By Richard Thieme

Defining the Challenge: The ‘Study’ of ‘Sacred Texts’ in the Digital Era

The single quotation marks around ‘study’ and ‘sacred texts’ signify that the words inside them no longer mean what they used to mean. The symbols and images of religious experience are no longer fixed in print but are now flowing. They feel less like objective artifacts ‘out there’ and more like pieces of thin ice in a moving river, dissolving and forming again and again. The context that defines our thoughts and actions is itself being redefined by the distribution of digital information through networks, and we humans too are being transformed into nodes in that network. As Marvin Minsky said, individual human beings are brains in bottles, like stand-alone desktop computers disconnected from the network.

The study of a sacred text is analogous to a community of people gathering around a fire, drawing on the energies of the flames. The words of the sacred text turn to flame, becoming fire and light that define a community and disclose possibilities for the future. The sacred text is a transformational engine that discloses, discovers, and creates an image of who we are now in relationship to a potential state, the discovery of which is simultaneously the discovery that we are not in that state. Thus, our interaction with the sacred text immediately creates a bridge of images and symbols that span from our present state to that future state. Of course, there is no ‘future’ state; both states are always present here and now.

The encounter of individuals in a community with a sacred text is analogous to space shuttles docking at a space station. We come together in momentary groups, exchange energy and information, and then move on. In a digital world, however, the space station is made up of pixels (light, energy, or information), and is given form by our collective will and intention. To think of the morphing forms of communities in this way makes sense in the current context of frequent, rapid transitions. We live between images that made sense in the past (the mental artifacts of formerly shared consensus realities) and those arriving faster and faster from the horizon of the future. We used to derive our liveliest metaphors from books, printing, and publishing—metaphors such as “turning over a new leaf,” “her life is only a footnote,” and “beginning a new chapter.” Now we derive our liveliest metaphors from life in the network, distributed computing, and technologies of information and communication. To speak of morphing, interfacing, rebooting, multi-tasking, or crashing is to articulate our shared life with metaphors derived from a shared experience of networked computing.

That is happening to the study of sacred texts as well. The study of sacred texts is a specialized subset of the study of all texts, with its own vocabulary and goals. But the word “study” is not adequate to describe what we do when we read linked documents on a monitor and explore them hypertextually. “Text” does not describe very well what we experience when we interact with an iconic flow of information in an immersive virtual experience. Those are last year’s words for last year’s experience. We virtual voyagers, exploring dimensions of the human soul that did not previously exist, need to invent new words to describe our new experiences.

A More Literal Description of the Problem

The process of interacting with hyperlinked sacred symbols changes who we think we were before we left the shore and began our voyage of discovery.

The digital world, in conjunction with other technologies, is recontextualizing what it means to be a human being. Inevitably the quest for a sacred dimension of life, and how we articulate that quest, will be redefined as well.

The energy of transformation always derives from a perception of difference, from a critical distinction that discloses a new possibility. The difference is defined metaphorically as a future state that will never be attained; if wholeness or completion were achieved, we would disappear and become something else entirely. Hence, images of ourselves as perfected at the climax of time are carrots after which we always trot. Because Judeo-Christian belief defines spiritual growth as a spiral rather than a circle, these images are not exactly Sisyphus rolling his boulder uphill, but they resemble Sisyphus once we admit that within the constrained domain of human civilization and its inadequate measures of time (in mere centuries rather than billions of years), there is no measurable moral progress.

To speak of ‘sacred text’ is to identify ourselves as Print People, post-Gutenberg pilgrims voyaging through vast typographic seas. The sphere of consciousness inhabited by our collective field of subjectivity is bounded by the way printed text has taught us to see and perceive. Our brains and the symbols it manipulates seem to have co-evolved, hands and tools together, so to speak, and we cannot escape that feedback loop. Our field of subjectivity, then, is a horizon defined by our genetic heritage, but we can see clearly that we were formed in the image of language that was spoken, then written, then printed, only because we can now manipulate symbols digitally. We do not speak language so much as language speaks us, and today the language speaking us is digital. So we have left the shores of Print Culture forever and can return to that now-imaginary world only through a digital simulation of print culture, just as Print People could enter into oral cultures only in and through their experience as Print People, understanding oral cultures in ways that people in them could not.

Here is an analogy: When I moved to Hawaii I believed there was such a thing as Hawaiian culture. But I learned that Hawaiian culture ended in 1780 when Captain Cook sailed into Kailakakua Bay.

Over the next century, the invaders did everything they could to dismantle that culture, in particular using Christianity to replace the framework for thinking, feeling, and being of the indigenous people. With the birth of various consciousness movements in the sixties (among African-Americans, women, etc.), Hawaiian culture was also reborn, but in the only way it could be reborn—in images of itself generated by the invaders over several generations and given back to remnants of the Hawaiian people who reconstructed themselves and their culture as seen by the Other. The taxonomic manner of understanding other cultures axiomatic to anthropology, although alien to Hawaiian oral culture, became the means of Hawaiians appropriating their own transformed identity from texts of the invaders that their ancestors could never have read.

It is not necessary to attend a staged luau as a tourist to witness ‘Hawaiians’ acting as the now-dominant culture expects and teaches them to act.

Hawaiians who refuse to act like ‘Hawaiians’ for tourists and insist on thinking of themselves as ‘real Hawaiians’ are playing roles in another’s script to just as great a degree. The prisoners and the guards are the same people. Touristic space is a nested set of images of self and identity, images in a hall of mirrors. But it always begins with an image in the eye or mind of the Other.

In the same way, the Digital World is an ongoing voyage into seas of transformation (Print People becoming Digital People), which we see as a process because the digital world teaches us that processes are primary. We see now that the sense of fixity derived from texts was temporary. The Digital World is characterized by verbs, not nouns.

Instead of determining a single objective and heading for it in a straight line, we see multiple possible outcomes because computers organize options into multiple outcomes fanned like playing cards in our hands. Quantum reality is replacing Newtonian physics as ‘common sense.’

What Came Before and What’s Coming Now

After this process has continued for a while, Digital People will no longer interact with images of (i.e., ‘worship’) gods-in-Print or follow print-text religious founders, such as Martin Luther or Joseph Smith. Digital People will interact with digital images of gods-in-Pixels and with whatever animatrons, bots, simulants, or replicants represent religious founders or leaders in a world in which all information is dynamic and distributed, gathered and integrated on the fly. Digital ‘beings’ will emerge from chaotic waters just as textual beings such as Luther emerged in the historical memory of a textual people. (I intentionally use the word “god” with a small “g” to mean the hundreds of images of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other “gods” to which we still refer anachronistically as “God.” The gods we can name never mean the God we cannot name.)

Luther and Joseph Smith are not the only ones to exist in the labyrinthine verbal structure of historical memory. Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, Buddha, Confucius, and Lao Tzu are also ‘textual beings’ who were translated from flesh-and-blood historical beings into mythical beings, first through stories, then through writing. Every major religious founder emerged in historical time when writing was redefining the field of subjectivity of humanity. The names of the gods worshiped for thousands of years in oral cultures either vanished or were translated into writing, just as written manuscripts were translated into printed text to remain viable.

Handwritten texts might exist in museums as objects of aesthetic or historical interest, but they no longer gather adherents around them. The words on those beautiful archaic pages no longer turn to flame.
All gods being worshiped today, such as all the founders of today’s major religions, emerged in history as ‘textual beings,’ known in and through text.

They ‘mean’ for us the way text means. Inevitably, transfigured, digitized images of those former gods, as well as new, exclusively digital gods, will be born. For the moment, however, we do not know their names. Or if we do, we do not yet know the significance of their names. None has yet emerged as a frontrunner in the twenty-first century religious marketplace.

The study of ‘sacred texts,’ then, will evolve into interaction with digital images aggregated in flexible groupings (hypertext rather than text) according to (1) the design of the enabling technology itself and (2) the design of the symbol-manipulating minds that engage with the technology. The exact contours of those interactions are difficult for us to define, given our predominant experience with, for example, Bible study groups in which individuals hold cheap portable books in their hands that are defined by the boundaries of their covers and that are read aloud together or silently to oneself. Such groups would have been as unthinkable to denizens of oral cultures or writing cultures in which literacy was closely held by priests and aristocrats as dynamic Internet culture was only a few years ago.

Hackers as Paradigms of Digital Humanity

My work with several generations of technophiles (what we used to call “hackers” before the word was hijacked by the media and used to mean criminal hackers only) has revealed how a generation now in their thirties engaged in a reflexive dialogue with the computer technology that created them as they created it. But the next hacker generation, now in its teens, has always known a digital world, and has always lived inside a network of distributed information and processes. The electronic games they play are more ‘real’ than the games they replaced. Their online gaming communities are more ‘real’ than town-hall meetings. Their digital selves are more real than the print-text selves they displaced. For example, a father and his young son often visited an online dinosaur museum that was physically located only a few miles from their home.

One day they were disappointed after visiting the actual museum. As they left, the son told his father he had enjoyed the visit, but “I like the real one better.”

In the study of sacred text, which is the ‘real one’?

The one that emerged when we developed the capacity to live inside the domain of speech and convinced ourselves that it was reality itself? The one that emerged when writing became ubiquitous, an event that Plato believed meant the end of civilization? Or the one that emerged during the Renaissance and Reformation, after movable type was invented?

Those periods define nested levels of identity and self, and the self is once again transcending itself and spawning new ways of being human. As digital symbols, icons, and glyphs replace printed images, everything—including our deepest experience of religious truth, our modalities of spirituality, and our religious community life—is being transformed.

Naturally the meaning of processes like “redemption” and “salvation” will be transformed, too. We see that the gods we worshiped were conceived in the image of written symbols. We see that when the introduction of the printing press translated the names of those gods into print, Christianity, for example, experienced the widespread division of its several gods (Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, etc.) into hundreds of gods, each at the center of a community that defined itself by subtle distinctions from neighboring communities.

These differences did not and could not exist before the medium of print enabled them to be created or discovered.

Deliverables

Identity, a coherent self, images of ongoing transformation of self or community (spirituality) and world (historical/mythic narrative), and processes and tools for transformation are some of the ‘deliverables’ of religions. They are delivered in and through communities defined by their sacred symbols. These deliverables are not delivered once and for all, however. Those religions that claim to do so are whistling in the dark. New identities are difficult to sustain, or else the community would not need to meet so frequently to reinforce them. Transformation is a hoop that hands must keep rolling.

The study of ‘sacred text’ is the willing participation in the process by which identity, self, and templates for future possibilities are created and discovered for individuals and communities. Words like “free individual with rights” and “intellectual property” designate concepts that emerged post-print. Something of those notions will likely persist in the digital era, but who we are and, more importantly, who we think we are, will never be the same. A collective sense of religious identity, like that which is axiomatic to the Hebrew Scriptures, will likely be reborn, but this time through symbols that will be moving targets.

Reflecting on the study of sacred text in a digital era is like entering the mirror-world of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, in which the dreamer dreamed of a dreamer dreaming the dream. Which one dreamed it? Which was the dreamed? The symbol-using brain that believed itself to be an “I”? Or the symbols of that “I” in the brain? Or the symbols in the larger brain of the hive mind? Deliverables presume an identity determined by boundaries around giver and receiver. But how do we play chess when the board itself is disappearing?

Interactive, Modular, and Fluid

In contrast to the field of subjectivity that we shared in the past, the digital world is more highly interactive, modular, and fluid. Because our lives are shaped and changed by the technologies with which we interact—context creating content or perhaps context becoming content—our lives and how we think of ourselves are also becoming highly interactive, modular, and fluid.

Let us not underestimate the extent of the changes we are facing. The advent of a digital era will turn currently established religions on their collective ears. It has happened before, and it will again. The critical question is, will the collective identities of those religions persist in a recognizable form that includes and transcends the forms that came before, or will there be such a disconnect that when we look into the digital mirror, the face we see does not even resemble who or what we used to see?

That question confronts individuals as well as religions, societies, and civilizations. Our longer life spans are segmented into a greater number of identifiable developmental phases. The word “adolescence” did not exist prior to the invention of the printing press; adolescence has come to mean the postponement of adulthood into another decade while individuals are socialized as literate adults. As recently as Daniel J. Levinson’s 1978 book, The Season’s of a Man’s Lives (which identified developmental stages of American males into their fifties), the author could only sketch vaguely the stages beyond the sixties, which he called “old age.”

As longevity is extended, we will have to learn how to integrate a dozen stages of adult life in a modular fashion, using a memory storage device that augments our biological memory in a way that does not violate the sense of a unified, persistent self that integrates all the stages— if, that is, we decide that the continuity and persistence of a seemingly single self is still valuable. Some biological models picture complex organisms like ourselves as colonies or hives. Perhaps that model will be deemed more appropriate when people live two hundred years or more and the pieces of memory that persist are mix-and-match, plug-and-play modules.

That our lives have already become modular in every department testifies to the impact of multiple technologies. Only a few decades ago, people had a single stable religious identity, a single career, a single marriage. Today we change careers, religions, marriages, and even identities, by design and intention, and we try to teach our children skills that will help them manage modular lives rather than pick a single course and stick with it.

It is not uncommon when one changes one of these modules—a religion, a career, a spouse—that one also changes communities and ‘starts over.’ That way we can create the new persona appropriate to our new self-construct without interference from people who cling to memories of our other stages.

We dock, as it were, at different space stations, according to our needs, often ones with different sets of values. That is why so many religions are so highly competitive, offering constructions of reality and templates of sanctioned behavior (both secular and religious) in a fiercely contested marketplace. In this context, the study of sacred text means the use of sacred texts to reinforce the subset of religious life that each institution is offering its members. In the future digital world, these religious contexts may well evolve in simulated form first, like complex models of spacecraft or weather systems, and we will try on digital religions for size and see how our personas during particular life stages fit them. (Today we call that “shopping for a church.”) If we feel ‘at home’ and the religion fits our current stage of life, we call it ‘true.’

One way of studying scripture is to choose stories which archetypally illuminate a critical passage or transitional episode in the lives of the faithful. The passages of scripture typically chosen by a lectionary in liturgical churches are images of healing, deliverance, and transformation. The preacher ‘reads the space’ of the congregation in light of his or her deeper intuitive knowledge of the body and illuminates possibilities using those passages much like a Tarot deck reader uses archetypal images to illuminate an insight into the life of the person for whom they are doing a reading.

The lectionary does the shuffling, and the word-pictures of deliverance, healing, and transformation provide the images.

Extrapolating on the distributed interactivity enabled by the Internet, sermons will likely be more interactive and fluid. Because the online conversation continues 24/7 and can deliver insight, consolation, or encouragement when it is most needed, the choice of when to offer access to sacred space will be customer driven, just as Roman Catholics now have the option of attending a Saturday service. The socioeconomic context has always determined the fit of sacred time and space with societal time and space. The choice of a one-day-in-seven kind of Sabbath was equally determined by the technologies of the time and the nature of work and community life.

The fragmentation and relativism of ‘truth’ itself in a distributed postmodern world, the difficulty in reaching consensus, and the toleration of multiple thought-worlds will stretch the capacity of religious structures to tolerate ambiguity and complexity.

That it means to be redeemed or saved will be transformed in both the from- and to- sides of the equation. The human condition of sinfulness will be understood differently, as will transfigured or redeemed humanity, individually and collectively.

Doctrine always follows facts the way ethics follows the power to act that is liberated by new technologies (e.g., in sexuality and child-bearing).

This will test all religions, but Christianity will be the hardest hit. Christianity claims to be exclusively true, and however that claim is nuanced to take into account the sensitivities of others in a pluralistic world, it still comes down to this: Either Jesus is the ONLY way, truth, and life, or Jesus is ONE way, ONE dimension of a larger Truth, and ONE path to life—one that works well enough for Christians but is still one path among many. The pressures of the digital world will continue to transform formerly exclusive paths into preferences. Those who need to be right and define being right by others being wrong will be flummoxed.

This means that the transformational energies of this period will turn into a real fire storm when they encounter formerly inviolable core proclamations. If Christianity is to embrace and be transformed by those energies, it will necessarily become something other than what it has been or at least what it has been thought to be. (We always save ourselves by saying that Truth is eternal and that we were merely mistaken about what it was). Either Jesus of Nazareth will take his place as an image of possibility among other viable images, or he will be the King of the universe without peers.

The history of Judaism is instructive for Christians pondering options. Jews today are either Jews by identity, behavior, or both. Some Jews believe themselves to be Jews and live their lives from core Jewish identities but are not observant. Still, their destiny is to live life as a Jew, because identity is destiny. But when identity itself is in question and is no longer correlated with observable behaviors, the primary mode of social control is absent from the community. When claimed identities and explicit behaviors that proclaim identities are intentional choices, how will we know who or what we are?

American Jews today feel a threat of annihilation not so much from marching jackboots as from radical assimilation. That threat faces Christians and others as well, but many are not aware of it yet. They live inside the Kafkaesque world of “The Great Wall of China,” a narrative that describes how the word has gone out from the emperor to the entire kingdom, but has not been heard by those who live on the edges. That word today is that the God fashioned in the image of the structures of prior minds, cultures, and civilization is, as Nietzsche said, dead. Of course, Nietzsche was not talking about the Creator of everything when he claimed that “God is dead.” As a linguist, he knew that to speak of “God” was to be a prisoner of linguistic structures. He meant the social construction of God, the glass house in which Christendom lived while it threw stones.

It is difficult to remember that the God of our sacred texts is not the glass but the stones. In order to be transformed, one must move through a zone of annihilation in which everything one believes oneself to be is called into question. This is as true for individuals losing the fact of individuality to an electronic collective as it is for societal structures and nation states, the boundaries of which are dissolving into a single global political and economic system.

To talk about the study of sacred text, then, raises important questions. What is the nature of humanity in the digital era? How will the symbols constitutive of human and cultural identity be different in the digital era? Who will we think we are?

Identity

In the first Christian communities, first Jews and then Gentiles brought their current identities to the scriptures and to the Christian community to be transformed. But all we can know at the outset of the journey of transformation is a possibility, glimpsed dimly from inside our current way of thinking and perceiving. From within the old paradigm, we can never predict the new paradigm. The genuinely new is predictable only after it has appeared.

The six seasons of the Christian year are six segments of a spiral of ongoing transformation, derived from the extended Christian narrative and transformed into time-calibrated rituals. The segments also define the transformational journeys of non-Christian spiritualities, but in those other contexts they are correlated with other stories, other symbols. In all cases, however, the rituals are mnemonic devices used by the community as portable bridges, easily carried and always at hand when we need them. Then we are tutored by the community in how to turn those memories into useful spiritual tools. The calendar of the Christian year is derived from a sacred text, then translated into other media based on drama and ritual. That process will happen too in the digital world.

Our identities derive from a complex interplay of genetic and cultural factors. We can only become what we can potentially become by virtue of our genetic heritage, which offers up possibilities of selfhood and identity to be framed in cultural forms.

Genetic engineering is an opportunity to self-direct human evolution so that the genetic determination is itself turned into a cultural decision.

One interesting discovery of genetic research is that qualities we thought to be subjective, such as the capacity to feel awe and wonder, a tendency toward mysticism, or a generosity of spirit, all seem to cluster around certain genes. Not to oversimplify, but it is likely that the genetic and chemical basis of religious experience and emotions such as awe and wonder will be identified and pre-set or manufactured. Then we will have to answer difficult questions about how many mystics we really want to have in the population.

Given the fact that in our society so many people use chemicals to adjust levels of well-being, anxiety, and depression, this trend of genetic engineering will advance a few more steps. We may be able to determine who and how many people we will want to interact with sacred symbols at all. We may want to retain a select group of sociopaths to fill occupational niches like Army Rangers, intelligence agents, or corporate lawyers. We may also want to make available religious experience in a modular fashion, letting someone “jack in” to the symbols and use processes or chemicals to enhance their capacity to have a meaningful experience and alter their subjective states.

Of course, that’s pretty much what we do now, isn’t it? Religious experience in an organizational context is designed as a mood-altering experience, often using primordial rituals, music, and drama to enhance our feeling of having a meaningful experience and to bind us to one another and the institution. The difference in how that process is conducted in the digital world will be one of degree, not kind.

Historical Antecedents

In the 1470s William Caxton introduced the printing press to England. Questions of identity were immediately raised. One needed to choose a dialect in which to print, which then imprinted that dialect’s way of thinking on a people who, Caxton realized, were no longer certain who they were.

Walter Ong identified one religious consequence of the printing press: the process of self-examination prior to confession during which the self examines itself in scrupulous detail, then says what it sees to another person, did not widely exist prior to the printing press. All technologies of information and communication, Ong said, initially distance the self from itself and from others. The printing press helped the English language explode from thousands to more than a million words, just as the colors on an artist’s palette increase exponentially the artist’s ability to express subtleties that did not previously exist. The newly created self feels isolated for a time as the technology creates appropriate ways for that self to connect once again with itself and other selves.

No one thought the telephone was a device for personal communication when it was invented. The telephone reproduced a simulation of the human voice so imperfectly and unnaturally that people did not want to use it except as a form of telegraph. A few generations later, we say, “Don’t send an email—call me. I want to talk to a real person.”

Once the technology and the simulations it delivers have been so internalized that we experience the simulation as a ‘real person,’ we become like fish in water, unaware of the water in which we are always swimming. New technologies are noticeable only by contrast with the world to which we have grown accustomed. Then the technology itself becomes the means for bridging the greater distance and creating genuine communion among those more subtle, more complex selves that subsequently emerge.

One cannot fly a stealth fighter with a propeller or run Windows 98 on an IBM XT. We also cannot put new wine into old wineskins, only no one knows what that means anymore. We do know what it means to use an obsolete operating system, though. When spiritual leaders insist on clinging to old metaphors that are no longer understood, they are binding the people to themselves by mystification, the keys of kingdom safely tucked into their privileged pockets. However, when we use current metaphors, drawn from the everyday language of the people (as Jesus himself once did with the wineskins metaphor), we subvert the monopoly power of an organizational framework that has become synonymous with archaic images and behaviors. As digital technologies transform Print People into new kinds of human beings, sacred text will become sacred digital interaction and the study of the scriptures will become a distributed process, blurring the distinction between humans and their wearable and implanted information machines. The dreamer and the dream will exist in a new relationship to one another. Genetic engineering and pharmaceutical advances will help us breed those new beings.

Cyborg Time

The dilemma of whether or not a single unifying self can persist over an increasing number of segments of life is a problem that will be solved by humans who will be enhanced by augmented memory and cognition and new kinds of sensory extensions. And we cannot discuss the impact of technologies of communication and information without at least mentioning the impact of genetic engineering on identity, self, and community. Like the replicants in the movie Bladerunner, whose manufacture blurred the distinction between manufacturing and breeding, we will see increased ambivalence toward memory-based identity. Our expertise in genetic engineering will enable us to be fitted with wearables and implants that make communication instantaneous, multi-level, and unconscious. The boundaries between us will at times be nearly invisible. Just as replicants were given manufactured memories borrowed from others’ lives, the real memories of individuals will be indistinguishable from false ones.

Of course, memory is creative, not a passive recording of what passes, and our biographies are personal mythic histories, how we want our lives to have been rather than how they were. Biography, like history, is a symbolic narrative designed to sustain the chosen identity of the present. Religions too are based on mythic memories and symbolic narratives.

The Christian world has split into those who can stand knowing that the memory of the Christ-event is a symbolic event and those who insist that the scriptures are a historical record. The latter viewpoint supports a rigid structure which admits neither dialogue nor flexibility. Whichever viewpoint comes to dominate the Christian future, the nature of the memory at the heart of Christian proclamation will be revised, because, as Bladerunner reminds us, memory is malleable and therefore never wholly trustworthy.

Cyborgs are blends of humans and machines. We are already cyborgs in rudimentary ways, with our pacemakers, implants of chemical catalysts for essential biological processes, transdermal patches, synthetic hips and hands and hearts, contact lenses, vision scopes that bypass the eyes of the blind and plug directly into the brain, and neural avionics that socket the optic nerve with fiber optic cables so that fighter pilots can fire weapons merely by thinking. Indeed, it’s already cyborg time, and as we engineer ourselves to accept more readily transplants and artificial devices, we will become more and more cyborg. Our cyborg selves will exist embedded in ubiquitous wireless real time networks, with chips in everything—furniture and appliances, automobiles and airplanes, houses and offices—and above all, chips in us. We do not merely use computers; we are becoming computers, nodes in a ubiquitous network.

Try making a large purchase for cash and see what happens. Only your digital self with its digital markers for identity and authentication can trade in the digital marketplace. ‘Real’ currency in the digital economy is digital. In the same way, only the digital self that uses the right metaphors for, say, inclusion in or exclusion from a redemptive religious network will have constant and immediate access to the energizing, mood-altering scenarios of renewal and transformation made available by the network.

Online passwords to the communities that mediate religious experience will resemble “recommends” by Mormon bishops permitting adherents to enter a temple. This is analogous to the delivery systems of medicines, drugs, and chemicals used to enhance emotional well-being and cognitive ability available through the network. The network, in other words, will be self-referential and will maintain equilibrium, not only of individual bodies, but of the network itself, of which we will be but a part. We will interact with sacred digital scenarios as online gamers today participate in communities of tens of thousands in real time. Those scenarios will be an important part of the self-regulating mechanisms of the entire network, i.e., the trans-planetary society into which we are evolving.

Religious rituals have always used dramatic techniques. Once they become virtual simulations, using scent, sound, images, and tactile feedback to integrate distributed individuals into a unified experience, we can ‘run’ those rituals whenever we need them. Those who control the technology will be high priests. ‘Services’ will be available anytime online, and because we will participate in them through complex and sophisticated avatars or online personas, which may well evolve independent and intelligent behaviors of their own, our ‘spiritual companions’ will always be available. We will ‘call them’ whenever we want to experience ‘real people’ and they will always show up.

The technology world calls them “early adopters,” those people out on the edge who make first use of new applications. Nietzsche called “original thinkers” those who see new realities just moments before others do and give them names. The nose of the snake gets to the mouse first, but the whole snake eats the mouse. If we are part of human society, participation in this digital transformation into cyborg humanity is unavoidable.

We will still have simulated experiences of prior times, of course, the equivalent of reading historical novels today or visiting a recreated nineteenth-century village, but we will know that the actors are in costume and that we, too, are actors in costume. But then, what else are Christmas oratorios, Purim pageants, or liturgical dramas, but historical simulations?

Religious claims to universal truth will both intensify and diminish. They will diminish as we are recontextualized in a situation that continuously reminds us that the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. But they will intensify because those with their hands on the levers of power in organized religion often use anxiety and fear as glue for communities. Those communities use rigid rules to maintain order. The more rigid the structures, the more obvious the pathology for both individuals and organizations.

Every age picks and chooses the “books of the Bible” or the scenarios that speak most powerfully to it. The potency of the stories is a function of their relevance to our current context. The Gospels were written, redacted, and juxtaposed with each other (which changed their meaning by placing them in new contexts) by communities articulating comprehensive visions. Which stories will lend themselves to digital interaction and which will diminish?

More Questions than Answers

The history of the study of sacred text is also a history of control over the interpretation of the text, the maintenance of boundaries as a safeguard of power. That control requires a stable environment, so that the decisions of the elders will matter and so that social and psychological escape hatches are not available to individuals who choose to contradict traditional teachings. Otherwise shunning has no effect. That control is lost in distributed networks.

Who can enforce rulings when alternative communities are readily available, and anyone can invent another by going online, sowing seeds, and pruning what grows, while plowing under what withers? What kinds of consensus will establish canonical texts, or will there be any consensus, just as today we draw our own conclusions about sacred texts? The person in the street does not care what a hierarchy says if it cannot enforce its decisions with physical coercion. In the absence of an invisible fence, the dogs run wild.

Digital Mystics

The imaginative reader may by now have begun to ponder the meaning of mysticism in the climate I am describing. The distributed network is a concrete manifestation of the unity of all things, the connectedness perceived in the past as a transcendent vision seen by those whose genetics inclined them to dream dreams and see visions.

Mystics do not see a different reality, but they see the wiring inside the wireless circuits. Mystics see structures of information and energy as it flows, a self-luminous tangle that can only be described using metaphors and symbols. Paradox is the language of the unconscious, which is why, like riddles or jokes, either we get what mystics say or we do not. Either mystical insights make all the difference in the world, enabling us to recontextualize everything, or they sound like snake oil.

Digital mystics are everywhere these days, searching for the words to give voice to their experience. Those who live life as nodes in a network cannot help but notice that they are enmeshed in a complex system of energy and information. The computer network becomes an image of the larger network, the planetary civilization, and even the galaxy, all the way out to the edges of the universe. We see that everything is part of one vast system of energy and information. Information is the form of energy. Information and energy, which look like two things, are aspects of a single thing, the way light is both particle and wave. The words “Let there be light!” give form to the potential of energy or perhaps make energy intelligible.

The digital world is a projection that lets us see ourselves seeing ourselves. For example, the other day I made a speech during which I moved in front of a huge video screen on the platform. The audience watched the ‘real’ me through the camera as I pointed to an image of myself pointing to an image of myself pointing to an image of myself, ad infinitum. “That,” I said, “is the digital world.” When I moved to the front of the platform, the audience divided—half looking at my digital image to the right, half to the left. This division changed my job description from a speaker engaging with an audience to a wizard creating a digital image with which the audience could engage. In fact, I am doing much the same thing now, whether you read these words in digital-made print or in pixels.

Now, these sentiments clearly tend more toward the tenor of the Gospel of John than to the hard truth of crucifixion at the end of the Gospel of Mark. The balance between the two ends of the spectrum will be as important to preserve in the digital world as it was when narratives were interlaced in leaves of printed text. But the aesthetics of the online experience will not be the aesthetics that have characterized our experience of reading. We do not yet have a vocabulary to speak about the aesthetic experience of online interaction. The narratives that report online mystical experience (e.g., the sudden socketing of minds through telepathic portals as they feel each other through the wires, answered prayers or healings, or synchronous flows of words of deeply felt feelings) are scattered now in diverse Web servers and email archives. They are not yet filtered through a digitally informed imagination into the momentary stasis of a ‘sacred text,’ nor are they collected into edifying cycles of music, words, and images for a digital generation.

The Twilight Zone

Let’s add to this rudimentary sketch the fact of trans-planetary culture and the inevitable encounter with multiple civilizations. It is not a question of whether ‘they’ come here or ‘we’ go there. Once the interface of our species with others becomes more conscious, we will see that there is no here or there to come from or go to. The distinction between ‘alien’ and ‘earthling’ will blur as the distinction between, say, Albanian and Greek, has blurred, and for similar reasons. Identity is a function of boundaries, and when boundaries dissolve, a new identity emerges that includes and transcends the identity that is then seen to have been the politically and economically determined structure of a prior time. When we first encounter other societies or civilizations, our initial shock at the differences of others pushes us into a self-transcendent space and forces us to realize that consciousness in its many forms is just one thing, one dimension of space and time in a universe that is becoming self-conscious. On the other side of the annihilation of an earth-bound identity, we will locate ourselves in a more complex matrix of universal self-awareness.

Throughout world history, the encounter of one people with another has often resulted in the assimilation of the technologically inferior society into the technologically superior one, but that has been in part because of the massive physical presence the superior civilization has been able to muster. A scout ship or an expedition, like Lewis and Clark’s, can absorb another civilization only if a massive presence follows. But contact can nevertheless radically impact the way the impacted society sees itself in the universal scheme of things, including how it uses selected sacred texts.

Hawaiian society, for example, began to dissolve the minute the explorers came off the ships. Their sacred stories were discovered to be interlaced with the entire fabric of their society, and when that began to unravel, the sacred stories dimmed and lost their numinous glow.

During times of radical transition, such as encounters between different civilizations, we tend to favor apocalyptic texts that provide symbols and images that can mediate our anxieties and that can make sense on a cosmic scale out of what we previously believed to be nonsensical. Only open-ended symbols (like the cross) that insist that the dissolution of our structures of meaning is itself a meaningful event can help us through the darkness of seeming meaninglessness that attends the end of our illusions. As we voyage to distant planets and come to terms with our status in the universe as toddlers coming down the steps of their house for the first time, rather than as Alpha Primates at the top of the food chain, images of the end-time will help earth civilizations keep their sanity and balance. Sooner or later things will stabilize again at a different level of equilibrium. We will then become aware of ourselves (or OurSelf) as an extended network or system of self-conscious nodes in a more conscious matrix, self-invented in ways we can only dimly glimpse now. How will we recontextualize images of a swarthy, uncompromising, street-smart rabbi, who several thousand years earlier lent his life to the creative memory of an emergent civilization, and who was fixed in archetypal images of self-transcendence just when that civilization could frame those memories in written words? Will we still value Bronze Age images of humanity as existentially relevant to our quest?

The Future is Behind Us

Any discussion of the future is speculative, of course, particularly since the future is a choice of one of several possibilities that we have constructed from the way information flows and organizes itself in distributed systems. Science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling, acknowledged in a private conversation that his own horizon for the future has come down to five years, more or less, as science fiction as a genre has shifted from technological speculation about the distant future to near-term issues of identity and self. The right-brain dreaming of a left-brain society dreams less of the physical landscapes of the fortieth century and more of sociological, even epistemological, contours of current interior landscapes.

Still, some likely scenarios do emerge, based on this cursory discussion of genetic engineering, the realization that we are becoming a trans-planetary civilization, and the emergence of a ubiquitous, embedded network with augmented cognition, memory, and senses. Cyborg humankind, in this imaginary scenario, is indistinguishable from its augmentations and machinery, except to the degree that the seeing self retains a feeling of autonomy and self-will, still feeling itself to be a self. That capacity will be an intentional choice, as we take the reins of evolution into our own hands. We may choose to retain the illusion of freedom because it serves our species so well. The field of human subjectivity that animates the human species will experience itself as selecting and directing its own evolution, even if the laboratory evidence indicates that this also is an illusion, a necessary fiction embedded in genetic code.

Cyborg humanity will be indistinguishable from its inventions and replicants. The power of projection will be used to glue feelings of respect, even affection, onto our own creations, much as we value dogs as companions and breed them for that purpose. The distinctions between property and persons will blur. Parts of humans, including memory modules and chemically catalyzed and activated behaviors, will be interchangeable, as well as our ‘artificial’ parts, a distinction that will also blur until it disappears. Not only will we grow hearts, lungs, and kidneys in laboratories and in other animals, we will grow memory banks and neural functions using processes that will come to us first through war, entertainment and child’s play, and sexual fantasy.

This field of subjectivity will be a network of extended self-consciousness, aware of itself as a collective with a collective memory and multiple modes of nodal operation. Long-term memory storage devices will augment innate memories. and, once we master the creation of memory clusters to cushion the impact of longevity, what we call “repression” or “forgetting” will be a conscious decision, the way societies remember or choose to forget historical experiences now. Disciplines that have already converged (such as public relations, advertising, and marketing; intelligence, counter-intelligence, and disinformation; mass media and entertainment) will cycle down from the top level (images, symbols, and media) to the level of perception. Percepts as well as concepts will be manufactured and delivered in support of a previously chosen consensus. That is, not only how we think about what we see but what we think we see in the first place will be designed. The quest for truth and justice in a designed world will itself be a simulation of the quest for truth and justice.

We will choose which memory modules are valuable as distractions (an extended romantic narrative can neutralize people as effectively as professional sports) or as useful tools (if a 150-year-old man were alive today, what memories from the Civil War or the spread of the railroads would be of survival value?). We will answer these questions as we answer all questions, through trial and error, which will of course raise ethical questions as to what to do with our mistakes.

The nodes in the network will be discrete human beings who have lost much of the notion of being an ‘individual’ and will look upon our time (when they visit virtual memory museums) as an era of lonely isolation in which the illusion of individuality enabled some successes but at the high cost of the security, community, and stability that, as in Brave New World, they will value more highly. Because the interchangeability of parts and processes as one ages through a century or two of modular life will erode the sense of the “I” that Christians believe is saved or redeemed, planetary consciousness might skew toward Buddhism, which is a good default choice during times of radical transition. Why?

Because Buddhism purports to describe “what is so” without reference to teleology or ultimate purposes, i.e., to what Christians call “God.” So Buddhism provides a convenient receptacle for dealing with prolonged transitioning by relating what are obviously the passing scenes of a moving narrative to a non-self that survives the extinction of the illusory self. When it becomes obvious that the contents of mentation are illusory, it helps that one of those concepts is the notion that all is illusion, including the self that thinks about such things.

Perhaps that metaphorical framework will further recontextualize Christianity in Buddhist terms. Perhaps the ancient Jewish and Christian belief in reincarnation, always a best-seller, will turn Buddhist/Christians toward the scriptural assertions (“Some say Elijah . . . ”) that reinforce such a contextual shift.

The boundaries around what twentieth-century humans call “the Canon” will continue to dissolve, accelerating a process already begun by print publishing over the last several hundred years. The rapid evolution of interactive scenarios with spiritual content will push more power to decide toward the nodes. People will pick and choose which paths to follow and will use archetypal symbols that correlate best with the needs of the moment. But then, this is merely extrapolating the present into the future, isn’t it?

The ‘study of sacred text’ will look like a collective consciousness choosing to distribute aspects of itself around archetypal symbols, themselves in flux, that resonate in terms of then-contemporary experience. We will step into or out of the virtual immersive experience at will or what will seem like “at will.” We will accept being conditioned to choose those moments of renewal and experience them as we have bred and manufactured ourselves to experience them, much as Brave New World suggests. Deltas will be glad they are Deltas.

Alphas will be glad they are Alphas.

A Digital Parable

All great truth, said George Bernard Shaw, begins as blasphemy. And here are my words in a different poetic form, a parable that searches for that great truth.

Islands in the Clickstream

A sacred canopy of shared belief used to soar above our heads like a large umbrella, keeping us warm and dry as the contradictory data of real life beat down.

A canopy doesn’t have to be sacred—any canopy will do—but because our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it is such an important part of our stance toward life, a canopy always has a sacred component. What we believe determines how we act.

No model of reality contains everything. Life is larger than our models of it. All we need is an umbrella that is ‘good enough’ to manage the odd drops by keeping them irrelevant. As long as our model of reality makes enough sense of the world to let us act, we hold to our beliefs.

But there is an awful lot of rain these days, forty days of rain, more than forty days, and it keeps on raining.
Our trans-planetary network of computers is a rain-making machine that—finally!—works. There is no snake oil this time, no flim-flam man. It’s really coming down out there. More and more data just doesn’t fit. Our umbrella has more than a few holes in it, and the water is trickling through.

At first we act as if we don’t notice. The real experience of our lives contradicts what we say about life. When we hear ourselves speak, we sometimes sound like someone else, someone we used to be or someone we’re overhearing. If we refuse to believe our experience and believe our beliefs instead, we get a headache, a very, very bad headache. We crawl into bed or pop a Prozac, but we keep getting wetter and wetter.

Alas! we’re all too human—stubborn, blind as umbrellas, frightened out of our shivering skins—so we still insist that we’re not wet. We hold the handle of the umbrella more and more tightly, telling ourselves and everyone else how dry we are and what an excellent umbrella we have found. Others politely suppress giggles and move on.

It’s so easy to see holes in someone else’s umbrella.
Finally the umbrella is so battered that we can no longer deny what everyone else has seen for a long time, that we’re holding nothing but shreds of wet black cloth on a skeletal metal frame and we’re soaked to the skin.

We all want to stay dry, but one legacy of living in the twentieth century is that no canopy spans us all. We join organizations to experience the momentary consolation of agreement, but we can’t live there.

Life today is like living in a village of grass huts in which everyone has a radio tuned to a different station. However high we turn the volume, we can’t shut out the other songs.

I recently spoke about “The Stock Market, UFOs, and Religious Experience” to an investment conference. The speech distinguished between things we think we see out there and things we really see. It was about the psychology of projection and the psychology of investment.

I noted that in the United States and, increasingly, in the world, an attitude of respect for other religious traditions creates a good deal of tension. We both have to believe in our own belief system and acknowledge that others are entitled to contrary views. Entertaining mutually exclusive truths simultaneously in our minds is difficult. We’re not even always sure which is the umbrella and which is the rain.

We will try to surrender our freedom to those selling cheap umbrellas, but we cannot avoid our destiny: we are each responsible for inventing ourselves, for creating our own lives. There is no high ground on which to hide.

Our calling is made more difficult by the digital world. The digital world consists of simulations, models so compelling that we mistake them for reality. Sometimes the digital symbols refer only to other symbols, what Baudrillard called simulacra, simulations of simulations, copies with no originals. All those simulations are umbrellas, and all those simulations are rain.

Nietzsche saw it coming at the end of the last century. It’s what he meant when he said “God is dead.” He wasn’t talking about the creator of the universe, but about the gods in our heads, the cultural artifacts that we invent. He saw that our sacred canopy had shredded and the rains were pouring down.

Prophets are people who get wet and start sneezing before everybody else. We try to quarantine them, but reality is a cold it is impossible not to catch.

As did speech, writing, and printed text, electronic media are transforming what it means to be human and what kinds of gods we are likely to worship.

Gods,” that was, not God. God is always God, and God is with us, out here in the rain, getting wet.

In the digital world, Nietzsche’s questions are more urgent than ever. Never mind that he asked them long ago. Civilizations take lots of bullets and walk dead for a long time before they fall.

Some treat the digital world as if it is an umbrella, as if simulations can be more than an umbrella, as if they can be stitched together into an ark. And who can blame them? Who does not want to be warm and dry? But the words “warm and dry” will not keep us warm and dry, nor will digital simulations of 3-D umbrellas dancing and singing on the screen. The digital world is water, a rising tide, a tsunami impacting our consciousness with revolutionary force, leveling our villages, sweeping away our shrines and altars, sweeping everything out to sea.
What games, asked Nietzsche, what festivals shall we now invent? Indeed, my friends. And what games shall we simulate? What games shall we play? What games shall we dare to believe? (Thieme)

Works Cited

Levinson, Daniel J.
1979 The Seasons of a Man’s Life. New York: Ballentine Books.

Minsky, Marvin.
1985 The Society of Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Ong, Walter J.
1982 Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen.

Thieme, Richard.
1997 Islands in the Clickstream. [electronic newsletter] November 14, 1997
copyright American Bible Society 1999-2004. All rights reserved.

This essay is included in ”New Paradigms for Bible Study: The Bible in the Third Millenium,” Robert M. Fowler, Edith Blumhofer, and Fernando F. Segovia, Editors. T&T Clark International, New York: 2004.

by Richard Thieme

October 6, 2008

A young man experienced an altered state and emailed to ask about its relationship to orthodox modes of spirituality and religious experience. I thought it might be of value to others who are asking the same question to share my response.

I replied:

I have used all sorts of modalities in my life to discover and ideally integrate various unconscious dimensions of my “Self.” What religions designate as “spiritual tools or techniques” have generally persisted for so many centuries because they work. The tools are woven into the narrative of each religion but the narratives are cultural media that validate them and enable them to be remembered from generation to generation. In short, religious systems, whatever else they may be, are mnemonic devices fused with interpretations of life that provide meaning or the illusion of meaning (choose one), community, and stabilizing fins in rough winds or training wheels for a tyke learning to ride a two-wheeler – pick your metaphor.

The community part is not extraneous. As I note below, wiser companions are well advised. We do this alone, but we cannot do it alone. We need to do it alone, together.

What you described is one attempt to enter a meditative or altered state, to take the train to the alpha wave central station. It sounds as if it sometimes works. The trick with dissociative states (like what I do when the dentist drills without Novocain but I feel little discomfort) is to be able to return to the center of your own psyche. Otherwise, it’s time for a therapist to get to work.

Over the years of my life, I have experienced – prayer, meditation in deeper and deeper states, guided meditations in group contexts (sometimes human potential movements and sometimes Buddhist and Christian communities), automatic writing, mediums, spiritualist trances, self-hypnosis, paranormal games (telepathy, clairvoyance, psychometry), even Ouija boards, in short, many orthodox and non-standard methodologies, and oh yes, the occasional “trip” on a hallucinogen (a recent study suggests that psilocybin delivers a religious experience which is subsequently designated by users as one of the most meaningful religious experience they ever had.. Before taking that trip, however, I suggest a major consult with the erowid web site.)

I don’t recommend fringe activities like automatic writing or Ouija boards. What seem to be discarnate spirits or, these days, space brothers in UFOs, are aspects of self that flick off like floaters in our eyes and lead to dissociated states with no controls. Sometimes the doors back home are blocked by falling debris. That can be frightening and dangerous. In addition, channeling of all kinds generally results in bogus testimonies and simplistic spiritualities, seldom specific but often sharing similar vague descriptions of another plane, another life, or another psychic domain. In Christian terms, the routes they suggest are generally around the cross, i.e. reality. In the spiritual domain, there are detours but no short cuts, and there are definitely no free lunches.

All religious traditions state that these practices must be guided by someone more experienced and for good reason – we are playing with powerful and dangerous fire here and like dynamite it can be used to build or to destroy. “Spiritual guides” – real flesh-and-blood people, I mean, not discarnate entities : – ) - or directors are needed for more than the shallowest waters – and that introduces the additional task of finding a good one. It’s like finding a good financial adviser – track record, maturity, word of mouth, due diligence all apply. Caveat emptor characterizes this marketplace too. Don’t just use the yellow pages. And remember, if you meet the Buddha on the road, shoot him.

The rewards of this journey include hierarchical restructuring of the psyche in ways that include and transcend prior states and deliver spiritual power, and the ability to live with self-mastery, dignity, and resiliency regardless of circumstances. That hard-wired experience is generally contextualized by religious narratives in a particular way – Buddhists experience “a nightmare in daylight,” Christians are “born again,” etc. – but the pluralism of interpretations relativizes them all and suggests an innate predisposition to transformation or conversion that is prior to any story.

The downsides include the trip being interrupted, which secular analysts unfortunately diagnose as mental illness instead of a detour, and of course, grandiosity and inflation of the ego. Think of Alice in Wonderland eating the wafer and growing real big. That’s ego inflation. Then think of Alice eating another and getting real small. That’s humility.

Humility is better.

In the end, one discovers that these practices all lead to diminishing self importance, a manageable and appropriately sized ego, and more surpassing joy in living life than one dares to dream.

It sounds to me like it’s worth it.

By Richard Thieme

National Catholic Reporter, February 11, 2005

I am a middle-age man who grew to maturity in a world of text, immersed in a typographic sea. I read endlessly and began writing stories as a teen.

When I tried to find a market for those stories, I turned to a standard reference, Writer’s Market, to locate magazines. Now, that sounds like an obvious thing to do, but it’s not. That book, the Writer’s Market, was itself a textual artifact that clearly defined my horizons of possibility. I internalized the information in it — markets in North America, markets to which I could send stories typed on paper by mail — as the limits of my vision.

Flash forward to the early ’90s, when I wrote an article for Wired Magazine about the impact of the Internet. They printed 500 words and gave back 4,500. I sat in front of my word processor, hooked up to a telephone modem, wondering where I could send an article using those extra words.

Then the light bulb went on. Duh. I could use the Internet to find markets for my article about the Internet.

I surfed the nascent Web and located magazines in South Africa, England and Australia. I offered articles by e-mail and within a week had contracts and had become a writer with a global presence.

Now, this is the point: That light bulb would never have gone on, I would never have discovered possibilities that shattered my old vision and disclosed those new horizons, had I not engaged with the technology and allowed it to disclose those possibilities. The technology itself over time restructured my beliefs.

That sounds obvious now, 10 years later, but then it was revolutionary. The breakthrough came when I realized that I was using the new technology like the old technology, as if a word processor were a typewriter, as if new wine could be squeezed into old wineskins. After I had engaged with the medium for a time, the information implicit in the transaction itself broke through to my conscious mind and I had an epiphany.

That’s what technologies are doing, too, to our notions of spirituality, our religious and spiritual practices and the organizational structures of our religions.

When we find ourselves blessed or cursed to live in a period of a genuine transformation — not just a time of accelerated change, but a time of elemental restructuring — it is hard to speak about the implications of that restructuring for our most cherished religious traditions, symbols and beliefs because they feel like skin on the bone and changes in them feel like a threat to our very being rather than an evolutionary necessity.

But transformations will happen, and afterward, when the skin is gone but the bone stays, when our essential selves and spiritual commitments stay, only then will we see that God is still God and cannot be equated to the image of God or idea about God to which we became so inordinately attached.

In this brief exploration of the impact of information and communication technologies on religious life, I hope to distinguish skin and bone.

The impact of these transforming technologies on our identities cannot be overstated. In turn, our identities — who we think we are when we don’t even think about it — determine what we believe we are capable of being and doing. Identity is destiny, and our technologies, by defining those identities, frame the parameters of our lives, disclose our horizons.

How does this happen? The way Ernest Hemingway said we go bankrupt — gradually, then suddenly. We never see what’s obvious until it is unavoidable. When Clyde Tombaugh discovered the planet Pluto and told the world where to find it, astronomers searched through old photographic plates to look for the coordinates of Pluto’s orbit. Sure enough, there the planet was and there it always had been, right in front of their eyes. But no one saw it because they didn’t know where to look.

The foundations of our religious traditions are undergoing a profound transformation, but we are still using word processors as if they are typewriters.

New era in communication

This is the fourth great era of the Technology of the Word, as theologian Jesuit Fr. Walter Ong calls it. The first was the era of speech and the co-evolution of tongue, larynx, pharynx and brain, which enabled us to create that first “virtual space,” something like the one we are inhabiting as I write and you read these words. The creation of linguistic symbols, and the creation of a meaningful universe from those symbols, in which we then live as if it is real, made us humans.

Speaking humans lived in oral cultures for thousands of years, populating a vast unknown prehistory that existed before writing. When writing emerged, everything from oral cultures either disappeared or found itself translated into written form.

We know that religious images, artifacts and rituals were part of oral cultures, but we only know those images and words that were translated into written symbols. That may sound obvious, but the implications are important. It is not coincidental that the persons associated with the world’s major religions as we currently define them — Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Abraham, Moses, Muhammad and all the others — emerged into human consciousness through the written word, which transformed our ancestors, and the internalized images of self and God formed as they engaged with written text. In every instance, a flesh-and-blood human being was transformed through writing into a “textual being,” a being with whom or which we engage in and through the text. Theology implicitly became hermeneutics, the study of how texts mean, because interaction with written texts forms an image distinctive to the technology that created the text.

It is also no coincidence that world religions like our “majors” ceased to emerge once the era of writing passed, except as subsets of prior religions.

When the printing press with movable type was invented, another revolution took place. The unique historical person Martin Luther may have been essential to the Reformation, but the being we call “Luther” is a print-text being mediated by type, just as Jesus is a textual being mediated initially by writing. But print text and the changes to which it contributed, including the Renaissance, generated a different sense of self and, once again, different notions of God. The fractal-like replication of Catholicism in the image of Protestantism was a prototype for how hundreds of additional denominations or religions would be generated, an inevitable consequence of the power printed text gave to people to recreate themselves. The Reformation is literally unimaginable prior to the emergence of the printing press, and those who used it to print the Bible, like Gutenberg himself, had no idea what a revolution had begun. Gutenberg would have been horrified to know what he had spawned. When he first printed the Bible, however, only 2 percent of Europe’s population could read, so it would have been impossible to forecast religious practices based on people reading silently to themselves and learning thereby a method of personal interpretation that was as alien to the prior culture as the notion of an individual with rights, intellectual property or all of the other emergent properties of the Renaissance that are now being challenged by electronic communication.

In the same way that “individuals” with “individual rights” were an emergent property of technological change, “a personal relationship with God” became possible only after an “individual” could think of himself/herself and God as distinct beings, neither mediated by a community. Paradoxically, biblical literalism emerged relatively recently and the “original text” to which it claims to be loyal is one interpretation among many that developed centuries after the fact.

William Caxton brought the printing press to the British Isles in the 1470s. When he looked back in his 60s on several decades of profound change, he wrote that he could barely recognize the landscape of his youth, so radically had it been altered. But he was not speaking only of moors and downs, he was speaking of the interior landscape and the transformation of identity through which he had lived.

On a fundamental level, the choice of a dialect with which to print helped determine an “English” identity rather than identities based on smaller populations, each speaking a distinct language that they did not see as a dialect. They experienced themselves as a single people with regional dialects only when a supra-identity defined by a nation-state had emerged.

In the same way, according to Marshall McLuhan, Catholics and Protestants would never have seen themselves as a single tradition before television created ecumenism, just as the word “Judeo-Christian” did not exist before the second half of the 20th century.

Beyond the nation-state

A nation-state, like a global religious organization, is defined by a boundary drawn around a more complex unit that organizes political, economic and social life at a higher level of abstraction. Nation-states emerged after the Renaissance in part as a consequence of the print-text revolution because society demanded organizational structures appropriate to a higher level of complexity. The speed of the flow of information is a primary determinant of the organizational level of a society or civilization. The transformational engine of electronic communication is now challenging national boundaries, but we do not yet have names for the fluid, modular way of life with rapidly morphing identities that is replacing a prior way of being.

Think of time-lapse photography on fast-forward and think of nation-states, religions, everything changing in relationship to the technologies that generate and sustain them. The England of the preceding paragraphs is now part of “Europe,” passports are no longer examined at borders that are more than porous, and most of Europe uses the Euro instead of a national currency.

The fourth iteration of the Technology of the Word, electronic communication in all forms, began with the telegraph, the first time human communication moved faster than people (or their animals and artifacts) could move. It continued with radio, television, wired and wireless transmission and now the Internet, the most recent iteration and the one most in the forefront of our awareness.

Langdon Winner, a professor of political science in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, studies the political and social implications of technological change. This is what Winner said about the impact of technology on people and society:

To invent a new technology requires that society also invent the kinds of people who will use it; older practices, relationships and ways of defining people’s identities fall by the wayside and new practices, relationships and identities take root. In case after case, the move to computerize and digitize means many preexisting cultural forms have suddenly gone liquid, losing their former shape as they are retailored for computerized expression.

When we translate his insights into implications for religious organizations and images of identity, human self and God, we see that this radical restructuring must profoundly impact who we think we are, how we imagine God and how we define our experience of ultimate meaning. “Reading the Bible” does not port or translate to an experience of immersion in an iconic flow of information in a virtual environment. The latter experience is generating dimensions of the human soul that did not previously exist, and when we try to say what we see, what we experience ourselves to be, we will need to invent a new vocabulary.

Pioneers of the spirit, as Nietzsche noted, are those who see first what is coming over the horizon and give it a name that the rest of us then use as if they created what in fact they merely discovered. It was impossible to predict precisely how the encounter of Greek and Hebrew worlds would create Christianity because it was unthinkable inside both of the prior paradigms.

In a more mundane way, when the U.S. government wanted to encourage people to fly on airplanes then subsidized by the government for delivering mail, it needed to change the word “aeronaut,” which designated the bold, courageous pioneers who were willing to fly. They needed a word into which everyone could project his or her identity and came up with “passenger,” a word we now use unselfconsciously to refer to an activity we take for granted. In the same way, astronauts going into space will be replaced by space tourists and travelers, and Christians, Jews, Buddhists and all the others will find new names for the new spiritual modalities and religious structures we are generating in networks and electronic webs.

The digital era

Let’s call them DPs (digital people, as opposed to print-text people). DPs will interact less and less frequently with images of print-text gods (that is, worship) and more and more often with images of gods-in-pixels in a world in which information is dynamic and distributed, gathered, integrated and recreated on the fly. As digital symbols, icons and glyphs replace printed images, the meaning of processes like “redemption” and “salvation,” now locked into nouns that imply a static state, will be transformed, too. Process theology will inevitably gain momentum because it will describe a cosmic structure congruent with our daily experience of this ceaseless flow. We recreate ourselves in and through the forms and structures of our technologies; the digital world is interactive, modular and fluid, so inevitably our lives and how we think of ourselves are becoming interactive, modular and fluid, too.

Think of the common spiritual practice of “journaling,” for example. Journaling began when people like James Boswell participated in the discovery and creation of a different kind of sensibility and self by using pen and paper to bring it into being. Today, bloggers engage in a web of self-discovery that older generations dismiss as shallow, but the collective self they are co-creating is in fact appropriate to the technology. When William Harvey described the circulation of blood, it is a historical fact that no physician over 40 ever accepted his theory. In religious life, too, new revelations are accepted one funeral at a time, but along a much longer timeline. Generations must pass away before the new sun can rise and shine.

In more mundane aspects of our lives, however, this impact cannot be avoided. Aspects of our lives that used to be unthinkably accepted as fixed by tradition, for example, have become modules in a self-generated persona or trajectory for which we are increasingly required to accept responsibility. Teaching children to learn how to learn is more important than teaching children stuff. Teaching children how to assemble themselves in an ongoing way is more important than teaching them how to live in a fixed and rigid way in a context that refuses to remain stable and thereby undermines that very fixity.

We used to be born into a religion, for example, and now we change religions and “shop for churches.” We used to stay married, but more and more people divorce and remarry. We used to choose a vocation and stay with it, but now we expect to have several careers in a lifetime. In every dimension of our lives, that which we took for granted as divinely ordained was in fact determined by an unvarying context for our lives, and it is that very context that our technologies undermine and transform. Then new contents inevitably flow into the new contours generated by a new context.

Changing face of Christianity

So the question is not will new technologies, and specifically digital ones, turn religious, political and economic structures on their collective ears, but will our identities persist in a recognizable form that includes and transcends the forms that came before? Or will there be such a disconnect that when we look into the digital mirror, the face we see does not resemble the one we used to see?

Just as many Jews and Christians look differently on their shared symbols and traditions, with Jews emphasizing the differences that make them distinct and Christians emphasizing the shared heritage that links them, new religious organizations and institutions will include and transcend our current structures according to those inside them but will constitute an unacceptably radical shift for those in the older structures.

I once identified the MOOs and MUSHes emerging in primitive cyberspace (multiplayer online games originally created in text) as the brackish tidewaters where new spiritual life was likely to emerge. Their descendents, multi-player online gaming communities like Everquest with hundreds of thousands of participants, have fulfilled my predictions. Spirituality and religious quests permeate those gaming environments and usually draw on various Neo-Pagan spiritualities that seem to be prevalent in hacker communities — yes, hackers often have a deep interest in spirituality, but it is usually expressed through nontraditional religions such as Wicca. Games include spells, rites, rituals, incantations and numerous religious classes of avatars like monks, spiritual warriors and warlocks. Asian disciplines, too, are mined for the spiritual implications of martial arts. Although Catholic traditions would work equally well, the flavor of exotic martial arts and the dissemination of its forms through movies (when was the last time you saw Christian warriors portrayed positively in a movie?) appeals more to young people than an Ignatian retreat or Benedictine discipline.

The implications of this article are not trivial. We are moving together, like it or not, through a zone of annihilation that challenges all of the ways we hold ourselves as human beings and possibilities for action in the world. The transformational energies of our time will become a firestorm when core proclamations about our beliefs begin to smoke and burn.

If Christianity is to embrace and be transformed by those energies, it will necessarily become something other than what it has been or at least what it has been thought to be. Perhaps claims to exclusivity and universality will survive the fire, but perhaps not. Perhaps those claims will both intensify and diminish, intensify because some can’t help but cling to the past and diminish because we are all nevertheless being re-contextualized in a way that will remind us unceasingly that the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. We can make this passage with sanity only if we know and have confidence that God is God and will defend Godself and cannot perish, while everything in this life, including our ideas about God, is transitory and passing.

By Richard Thieme

William Gibson’s Neuromancer is known to many because of one word, “cyberspace,” a fulcrum of a word around which a whole new world has coalesced. Equally memorable, though, is an image of the cyberjunkie Case jacking into the Dixie Flatline for the first time.

The Flatline, a.k.a. McCoy Pauley, is a firmware construct, a set of instructions arranged in a memory bank, giving the dead man’s memories sequence and form. The construct simulates a gestalt, Pauley’s personality and knowledge, molded into a shape something like the potato-shaped universe described by Einstein — finite but unbounded. The horizons of the Flatline’s world are fixed, but inside that world, the friendly ghost seems as limitless as a live human being. The Dixie Flatline is a persona fixed in a silicon chip in a way that lets Case interact with his wisdom.

I imagine Case in his loft at twilight, slotting a ROM chip into a socket in his skull for a direct feed from his dead hero.

That image fuels my expectations when I jack in to the World Wide Web. Alas, my dreams are too big for the current Web to address.

New technologies take a long time to teach us how to use them. When the telephone was invented, it was thought a way to call ahead to the next town to say a telegram was coming. The motion picture camera was used to film stage plays. As we used those technologies, entering into a symbiotic relationship with them, they taught us how to extend our senses.

Now we’re trying to extend our minds and brains throughout the Net. Extensions of our brains, nodes by the millions in a web of glowing filaments, the Net is a mirror of our hive brain. Participating in it takes us to another level of corporate consciousness. So the Net ought to feed back to us reflexive knowledge about the trip itself. We ought to encounter our hive brain in a way that lets us recognize ourselves, included in something bigger that is at the same time reduced to symbols that enable us to see our new selves.

Ought to. Right. But what in fact do we find when we explore the mind/brain in cyberspace?

There’s a lot of snake oil out there, more ore than gold. Caveat emptor. Let the netsurfer beware. If you meet the Dixie Flatline at a web site, slip him a virus. It isn’t the real McCoy.

Patience is a requisite when you enter cyberspace hoping to interact with constructs promising to blow your mind, train your brain, or simply enhance your health.

It’s a shame, really: if ever there’s a natural fit, it’s cyberspace and our hunger for growing our minds and training our brains. Our minds expand naturally into the shimmering non-space of the Net. The glowing screen seduces us into a night that never ends. I stay up way too late, following luminous breadcrumbs through the forest, but often I’m disappointed.

Maybe I’m jaded. My eyes have been trained by fractals, after all, cycling through millions of colors, kaleidoscopes of unimaginable complexity. I want the same rush, the same insight into the nature of things, when I click from site to site searching for wisdom.

Books are fine; books are good; but when I’m on the Web, I don’t want books. I want interaction. I don’t want to keep hitting home pages selling herbs and dubious kinds of healing, hawking new age postures and potions for body and soul. But nine times out of ten, that’s what I get.

H. L. Mencken said no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence (or was it the taste?) of the American public. For America, read “world.” When they’re selling symbolic constructs – promises of better health, wisdom, or transformation – it’s easy to sell the menu as if it’s the meal.

Typical of sites offering guidance in meditation is FISU, the Foundation for International Spiritual Unfoldment (http://www.cityscape.co.uk/users/ea80/fisu.htm). Typical too is their blend of true and even obvious statements about the benefits of meditation (“most meditators agree there is an overall improvement in health”) with claims that can’t possibly be true unless the site’s webmasters are literally gods. Like Transcendental Meditation and its “customized” mantras, FISU markets a generic product masquerading as a set of techniques tailored to each individual’s “unique vibrations.”

Generic information can be packaged as unique and life- changing because it is keyed in to “arcane secrets of the Masters.” The claims would be more believable if the interactive potential of the Net was used for a demonstration. Instead, most of these sites are electronic billboards selling products.

Cognitech Corporation

(http://www.interstar.com/health/cognitech.html) offers Brainware, a technology that promises greater mind/body control, reduction in stress, increased energy, better concentration, improved business performance, enhanced memory and learning, etc. — all this from something that sits on your head like a squid, its lights flickering and blinking. (They do warn off epileptics — the device might trigger a seizure). The squid costs a mere US$340 plus postage.

There’s a broad pattern to these virtual presentations:

It begins with information or real research into what helps people feel better or take more responsibility for their own well-being. Often the decision to take responsibility and do something – anything – mobilizes our resources and gives us energy and hope. So far so good.

Some of this information is linked to the ancient wisdom of hallowed traditions. Yoga sites abound, offering journals, archives, and pathways to classes, workshops, and products (tapes, books, “meditation pillows”). Spirit-WWW offers links to all sorts of alternative paths, such as theosophy, lightwork, extraterrestrials, channelings. Their Yoga Paths page (http://www.94.20.164.5/spirit/yoga/overview.html) takes you to the teachings of myriads of gurus.

Who has the right to teach the techniques and philosophy of Vedic Yoga? Hard to say. Credentials are not easy to come by at these sites. Instead we are clued in by a new exotic name that our teacher, once an ordinary bloke, is now an enlightened master. The home page of Robert Green was renamed when his Guru Swami Shyam named him Amarnaath (http://www.hookup.net/~greenr/). He offers selected words of wisdom and a catalog of products.

If the ancient wisdom is truly ancient, there will be a living breathing connection between masters and disciples, long lines of adepts who hand on their teaching and practice. Genuine teachers will gladly provide mundane details like bios, credentials, and references. It pays to check them out.

Other “traditional” movements play the “exotic” card. The more primitive and esoteric the tradition, the more potent it promises to be. Check out the Tribe of Love (http://www.turnpike.net/metro/tribo/) whose goal is nothing less than “an international cultural revolution … a humanistic transformation by giving access to a higher quality of being/consciousness.” Their promo piece invokes rites of transformation, Reichian psychotherapeutic techniques, modern management techniques like reengineering, and shamanism to provide access to Tropical Bioenergetics, in turn based on the even more esoteric BioTantra.

Does it work? Evaluating these cosmic claims is like putting together an investment portfolio or raising children. By the time you have the data you need, it’s too late to change what you’re doing. So keep an open mind. Suspend both belief and disbelief. Doubt everything. In the long run, the truth will out.

Information is easier to provide than creative interaction. The information may be sound, but it’s often converted into a model of the universe or cosmololgy. Then something that is in fact helpful is subtly turned into an invitation to make a commitment to a belief system or cultic community. In carnival terms, the WWW site tries to “turn the tip,” i.e. turn the crowd attracted by the free show — fire-eating or sword-swallowing — into paying customers inside the tent.

WWW-Spirit, for example, offers links to the World of Dolphins. Alien Cultures. and Healing Ways. At “Dolphins,” Birgit Klein shares her experience channeling messages from dolphins. Telepathic connections open up to spiritual experiences which in turn are opportunities to heal not only the individual but the entire planet. The same is true if you follow the link to Lightworks and read accounts of starseeds and walk-ins (varieties of extraterrestrials disguised as earthlings, here for cosmic purposes). Telepathic communication begins with practical advice, leads to a spiritual connection, and ultimately discloses a new belief system. Visitors are invited to revise their version of reality accordingly.

What’s going on here? Channelings from discarnate entities, visitors from the Pleiades, and whales and dolphins all teach the same or similar content. It’s always “sandbox stuff:” be nice to each other, preserve the environment, don’t hit.

In domains that traffic in symbolic constructs, such as healing, meditation, and spirituality, anybody can say anything they please and no-one can contradict them. In fact, whether the mediating structures are angels, dead ancestors, dolphins, discarnate beings, or extraterrestrials, something beneficial often happens. The mediating structures, it seems, simply have to be “good enough” to get helpful truths and tools to people who need them. The efficacy of the practice is not contingent on the absolute truth of the belief system with which it is fused.

In short: take what you need and leave the rest.

Most sites provide lists of benefits. Buy this book, watch this video, wear this squid, and all these good things will happen.

The Real Life Shark Cartilage Information Exchange proclaims the value of shark cartilage in treating everything from cancer and AIDS to psoriasis (http://www.electriciti.com/~reallife/).

After the benefits come testimonials – quotes from individuals whose lives have been changed. The standard “conversion formula” — this is how it was, this is what happened, this is how it is now — is followed.

A final click of the mouse will take you to an ordering form. Have your credit card ready.

Used judiciously, resources on the Net can help you sort all this out. The Meditation Information Network (http://minet.org/newsgroup/) has plenty of critical reflection on programs associated with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The articles on Deepak Chopra alone are worth the price of connect-time. They reveal the mixed motives behind the promises of healers who in fact are businessmen making a great deal of money. In Hawaii it was said of the missionaries who came in 1820, “They came to do good and they did well.”

The wisdom of the ages is consistent with what you already know. There’s little new under the sun. The Self-Help and Psychology Magazine (http://www.well.com/user/selfhelp/) has a page of twelve suggestions for taking care of yourself. They’re simple, they’re basic, and they make sense (“learn to say no,” “change jobs if you’re miserable at work,” and “avoid comparing yourself with others.”)

So if practical wisdom is plain common-sense, and a mystic is just someone who found out what’s so, why go into cyberspace at all?

Because wisdom is always mediated through communities. Good health is a function of connecting with others in positive ways and taking responsibility for one’s own life. Isolation is ubiquitous today. The Net is often criticized for increasing isolation, but it’s a bad rap. Every transformation of the technology of the Word, from writing to the printing press, increases our distance from one another but simultaneously makes available the means for connecting at deeper levels. The Net separates us and also mediates new opportunities for intimacy and community. Connecting with each other and hearing what others say is in itself healing and therapeutic. Then it’s up to us to act.

Good health doesn’t come from knowing what to do. It comes from doing what works. But remember, as you pursue the truth that sets you free: if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

The Episcopalians? They are us
Assessing the ordination of Gene Robinson and responses to it

By RICHARD THIEME

Just as California is often said to be the leading edge of American popular culture so that what shows up there will soon show up in Pittsburgh, the Episcopal church often serves as a bellwether for Catholic and Protestant churches as to what to expect in coming years.

Not surprisingly, the issues being discussed today are sexual. Above all, they are homosexual, thanks to the consecration of a gay man who lives openly with his lover as the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire and the recent decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court that the states ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional

Carl Jung said that when we talk about religion we are really talking about sexuality and when we talk about sexuality we are really talking about religion. Jung was speaking, of course, in the context of Western notions of identity, sexuality and autonomy, a context most Americans share so unthinkingly that we dont pause to consider that an Asian or African bishop who expresses distress over homosexuality in the church may be standing on an entirely different platform. Cultural differences do make the conversation about sexuality more complex, but from the perspective of Western culture alone, there are issues enough to stimulate reflection on why, when the Rev. V. Gene Robinson was consecrated a bishop of the Anglican communion, distress flares went up all over the communion, even though those flares did not all signal the same sources of distress.

First, lets consider the broader question of sexuality in the church.

Whenever we discuss human sexuality in an ecclesiastical context, issues are distorted as surely as our images are warped by the curves of a funhouse mirror. Sexuality is always charged with emotion, but the passionate intensity caused by linking sexuality to what we believe are Gods sexual preferences seems to release a particularly nasty kind of ranting and judgmentalism.

As Jung said, the lines between sexuality and spirituality are murky. Our religious rituals are suffused with the language of sexuality. We speak of love, we speak of being close and caring, we speak of being touched; we speak of surrender, losing ourselves in God and one another, and we speak of being one body, one flesh, one extended if imprecisely defined and often dysfunctional family.

The language of mystical ecstasy is the language of the lover. It speaks of union beyond simple intimacy, of being penetrated with joy and abandon. Who has not noticed, during a charismatic prayer service, the beatific smiles on the faces of our brothers and sisters, rapt in adoration, their hands raised in what can only be described as delicious sensual rapture? With the Anglican poet and pastor John Donne, we beseech our God to batter our hearts because we will never be chaste unless we have been ravished, never whole until we have been consumed.

The pervasiveness of sexuality in religious experience helps us understand the widespread terror of sex found frequently in the church. The inability to discuss sexuality clearly, simply or directly is caused by that force field of distortion and self-deception. We may begin the discussion in a civil tone, but sooner or later we find our voices rising and our feet socketed in muck. The waters muddy and the going gets slow.

The demands of honesty

Stating the simple truths of our lives, often an easier task in non-ecclesiastical contexts, is considered heroic when done in the context of the church. Normal people saying normal things about their normal lives are turned into saints or devils because their honesty is so anomalous.

So when an Episcopal priest who lives openly with his gay partner in a committed relationship is consecrated a bishop in the Anglican communion, it is to be expected that the event will be treated as a major crisis. Men who are only being themselves and disclosing who they have always been are described as the worst kinds of subversives, undermining the Gospel and the sanctity of the church.

When I was preparing for the Episcopal priesthood, I noticed that one of the intentions of a long period of training was to socialize us to accept the fact that when we performed liturgical functions we would be the only men in the church wearing what looked like dresses. That socialization process stands as a metaphor for how sexuality is cloaked and hidden inside the black cassocks, neutralizing our bodies in generously draping folds.

Who knows how many gay men and lesbian women hide inside those cassocks? Who knows what others really do in the privacy of their lives? I can only say that when I was in seminary it looked as if about one-quarter of the students preparing for the Episcopal priesthood then were gay. Sixteen years in the ordained ministry suggested that this was a reasonable estimate. It is from those clergy that bishops are chosen, so naturally there are plenty of gay bishops. Many of them share this fact in confidential conversations but are reluctant to broadcast it to the world because they have been taught that the real sin lies not in the being or the doing, but in the saying what is so.

A church coming out of the closet

The first bishop under whom I served, Otis Charles, was a married man with five children who after several decades of marriage announced that he was a gay man who had lived a lie. Then dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., he divorced and moved to San Francisco where he continues to exercise a number of compassionate ministries.

The real issue is that the church is coming out of the closet,he said. Thats the fact. Both the clergy and the episcopate have large numbers of gay men and lesbians. And the worst part is, in the U.K. and the U.S.A. there was a high degree of tolerance as long as you did not speak. The most severe criticism I received in general [when I came out] was, Why do you need to talk about it? Be what you want, just dont make us acknowledge it.

Charles believes that sanctioning such dishonesty impairs the health and well-being of all in the church.

We have excluded a large area of sexuality by not talking about it and this has a huge negative impact not only on individuals but also on the community, on the church. How can a bishop be in relationship with members of that community if theres a whole area of their lives that cannot be discussed?

I once served an urban parish the members of which spoke in glowing terms of two previous rectors with long tenures. They described them as celibate menwho lived chastely with companions.The congregations commitment to denial was bone-deep and baffling when it was obvious to me that these men were living with gay lovers.

You need to understand that there is a yuck factor,said a parish priest about the reactions of some church members to Robinsons consecration. As long as they dont have to think about what it means, they can live with the abstraction. They often agree that the consecration merely ratified what everybody has long known to be true, but when they visualize what it means to have gay sex, many straight men and women blanch.

Perhaps they feel similarly about the blessing of same-sex unions (which is practiced in several dioceses but not sanctioned by the church as a whole). In that discussion too we hear the same theological and scriptural rationales for positions on all sides of the conversation, but those stated positions frequently obscure the fact that people are not talking about religion so much as sex and how they really feel about homosexual sex.

Anyone who followed the path of women to ordination as priests and bishops in the Episcopal church can write the script as to who is saying what on which sides of the question and what they are saying. When a sexual controversy erupts, it is like calling central casting and asked them to send over the usual suspects. So I will merely invoke rather than describe their predictable positions. You, dear reader, can fill in the blanks.

The consecration raises thorny legal issues for the Episcopal church that are just beginning to be discussed. Some American dioceses are threatening to withdraw from the Episcopal church over this issue and some want to establish alternative structures of authority based on theological similarities rather than tradition, hierarchy or geography. This constitutes a novel challenge for the church. When womens ordination posed a similar threat to political unity a few decades ago, some parishes left the church but had to leave behind the parishs buildings and belongings because they were owned by the diocese. This time, the threat of whole dioceses to withdraw raises the question of whether parishes wishing to remain faithful to the larger body would have to surrender their property to the conservatives and head for the nearest high school auditorium to worship. This question is currently being studied by canon lawyers, and no one knows how it will be resolved.

But this, as I said, is from the Western point of view. When we listen to some of the Asian or African bishops who are distressed, we find they are not concerned primarily with the issues as touched upon above because in their cultures, identity, community and human sexuality are framed so differently.

The prism of culture

Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, speaking for and on behalf of the working committee for the Primates of the Global South,tells us they were all appalledthat the Episcopal Church USA (ECUSA)ignored the heartfelt plea of the communion not to proceed with the scheduled consecrationof Robinson and the clear and strong warning of its detrimental consequences on the unity of the communion.He continues, We can no longer claim to be in the same communion. We cannot go to them and they cannot come to us. We will not share Communion. We have come to the end of the road.

That might sound like a homophobic American voice, but Akinola and his African colleagues do not see it that way. To them, the consecration clearly demonstrates that authorities within ECUSA consider their cultural-based agenda of far greater importance than obedience to the Word of God, the integrity of the one mission of God … and the spiritual welfare and unity of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Persons who claim to speak from a position that transcends cultural-based agendasare usually signaling their own cultural-based agendas. A similar stance was taken by Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi of the Anglican Church of Kenya who announced that his church will have nothing to do with Robinson or any of the 53 bishops who participated in his consecration. He declared that they are no longer Anglicans and that we cannot be in the same communion with Robinson, his diocese and the bishops who were in the consecration,adding that the devil has entered the church and God cannot be mocked.

What cultural contexts might help us understand these pronouncements?

Willis Jenkins, currently a fellow of the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life at the University of Virginia and a doctoral student in environmental ethics and religious studies, lived in 1998 in rural Uganda, where he taught in a seminary for the Anglican Church of Uganda. Because he lived in a village where homosexuality was becoming an increasingly familiar issue, he observed both the popular and the Episcopal reaction to it.

I was taken aback by the intransigence of the discordbetween progressive and conservative elements of the church, Jenkins said. He became frustrated with what seemed to him to be the rhetoric of ethnocentrism. Much of the tension,he concluded, is rooted in cultural values,and the debate does not so much need theological or hermeneutical attention as it does recognition of mutual ethnocentrism.

Both Ugandan and American bishops are guilty of ethnocentrism, Jenkins believes, and both, perceiving their own cultural categories to be universal, create the ground of fear on which they stand.

Jenkins distinguishes numerous reasons for this dynamic, including a long history of imperial dominance in Africa. Rural bishops resist the perceived allegiance of the urban dioceses to Western influences and sources of funding. But equally critical are fundamental issues of identity.

The core value of the villages of southern Uganda is social participation, which creates a community cohesion needed for agricultural subsistence. Each person has a prescribed role and the sign of adulthood is the ability to provide children. Identity is thus determined by family position, and social role is determined by identity. Neither identity nor social role is fluid. So the encroachment of Western notions of individual identity and sexual promiscuity of any kind are subversive of the very fabric of society and an affront to the theological underpinnings with which they are fused.

It was impossible for the people with whom Jenkins lived to conceive of a homosexual as an individual whose sexual expression is a function of his or her core identity. Such categories were literally unthinkable. Heterosexuals for the same reason simply do not exist.

Jenkins speaks from a point of view determined by his experience in a southern Ugandan village. But to speak of African bishops or an African perspective on sexual issues is to falsify through homogenization a complex continent characterized by many diverse cultures. Charles recalled a Nigerian student at the Episcopal Divinity School who was asked to speak to his cohorts about Africa. The student said he would try, but that he had never been outside Nigeria until he came to Boston.

Charles speaks of these cultural issues in a very personal way. An English friend lived with a same-sex partner who was Ghanaian. When the pair lived in Ghana, they were part of a larger extended family and there was little discord. But the relationship became difficult when they moved to England, in part because the Ghanaian could not handle being identified as a gay man.

He was, of course, Charles said, but only in terms of our cultural categories. He functioned as he had always functioned, but he was perceived differently. The fact of naming was very difficult.

The norms of the church

A Gospel position that includes but genuinely transcends cultural differences is the Holy Grail of this conversation about sex. Shared core Gospel values might be used to contextualize the debate in a less confrontational way. But the search reveals that it is not only global cultures that blind adherents to the real sources of their emotions and theologies but the culture of the global church as well.

Not one clergy I have spoken to has any sense of why we are offending the southern hemisphere,reports an Anglican priest who has served the Episcopal and Roman Catholic churches as a resource on sexual matters. They just talk about disturbing the unity.

Back home in America, regardless of the emotional or psychological roots of some of the arguments against ordination of homosexuals, the issues are always framed theologically.

Its scripture and tradition,states another Episcopal priest. The arguments are predictable and come from those who consider themselves the defenders of the orthodox faith. Jesus came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it … Pauls lists of sinful behaviors …. its all about order and authority,he explained. Its incomprehensible to me. Isnt Jesus enough? I ask them. Isnt Jesus a sufficient center for the church?

They just look at me. The issues for them are doctrinal and have to do with the sanctity of marriage and the definition of order. It hearkens back to the Thirty-Nine Articles, which are foundational for the Anglican church. The articles say that the scriptures are sufficient for salvation and nothing ever needs to be added. Of course they mean scripture as interpreted by them. Any other interpretation, any notion of an evolving rather than static faith, is a departure from Gods will and the authority of the church. So other interpretations of scripture or tradition are condemned.

You can understand why, from their point of view. If other interpretations are allowed, then nothing is legitimate or authoritative and it all turns into chaos. Then where does the authority come from?

For most Anglicans, the unity of the communion is based on a shared interpretation of a tradition that allows for complexity and diversity without the necessity of resolving all issues in doctrinal terms. The Roman Catholic church insists on a doctrinal unity that is alien to the Anglican ethos. But in both institutions, the implicit cultural norms of the church itself, those unwritten but widely known rules that govern how an institution in fact acts and behaves, are at the core of the sexual conversation. Yet those norms are seldom discussed explicitly. Theologians such as John Spong, retired Episcopal bishop of Newark, who have long advocated a progressive approach to sexual matters or who deconstruct their own theological arguments are considered fringe elements.

Thats not surprising. The hierarchical structure of the church and the way clergy are promoted is very much like the military. A study of military promotion revealed that the inclination to change anything in the institution declines in direct proportion to ones rank, so those elevated to positions of authority are committed to preserve the institution and its norms. Damage control replaces a passion for justice. In that regard, the church is no different from any other institution hesitant to engage in meaningful self-critique, but the absolute nature of its claims make that lack of authenticity and courage more conspicuous and, some would say, more damning.

The current struggle over sexuality is a mirror into which all Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches might look. Perhaps the current troubles of the Anglican church can serve as a reflecting shield in which we can all look at the Medusa head of reality and say what we see without being turned to stone.

(published in the National Catholic Reporter)

So far the discussion has proceeded as if we all know what homosexuals are and why homosexuality causes distress for some in the church. We uncritically accept the categories of thinking given by our cultures and however much we want to believe that our theological statements transcend our cultures, they do not and can not. Cultural presuppositions are embedded in our language and there is an unceasing feedback loop between theology and the context in which it takes place..

So we must listen to other voices in other rooms of a global communion. They may be no less ethnocentric than we, but the clash – once the smokes clears – might indicate a pathway to greater clarity for all of us.

Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, speaking “for and on behalf of the working committee for the Primates of the Global South,” tells us they were all “appalled” that the Episcopal Church USA (ECUSA) “ignored the heartfelt plea of the Communion not to proceed with the scheduled consecration” [of Bishop Robinson]and the “clear and strong warning of its detrimental consequences on the unity of the Communion.” He continues, “We can no longer claim to be in the same Communion. We cannot go to them and they cannot come to us. We will not share communion. We have come to the end of the road.”

That might sound like a homophobic American voice but Akinola and his African colleagues do not see it that way. To them, the consecration “clearly demonstrates that authorities within ECUSA consider their cultural-based agenda of far greater importance than obedience to the Word of God, the integrity of the one mission of God … and the spiritual welfare and unity of the worldwide Anglican Communion.”

Persons who claims to speak from a position that transcends “cultural-based agendas” are usually signaling their own cultural-based agendas. A similar stance was taken by Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi of the Anglican Church of Kenya who announced that his church will have nothing to do with Bishop Robinson or any of the 53 bishops who participated in his consecration. He declared that they are no longer Anglicans and that “we cannot be in the same communion with Robinson, his diocese and the bishops who were in the consecration” adding that “the devil has entered the church and God cannot be mocked.”

What cultural contexts might help us understand these pronouncements?

Willis Jenkins, currently a Fellow of the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life at the University of Virginia and a doctoral student in environmental ethics and religious studies, lived in 1998 in the Diocese of Ankama, located in rural Uganda, where he taught in a seminary for the Anglican Church of Uganda. Because he lived in a Banyankama village during a time when homosexuality was becoming an increasingly familiar issue, he observed both the popular and the Episcopal reaction to it.

“I was taken aback by the intransigence of the discord [between progressive and conservative elements of the church],” Jenkins says,. He became frustrated with what seemed to him to be the rhetoric of ethnocentrism. “Much of the tension,” he concluded, “is rooted in cultural values,” and the debate does not so much need theological or hermeneutical attention as it does “recognition of mutual ethnocentrism.”

Both Ugandan and American bishops are guilty of ethnocentrism, Jenkins believes, and both, perceiving their own cultural categories to be universal, create the ground of fear on which they stand.

Jenkins distinguishes numerous reasons for this dynamic, including a long history of imperial dominance in Africa. Rural bishops resist the perceived allegiance of the urban dioceses to western influences and sources of funding. But equally critical are fundamental issues of identity.

The core value of the villages of Ankama is social participation which creates a community cohesion needed for agricultural subsistence. Each person has a prescribed role and the sign of adulthood is the ability to provide children. Identity is thus determined by family position, and social role is determined by identity. Neither identity nor social role is fluid. So the encroachment of western notions of individual identity and sexual promiscuity of any kind are subversive of the very fabric of society and an affront to the theological underpinnings with which they are fused.

It was impossible for the people with whom Jenkins lived to conceive of  “a homosexual” as an individual whose sexual expression is a function of his or her core identity. Such categories were literally unthinkable. “Heterosexuals” for the same reason simply do not exist.

Jenkins speaks from a point of view determined by his experience in a southern Ugandan village. But to speak of “African bishops” or an African perspective on sexual issues is to falsify through homogenization a complex continent characterized by many diverse cultures. Bishop Charles recalled a Nigerian student at the Episcopal Theological Seminary who was asked to speak to his cohorts about “Africa.” The student said he would try but that he had never been outside Nigeria until he came to Boston.

Charles speaks of these cultural issues in a very personal way. An English friend lived with a same-sex partner who was Ghanaian. When the pair lived in Ghana, they were part of a larger extended family and there was little discord. But the relationship became difficult when they moved to England, in part because the Ghanaian could not handle being identified as a “gay man.”

“He was, of course,” Charles said, “but only in terms of our cultural categories. He functioned as he had always functioned, but he was perceived differently. The fact of naming was very difficult.”

Charles also identifies political dimensions in the various African perspectives dating from 1979 when Western conservatives began trying to pass legislation preventing any gay or lesbian from being ordained. Thwarted at every ECUSA General Convention, they developed a strategy in 1998 to co-opt African, Asian, and Latin American bishops wherever they could and make them their allies and achieve internationally what they could not achieve nationally.

The supreme issue for Charles which he feels transcends ethnocentric aspects of the debate is that the opposition encourages acts of injustice and violence.

“Somewhere along the line,” he says, “someone has to say even to the African Bishops, it is fine for you to believe as you will and it’s fine for you to hold your cultural norms, but you cannot speak in a way that gives permission to others to act with violence and think they are doing the will of God.”

That “Gospel position” which includes but genuinely transcends cultural differences is the Holy Grail of this conversation about sex. Shared core gospel values might be used to contextualize the debate in a less confrontative way. But the search reveals that it is not only global cultures that blind adherents to the real sources of their emotions and theologies but the culture of the church as well.

“Not one clergy I have spoken to has any sense of why we are offending the southern hemisphere,” reports an Anglican priest who has served the Episcopal and Roman Catholic churches as a resource on sexual matters. “They just talk about disturbing the unity.”

Back home in America, regardless of the emotional or psychological roots of some of the arguments against ordination of homosexuals, the issues are always framed theologically.

“It’s Scripture and tradition,” states another Episcopal priest. “The arguments are predictable and come from those who consider themselves the defenders of the orthodox faith. Jesus came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it … Paul’s lists of sinful behaviors….

it’s all about order and authority,” he explained. “It’s incomprehensible to me. Isn’t Jesus enough? I ask them. Isn’t Jesus a sufficient center for the Church?

“They just look at me. The issues for them are doctrinal and have to do with the sanctity of marriage and the definition of order.  It hearkens back to the Thirty Nine Articles which are foundational for the Anglican church. The articles say that the scriptures are sufficient for salvation and nothing ever needs to be added. Of course they mean scripture as interpreted by them. Anything other interpretation, any notion of an evolving rather than static faith, is a departure from God’s will and the authority of the Church. So other interpretations of scripture or tradition are condemned.

“You can understand why, from their point of view. If other interpretations are allowed, then nothing is legitimate or authoritative and it all turns into chaos. Then where does the authority come from?”

For most Anglicans, the unity of the Communion is based on a shared interpretation of a tradition which allows for complexity and diversity without the necessity of resolving all issues in doctrinal terms. The Roman Catholic Church insists on a doctrinal unity which is alien to the Anglican ethos. But in both institutions, the implicit cultural norms of the church itself, those unwritten but widely known rules which govern how an institution in fact acts and behaves,  are at the core of the sexual conversation. Yet those norms are seldom discussed explicitly. Theologians like Bishop John Spong who have long advocated a progressive approach to sexual matters or who deconstruct their own theological arguments are considered fringe elements.

That’s not surprising. The hierarchical structure of the church and the way clergy are promoted is very much like the military. A study of military promotion revealed that the inclination to change anything in the institution declines in direct proportion to one’s rank so those elevated to positions of authority are committed to preserve the institution and its norms. Damage control replaces a passion for justice. In that regard, the Church is no different from any other institution hesitant to engage in meaningful self-critique, but the absolute nature of its claims make that lack of authenticity and courage more conspicuous and some would say more damning.

The current struggle over sexuality is a mirror into which all Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches might look. Perhaps the current troubles of the Anglican Church can serve as a reflecting shield in which we can all look at the Medusa head of reality and say what we see without being turned to stone.

(published in the National Catholic Reporter)

Just as California is often said to be the leading edge of American popular culture so that what shows up there will soon show up in Pittsburgh, the Episcopal Church often serves as a bellwether for Catholic and Protestant Churches as to what to expect in coming years.

Not surprisingly, the issues being discussed today are sexual. Above all, they are homosexual, thanks to the Consecration of a gay man who lives openly with his lover as the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire and the recent decision by the Masschusetts Supreme Court deciding that the states ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional.

Carl Jung is said to have said that when we talk about religion we are really talking about sexuality and when we talk about sexuality we are really talking about religion. Jung was speaking of course in the context of Western notions of identity, sexuality, and autonomy, a context most Americans share so unthinkingly that we dont pause to consider that an Asian or African  Bishop who expresses distress over homosexuality in the church may be standing on an entirely different platform. Cultural differences do make the conversation about sexuality more complex and we will address them in the next installment, but from the perspective of western culture alone, there are issues enough to stimulate reflection on why, when the Rev. V. Gene Robinson, a man who lives with another man as his lover and faithful companion, was consecrated  a Bishop in the Anglican Communion, distress flares went up all over the Anglican Communion even though they did not all signal the same sources of distress.

First, let’s consider the broader question of sexuality in the Church.

Whenever we discuss human sexuality in an ecclesiastical context, issues are distorted as surely as our images are warped by the curves of a funhouse mirror. Sexuality is always charged with emotion but the passionate intensity caused by linking sexuality to what we believe are God’s sexual preferences seems to release a particularly nasty kind of ranting, brimming with judgments, hatred or disgust. There’s no war like a religious war and no religious war like one caused by two gay men holding hands at the altar, one a bishop and the other his beloved.

As Jung said, the lines between sexuality and spirituality are murky. Our religious rituals are suffused with the language of sexuality. We speak of love, we speak of being close and caring, we speak of being touched; we speak of surrender, losing ourselves in God and one another, and we speak of being one body, one flesh, one extended if imprecisely defined and often dysfunctional family.

We play music before services as a “warm up,” music designed, regardless of whether it is traditional organ music or a jazzy upbeat clap-your-hands sort of modern minstrel show, to dissolve our boundaries and melt us into a single undifferentiated mass in which we experience relief from the constraints of the roles of everyday life and can bask in a kind of warm bath.

The language of mystical ecstasy is the language of the lover. It speaks of union beyond simple intimacy, of being penetrated with joy and abandon. Who has not noticed, during a charismatic prayer service, the beatific smiles on the faces of our brothers and sisters, rapt in adoration, their hands raised in what can only be described as a delicious sensual rapture?  With the Anglican poet and pastor John Donne, we beseech our God to batter our hearts because we will never be chaste unless we have been ravished, never whole until we have been consumed.

The pervasiveness of sexuality in religious experience helps us understand the widespread terror of sex found frequently in the Church. The inability to discuss sexuality (or money, the other of the twin engines of organized religion) clearly, simply, or directly is caused by that force field of distortion and self-deception. We may begin the discussion in a civil tone but sooner or later we find our voices rising and our feet socketed in muck. The waters muddy and the going gets slow.

Stating the simple truths of our lives, often an easier task in non-ecclesiastical contexts, is considered heroic when done in the context of the church. Normal people saying normal things about their normal lives are turned into saints or devils because their honesty and transparency are so anomalous.

We have all heard preachers getting hysterical about sexual sins. The possibility that women  might control their own lives or bodies through contraception, abortion, or divorce becomes a threat to the very fabric of their being. Meanwhile bodies pile up by the thousands in the Middle East with nary a peep from the same pulpits. The cold sins of indifference, cruelty, hatred and injustice which lead to much more destruction and suffering are frequently ignored.

So when an Episcopal  priest who lives openly with his gay partner in a committed relationship is consecrated a Bishop in the Anglican Communion, it is to be expected that the event will be treated as a major crisis. Men who are only being themselves and disclosing who they have always been are described as the worst kinds of subversives, undermining the Gospel and the sanctity of the Church.

That’s a lot of power to hand over to someone just for telling us what they discovered about their sexual desires.

When I was preparing for the Episcopal priesthood, I noticed that one of the intentions of  a long period of training was to socialize us to accept the fact that when we performed liturgical functions we would be the only men in the church wearing what looked like dresses. That socialization process stands as a metaphor for how sexuality is cloaked and hidden inside the black cassocks, neutralizing our bodies in generously draping folds.

Who knows what the numbers really are, how many gay men and lesbian women hide inside those cassocks?  Who knows what others really do in the privacy of their lives? I can only say that when I was in seminary it looked as if about one quarter of the students preparing for the Episcopal priesthood then were gay. Sixteen years in the ordained ministry suggested that this was a reasonable estimate. It is from those clergy that bishops are chosen so naturally there are plenty of gay bishops. Many of them share this fact in confidential conversations but are reluctant to broadcast it to the world because they have been taught that the real sin lies not in the being or the doing, but in the saying what is so.

The first Bishop under whom I served, the Rt. Rev. Otis Charles, was a married man with five children who after several decades of marriage announced that he was a gay man who had lived a lie. Then Dean of the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, he divorced and moved to San Francisco where he continues to exercise a number of compassionate ministries.

“The real issue is that the church is coming out of the closet,” he says. “That’s the fact. Both the clergy and the episcopate have large numbers of gay men and lesbians.

And the worst part is, in the UK and the USA, there was a high degree of tolerance as long as you did not speak. The most severe criticism I received in general [when I came out] was, why do you need to talk about it? Be what you want, just don’t make us acknowledge it.”

Bishop Charles believes that sanctioning such dishonesty impairs the health and well-being of all in the church.

“We have excluded a large area of sexuality by not talking about it and this has a huge negative impact not only on individuals but also on the community, on the church. How can a bishop be in relationship with members of that community if there’s a whole area of their lives that can not be discussed?”

I once served an urban parish the members of which spoke in glowing terms of two previous rectors with long tenures. They described them as “celibate men” who lived chastely with “companions.” Their commitment to denial was bone-deep and baffling when it was obvious to me that these men were living with gay lovers. In the gay community their behaviors as well as inclinations were common knowledge but straights were unwilling to accept the simple truth.

“You need to understand,” said a parish priest about the reactions of some church members to Robinson’s consecration, “that there is a yuck factor. As long as they don’t have to think about what it means, they can live with the abstraction. They often agree that the consecration merely ratified what everybody has long known to be true but when they visualize what it means to have gay sex, many straight men and women blanch.”

Perhaps they feel similarly about the blessing of same sex unions (which is practiced in several dioceses but not sanctioned by the Church as a whole). In that discussion too we hear the same theological and scriptural rationales for positions on all sides of the conversation but those stated positions frequently obscure the fact that people are not talking about religion so much as sex and how they really feel about homosexual sex.

Anyone who followed the path of women to ordination as priests and Bishops in the Episcopal Church can write the script as to who is saying what on which sides of the question and what they are saying. When a sexual controversy erupts, it is like calling central casting and asked them to send over the usual suspects. So I will merely invoke rather than describe their predictable positions. You, dear reader, can fill in the blanks.

The Consecration raises thorny legal issues for the Episcopal Church that are just beginning to be discussed. Some American dioceses are threatening to withdraw from the Episcopal Church over this issue and some want to establish alternative structures of authority based on theological similarities rather than tradition, hierarchy or geography. This constitutes a novel challenge for the church. When women’s ordination posed a similar threat to political unity a few decades ago, some parishes left the church but had to leave behind the parish’s buildings and belongings because they were owned by the diocese. This time, the threat of whole dioceses to withdraw raises the question of whether parishes wishing to remain faithful to the larger body would have to surrender their property to the conservatives and head for the nearest high school auditorium to worship. This question is currently being studied by canon lawyers and no one knows how it will be resolved.

But this, as I said, is from the Western point of view. When we listen to some of the Asian or African Bishops who are distressed, we find they are not concerned primarily with the issues as touched upon above because in their cultures, identity, community, and human sexuality are framed so differently.

In the second installment we will look at some of these cultural dimensions and see why the search for common ground is not easy to find. We will also see how the problems of the Episcopalians illuminate the landscape of the Roman Catholic Church as well.

Virtual Souls, Virtual Wine

by

Richard Thieme

published in the National Catholic Reporter

When we find ourselves blessed or cursed to live in a period of a genuine transformation – not just a time of accelerated change, but a time of elemental restructuring – it is hard to speak about the implications of that restructuring for our most cherished religious traditions, symbols, and beliefs because they feel like skin on the bone and changes in them feel like a threat to our very being rather than an evolutionary necessity.

But transformations will happen and afterward, when the skin is gone but the bone stays, when our essential selves and spiritual commitments stay, only then will we see that God is still God and can not be equated to the image of God or idea about God to which we became so inordinately attached.

In this brief exploration of the impact of information and communication technologies on religious life, I hope to distinguish skin and bone.

The impact of these transforming technologies on our identities can not be overstated. In turn, our identities – who we think we are when we don’t even think about it – determine what we believe we are capable of being and doing. Identity is destiny, and our technologies by defining those identities frame the parameters of our lives, disclose our horizons.

Here’s an example of how that works.

I am a middle-aged man who grew to maturity in a world of text, immersed in a typographic sea. I read endlessly and begin writing stories as a teen.

When I tried to find a market for those stories, I turned to a standard reference, Writer’s Market, to locate magazines. Now, that sounds like an obvious thing to do, but it’s not. That book, the Writer’s Market, was itself a textual artifact which clearly defined my horizons of possibility. I internalized the information in it – markets in North America, markets to which I could send stories typed on paper by mail – as the limits of my vision.

Flash forward to the early nineties when I wrote an article for Wired Magazine about the impact of the internet. They printed 500 words and gave back 4500. I sat in front of my word processor, hooked up to a telephone modem, wondering where I could send an article using those extra words.

Then the light bulb went on. DUH. I could use the Internet to find markets for my article about the Internet.

I surfed the nascent web and located magazines in South Africa, England, Australia. I offered articles by email and within a week had contracts and had become a writer with a global presence.

Now, this is the point: that light bulb would never have gone on, I would never have discovered possibilities that shattered my old vision and disclosed those new horizons, had I not engaged with the technology and allowed it to disclose those possibilities. The technology itself over time restructured my beliefs.

That sounds obvious now, ten years later, but then it was revolutionary. The breakthrough came when I realized that I was using the new technology like the old technology, as if a word processor were a typewriter, as if new wine could be squeezed into old wineskins. After I had engaged with the medium for a time, the information implicit in the transaction itself broke through to my conscious mind and I had an epiphany.

That’s what technologies are doing too to our notions of spirituality, our religious and spiritual practices, and the organizational structures of our religions.

How does this happen? The way Ernest Hemingway said we go bankrupt – gradually, then suddenly. We never see what’s obvious until it is unavoidable. When Clyde Tombaugh discovered the planet Pluto and told the world where to find it, astronomers searched through old photographic plates to look for the coordinates of Pluto’s orbit. Sure enough, there the planet was and there it always had been, right in front of their eyes. But no one saw it because they didn’t know where to look.

The foundations of our religious traditions are undergoing a profound transformation but we are still using word processors as if they are typewriters.

This is fourth great era of the Technology of the Word, as Walter Ong calls it. The first was the era of speech and the co-evolution of tongue, larynx, pharynx and brain which enabled us to create that first “virtual space,” something like the one we are inhabiting as I write and you read these words. The creation of linguistic symbols and the creation of a meaningful universe from those symbols in which we then live in as if it is real made us humans.

Speaking humans lived in oral cultures for thousands of years, populating a vast unknown pre-history that existed before writing. When writing emerged, everything form oral cultures either disappeared or found itself translated into written form.

We know that religious images, artifacts, and rituals were part of oral cultures but we only know those images and words that were translated into written symbols. That may sound obvious, but the implications are important. It is not coincidental that the persons associated with the world’s major religions as we currently define them – Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Abraham or Moses, Mohammed, and all the others –emerged into human consciousness through the written word which transformed our ancestors and the internalized images of self and God formed as they engaged with written text. In every instance, a flesh-and-blood human being was transformed through writing into a “textual being,” a being with whom or which we engage in and through the text.  Theology implicitly became hermeneutics, the study of how texts mean, because interaction with written texts forms an image distinctive to the technology that created the text.

It is also no coincidence that world religions like our “majors” ceased to emerge once the era of writing passed except as subsets of prior religions.

When the printing press with movable type was invented, another revolution took place. The unique historical person Martin Luther may have been essential to the Reformation, but the being we call “Luther” is a print-text being mediated by type just as Jesus is a textual being mediated initially by writing. But print-text and the changes to which it contributed including the Renaissance generated a different sense of self and, once again, different notions of God. The fractal-like replication of Catholicism in the image of Protestantism was a prototype for how hundreds of additional denominations or religions were generated, an inevitable consequence of the power printed text gave to people to recreate themselves. The Reformation is literally unimaginable prior to the emergence of the printing press and those who used it to print the Bible like Gutenberg himself had no idea what a revolution had begun. Gutenberg would have been horrified to know what he had spawned. When he first printed the Bible, however, only 2% of Europe’s population could read, so it would have been impossible to forecast religious practices based on people reading silently to themselves and learning thereby a method of personal interpretation that was as alien to the prior culture as the notion of an individual with rights, intellectual property, or all of the other emergent properties of the Renaissance that are now being challenged by electronic communication.

In the same way that “individuals” with “individual rights” were an emergent property of technological change, “a personal relationship with God” became possible only after an “individual” could think of him/herself and God as distinct beings, neither mediated by a community. Paradoxically biblical literalism emerged relatively recently and the “original text” to which it claims to be loyal is one interpretation among many that developed centuries after the fact.

William Caxton brought the printing press to the British isles in the 1470s. When he looked back in his sixties on several decades of profound change he wrote that he could barely recognize the landscape of his youth, so radically had it been altered. But he was not speaking only of moors and downs, he was speaking of the interior landscape and the transformation of identity through which he had lived.

On a fundamental level, the choice of a dialect with which to print helped determine an “English” identity rather than identities based on smaller populations, each speaking a distinct language that they did see as a dialect. They experienced themselves as a single people with regional dialects only when a supra-identity defined by a nation state had emerged.

In the same way, according to McLuhan, Catholics and Protestants would never have seen themselves as a single tradition before television created ecumenism and the distinctions we now take for granted just as the word “Judeo-Christian” did not exist before the second half of the twentieth century.

A nation state like a global religious organization is defined by a boundary drawn around a more complex unit which organizes political, economic and social life at a higher level of abstraction. Nation states emerged after the Renaissance in part as a consequence of the print-text revolution. because society demanded organizational structures appropriate to a higher level of complexity. The speed of the flow of information is a primary determinant of the organizational level of a society or civilization. The transformational engine of electronic communication is now challenging national boundaries but we do not yet have names for the fluid, modular way of life with rapidly morphing identities that is replacing a prior way of being.

Think of time lapse photography on fast forward and think of nation states, religions, everything changing in relationship to the technologies that generate and sustain them. The England of the preceding paragraphs is now part of “Europe,” passports are no longer examined at borders that are more than porous, and most of Europe uses the Euro instead of a national currency.

The fourth iteration of the Technology of the Word, electronic communication in all forms, began with the telegraph, the first time human communication moved faster than people (or their animals and artifacts) could move. It continued with radio, television, wired and wireless transmission, and now the Internet, the most recent iteration and the one most in the forefront of our awareness.

This is what Langton Winner said about the impact of technology on people and society.

“To invent a new technology requires that society also invents the kinds of people who will use it; older practices, relationships, and ways of defining people’s identities fall by the wayside and new practices, relationships, and identities take root. In case after case, the move to computerize and digitize means many preexisting cultural forms have suddenly gone liquid, losing their former shape as they are retailored for computerized expression.”

When we translate his insights into implications for religious organizations and images of identity, human self, and God, we see that this radical restructuring must profoundly impact who we think we are, how we imagine God, and how we define our experience of ultimate meaning.  “Reading the Bible” does not port or translate to an experience of immersion in an iconic flow of information in a virtual environment. The latter experience is generating  dimensions of the human soul that did not previously exist, and when we try to say what we see, what we experience ourselves to be, we will need to invent a new vocabulary. Pioneers of the spirit, as Nietzsche noted, are those who see first what is coming over the horizon and give it a name which the rest of us then use as if they created what in fact they merely discovered. It was impossible to predict precisely how the encounter of Greek and Hebrew worlds would create Christianity because it was unthinkable inside both of the prior paradigms. In a more mundane way, when the U. S. government wanted to encourage people to fly on airplanes then subsidized by the government for delivering mail, it needed to change the word “aeronaut” which designated the bold courageous pioneers who were willing to fly. They needed a word into which everyone could project his or her identity and came up with “passenger,” a word we now use unselfconsciously to refer to an activity we take for granted. In the same way, astronauts going into space will be replaced by space tourists and travelers and Christians, Jews, Buddhists and all the others will find new names for the new spiritual modalities and religious structures we are generating in networks and electronic webs.

Let’s call them/is DPs (digital people, as opposed to print-text people.) DPs will interact less and less frequently with images of print-text-Gods (i.e. worship) and more and more often with images of gods-in-pixels in a world in which information is dynamic and distributed, gathered,  integrated and recreated on the fly. As digital symbols, icons, and glyphs replace printed images, the meaning of processes like “redemption” and “salvation,” now locked into nouns that imply a static state, will be transformed too. Process theology will inevitably gain momentum because it will describe a cosmic structure congruent with our daily experience of this ceaseless flow. We recreate ourselves in and through the forms and structures of our technologies; the digital world is interactive, modular, and fluid, so inevitably our lives and how we think of ourselves are becoming interactive, modular, and fluid too.

Think of the common spiritual practice of “journaling,” for example. Journaling began when people like James Boswell participated in the discovery and creation of a different kind of sensibility and self by using pen and paper to bring it into being. Today bloggers engage in a  web of self-discovery that older generations dismiss as shallow but the collective self they are co-creating is in fact appropriate to the technology. When William Harvey described the circulation of blood, it is a historical fact that no physician over forty ever accepted his theory. In religious life too, new revelations are accepted one funeral at a time, but along a much longer timeline. Generations must pass away before the new sun can rise and shine.

In more mundane aspects of our lives, however, this impact cannot be avoided. Aspects of our lives that used to be unthinkably accepted as fixed by tradition, for example,  have become modules in a self-generated persona or trajectory for which we are increasingly required to accept responsibility. Teaching children to learn how to learn is more important than teaching children stuff. Teaching children how to assemble themselves ongoingly is more important than teaching them how to live in a fixed and rigid way in a context that refuses to remain stable and thereby undermines that very fixity.

We used to be born into a religion, for example, and now we change religions and “shop for churches.” We used to stay married but more and more people are divorced and remarry. We used to choose a vocation and stay with it but now we expect to have several careers in a lifetime.  In every dimension of our lives, that which we took for granted as divinely ordained was in fact determined by an unvarying context for our lives and it is that very context that our technologies undermine and transform. Then new contents inevitably flow into the new contours generated by a new context.

So the question is not, will new technologies and specifically digital ones turn religious, political, and economic structures on their collective ears, but will our identities persist in a recognizable form that includes and transcends the forms that came before? Or  will there be such a disconnect that when we look into the digital mirror, the face we see does not resemble the one we used to see?

The implications of this article are not trivial. We are moving together like it or not through a zone of annihilation that challenges all of the ways we hold ourselves as human beings and possibilities for action in the world. The transformational energies of our time will become a fire storm when core proclamations about our beliefs begin to smoke and burn. If Christianity is to embrace and be transformed by those energies, it will necessarily become something other than what it has been or at least what it has been thought to be. Perhaps claims to exclusivity and universality will survive the fire, but perhaps not. Perhaps those claims will both intensify and diminish, intensify because some can’t help but cling to the past and diminish because we are all nevertheless being recontextualized in a way that will remind us unceasingly that the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. We can make this passage with sanity only if we know and have confidence that God is God and will defend Godself and cannot perish while everything in this life including our ideas about God are transitory and passing.

Richard Thieme (rthieme@thiemeworks.com) speaks professionally, writes, and consults on the human side of technology and the work place.

Mystics are mostly born, I think, not made, so the ability to see the unity of all things must be a function of our genes. Once we can engineer offspring so they have the gifts we choose, it will be interesting to see how many mystics we think we need. If we have too many, there won’t be enough accountants, but too few … well, only other mystics would think it a loss if there are too few. Mystics do not see a different reality but see the wiring inside the wireless circuits. Mystics see structures of information and energy as it flows, a self-luminous tangle that can only be described using metaphors and symbols. Paradox is the language of the unconscious. That’s why, like riddles or jokes, either we “get” what mystics say or we don’t. Mystical insights either make all the difference in the world, enabling us to recontextualize everything, or sound like snake oil.

I believe that the experiences in which I saw most deeply into the nature of things are the most important in my life, but I can’t prove it. I just “know,” the way we know all the important things in our lives. Everything that seems to matter most comes somehow from the awareness that everything is connected to everything else. We can see that when, momentarily letting go of the everyday, we turn aside and look – just look – and really see what we are looking at.

But what has that got to do with the digital world?

Those of us who live much of our lives as nodes in a network notice that we are involved with a complex system of energy and information. The computer network becomes an image of the larger network, the planetary civilization, the galaxy, all the way out to the edges of the universe – and we see that everything is part of one vast system of energy and information.

Once we see that, the boundaries that had seemed to define individual identities dissolve. The network really is the computer. Stand-alone desktop computers are, as Marvin Minsky said, brains in bottles. The interfaces between humans too look less like barriers and more like the translucent walls of cells in a living system.

That happens too when we explore “psychic phenomena.” An experience of telepathy makes sense when we think of minds communicating with one another. But once telepathy becomes indistinguishable from clairvoyance – where is the information, in another mind, or somewhere else? – psychic phenomena seem more like manifestations of a singular consciousness becoming aware of itself.

But to see itself, it has to have a point-of-view. That means differentiating itself from itself by making arbitrary distinctions.

“Clairvoyance” and “telepathy” make sense as concepts, in other words, only to “individuals” who accept the illusion of being individuals. Individual consciousness is how Consciousness manifests itself … a dip or a pit in a matrix or system of energy and information differentiating itself in order to see itself from a point of view.

Alice in “Through the Looking Glass” wondering “which one dreamed it” – the dreamer or the one in the dream dreaming of the dreamer.

Paradox. Metaphor. Archetypal images. Nothing else describes the landscape we see illuminated suddenly in a lightning flash. Nothing else can tell that truth.

What do we see when we look? We see that information is the form of energy. We see that what looked like two things are aspects of a single thing the way light is both particle and wave. That “Let there be light!” is a way of giving form to the potential of energy. Or maybe that information makes energy intelligible.

“I am not a religious person, but I could say this universe is designed very well for the existence of life,” said Heinz Oberhummer of the University of Vienna, reflecting on how a half-percent change in the Coulomb force that repels protons form one another would have prevented stars from forming oxygen and carbon, two basic building blocks of life, which are formed in stars when they enter a red giant phase and fuse helium rather than hydrogen.

The digital world is a projection that lets us see ourselves see ourselves … the way it looked the other day when during a speech I moved in front of a huge video screen on the platform as the camera tracked and the audience watched the “real” me point to an image of myself pointing to an image of myself pointing to an image of myself … “and that,” I said, “is the digital world.”

When I moved to the front of the platform, the audience divided like the Red Sea, half looking at my digital image to the right, half to the left, which changed my job description from a speaker engaging with an audience to a wizard creating a digital image with which the audience could engage.

Just as I am doing now.

Well, that’s mysticism for you. Is it good for anything? Who knows? That will have to be answered by parents who buy gene splicing on the black market to ensure that they will or won’t get a mystic. The free market will give us that feedback.

But I do know that mysticism needs the world of the flesh to manifest itself. That the world of the flesh is where we play with real money. Mysticism is not only insight, it’s a cry for truth and justice, a deep passion for getting it right. Mysticism without action is self-indulgence; action without mysticism always burns out.

The network is the computer, and the Internet is a transitory form for expressing ourselves “out there” at this wrinkle in spacetime … knowing all the while that “out there” is “in here,” that “out” and “in” are as illusory as selves and all the other distinctions that seem to be built in so we think we think we think we know.

Sometimes the streams of our lives converge in a single river and its power is impossible to resist.

This month many of the passions which have animated much of my adult life converged. As the recipient of the Gamalial Chair in Peace and Justice through the Lutheran ministry at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, I will devote much of October and November to speaking about technology and justice issues in a variety of venues in my home town.

At the same time, new material came into focus for a series of articles I am writing on “Chinatown moments.” Disclosed to me over the past year, these are moments in which different people were told either directly or by circumstances – as Jake Gittes, the “Chinatown” detective, was told by Noah Cross – “You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me, you don’t.” In two instances, people were threatened with death, in another an investigator feared for his life when he discovered that a prominent local citizen might have committed murder, and in a fourth, a young computer hacker broke suddenly through a false partition in cyberspace and found himself in freefall in a world more complex and corrupt than he had dreamed.

And at the same time … I interviewed Dan Geer for next month’s Information Security Magazine. Dan Geer is incredibly smart. He is currently Chief Technology Officer for @stake and newly elected president of Usenix. He has a doctorate from Harvard and helped develop the Athena Project and Kerberos at MIT. When you’re talking to a guy like that about computer security and he tells you that he only hires people who are “sadder but wiser,” you pay attention. By that he meant that he wants people who know what’s really at stake. The urgency of their work must be energized by an encounter with the face of evil so they understand what they’re up against and why their work matters.

Geer has a friend who is now a corporate attorney but who was once assistant station chief of the CIA in Beirut. Geer asked about his migration from intelligence to the private sector. His friend had paid plenty of dues – he had been held hostage, for example, for two weeks on a runway – but the defining moment was created by those who had kidnapped his superior, the CIA station chief. Over the next days, they took video tapes of the slow careful process by which they tortured him to death. Geer’s friend watched those tapes, every day. Every single day. Until the body of his colleague was at last lifeless.

“I wish we could talk about our successes,” Brian Snow, the head of NCSC (National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency) told me, but sources and methods must be protected. So I had to rely on his tone of voice when Snow spoke of what might have happened, indicating an unimaginable scale of death and destruction, to know that Snow too had seen the face of evil.

Reflection on “truth and justice” issues for the Gamaliel Chair, the stakes of the game when spy meets spy, and the stories in those articles all point in the same direction.

Technology transforms what it means to be human. Technology transforms the future by changing how we hold ourselves here and now as possibilities for action. Technology redefines our human enterprise at its core.

New technologies – genetic engineering, instruments of surveillance and social control – deliver power into our hands, and we always use it. Then comes reflection on how to use it, after the fact. But that reflection can impact what we choose to do in the next future, even as the current future becomes the past.

Technology is not about anti-gravity, designer children, or new information channels merely. It is about the entire field of human subjectivity and how we choose to define and direct ourselves. Those questions invoke the ultimate meaning of our lives. Technology enables people to act powerfully but how we act is not determined exclusively by technology.

Either the universe is all meaningless or it is all meaningful. Meaning seems to be a function of complexity. As seemingly isolated events or inert substances are integrated into a complex system, meaning happens. Ultimately the entire universe and its passing shadow which we call spacetime will be integrated into itself … and conscious of itself. At that instant, when the circle is closed, the beginning and the end will be seen to have always been one thing. Consciousness including all of its means of being.

Or put it this way.

“You tell me there’s no God,” said Geer,” and I’ll ask you to look me in the eye and tell me there’s no such thing as evil. If you can’t do the one, you lose the right to do the other.”

The evil of which he speaks is no abstraction. It is the gut-level discovery that comes when we face the worst that human beings can do and know in that harrowing moment that there is another, a better option.

To know the truth, however, there must be disclosure. Without disclosure, there is no truth. Without truth, there is no accountability. Without accountability, there is no justice.

The digital cage in which we flap our wings either hides or discloses the truth. The liberation of the truth and its right uses are the flip sides of the loss of privacy and places to hide. How we build that cage, how we live in it, is not built into digital technology but into our souls. That is where we make decisions about making decisions, and that is where we discover a capacity for freedom that enables us to define our lives as heroic or debased.