Many of the more profound insights into both digital and non-digital
realities sound like bumper sticker slogans, and whether they are truisms
uttered by a well-intentioned friend or the sudden illumination that
recontextualizes … everything … is due more to our readiness to hear them
than anything else. For example, I was expressing anxiety the other day about something, and my
friend said, "let go and let God." That happened to be what I needed to
hear, and my concerns dissolved.
Here's another one, equally simple: What is, is. What isn't, isn't.
So long as we operate in the domain of conceptualization, this is obvious.
Things that are true are true; things that are not true are not true. But
this isn't about things that are true. This is about things that ARE. It is
the relationship between the representations of things that are in our
heads … mental artifacts, Marvin Minsky calls them … and things that are or
are not … that creates confusion. The amount of energy needed to turn
something that is into something that isn't, is infinite, because it can't
happen. And vice versa. What is, is, and what isn't, isn't.
I was thinking about that here in Honolulu where I came at the invitation
of St. Andrew's Episcopal Cathedral to speak and keynote a workshop on the
larger issues of technological impact and specifically the transforming
effect of computer technology on spirituality and religion.
Keep in mind that I am a former Episcopal priest who feels deep gratitude
and reverence for the Anglican tradition, for the way it "constructs
reality," for its symbols and rituals. But keep in mind too that a primary
reason for leaving the ordained ministry was my need to explore the impact
of computer technology in a free and unfettered way. Had I remained a
custodian of the institution and its traditions, I would have been
constrained to incline my insights in the direction of its construction of
reality. And central to that construction is the exclusive claim that Jesus
alone is the path to God.
Most other religions do not ask that others either convert or get out of
the way. The Judeo-Christian God is indeed a jealous God. Buddhists revere
Buddha as an image of enlightened possibility and allow others to walk
their own paths. Jews do not ask others to become Jews. Hindus believe that
God has many names and forms and invite them all to the party. But
Christians claim that there is no other way to come to God, which makes the
journey into cyberspace so perilous for Christianity.
The journey into digital reality explodes our boundaries, threatens our
imaginary walls, from the borders of nation-states to the creeds that
contain a religious community. I don't know the answer to the question, but
I do know that this is one of the questions: Is Christianity bigger than
everything else or is there something bigger than Christianity?
Entering cyberspace changes everything. Local communities become global.
Power is exercised in a network, not by dominating and controlling, but by
participating and contributing. When a community creates structures that
invite and sustain real growth, it is subversive of the structure that
exists when the invitation is issued. Control of the process must be
surrendered.
The simple fact of other viable spiritual traditions is a conundrum for
Christianity. 70% of the world's inhabitants are not Christian and seem to
develop spiritually using other traditions. That they exist is an
ineluctable fact, a way of saying something about God's generosity and
graciousness as a host of the party called the universe, that threatens all
of our efforts to define "Truth" from the top down, rather than the inside
out.
It is not God who is as stake, but our images of God, our constructions of
reality, the names and forms and symbols that we use to move toward God.
The Judeo-Christian tradition calls those images idols, mental artifacts as
culturally relative and transitory as fetishes. Buddhists say that the
finger pointing toward the moon is not the moon. That's a way of saying
that all religious traditions formed and sustained by writing and printed
text are engaged in a transformative process of which digital reality is
the catalyst, and may in that process be transformed into something
entirely else, something that includes and transcends all that came before.
Digital reality is interactive, a moving process rather than a fixed
tradition, shape changing or "morphing" in its essence, and those intrinsic
qualities determine a different kind of experience and a different kind of
human being (at least in how we conceive of ourselves and construct
ourselves as possibilities for action in the world) than entered the
process in the first place.
There always comes a moment in those workshops in which that paradox is
encountered. I see in the eyes of spiritual pilgrims the same light that I
see when teachers realize that incorporating computers into education means
that teaching and education is changed forever. The same light that I see
when leaders and managers realize that bringing technology into the
workplace changes their role and function forever.
That's why it matters to distinguish the representations in our minds from
the real thing. Those representations are the only things that CAN be
threatened. Our inviolable selves are never threatened. The God who created
and sustains us is never threatened. Only our way of constructing reality,
that walls both in and out specific possibilities, is threatened. And the
Good News that speaks to that fear and anxiety is that good old
bumpersticker slogan, what is, is, and what isn't isn't.
Power consists of seeing and saying what is simply and deeply true. When we
speak that truth, as much as the Truth can be spoken, we move with the Tao,
the power of the universe, the Truth that will and does set us free.
