ABSTRACT
The present of prayer is such that: a) it is impossible to conceive God as absent from this experience – otherwise one would simply not pray; and b) that it is impossible to see the world as not linked to creation such that world and God are, in this experience, jointly given. This explains Bloechl’s puzzlement as to Lacoste’s stance with regard to extrinsicism when confessing that ‘[he] cannot confidently say […] whether [Lacoste] considers his position intrinsicist or extrinsicist with regard to this matter of a properly religious dimension of our humanity’.21 The answer to the puzzle lies in the different kind of ontology that liturgy proposes in the margins of being-in-the-world, an ontology that is able to combine both extrinsicism and intrinsicism: while God approaches the world extrinsically, it is only in and through liturgy that God relates intrinsically to being-in-the-world. Whereas God, from the perspective of Dasein, is extrinsically related to the world, for the believer, God and being are intrinsically related to the point that it becomes unconceivable that the world holds no relation whatsoever with being-in-theworld. One is not born a believer, but once baptized one is always and already present to the divine.
