WHILE WE’VE BEEN GONE…THE E-CHURCH

pray tell blog

 Rev. Canon Dr. Lizette Larson-Miller is currently the Huron Lawson Professor of Liturgy at Huron University College (a college of the University of Western Ontario) in London, Ontario, Canada. She is also the Canon Precentor of the Anglican Diocese of Huron, and past president of Societas Liturgica and the IALC (International Anglican Liturgical Consultation)

Liturgy on TV, radio or through other electronic means is not a new thing. Beginning in the 1950s with the first televised liturgy from Westminster Abbey (the Coronation of Her Majesty Elizabeth II in 1953), and the first televised mass in the Archdiocese of Boston (the beginnings of CatholicTV in 1955), countless sacramental liturgical events have been broadcast and shared around the world. The beginnings of this brave new world were both applauded and critiqued by notable voices, including many who felt that such public access to the visual and aural dimensions of liturgy was devaluing the mysteries of the church as well as posing “a danger to ritual authenticity” (Johannes Metz, Umberto Eco, and others).

We’ve come a long way since then, televised to livestreamed liturgies have provided huge comfort to those unable to join in their parish liturgy from hospitals and care homes to shut-ins in their own homes. All this was in addition to the majority of Christians who celebrated the liturgies of the church gathered together in one place, and before the pandemic drove parish churches to lock the doors and deliver ‘normative’ liturgy, community, pastoral care, bible study, meetings, and even the dreaded coffee hour online. But long before this momentous change, the electronic to digital realities were being analyzed from both religious and corporate perspectives. Buried in the massive numbers of books, interviews, webinars, journals, and blogs is a recurring theme countering the seemingly limitless possibilities of cyberspace – what is this doing to us – human beings ‘built’ to be social beings, and Christians of the sacramental variety, for whom the incarnation is central, and ‘matter matters’ as the means of our salvation?

From time to time, someone will point out that most of the founders and CEOs of major internet companies (Google and others) have responded to interviews or freely volunteered that they strictly limit their own children’s time on the internet or engagement with any screens. From Steve Jobs (2014) who forbade any digital devices at the dinner table to Susan Wojcick (2019) “I take away all my kids’ phones on vacations…because I want people to interact with each other,” these leaders at the heart of the digital explosion know the need to limit the increasingly addictive lure of the screen. Echoing the WHO advice to limit children under the age of five to one hour a day, it seems those who know know there is a shadow side to the plethora of positives associated with the world wide web.

In spite of all this, the installation of large screens (often in small churches with clear sight lines to the altar) continued. In the one place with no reason to add to the growing concerns about too much screen time, screens were set up with texts (no music – just words) of songs and scripture readings, and even more inexplicably, lovely nature photos distracting the assembly while the presider stood at the altar leading the community in the great thanksgiving of the church. When quizzed “why?”, many parishioners – having apparently never met any millennials – said it was very popular and would draw young people to their church. This is a trend that needs to be seriously analyzed and challenged – BUT – in the meantime, 2020 happened. Now students spend hours on zoom ‘going’ to school, countless adults spend their days in zoom meetings, and Netflix has become the salvation of the isolated. With very little warning, parish priests needed to become tech experts, attempting at least Morning Prayer on Zoom, if not the Sunday eucharistic liturgy on Facebook. The issue of screens in the chancel has taken a back seat to much more urgent questions.

It seems years ago now, but do you remember the haunting broadcast of Pope Francis (a Lenten Friday, 27 March) from a dark, deserted, rainy piazza in front of St. Peter’s, an urbi et orbi prayer for the end of the Coronavirus pandemic? Or, at the other end of the spectrum, the engaging and differently comforting daily broadcasts of the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, offering brief prayers each morning in his garden, surrounded by his menagerie of pets (including his now famous cat, who proceeded to drink from the tea set pitcher of cream behind the Dean during the entire prayer). So many occasions of prayer during lockdown have engaged us via Youtube or other platform, allowing us to enter into something we would otherwise have missed, and been poorer without.

It is good to remember the good, the helpful, the engaging, and the prayerful. But as the world hopefully emerges from this pandemic in 2021, the issue of what virtual reality is doing to us needs to remain in the conversations and wisdom of the church (and not just in the conversations of the “experts”, but at the diocesan and parochial levels). There is much good writing and reflection out there – but two issues in particular seem increasingly urgent. The first is what many students of cyberia note as the tendency of online liturgical experiences to disregard or downplay the essential nature of the material and embodied qualities of sacramental reality. Matthew Tan summarizes the work of a number of scholars in writing how “cyberspace repeats many threads of the old heresy of Gnosticism.” (“Sarah Coakley and the Prayers of the Digital Body of Christ”). The mundane, the ordinary, the corporeal are not desirable as hope rises for creating new and improved human beings, as many working in digital worlds increasingly see the body (and presence, location, in-person engagement) as undesirable and limiting, what Ed Regis calls the desire to “implement the human being in alternative hardware.” How is this filtering into the actual preference of many parishioners for the ease and anonymity of Sunday mornings from their living room? How is the necessity of listening to one another, breathing and pacing with those around us, negotiating the re-establishment of the “we” of the body of Christ factoring in online? The second issue is the mutually reinforcing dynamics of cyberspace and consumer culture. We consume the internet, and commodification is a threat to liturgy and ecclesiology in that it stresses social fragmentation and the fracturing of identity. Tan again writes that this stress on the autonomy of individuals is incompatible “with the body of Christ” particularly because its glorification of “the fragmentation of all bodies, biological and social” works as a type of “anti-sacramentality” re-enforcing the rampant individuality with which we already wrestled prior to 2020.

We have found a temporary solution to one problem in this horrific year – but where will it lead us, and how will the virtual reality reshape liturgy in the years to come?