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April 12 - April 26, 2023
Barry Wellman called this phenomenon “networked individualism” and recognized how social media is organized around networked individualism’s key premise that there are no meaningful sources of orientation external to the self.10 As the consumer, you are your only source of orientation. The networks radiate out from the center—a center that is not a location, a cause, or a common identity—it is simply you.
Again, years ago the church was in the center of town
We are formed by our habits of consumption. And in contemporary America, this daily formation is often at odds with our formation in Word and sacrament. In this alternative economy of the true bread of life, we are turned inside out so that we are no longer people marked by scarcity, jockeying for our own good, but are new people, truly nourished, and therefore able to extend nourishment to others. The economy of the Eucharist is true abundance. There is enough for me, not in spite of others, but because we receive Christ together as a community.11
In the same way that some of us may never have tasted what a green bean or asparagus could really be like (having only ever had the canned versions), I wonder if we are reaching a similar point as industrialized human beings in a digital world. We may be forgetting—or to use the food analogy, we may be “losing a taste for”—the amazing fruit that can be borne out of a social landscape where human presence is unmediated and our social horizons are bounded enough to discover the depths of who we are in ourselves.
For those who profess to follow after Jesus Christ, someone whose incarnation through an embodied human presence was used to reveal the true nature of God’s love, we should be imagining more deeply how we can interrupt these industrializing tendencies of social media in our lives, and vigilantly stake out a theologically informed vision of what it is to know and be known, so that one day we can turn to those around us and say: come, taste and see that the Lord is good.
take a few minutes to center yourself and respond to three to four of these prompts in order to articulate to yourself some of the goals and hopes in your life: ■ I’ve always loved to . . . ■ I’ve always wanted to . . . ■ When I was a kid, I was fascinated by . . . ■ If I had more time, I would like to . . . ■ Some activities that I know put me into flow are . . . ■ People I would like to spend more time with include . . . Then make a list of ten specific nondigital activities you have not done in a long time (if ever) and would like to do in the next three months (e.g., bake, hike, go to the
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you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY
The ultimate reason for our hope is not to be found at all in what we want, wish for and wait for; the ultimate reason is that we are wanted and wished for and waited for. What is it that awaits us? Does anything await us at all, or are we alone? Whenever we base our hope on trust in the divine mystery, we feel deep down in our heart: there is someone who is waiting for you, who is hoping for you, who believes in you. . . . God is our last hope because we are God’s first love. JÜRGEN MOLTMANN A
When I was on Facebook and regularly experiencing a delicious river of digital affirmation that flowed as much as I primed it, I sometimes felt like I needed to engage, post, and publish simply in order to exist.
In church each week, we repent together. . . . Confession reminds us . . . our failures or successes in the Christian life are not what define us or determine our worth before God or God’s people. Instead, we are defined by Christ’s life and work on our behalf. We kneel. We humble ourselves together. We admit the truth. . . . And then—what a wonder!—the word of absolution: “Almighty God have mercy on you, forgive you all your sins through our Lord Jesus Christ, strengthen you in all goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit keep you in eternal life. . .
I need to hear my forgiveness proclaimed not only by God but by a representative of the body of Christ in which I receive grace, to remind me that though my sin is worse than I care to admit, I’m still welcome here. I’m still called into this community and loved.2
We lose track of the fact that the Christian tradition produces a social imaginary that understands our embodiment, our worth, and our relationship with time and the other in terms that are often completely opposite from that of permanent connectivity.
Richard Rohr once noted that the journey of faith is a constant work of undoing. He wrote that faith itself is “not just a security blanket of doctrinal statements and moral principles. . . . It is more about ‘unbelieving’ the disguise that we all are,”6 unbelieving the false versions of ourselves that we have defensively clung to. Is it possible that a key piece of what needs to be undone and unbelieved in our present age is the digital social imaginary that we have been baptized into?
When the apostle Paul asks the early church, “Who has bewitched you?” and pleads for their return to what they know to be true, we should take that as a sign for how much of the journey of faith is about undoing and unbelieving. Or as Elie Wiesel might have explained it, how faith is not so much a noun, but a verb.7
Created for Communion, Settling for Connection
Nobody has seen the trekking birds take their way toward such warmer spheres as do not exist, or the rivers break their course through rocks and plains to run into an ocean which is not to be found. For God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them, but our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home. ISAK DINESEN
This quality of permanent connectivity that our online capacities offer us has not proven to grant us peace.
Why? Because even though we desire connection, what we long for and are actually created for is something far deeper. What we actually need is communion.
And yet under all the layers of sexual attraction, social status, and affirmation we may acquire through these apps, most of us would admit that what we actually long for in our most intimate of relationships is to know and be known, to trust and be trusted, and to experience the freedom in disclosing our most vulnerable and weak selves and finding that we are still loved.
The first brick to be laid in the foundation of Christian theological anthropology is the understanding that human beings are “made in the image of God.”
It was only later as an adult that my interest was piqued when it was pointed out that the creation account from the first chapter of Genesis actually reads, “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’” (Genesis 1:26 emphasis added). What did it mean that the plural forms of us and our were used in reference to God?
Colin Gunton’s assertion that the significance of God’s trinitarian nature as both “one and three” lies in the claim that God’s very essence consists of being in relationship,1
There was something clarifying and breathtaking about the three distinctive aspects of the triune God being in relationship with each other, sharing in a love that defines the very essence of their being.
Here is some shred of the Trinity’s nature that I can meaningfully relate to, and what made it especially intriguing was the realization that we are the same.
As Saint Augustine famously prayed: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
it is critical to note that it is precisely their loving relationships with each other that enables them to become more distinctively themselves. In fact, their particularity is welcomed and the wholeness of each of their beings is required for there to be perfect love.
Instead the call to love is the thunderous invitation to lean into the possibility that each of our particularity is neither threatened nor diminished in our relationality.
God's love multiplies; it does not divide
Is it possible that I can give myself over to God and another and not feel that something has been taken away from me?
We have always struggled to remember that “at the foundation of our existence . . . we are held and cherished by the infinite love of God.”3
“Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance,” wrote Pascal, “we have decided in order to be happy, not to think about such things.” Social media helps us not to think about such things.5 To be reminded that even Pascal, living in the seventeenth century, had observed our instinct to run away from the helpless disappointments of being human is strangely comforting.
Jean Baudrillard termed “the hyperreal.”6 It is a hyped-up version of reality, tricked out with filters that make it pop and impossible to ignore. The hyperreal is glamorous, alluring, and as we saw in previous chapters, the product of well-researched strategies designed to keep us hooked.
In this broken and diminished condition, we tend toward behaviors and attitudes that feed into our lesser selves: gathering and clinging to accomplishments, material wealth, people, and technologies as ways to defend against having our vulnerabilities exposed. We end up turning our energies of love and adoration toward other parts of creation instead of God. Losing our way, we go seeking after other loves and become disordered in our relationships with everything both outside of ourselves and also within.
As Reverend Fleming Rutledge often preached: the line between good and evil runs through each one of us. For while we carry the sin of Adam in our lives and are inextricably enmeshed in a broken world, we are still human beings created to reflect God’s capacity for loving relationship. And in proclaiming Jesus Christ to have overcome the tyranny of sin and death through his crucifixion and resurrection, we are capable of being transformed and empowered by the Holy Spirit to live into God’s work of reconciling all things within the here and now.
so much of the digital ecology is designed to pander to (and even exploit) our lesser selves—the parts of us that are driven by fear and defensiveness.
Today, the industry’s algorithms quickly glom onto the fodder generated by trolls and end up inadvertently amplifying their voices, giving them far more credence and legitimacy through sheer ubiquitous exposure.
perhaps our tech problem is at root a fundamental problem of identity, a mistaken theological anthropology: Who do we believe we are? Do we let ourselves remain in the grip of being fearful, needy selves, or do we believe in the “deeper Magic” (as C. S. Lewis put it in his powerful tales from Narnia) that lay at the base of who we are in fact created to be: communing beings cherished by the God who sustains the universe? When we take stock of our everyday lives, which part of our human condition do we feed, cultivate, and live more deeply into?
For while we may imagine the new creation to be a rewind-act of reversing the effects of the fall and a return to an innocent Edenic state of being, it is actually so much more. “The restorative character of re-creation is even bigger, even weightier, than that of creation. The special mission of the Son opens [us] . . . to an even deeper communion, an even deeper story, an even deeper life, an even deeper love,” as one theologian maintains.8
the testimony we share will be a story of how it was that only after discovering what it means to surrender ourselves to God’s love, did we begin to become something new—a new creation. In this way, the foundation of Christian formation is located not in character-building actions but relaxing one’s will and trusting God enough to become the object of his love, rather than insisting on being the acting subject of every sentence of our lives.
short story by William Faulkner, where a boy is raised up in both fear and curiosity about a bear who haunts the local lore. With help and guidance, the boy learns to track and hunt the bear, only to discover that the bear is the one who has been tracking him all along. As he grows, it is this “great reversal” that the boy needs to come to accept. He has to be reoriented to the humbleness of his location in the wider cosmos and realize that when he surrenders to accepting his position as the one who is tracked and the one who is found, he will actually be given the opportunity he has been
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as the wise and indigenous guide teaches the young boy the ways of the bear, he informs the boy that at the end of the day he will need to choose between the security that the gun provides and the experience of actually seeing the bear.
if we wish to enter into experiencing genuine communion with God and consent to being transformed, we too will need to set down our armament and trust that the triune God regards us not with indifference or calculation, as if we were a servant, slave, or thing. Rather against all odds, we are to him one who is beloved.
We forget and even lose the capacity to accept that we are already beloved.
If the church can be the training ground for how we live into the Christian social imaginary that trusts God enough to let go of control and be transformed by God’s love, then our testimony might one day be a song we can sing with all the saints: “When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then it was said among the nations, ‘The LORD has done great things for them.’ The LORD has done great things for us, and we rejoiced” (Psalm 126:1-3).
what if the central problem isn’t that we can’t adapt fast enough to our changing environment, but rather that as modern people we do not possess a clear enough sense of what is at our “core” as human beings? What if the problem is that we don’t have a robust enough story to anchor us and keep us steady when the ground under our feet keeps shifting?10
We need a paradigm that helps us down a journey of actually becoming a different kind of person than who we are now. How do we become the kind of person who so recognizes the promise of emotional health and a rich interior life that we can commit to the periods of silence and meditation that are well known by the ancients to fill the soul? How do we become a person consenting to surrender to God and receive the transformative love that is ours to receive? How do we train to become that person? How do we even become motivated to undertake such a journey?
I’ve come to think that liturgy works like this too, except better. For liturgy to “work,” you’ve just got to show up and “do” the liturgy. Simply by regularly reciting prayers, kneeling, and just breathing, you are participating.
what generates the liturgical payoff is something mysterious, a surprising sort of grace.
We may know a lot about how we should live, but as Richard Rohr astutely observed, “Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.”1
“Men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”3 What we enact or perform with our bodies are not merely secondary aspects of how we express our beliefs, commitments, or values. Rather, the practices we embody do a work on us in a way that is separate from and external to whatever cognitive meaning, moral intention, or cultural logic we may also bring to the table.4
When the Church of England introduced the Book of Common Prayer in the late sixteenth century as a way to order worship through collective liturgy—in all of its physicality of shared words, collective kneeling and bowing—they believed that regular, external bodily actions had the capacity to transform the internal landscape of one’s soul.5
For if we consider how checking our phones has replaced the disciplines of Scripture reading and prayer that Christians have historically practiced during the early morning and late evening, we have to ask ourselves: What soul formation (or mis-formation) is taking place when we go to sleep and arise with our emails and social media feeds bookending our bodily rest?
