Communion in a Networking World

This is an interesting and enlightening article, developing a more elegant theory than my own–that the West is plagued by psychological unhappiness because of too much material comfort. Rather, posits the author, the failing social contract is at the heart of all our misery. The fractured nature of modern life, of having to depend entirely on yourself for all your emotional, material, and social needs, of not knowing the person across the street any better than you know any of your twitter followers is bound to amount to some level of depression. This is the part that struck me,

They may have the wherewithal, the talents, and the preexisting social capital to successfully navigate a world in which their communal life has been almost entirely displaced by a networking life. For a while, they often succeed more when liberated from a life that would impose obligations. They throw themselves more fully into careers and social milieux that run on a more disguised form of conditional favor-trading, rather than reciprocal duties. But it is precisely because they see so clearly how much their outcomes in life depend on the favors they put into and extract out of a network, that they dread their loss of status which they value most keenly. [emphasis mine]

I confess that when I first read the line I thought it said “communion,” which didn’t make sense, so I had to go back and read it again. But that’s really the issue, isn’t it? The very concept of communion, of being tightly bound to other people, but more importantly to God, isn’t something that you can haphazardly replace it with a lot of money or social media. You can’t cheapen it and still taste, as it were, its benefits. For communion to work, you have to give of yourself. Networking, by contrast, is a fluttering by with nothing substantial lost and nothing of value really gained. It’s like thinking that Thomas Kincaid is “artsy” enough to be counted as a true purveyor of beauty.

But to have true communion you have to go where it is really available, and it’s hard for ordinary people to fathom going to church any more. Why would you go there and sit in a pew or even a padded chair? To listen to some people talk? And drink some coffee after? What is it for? If it’s not about me, what is there to make me interested? I mean, church, at some level, is manifestly about you, but it’s about you and God, and you and yourself, and you and other people. It’s not about you being you. It’s about you being brought into a communion, a mysterious life woven together with other people certainly, but most of all with a God who won’t be defined by your preferences and desires. So even if the chairs are comfortable and the coffee is strong, if the church is a good one you won’t be entirely comfortable in your own self, not even after years of going there.

But, the longer you go, the more you put yourself into the hands of God and other people, the less lonely you’ll be. Indeed, if the church is active, you may sometimes long for loneliness. The loneliness dissipates not because there’s a social contract, not because you finally make friends and get to know people—although certainly that should and does happen—not because you do a lot of work and forget your troubles and your cares, but because God crosses over the distance of your networking self to join you to himself through the life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of his Son. He brings you into communion with himself and that manifests itself and is made obvious in your deepening communion with other people.

But more and more people aren’t up for it. They wander in and wander back out again, disappointed that money didn’t roll out of God’s hand, or that there wasn’t some kind of astonishing miraculous amelioration of their temporal circumstances. They wanted cake and God gave them bread and they felt like it was a stone. So the loneliness stretches as far as the eye can see.

The great thing to remember, of course, is that God took what looked from our end to be a contract—socio-political and everything—and turned it into a gift, the gift of himself. I mean, we still didn’t want it, but a few wandering by looked up and saw how rich and plentiful it was. They saw not just blood and nakedness and death, they saw—because part of the gift was eyes suddenly opened to see it for what it was—they took hold of a cup, a drink to sustain the body and soul all the way through eternity. They tasted a loaf that was broken into pieces. As it was broken, it irrevocably bound the one who tasted it to God himself.

All you who pass by, stop for a while and see this great thing that the Lord has done. Leave the loneliness to one side for a while and go to church.