by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, December 14, 2003
Almost ten years ago I preached a sermon called "A Pedestrian on the Information Super Highway". It was a sort of confession about my ambivalence toward computers and computer technology. And it was prompted because like Neil Postman, I had a feeling that in our rush toward more information, more speed and more technological fixes, something might be lost, or at least overlooked.
A lot can happen in ten short years. The title of that old sermon alone is a bit telling, because today, a mere decade later, we really never hear the term "information super highway". It's already an anachronism, replaced by the World Wide Web, which offers a less linear and more accurate image. Even that name has been replaced by 'the net' when we talk, or the shorthand of 'www.' when we're at the keyboard.
Ten years ago I was serious about the word "pedestrian" to describe my own attitude to the electronic universe. I didn't use e-mail, had no clue how to look something up on-line, could not imagine owning a cell phone and hadn't even ever seen a palm pilot. Now I work on a lap-top computer, and e-mail, the internet, a cell phone and a palm pilot are routine parts of my life, as I know they are for many of you.
As I've invited each new piece of technology into my life, it's a little like starting a new relationship. After the search and the decision to take the plunge, there comes the first blush of ridiculous affection, followed by some intense one-on-one time to really get to know each other. After a while we settle in together and before I know it I'm taking this new dimension of my life for granted.
I don't think very much about the ways I've cozied up to technology that didn't even exist a few short years ago. But I think it's important to step back from it every once in a while and pay attention to how our lives are shaped and changed by the tools we use and by how we think about them. Neil Postman writes, "Embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another…New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop."
In other words, significant technologies are not just additions to ordinary life, the way we might add a sweater to our wardrobe. They change ordinary life, and large technological shifts can change us in large ways. They change our behavior by changing the way we spend our time. They change our choices, because more choice is available to us. And they change our metaphors, the ways in which we think about our reality. A generation ago, when computers were just brushing up against the general public, scientists and mathematicians were already using the new imagery to describe reality. Today, some of them use it to describe ultimate reality -- God, or the essence of life.
The scientist Archibald Wheeler (who coined the term "black hole") began claiming back in the 1980s that fundamentally, atoms are made up of bits of information. Therefore, he said -- only slightly tongue in cheek -- all "its are bits". By way of elaboration he said, "Every it -- every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself -- derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely from binary choices, from bits. What we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions."
In an article last year called "God is the Machine" one of the editors of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly, wrote, "[T]he new science of digitalism says that the universe itself is the ultimate computer -- actually the only computer…From this perspective, computation seems almost a theological process. It takes as its fodder the primeval choice between yes and no, the fundamental state of 1 or 0. After stripping away all externalities…what remains is the purest state of existence: here/not here. Am/not am. In the Old Testament, when Moses asks the Creator, 'Who are you?' the being says, in effect, 'Am'. One bit. One almighty bit…All creation, from this perch, is made from this irreducible foundation. Every mountain, every star, the smallest salamander or woodland tick, each thought in our mind, each flight of a ball is but a web of elemental yes/nos woven together."
It's a little weird when science seems to be catching up with science fiction. When I was in high school I read stories by Isaac Asimov, written in the 1950s, that offered the image of cosmic computers running the whole show -- or rather, the whole show being a cosmic computer. I'd rather have it stay there in the realm of fiction, because the theoretical physics makes my head hurt with all that I can't really understand. I also find myself a little cranky when I imagine that all my choices and feelings and thoughts can be boiled down to a stream of zeros and ones -- a computer program.
But if I can get past the mechanistic language, it's a revelation to see how close the imagery of experimental science can be to that of religion. To say that reality is more like computation than something concrete or solid doesn't seem that far from Buddhist teachings about illusion and emptiness and the mind, or from our own declaration of faith that everything is invisibly, inseparably linked.
Computers and the internet are now so much a part of our lives that it takes some effort to remember what life was like without them. Ten years further out, there will be new leaps that will land us somewhere else, scratching our heads and trying to remember what life was like in 2003, before whatever it is became so common. Those new technologies will also change our metaphors, and esoteric science will find ways to use those new images too in describing "God, the universe and everything".
But it isn't just in the realm of metaphor that technology touches those of us on a religious journey, and the internet is a prime example. Type the word "God" and then hit the "search" button and unbelievable numbers of references come up. There are now tens of thousands of websites devoted to some dimension of spirituality. They are the home pages of mainstream denominations and individual congregations, propaganda engines for fundamentalists and atheists, and outlets for single individuals to share their faith -- or lack of it-- with the world.
There are websites for every conceivable brand of Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and Jew -- which isn't too surprising. But there are also websites for atheists, agnostics, Rastafarians, Zoroastrians, Pagans, Satanists, and Taoists. Cults have web pages, from harmless groups like the Church of Elvis, to the suicide cult Heaven's Gate and white supremist hate groups like Christian Identity.
Some religious sites only exist online; they have names like the First Church of Cyberspace, the Order of Divine Logic and the First Online Church of Bob. My personal favorite is an irreverent Christian site called the Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua, which won my loyalty when I stumbled on it a few years ago and read its self-description. Pasted next to a picture of a Chihuahua in dark glasses standing on a cloud are the words, "The courage to be ridiculous before God", and below it the following introduction: "Welcome to the Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua, a sacred place in cyberspace named in honor of a little old dog with cataracts, who barked sideways at strangers because he couldn't see where they were. We humans relate to God in the same way, making noise in God's general direction, and expecting a reward for doing so. Hence our creed: We can't be right about everything we believe -- thank God we don't have to be."
Once you get started in exploring religion online, it's pretty clear that there is no endpoint. You can find out more about someone else's beliefs than you ever could have imagined a generation ago. Without much effort at all, you can find out why Rastafarians wear dreadlocks or why the Ganges is sacred to Hindus. You can read the Talmud, the Koran and the Bible in any translation you can comprehend, download sacred music from the Sufis or images of Hindu gods, browse for Wicca spells and find out details of West African rituals. For any given faith you can find websites of dissenters, and read volumes of pro and con arguments about controversies you never knew existed. You can read Sunday sermons from a church halfway around the world, or get a first-hand account of praying at the Wailing Wall, or hear about how Ramadan was celebrated in Baghdad this year.
For those of us who are insatiably curious about the ways human beings find and express their faith, the internet is like the proverbial candy store and we're the wild children with sweet tooths, turned loose with a bottomless budget. But it's a good thing to remember Neil Postman's caution every once in a while. How does all this information serve us? And what are its limitations?
How we would like it to serve us is easy to answer. We have a kind of faith in information. We know how often sheer ignorance is at the bottom of human bias, and there is a hope I think we all carry that the more we learn about each other, the more the walls between us will shrink. The internet is good for that. Pretty much any question we figure out how to ask can be answered there, at least in the form of more information.
But there are a lot of other forms for our answers to take, particularly when it comes to the spiritual life. Information in not always the best answer, and sometimes it is no real answer at all. In other words, reading about prayer is not the same as praying. Studying how people around the world come to worship is not the same as worshipping. Reading about Buddhist meditation is not meditating, and it can't teach us about what will rise up to greet us when we turn away from the screen and settle ourselves into silence on a cushion.
A Buddhist metaphor teaches that there are many paths to the top of the mountain, each one with its own characteristics, its own requirements. It can be endlessly fascinating to explore those many paths to spiritual growth; but unless we choose one to follow, we will merely circle around the bottom of the mountain and not make it to the view we're really after. That view from the top of the mountain doesn't come through the words and images that rise up on our computer screens.
There are other ways of knowing, and other currents we need to open ourselves to, because we ourselves are not computers. We don't "process" information, even though that word has become so common among us. In order to move it into the realm of knowledge and even transform it into wisdom, we incorporate it, make it corporeal, a part of our being. Our minds piece things together in amazing, intuitive, creative ways, but we are embodied, organic, wildly disorganized creatures. Incorporation comes only when we give ourselves the time, the quiet and the peace for it to happen.
Vladimir Nabokov wrote, "A passerby whistles a tune at the exact moment that you notice the reflection of a branch in a puddle, which in its turn…recalls a combination of damp leaves and excited birds in some old garden, and the old friend, long dead, suddenly steps out of the past, smiling and closing his dripping umbrella. The whole thing lasts one radiant second and the motion of impressions and images is so swift that you [have no way to trace its pattern]…It is like a jigsaw puzzle that instantly comes together in your brain,…and you experience a shuddering sensation of wild magic."
It's that "wild magic" that makes us who we are, and it's the wild magic that I'm sometimes afraid we'll lose, when information and more information is what fills up our minds and consumes our time. I know I'm not the only one who has had the experience of sitting down to the computer at night to spend just ten minutes looking up one small tidbit or to answer just one e-mail. An hour later, or two hours later, we finally slide back into what we now call "real time", having once again been seduced by all we can do, all we can find out, all we can respond to, through these wonderful machines of ours.
The 'wild magic' inside of us needs time and space that we don't fill up with words, that we don't fill up with busy typing fingers, that we don't fill up with our insatiable hungers for more, even when the 'more' we crave is information. In the esoteric world of theoretical physics, it may make sense to see the whole universe in terms of bits instead of beings, all our lives boiled down to the streams of zeros and ones, the ultimate reduction down to those two options, 'yes' or 'no', 'am' or 'not am'.
But that's not the world we open our eyes to on a winter morning when the gray sky is fat and heavy with the promise of snow, when our hands are hungry for touch, when we're missing someone who has died, when we're giddy with love for a child, when our eyes fill up at the sound of an ancient, beloved piece of music. We live in the world of wild magic.
What do we do to preserve it for ourselves? All I know to do is take the time. These winter weeks we're in right now are the weeks of Advent in the Christian calendar, when observant Christians have certain prayers and candle-lightings to remind them that the birth of Jesus is immanent. But we don't have to be Christians to understand what an Advent practice offers us. It's a discipline of time, a discipline of attentive waiting for something that cannot be rushed. It's an inner turning, a willful assent to silence, a preparation of the heart so that something that's carried on the slow tide below the busy mind might have a chance to be carried into shore and touch us.
I love Christmas, despite all its schlock and commercial warping, and despite the long distance I've traveled from the God of my childhood. I love tree and the holly and wreaths, the music, the small circles of friends and family, the indulgences of food and presents. But they all have a shadow side. They all have inside them the seed of competition with the past, the sense that each thing has to be done just this way so the season will measure up to what's gone before. They can run away with us and leave us feeling ragged and sad, worn out with effort and wondering where all the spirit has fled to.
An Advent practice is like a daily nod to the Sabbath, checking ourselves and our choices against the slow and steady rhythm of a beating heart, and against those things that truly do the heart good. What I need this Advent season is not the God of information but the God of silences, the God of winter, the God of hibernation and December stars, the God of solstice nights and thin bright sunlight on snow, the God of patient waiting, the God of a slow candle burning. The time we have is so fleeting, and what we need to fill ourselves to the brim so simple and near at hand most of the time. It's our wild magic. We just need to remember, and turn to greet it. AMEN.