ABSTRACT
By material transcendence, I refer to the otherness (alterity) that is proper to the matter from which all things in the cosmos-stars, rocks, minerals, air, water, plants, animals, including humans-are composed, an otherness toward which humans can orient themselves in openness and humility. Since humans are part of a more than human cosmos, this otherness is also an otherness within humans. Humans share in the materiality of all creatures, from distant suns to the dust on the windowsill and the micro-organisms that inhabit human intestines. Like the transcendent otherness of God, this shared materiality-which is not fully graspable through human reason and the senses-can be welcomed as a calling forth toward communion. Rather than furthering a matter/spirit split, I want to affirm that in the materiality of Earth is its transcendence. Without reducing the idea of spirit to an organizational principal of matter, which is always already organized in one way or another, I want to affirm the coherence of spirit with matter in a material transcendence.2 Here, divine immanence and a material transcendence are co-abiding alterities at the heart of Earth (and cosmic) being, such that they cannot be separated from the materiality in which they co-inhere. This incarnational understanding of a material transcendence is the basis for my exploration of Eucharist as a sacrament of Earth.
