Faith in the metaverse

I’m shocked that I’m offering a third story related to “digital church.” Still, the AP report does seem to connect to yesterday’s Tish Harrison Warren piece in the New York Times: Why Churches Should Drop Online Services. Embodied Worship is the related blog posting. (Be sure to read the comments at the end of the post.)

Today’s Seattle Times picked up an AP report: Faith in the metaverse: A VR quest for community, fellowship    It was as though the gods had decided to offer an illustration of Warren’s fears.  

The piece is on how “some traditionally religious, some religiously unaffiliated — who are increasingly communing spiritually through virtual reality, one of the many evolving spaces in the metaverse that have grown in popularity during the coronavirus pandemic.” Those following this path claim that “the experience offers a version of fellowship that’s just as genuine as in-person worship. Here are a few quotes from the article.

• "But in the church of 2030, the main focus is going to be your metaverse campus.”
•  "the potential to build community and “get away from the brick and mortar”
• “We have deep relationships, hundreds of people from around the world who know each other and wonder, ‘Is your dog, OK? How’s your wife?’” than in a physical church.

And as for sacraments, those “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace. There was this in the AP piece.

Soto baptized her in a metaverse ceremony in 2018, submerging her purple robot avatar in a pool as relatives and friends cheered her on virtually. While even many VR proponents believe such sacraments should be offered only in a physical space, to Delp it felt like a real blessing.

“Jesus is who baptized me. Jesus is who changes me,” she said. “The water, or lack thereof ... doesn’t have the power to change me.”

“Participating in Community” is a chapter in In Your Holy Spirit: Shaping the Parish through Spiritual Practice. The chapter begins with a series of quotes from the Scriptures: “love one another with mutual affection, outdo one another in showing honor.” (Romans. 12:10); “when you come together to eat, wait for one another.” (1 Corinthians 11:33); “be kind to one another, tender- hearted, forgiving one another” (Ephesians 4:32); “Love is patient[ love is kind[ love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way[ it is not irritable or resentful[ it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Corinthians 13: 1 -7) and so on.  What surprised me, okay, annoyed me, was that I had to acknowledge that just about everything being said in these Biblical passages was possible in “digital church.” I expected to open to that page and find a list of passages that wouldn’t be possible unless you were in-person. As I write this I’m defensively saying to myself, “yea, it’s there online but it’s a pale imitation of the real thing.”

I continue in the chapter and find this: “Our personal and spiritual growth is bound up with being in community. Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it this way: ‘The new person is like a garment made to cover the individual believer...It is impossible to become a new person as a solitary individual. The new person is not the individual believer after he has been justified and sanctified, but the Christian community, the Body of Christ, Christ himself.’’ and this “Parker Palmer wrote, ‘Community is that place where the person you least want to live with always lives...And when that person moves away, someone else arrives immediately to take his or her place.’ That’s a reminder that there is no perfect community in this life. The parish is built with the stuff of human frailty. The heavenly Jerusalem is something we taste now and know fully in the future.” Hmmm…cuts both ways.

The chapter then offers images of what health looks like. There are sections on “There are odd people,” “There’s a shared way of being and a direction,” “There’s love,” “There are friendships,” “There’s a climate of acceptance and challenge,” There it is again. Things that are possible in “digital church.” And I add, “to some degree.”   There are also items in the list that weigh against “digital church.” Things such as “There’s the Holy Catholic Church” and “There’s tradition.”

“People touch” is a section that stands out because it is so aligned with Tish Warren’s views.  It includes this from Star Trek: First Contact.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: It’s a boyhood fantasy...I must have seen this ship hundreds of times in the Smithsonian but I was never able to touch it.

Lieutenant Commander Data: Sir ,does tactile contact alter your perception?

Captain Jean Luc Picard: Oh Yes! For humans, touch can connect you to an object in a very personal way.

From “Participating in Community” –

“Touch is innately humanizing. Jesus healed with his touch. Thomas believed through touching. Many doctors know about touch. The routine of using the stethoscope and pressing the patient’s belly may be less about diagnostic benefits and more because it’s expected and also because it makes a connection and offers comfort. At coffee hour you’ll see people hugging, patting a back, reaching across a table to grasp a hand.

Physical touch is a common element of liturgy. In the Eucharist we exchange the peace. At our baptism we are anointed and crossed with oil. On Ash Wednesday the cross is made on us with ashes. On Maundy Thursday there is foot washing. When we’ve ill there is the laying on of hands with anointing. All this touching is an expression of our communion with one another and God.”

There were three questions offered in In-person and on-line attenders.

• What’s the data?
• What actions are needed now?
• What do we make of things as we apply models of pastoral theology to the situation? 

That last question is essential to the conversation. Society and therefore the church are usually driven be the first two. It is the third on that is unique and central to the parish’s life.  

rag+

Comments

[Charlotte Weaver-Gelzer]

Perhaps try not to see the metaverse using your expectations of primacy in the physical aspect of things. Observations like "community includes the odd person" or "touch is innately part of the liturgy" seem to be aces in the ecclesial deck of cards one hopes in play. What if, instead, you used any grasp possible for the immanent invisible mysterious power of the divine Spirit in this and all situations, careful to do so without assuming the presence of clergy as the guarantee of the Holy Spirit's presence and action? What if the pastoral aspect does not depend on clergy-defined activity? Perhaps ask questions without assuming the answers will miss the mark you have in mind.
Every online gathering has 'odd' people and annoying people, also misbehaving and immature people. The response to such folk online is as difficult and challenging to the gathering as is implied in Parker Palmer's point of such behavior an in-person community. The means of keeping disciplined communal norms online are more likely to center on safety and group care, than in person.
As uncomfortable as it is, you could try looking at it this way--the metaverse is revealing that people gathering 'there' for worship and spiritual nourishment are not as inevitably in need of a clergy person's physical touch and leadership as seems to be the going assumption of 'real' church In the real in-person world, touch and a face-to-face encounter in a liturgical or learning situation, the hope is to give everyone there some access to the growth and trust of spiritual life making it possible to touch all the people who aren't with those people in the congregation, but who are implicitly present by relationship--all those with whom we live, day by day, who don't come to in-person church with us. Can it really be true that the 'best' and most blessed growth can only come from physically being in a church setting, spiritually being led by clergy? This discussion needs clergy to wrestle with the fact that the worship and spiritual fellowship increasing online is likely to abandon the sharp-edged tools meant to theologically and by ecclesial power exclude or approve of right ideas and people. None of that seems to be as important now as being in relationship with God and others in the most inclusive ways possible. Must being in 'right' relationship with God include in-person worship, in-person presence? Why? There is fellowship in the metaverse; deep prayer is possible in gatherings in the metaverse; spiritual nourishment is possible in the metaverse. All that seems improbable only when using all physical markers of fellowship, worship, prayer, spiritual life. Why is it so hard to trust that the metaverse can have the same or stronger effects of the divine Presence in the daily lives of those people who make themselves present in such gatherings, as when they go to a physical church? Those people are as likely to carry their relationship with God into the grocery store, when visiting their parents (if they can), participating in civic life, setting the table, disciplining children, speaking with a spouse, presenting project revisions or raising questions in business meetings, doing lectio, reading the Daily Office or meeting each other online for that, too. The experience of worship and fellowship in the metaverse is curiously likely to mean people find God everywhere, instead of expecting to meet God only in the building. And isn't that the formation wanted from in-person participation in the liturgy? Why should the result only come from in-person, brick and mortar surroundings?
When I did go to in-person church, I regularly attended a healing service at which the priest, with both hands on my head, would say intensely, "May the Holy Spirit move THROUGH you and heal you and INTO the lives of all you meet and whom you love." That's got the vigor of a practical, real thing happening which is, both mysterious and significantly, quite out of the priest's control. That blessing is full of power. Why would the metaverse make it impossible to experience the transformative power of God?
For thousands of people around the world who find online contemplative prayer groups, for example, to be more effectively healing and wholesome for body, mind and spirit in daily life, there's not much pull in going back to an hour of liturgy in person, added to many hours of make-work committee service, when all that has accomplished little for them in faith or rule of life. Worshipping, praying communities online are explosions of divine energy, with people leaning into spiritual maturity with urgency. It is churlish to think all that spiritual development would lack the good effects in daily life and service that one would hope for in church communities in physical settings. There's a mysterious effect in these online groups, of holding each other accountable, while holding themselves accountable individually. There's an equally interesting effect of loosening the constricted bounds of 'witnessing.' Here's how it is with my soul. How is it with yours?
But you are right--when we are ill, we want the healing touch; when we are confessing, or celebrating, or mourning, we want the human touch. But why must that be the touch of the pastorally trained person? Must it be?
There is another positive to brick-and-mortar in-person communities. Some people need the structure of church-in-person. It's good to have that, for them. Perhaps what's happening is that in-person church is being revealed as not one-size fits all in every circumstance forever and ever amen,
The choice to participate and even 'belong' to online church or prayer groups casts some light on church- in-person with a question mark included. It seems self-evident but important to add that that clergy aren't able to make a real and respectable living in these spaces of the metaverse. There's no building to support, for one thing, no clergy person deputized to be the representative of everything Christian. People must finally work out their salvation for themselves, and there's something about prayer and contemplation and perhaps church online, too, that encourages that recommendation of St Paul's.
And the hierarchy that is the structural skeleton of conventional and traditional churches is done away with, in the metaverse. That's an evident sticking point of discomfort, if not perceived threat, under all the public worries and assertions about human nature needing to touch in physical spaces of church settings, etc. etc. Perhaps any important research into the matter should include a question of all clergy: how much of what you are proposing or objecting to is related to what you do as a professional Christian, dependent on people coming to you in your place of work?
But I rather expect that people who have found relationship with God a real and vital force of priority in their lives because of the online communities they are a part of, will be unlikely to fill in research questionnaires about the experience. And why say the sheep are all running away through the broken fence? Perhaps instead they have heard the Shepherd's voice outside, and perhaps it was the Shepherd broke the fence down, and is even now striding away, still calling, 'Follow me!' Isn't that possible, too?