and symbolic aspects of baptism and the Eucharist have become decoupled from their ontological realities. We can cite, once again, Flannery O'Connor's famous assessment about the Eucharist, how, if it's "just a symbol," then to hell with it.
That said, I don't think celebrations of the Eucharist within memorialist traditions like my own, where we explicitly believe the elements of the Supper are symbolic, are devoid of spiritual power, potency, or profundity. As I've also shared, Jesus promised us that he is "really present" when two or three gather in his name. Christ's "real presence" in the Supper is experienced pneumatically rather than through a ritual of consecration upon an altar carried out by priests.
Regardless, I do have an interest in (re)connecting symbolic Christian practice to ontological realities. Less to move a practice from failed and illegitimate to successful and legitimate than as a part of my larger project of "Keeping Christianity Weird." For my part, I believe Christ is really present in a memorialist practice of the Lord's Supper, for the simple reason that I believe Jesus tells the truth. But from a spiritual formation perspective, I have a concern about the metaphysical and ontological impoverishment of the Protestant mind in modernity. Five hundred years ago, with the Reformers, this wasn't a problem. Those dudes were enchanted. But five centuries downstream of the Reformation, the Protestant mind has become metaphysically deracinated, uprooted from an enchanted ontological worldview. Our minds default to the Newtonian, the causal, the material, the scientific, the reductionistic, the deterministic, and the mechanical. This is my concern about exclusively symbolic practices of Christianity. Sacraments are visible, material signs that point to and participate in invisible, ontological realities. But if your default assumption is that said realities "don't exist" because we "can't see" them or can't "scientifically observe" them, well, the symbolic practice becomes disenchanted via sacramental drift.
So my interest here isn't to play Eucharist Police or Sacramental Cop. I'm not the ICE of the Real Presence, busting into denominational spaces to arrest and detain your sacramental theology and practices. My interests here are about resisting the materialistic metaphysics of modernity. And one way we can do that is by reinvigorating a more robust ontological imagination when it comes to the sacraments.
An invisible reality needs to be made visible.
