While the Eucharist has a focus on both the past (re-presenting the passion of Jesus) and the present (feeding and nurturing us with the Body and Blood of Christ), it also is a celebration of hope and renewal. This hope provides a vision for the future, challenges the status quo, and prevents the church from falling into despair when faced with a culture that no longer lives sacramentally.

Even though hope is one of the three theological virtues, it has taken a beating in recent years. In today's secularized culture hope is synonymous with mere optimism or even wishful thinking. For a large segment of Christianity, hope means little more than heaven when you die. Even our language betrays us. A sentence such as, “I hope it may come true,” structured in the subjunctive mood and filled with uncertainty, casts a pall of doubt.

The Christian concept of hope, however, is much richer. It implies expectation, even confidence, and is centered on the promises of God. In fact, the focus of hope is not only on its content but on the act of hoping as characteristic of the community of faith. Therefore, hope is closely connected with patience, because it speaks of future promises which are already authentically experienced now, even though partially and in a preliminary form.

Before God created, he knew what he would reveal and how he would save us. So, he included in creation all the realities he would use to make himself and his plan for us known, and to carry out that plan. Among those realities are sex and the interpersonal relationships that presuppose sex. Thus, God created fathers and sons so that he could reveal himself as Father and Son, and call us to be children in the divine family; he created marriage, so that he could faithfully love Israel as his unfaithful wife, make the Church the Lord Jesus’ spotless bride, and promise an unending heavenly marriage feast. He made both motherhood and virginity possible, so that the incarnate Word could be both the Son of God and the son of Mary, whose virginity points to Jesus’ divine origin and personhood, and whose motherhood manifests his humanity.

The Incarnation, considered as the coming to be of the created humanity assumed by the Word, neither began nor ended at the Annunciation. Part of any human individual's make up and identity is having ancestors, living within a tradition, belonging to a community, and sharing its culture. Thus, the whole history of Israel is necessary for Jesus to come to be as the man he is and to live the life he lives. Mary in particular contributes to Jesus’ make up and very identity. To regard her as simply and absolutely other than the Lord Jesus is either to deny the Incarnation or to suppose that a real human individual can be only contingently related to his or her parents—to suppose that each of us could have had other parents while remaining the same individual.

It has often been pointed out that drama—and theatre, its focused form—can be liberating to people who find themselves oppressed by what might be called ‘restricted personhood’, conditions of individual belonging which make it hard for them to be both independent and cooperative in their relationships with other people. Because of its combination of a definitive structure with a stimulating imaginative freedom, drama helps those contained within narrow personal boundaries, as in depression, or limited by the absence of recognisable structure, a stable and recognisable image of the self as distinct from other people, as in schizoid thought disorder.

These are not the only ways in which psychologically oppressed people are helped by the experience of participating, however sporadically, in an alternative world in which their difficulties no longer exert the same kind of hold upon them. Even those for whom theatricality constitutes a characteristic source of communication about their personal distress—hysteric personalities who act out their problems as an alternative to thinking about them—seem to gain insight from being included in other people’s scenarios. This happens when they take an active part in the proceedings, as in drama, or when the magnetic force of theatre draws them into the action of the play without any conscious effort on their part—unless it be the determination to remain aloof! The most noticeable difference in behaviour occurs among people suffering from what are generally described as anxiety states, particularly social phobias, when the dramatic milieu reproduces the effects of desensitisation techniques within a wider, more realistic context, one which is more easily harmonised with life in the outside world; comprising, as it does, an exercise of imagination in which everyone present co-operates—an interchange of ideas, feelings and expectations which is not merely life-like but is human living.

Recently, the anthropologist Mary Douglas has pleaded for a space within the Church's pastoral life, in which women’s contributions could be fully valued. Her article might appear to some as a make-do solution, because it advocates using the area which has not been claimed by the hierarchy so as to spell out a proper task for women. The misgivings of some feminists might actually be heightened even further by her last paragraph, on the caring role of women. For has this not been the age-old role pattern? Maybe it has. But as the article was printed in a special issue on the sacramental life of the Church, there is a strong case for its argument, looking at a much neglected side of the Eucharistic tradition. I wish to highlight this by reflecting on an insight of the Nigerian sister and exegete Teresa Okure, and especially on a most revealing, new definition of the Church which emerged from the African Synod (three years ago, April-May 1994), calling the Church ‘the Family of God'.

In keeping with the hope that African perspectives may also inspire the Church at large—as the papal exhortation Ecclesia in Africa expresses it—I venture to join the research on this concept. Although the papal text openly endorses this term at the outset of the third phase of the synodal process, it does not wish to advance any specific interpretation of it yet. It sees it clearly as a notion that is still to mature in the interchange between pastoral practice and reflection.