My hunch is that in each age, or each culture, or each value system, there is a similarly-elevated human activity regarded as the sine qua non of existence. Each of these ergo sums (if I can call them that) encapsulates what we think to be most important, most constitutive of our human identity. The lack of this quality will result in significant anxiety, the sense that one is not fully participating in whatever it means to be human. Descartes’ anxious doubting was assuaged by the act of philosophical reasoning, which proved to him that he was real. For someone alive during, and participating in, the Romantic movement, the anxiety would have centred instead around the amount and depth of authentic emotion; the ergo sum of that period would have been “I feel, therefore I am.” This is how you know you are really human: you exist in a state of transcendent passion! I’ve always found it interesting to consider: what is the " X ergo sum" of any particular time or place?

A year or two ago, for a variety of personal reasons irrelevant to this little essay, I somewhat intentionally decided to reengage with social media. I scrolled through my Facebook feed again for the first time (after declaring my relationship with it “complicated” some 10 years prior). But mostly I started to follow friends and post on Facebook’s more glamorous younger sibling, Instagram. There are many, many reflections I could write about the state of social media as I found it, and upon my own emotional and psychological state as I engaged with the apps. Many of the various downsides of social media are now fairly well-recognized, and don’t require my reiteration. But one feeling I noticed kept coming up again and again: an anxious need to establish myself as present by posting something, anything. I’m here, I exist, I matter! It struck me that we may have here the evidence of a new ergo sum: Communico, ergo sum. “I share, therefore I am.”

From my own self-reflection and observations of others’ behaviour on the platforms, it does seem there is now a heightened urgency around the sharing of experiences over against the mere having of them. It is not enough to go on vacation; it must be live-blogged! It is not enough to eat at a fun restaurant with friends; the friends must be tagged! It is not enough to have a funny thought in one’s own head; it must be refined with the choicest of memes and emoji and shared. And so on. Of course, sharing our experiences with one another is not a strange or pathological behaviour. On the contrary, it is an integral part of human relationship. On a deep psychological and emotional level, we need others to know our feelings and thoughts about the things in our shared reality, and we likewise need to empathize with the experience of others. What’s new seems to be the degree to which the act of sharing itself has superseded the reality of the thing or experience shared. Enjoying an experience with those present (even if that is just myself) is replaced by the need to immediately translate that experience into the realm of social feedback. I suspect that this means there is some kind of core anxiety of identity at play here. Am I even a person if I am not establishing my presence in these various online places with content of the kind that will cause people to see me how I want to be seen?

I would have thought that identity anxieties would be about the lack of attaining a situation prized by the surrounding culture (however locally or globally defined). In ancient Greece, maybe you’d feel some identity anxiety if you were a foreigner, or someone who couldn’t participate in the civic or martial affairs of the day, for whatever reason. In mid-2000s Silicon Valley, maybe you’d feel similarly if you weren’t building a “disruptive” startup. There are a no doubt a large number of “identities” that have been seen as of paramount value over the years: warrior, scholar, saint, parent, entrepreneur, scientist, evangelist, libertine, empath, sex icon, guru, artist, athlete, etc… But nowadays, perhaps as a consequence of society having approximated the liberal ideal of freedom of self-determination, it seems that more important than actually attaining any of these identities is the establishment of the identity via social media. And so what becomes common in our age is not a particular identity per se (because we each choose our own from a wide and even conflicting array of options), but a kind of meta-identity or modus operandi of identity establishment. We are defined, not so much by who we “are” in some kind of essential or internal way, and more by the space we carve out for ourselves via the act of sharing. The result is that “sharing” transitions from being a basic human social practice (the kind typically found among close relations and which facilitates the establishment of empathic bonds), to being a much more consequential (and therefore anxiety-ridden) social practice of establishing one’s chosen identity (qua identity) in the most highly-trafficked sphere of human society today: social media.

So far this is just a hypothesis I’m developing from observations of cultural change over the last few decades. I don’t claim to have proved it. I also feel the need to pause and anticipate a few of the possible reactions to the hypothesis so far:

1. I’m not trying to claim that this way of using social media (what we might call “sharing as identity establishment”) is the only one; clearly you could point to any number of examples of posts that don’t fit this description. In fact, probably very few people do only this on social media.
2. I would acknowledge that “sharing as identity establishment” happens in many human contexts, on and offline—not just on social media. This whole thought experiment is dealing with the question of identity anxiety, and as I’ve already indicated this is not a new question. What does seem new to me is the extent to which this “sharing at one another” has become a dominant mode of discourse (well, a dual monologue, as it were). As such, this mode of engaging with social media is by no means “abnormal”, and is probably hardly even worth comment anymore; that’s exactly the point! The fact that it doesn’t seem to register that we are doing something different, or more, with “sharing” than we used to, is precisely what has me intrigued.
3. The fact that many of us choose not to share at all on social media does not run counter to the hypothesis. It is not surprising that, faced with the huge amount of effort required to establish one’s identity online, many people would decide not to play the game. This doesn’t mean the game isn’t the dominant one, though, in just the same way that in a wealth-driven society some people might resign themselves to being poor because they don’t feel that there is any opportunity for change in their circumstances. The identity anxiety persists, and has simply been capitulated to completely.

So, if any of the hypothesis is at all right, how did we wind up here? First and foremost I see the current situation as an unintended consequence of the design of social media. As companies like Facebook/Meta have unabashedly pushed forward the concept of “connection” (whatever they mean by it; it’s certainly been twisted beyond all recognition into something like sheer access to personal information), we are essentially force-fed a never-ending stream of posts from people at varying degrees of separation from us. When these feeds are sprinkled liberally with advertisement we are left feeling even more overwhelmed. There is the sense that to be heard amidst the clamour we must shout (share) all the louder and all the more. And so a vicious cycle develops: to be “seen” by our peers we must engage in the rigorous process of identity establishment by sharing enough to be noticed. But this increases the amount of information in the feeds, making individual posts (which we may regard on the hypothesis as bids for identity establishment) less likely to be seen. And so we must shout even louder.

If you agree with any of this, or that it’s at all a problem, what is there to do about it? I think there are two levels on which we can give some suggestions. Practically, we can recognize that social media is an imperfect and distorted model of healthy social structures. It’s not “normal” (in the history of humanity, anyway), or necessary, to passively keep in touch with hundreds or thousands of people. It’s not “normal” to be constantly bombarded by personal news and announcements of varying degrees of significance from people at varying degrees of intimacy. I think it’s possible to choose smaller and more intentional spaces in which to engage in the act of sharing, which are less likely to encourage a distortion of that sharing in the direction of anxious identity establishment. I think it’s even possible to use digital tools for this purpose (groups of friends and families can maintain their own ad hoc social media networks via chat apps, for example, in ways that more closely mirror real-world relationship structures). Choosing smaller venues does mean intentionally foregoing the “reach” that our sharing might have. I see this as a choice to trade the “quantity” of reaction (likes, comments, etc…) for the “quality” of interaction (dialogue with people you actually independently know and care about). None of this is to discount the various benefits that social media apps provide, but merely to point out that in their current design they are perhaps pressing the normal human sharing impulse into a service for which it was never meant.

On a deeper level, I think we have to face the classic existential questions (what I’ve called “identity anxiety” or “anxiety of existence” here) without flinching. It’s certainly true that being an “influencer” (at least the kind which I most often see online) is a vacuous kind of identity, utterly precarious in its situation. But it’s also true that other, more traditional, identities are equally precarious, if only in the limit and less obviously so. Hooking your existential cart up to the horse of motherhood, for example, might be more wholesome (not to mention more valuable to the community), but at the end of the day it’s not going to leave you free of anxiety (what if you cannot have children? What do you do when they leave the house? Etc…) Philosophically, I tend to agree with the teacher in Ecclesiastes, who declares all such things to be a kind of mist that eventually evaporates. Any kind of ergo sum which depends on our abilities, our productivity, our intelligence, or our fortune in life, is bound to generate anxiety, or to draw lines of value judgment that leave some people out. What if the ultimate value of a person, our “identity”, is not so differentiated and special as we would like to think? What if it just is, established not by a process of existentialist self-determination, but by the words that declared every single part of creation good? This would be an identity which cannot be lost or tarnished. It would be an identity which cannot be denied to any person, no matter their race, gender, nationality, abledness, wealth status, or any other attribute or lack thereof. It would be an identity which could never result in anxiety. And finally, it would be an identity that would never even need to be shared about on social media, because everyone would already possess it equally.

If I believed all of that, which I would like to, then I would probably post a bit less, or at least less self-centredly, on Instagram. If I believed all of that, which I would like to, then I would be asking how to move more concretely from anxious communico (“I share”) to true communio (“community”).

Today I received my first set of tattoos.1 It took me many years to come up with something that I felt was meaningful enough to make a permanent part of my external appearance. Ultimately, I was able to develop a short poem in Koine Greek that hit the mark for me. What follows is a sort of theological meditation on the text and the meaning of these tattoos.

The text in Greek:2

ἐν ἀρχῇ ὁ λόγος
ἐν τέλει ὁ χορός

And translated into English:

In the beginning [was] the Word
In the end [will be] the Chorus

John the Theologian makes an astonishing claim in the first sentence of his Gospel about the primacy of the ontology of the “Word” (including in its semantic constellation categories like Relation, Story, or Reason): it is coeval with God, in fact it is coextensive with God. Even more astonishing, several sentences later, he makes the claim that this primal category of existence became human flesh—became one of us, in all the important ways that make you you and me me.

The prophet Isaiah declares that the Word of God shall not return void, and trinitarian theology sees this fact as part of the very fabric of reality: the Word proceeds from the Father (as the Son) so as to save, collect, and preserve all of Creation, returning it to its Creator in a joyful reunion. A word that is spoken into nothingness is of no value, for soliloquy is the domain of solipsism. A word that is spoken to a featureless surface and bounces back as a mere echo is similarly void, however resounding. But a Word that is caught by its hearers, that effects change, and that elicits a conversation in response—that is the Word which does not return void.

And so, in almost syllogistic (literally, “together-with-the-word”) fashion, we realize that the point of the Word is to produce many other words in response. The point of the Son is to bring all of Creation into the relation of restored childhood with the Father. The point of the first Word spoken in the darkness is to create the the light necessary for life. And the point of the Word spoken into human flesh is to enable all flesh to speak to God. But do we imagine a cacophony of voices shouting unintelligibly? No! The proper mode of diverse oral unity is not speaking (which can ultimately only mean speaking over one another) but singing, together. Only in singing are words from multiple parties joined temporally in mutual respect and harmony. They blend, creating something new and better without loss of person or agency. Therefore, the proper auditory image is not the atonal conversation of a debate, but rather antiphony, call-and-response, the bid of the lover and the reply of the beloved. First the Word, then the Chorus. When the Chorus joins the Word, the distinctions between the two matter less than they did before. When humankind joins the Son as children of God, the Son becomes “merely” the eldest brother, the first-born of a new kind of creature. The Word lassos and lifts; it does not return void. It grants existence without being made less itself. The relationship between God and Creation is anything but zero-sum.

The existence of God as Word shows us God as yearning, more than anything else, to be joined in song by other words, by we who have heard the first Word and who have chosen to sing in reply through the patterning of our lives. Each voice that answers the Word in song has its own character, its own timbre, its own language, and these differences are not erased when joined in the mighty chorus with others; rather, they meld into something impossible, individual yet corporate, the distinction between sum and parts having become a category error. The ineffable movement and infinite song of Dante’s comic apex is captured in the χορός, because this word in Greek is the root not only of “chorus” but of “choreography”. When we respond to the Word we do not do so with verbal statements, but with our singing voices and our moving bodies, the inscribers upon physical reality of the Word’s work upon our hearts.

The fact that “Word” is the primary ontological category, not just in the sense of time but also in the sense of preeminence, implies that “Chorus” (known variously as theosis, the beatific vision, and so on) is the primary teleological category, not just in the sense of time but also in the sense of purpose. The Word that spoke the universe into being also apparently spoke Aramaic, through trachea and tongue, creating pressure waves of sound, which reverberated eventually, with many twists and turns, into my ears, transformed but retaining their essence. The choice that remained for me was merely whether to join the Chorus or to remain silent. And in a way it was never really a choice, because whatever else I am, I am a musician. I will always choose the song, the “yes”, over the silence of the void.

Notes

1. The tattoo was inked by Jessica Puska; very happy with her work!
2. Many thanks to Seumas Macdonald who helped to ensure the Greek was sensible and correct.

Most of my writing energies these days go to keeping Appium Pro current, so it may surprise some of my Internet people to know that I have a personal blog, where I have (with decreasing frequency) mused in long or short form on a number of topics, most recently evaluating technology from a critical philosophical perspective. Of probably even greater surprise to many would be the fact that I have a strong interest, not just in the philosophy of technology, but in the theology of technology (and indeed, theology as it relates to technology).

Personally, I grew up in and remain in the Christian tradition, though over the years my faith has become something very unlike what often goes under the adjective “Christian” in our world today (especially in the United States). If I thought you had the patience, I would heap paragraphs on top of one another critiquing contemporary “Christianity" from top to bottom. As is readily visible to anyone with the eyes to see, mostly what people mean by “Christian”, and uphold as Christians, is a set of beliefs and practices at best orthogonal to, and at worst diametrically opposed to, the teachings and actions of Jesus. But that is not what this post is about, so I will have to (uncomfortably) settle for this brief disclaimer.

This post is about the SARS-COV-2 virus, and more specifically how it is changing our culture and our theology as it rampages in pandemic form around the world. This post is also about the phenomenon of increasing virtualization of everything, even the practice of “church”. And finally, this post is about embodiment, which is under attack at this moment in history, and not only in the direct and obvious form of COVID-19. This post is primarily addressed to people who would themselves care about what church is (or is supposed to be), but others of you might find the reflections interesting as well.

VR Church

To get into this discussion, let’s talk about VR church. A year and a half ago, CNN aired a video on the new phenomenon of VR church (take the time to watch it now if you didn’t catch it earlier). The video description asks the question, “What if you didn’t have to leave your house to go to church, and all that you needed was a computer and an internet connection?” There are multiple kinds of digital church envisioned here, from the equivalent of huge video calls, to the extreme of church meetings taking place purely via the interaction of VR avatars. The basic tone of the video is: of course church could be digital and/or virtual, just like everything else! Why wouldn’t it?

The thesis I want to promote here is contrary to that position, and quite simple: VR church is not church. To be more helpful, I can rephrase in more specific language: According to the vision for humanity, and for the trajectory of humanity’s relationship with God, found in the best and most careful exegeses of the Judeo-Christian writings, the idea of a purely “virtual” or “digital” church is a contradiction in terms, because it loses sight of the intense biblical focus on the value of ordinary, embodied human existence.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and a lot for people to disagree with. To argue for the essential opposition of “church” and “virtual” that I’m proposing, we need to first make sure we understand VR, and then we need to make sure we understand Christianity’s vision for church and indeed for humanity in general.

The Nature and Purpose of VR

What is VR? As we all already know, it involves covering our sense perceptors as completely as possible with digital inputs, so that we are transported to a completely digitized reality. Today, this means mostly the covering of our eyes and ears, but in the future it will mean the wearing of special suits for tactile feedback, and potentially olfactory feedback as well. Why would anyone engage in this kind of apparently odd behavior? Proponents of VR point to any number of uses of the technology, but as far as we can tell, the primary uses today are in the realm of entertainment: gaming (first and foremost), and passive consumption of immersive content (as always with technology, pioneered by the porn industry). Other more mundane uses include team meetings, group chats, exploring houses and buildings before they are complete, “trying on” new furniture, immersive virtual shopping experiences, or virtual tourism. In the future, it is promised that VR will unlock new kinds of educational experiences, and also provide high-fidelity training for workers of all kinds.

Researchers and technologists are also excited about the prospects of VR for allowing humans to inhabit other kinds of mental states than the ones we normally do. We might, for example, use VR to teach empathy with other people’s experiences. Somebody without the use of certain limbs might regain the experience of using them through a VR interface. We might even put a person in place of an insect, and explore a range of psychological possibilities for the human brain that we have not been able to fathom yet.

One basic and obvious fact about VR that goes unmentioned is that people use VR because they think it will provide something better than “real reality” (which I will denote as RR). Either a more intense gaming experience, a more immersive media consumption experience, a shortcut for the imagination when trying to pick a color for a room, or just an escape from a dull or anxious everyday life. I’m focusing on the “entertainment” uses of VR, because these are (and always will be) the most prevalent. The use of VR, then, implies either the dissatisfaction with RR or the hope to find something better than RR, if only for a period of time. This is not so different, someone might argue, from how we currently use movies and TV shows, or indeed books. We turn to them to provide a different sort of experience for our minds, often in an intentional effort to escape our prior experience, whether out of boredom or some other motive.

Indeed, we can place VR on one end of a spectrum with a number of other developments in human history, with something like the oral tradition of epic poetry on the other end. The question for us as people wishing to analyze VR from a cultural, philosophical, or ethical perspective, becomes: what are the distinctives of VR, and do these imply a different analysis than the kind we would give about books? On the face of it, VR is certainly distinct from reading a novel. The whole point of VR is to provide complete immersion, overwhelming the senses in order to convince the user that what they are seeing is “real” (even if that “realness” is cached out in terms of an aesthetic quite different from RR, e.g., the pixelated and blocky aesthetic of Minecraft). The point of a novel is to meet the reader halfway—the author provides a sort of schema for understanding a set of descriptions, and the reader constructs an imagined experience with those pieces. The reader of a novel is still doing her own “work” to cognitively build the reality she then inhabits, whereas in VR, the reality comes of its own accord (however malleable that reality is via the user’s manipulation of it).

Movies would occupy an intermediate space between novels and VR experiences, because the filmmaker does the work of crafting a single reality for all viewers to experience, and yet each viewer sees the bounds of the screen, and knows that what is happening is that a story is being told, rather than a reality being constructed for their participation. This is the other distinctive of VR—the user actually inhabits the entertainment world in a way that the reader of a book or a viewer of a movie does not. This habitation of the virtual world brings with it a whole new set of psychological and emotional investments. Users of VR are described as merging with their avatars in a way completely unlike our experience of watching a character on a screen. Users of VR have also reported a sense of loss or dissatisfaction or disorientation with RR, upon returning from their VR excursions. Something real in our identity is given over to the VR world, as indeed can happen with the imagined worlds of novels or movies, but in a way which is much stronger and unconscious in the VR case.

Crucially, VR experiences involve the phenomenon of disembodiment in a much more significant way than other forms of media. This is quite the point of VR—to encourage a person to forget the reality experienced by their body and to invest in the reality delivered by the device. The fact that usually the user inhabits some point of view or a personal character in a VR experience might convince us to use the neologism otherbodiment instead, but the end result is the same—the dissociation of one’s mind and experience of reality from one’s concrete physical situation.

Users of VR might argue that I’m wrong about VR being disembodied, at least relatively speaking. They might point to the variety of VR games that crucially involve the use of body movements for playing the game. It’s true that compared with sitting at a desk and using a keyboard and mouse, VR games can be more kinetic (and I think this considered on its own is a good thing). However, the fact that one’s body is involved does not amount to “embodiment”. First of all, the user’s body in this case is separate from the game “body”, and used merely as a sort of controller. Secondly, the motions used for controlling VR games are (at least to this point) merely coarse-grained pantomimes or symbolic representations of real bodily action (for example, the digital version of nocking an arrow and loosing it has to be quite a bit more generic than the real thing). Finally, the use of one’s body to drive VR experiences is probably ultimately a hindrance to the delivery of the most immersive content, and will ultimately give way to neurological control according to the nature of the Device Paradigm.

We could say a lot more about VR, and we are almost in a position to give an ethical and social analysis of it on its own terms. But the point of this essay is to explore the phenomenon of VR church, so it’s time we took a look at the other side of that question—the “church” side.

The Vision of Christianity

In this essay, there is no way to give the appropriate qualifications on the meaning of the term “Christianity.” There is in actual practice of course not just one thing to which that term refers. Historically, the thousands of years of the religion’s development has seen many and sometimes conflicting variations. And yet, I would argue that we can indeed trace one thread from the Mosaic Yahwism of the authors of the Pentateuch through the prophetic ministry of Jesus of Nazareth to the current practice and tradition of at least some of modern Christianity. It is this thread, which has almost always been misunderstood in various ways, or pulled in erroneous and contradictory directions, which I mean by “Christianity.” It is this thread which I am attempting to speak on behalf of (with the appropriate amount of humility) in this essay.

What does this kind of Christianity propose is true about the world? Let me highlight the points which I take to be relevant for the current discussion in bulleted fashion here:

• Reality is good, not something to escape. God created a good (yet still “in-progress”) world, and nothing humans can do could made it a “bad” world in its essence (though the evidence is clear enough in the Bible and in our present experience that we can do an awful lot to make it worse—see the next point).

• Pain and evil are real, and real problems, and the appropriate response to their existence is to work faithfully against them with the ultimate awareness that God will not suffer them forever. We should neither fatalistically succumb to the existence of evil, nor attempt to escape and transcend it in an ultimate denial.

• The sphere of our existence is resolutely physical. We are embodied beings, living in a physical world with other embodied beings. Nothing in the Bible suggests that some kind of escape from the physical is desirable or appropriate (that idea is of Gnostic or Neoplatonic origin, and it has unfortunately been attractive to people for a very long time). The focus for ethics and even theology in the Bible is always brought back to the well-being of the earth’s creatures, considered at least physically (not denying however that the ultimate source of physical goodness is the “spiritual” goodness of appropriate relation to God).

• Humanity is basically personal, relational, and communal. We are responsible for one another as well as for the earth in general. To attempt to escape a painful or evil situation while leaving others in it would be immoral. Because humans are embodied, our ethical responsibility is first and foremost in the sphere of physical needs and well-being, all the while acknowledging the intrinsic relationship between the physical and spiritual (they do not vary freely with respect to one another).

• Human beings, and indeed all the earth’s creatures, are dependent. We are not gods ourselves, though God does want us to grow in relationship with him to the extent that we eventually become something quite different than we are today. The way to grow is by trusting in the good gifts of God despite circumstances, and indeed by suffering even death in the service of God’s creatures while remaining in that posture of trust.

• Created reality is “sticky”, and “hard”—we are to work with it, and will inevitably experience its resistance. If we fall on the ground, we will get injured. This is a part of living in an ultimately good and ordered creation, and not a result of a moral or metaphysical “Fall”. We cannot reshape reality as we see fit just by a word—that power is clearly on the side of God and not of his creatures. We are to shape reality, but only by working with the tools available within the created world (and indeed by developing new tools to help us better work with reality).

This might not sound like the Christianity you grew up in or around. It certainly would have sounded foreign to my Bible-belt-dwelling teenage self! But it is nonetheless the story the Bible paints when it is read carefully and well. Crucially, the climax of this story involves what we call the Incarnation, which is God’s act of becoming a human being. If anything could be the nail in the coffin of the Gnostic heresy of Docetism, it would be this doctrine that the supreme spiritual being chose to become a physical, flesh-and-blood human being, with all the physical and intellectual limits that implies. According to Christianity, God’s purposes never included rescuing people from physical reality, but was and is to work with human beings in physical reality, encouraging humans and all the rest of Creation to become more and more like him (i.e., creative, free, and loving).

Christianity vs VR

Now that we’ve looked at VR, and looked at what I mean by “Christianity”, we can consider the phenomenon of “VR Church” more directly. It’s true that we haven’t discussed ecclesiology (i.e., we haven’t defined “church”), but even if we take “church” to just mean something like “a group of people living out the vision of Christianity together,” it’s clear that “VR Church” is a contradiction in terms.

First of all, VR experiences are completely disembodied (or otherbodied), which undercuts the Christian emphasis on embodiment and on physical reality being the zone within which God has chosen to relate to us. What’s so bad about disembodiment? In general, I see it as having a variety of negative consequences. I’ll list a few:

• Disembodiment can discourage care of the physical world and its creatures—if we don’t inhabit that world, why would we maintain it?

• Disembodiment can distort human relationships. On one hand, the ability to present oneself in any form one chooses is a freeing experience. On the other hand, whenever I encounter someone so presented, I am not actually interacting with them. It becomes that much easier to engage in the process (not limited to VR, certainly) of mutual projection—I project onto the other person what I want them to be, and vice versa. The difference with VR is that mutual projection can continue forever—there is no rubber to meet any proverbial road in showing me who my interlocutor really is.

• Disembodiment goes hand in hand with distemporality. Space and time are essential features of our physical experience, and time is a key ingredient in most physical and psychological processes. VR experiences, like many other digital experiences, contribute to a reliance on instant gratification, which is at odds with the way RR works. In general disembodiment leads to a greater dissatisfaction with anything difficult or unpleasant, because there is no intrinsic need for difficulty in an entirely constructed world.

In fact, VR opens up a kind of new Platonic Gnosticism, giving us the power to finally be our own gods, at the cost of our universe(s) becoming totally solipsistic. Still, the ability to forge our self image with complete arbitrariness, and to experience whatever we will, whenever we will it, is intoxicating. The better the VR experience, and the more compelling our own existence in it, the more dissatisfied we will become with RR, leading to a vicious cycle of disembodiment.

Ultimately, VR is a tool, like many other technological devices, designed to help us avoid pain and death—even if the pain to be avoided is the minor pain of a daily inconvenience. The real danger of VR, from a Christian perspective, is that the price for doing so is buying into a reality that disregards what Craig Gay (in his book on modern technology) calls “ordinary embodied human existence”. This kind of existence might not hold much appeal for many people, but for the Christian, it is the kind of existence which has been stamped with the ultimate seal of value by the Incarnation. And it’s not hard to see why! On the Christian view, we are not meant to be gods (at least not without first going through a process of maturation into the character of God). Physical reality, with all its pains, toils, and rough edges, keeps us grounded in trust and dependence along the journey towards that maturity. Physical reality involving other people reminds us of our intrinsic social and ethical dimensions—we aren’t meant to live solipsistically, and sometimes we need the messiness of other people to help us see that.

So, should churches adopt VR services to reach a broader audience and increase the convenience of all involved? No, I don’t think so. The point of church is not to reach a broad audience, as if the Gospel of Jesus Christ were a marketing campaign (and obviously some people treat it just like that). Nor is convenience a spiritual virtue. Instead, churches should remember that Jesus became the first true human being so that we too could be truly human beings in a truly physical world, not to escape to a disembodied Heaven when we die. Churches should take seriously the parable of the Good Samaritan and look to the physical well-being of their neighbors, inside and outside the flock. And finally, churches should be critically aware of all the ways disembodiment can sneak in. VR services are just one end of a spectrum—what about fully remote video services? Do these differ substantially in analysis from what I argued about VR? Ultimately, I would argue they don’t. And so it is interesting to see that, despite the “fringe” nature of VR services, fully remote online services are exploding in number across the world as we speak, due to the social distancing recommendations attached to the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19

The current pandemic is unique (in my experience at least) in moving almost all social interaction online. This probably couldn’t have happened even 10 years ago, but it is now possible to use video conferencing tools successfully for a lot of social interaction. There are two questions I want to consider in this connection: first, should churches run online services, given everything we said about “VR Church”? And second, more generally, what is an appropriate Christian response to the pandemic, based on my understanding of Christianity?

My take on the first question is that remote online church services are a net negative, or maybe instead that they reveal a negative truth about what church has already been. The fact that we could, within the space of several weeks, have fully-functioning church services online without intense disruption of people’s faith lives, signals to me that most churches have already become virtual, even while meeting in their sanctuaries every Sunday. It’s not hard to believe, especially for megachurches, that actual “ordinary embodied human existence” is not a central feature of church life. Sitting as a more or less faceless member of a huge audience watching a pastor speak, or a worship leader play music on a stage, one is not actively engaging one’s ordinary embodied existence in the direction of spiritual maturity!

Let me clear about the present situation: I’m not saying that video chats with your parishioners, friends, or family during a shelter-in-place order is a bad thing. I’m grateful for the technology that lets us connect in high-bandwidth ways that keep the wheels of society from grinding completely to a halt, and I’m not suggesting that we live as Luddite hermits merely because we’re not allowed to be physically present with our friends and neighbors (although, pretty much everybody in our overly connected society would probably benefit from some screen-free solitude).

My real problem here is that, as I look around, I don’t actually see that many churches even nominally living out the vision of Christianity I framed above. As a result, for the average church, a move online is probably not going to make much of a difference to the experience of their average member. Moving everything online might, however, further sanction the kind of disembodiment I find so dangerous about VR, contributing to a naive and problematic openness to VR on the part of Christians and the wider culture. Rather than facilitating this transition, I think churches should be actively resisting it!

So, should churches continue to meet in person, in the midst of a pandemic? No, of course not. Christians should listen to scientists and doctors when they say that social distancing is the best way to care for the especially vulnerable in our society. Caring for the especially vulnerable is practically the charter of Christianity, so it would be a horrible irony if Christians valued some abstract concept of embodiment over the concrete well-being of their neighbors! Christians should be eagerly seeking advice on how best to care for others in society, and if that means staying at home and not going to church—so be it!

But of course, there are options besides just canceling church on one hand and doing a purely remote online version of a church’s normal service on the other, and this brings us into my take on the second question (about how Christians should respond to the pandemic generally). In addition to paying attention to the recommendations of trustworthy doctors and scientists, Christians should be creative in finding ways to help others in what is currently a mounting crisis not just of health but of the economy. For someone in the church’s neighboring community who has just lost a job, what they need is probably not an online church service, but cash to get them through the coming rough season. Why wouldn’t churches take their online marketing budgets and create a fund for those in need in their communities? Transferring money can be done without the risk of infection!

Or, what if churches acknowledged the fundamentally consumption-oriented model of online services, and decided to scrap the whole thing? Churches could connect smaller groups of members, who could meet in video chats where at least everyone has the sense of participating. Or, at an extreme, what if churches sold their big and expensive buildings and gave the profits to those in need, pledging to instead spin up a house-church model after the pandemic subsides? There are lots of things that churches could do, in other words, that don’t sacrifice ordinary embodied human existence even as we all abide by the social distancing policies that temporarily restrict our embodied existence in certain ways. In my awareness, however, churches in general have not been asking creative questions about what they could do along these lines, and instead have been focused mostly on asking how they can continue to do the same thing they did before, but online.

In terms of the individual Christian’s response to the pandemic, it is clear from Scripture that at the very least we should not be panic-buying and hoarding toilet paper. Instead, we trust that the God of the widow of Zarephath will provide for our needs in such a way that we can allow our neighbors their fair share—or more—of toilet paper as well. Trust is the key posture. For the Christian, there is no guarantee of happiness or health in life, or even of the continuation of life itself. A lot of things can happen in this world, and even some of the things that aren’t morally bad about the world (e.g., viruses) can kill us. The Christian merely has the confidence that the same God that made the world (and allowed for the evolution of viruses) has the power to restore life, and moreover knows each of us by name. And in the meantime, we should do all we can to prevent the kinds of bad things humans are responsible for (like poor pandemic preparedness, or the hiding of information, or the injustice in the distribution of tests and medicine, or taking advantage of people’s rights in a crisis, etc…). The virus on its own is one thing, but compounded by all kinds of human evil and thoughtlessness, it becomes something else entirely!

Conclusion

This has been a long essay indeed, so allow me to summarize what I’ve tried to communicate here: according to the kind of Christianity I take to be most authentically Christian, churches should think twice before virtualizing their operations. In fact, they should already be thinking twice about what on earth (pun!) they are doing. Churches should recover a theological focus on the value of ordinary embodied human existence to such an extent that the very idea of “VR Church” should appear to be a contradiction in terms, and they should moreover be asking what it means to value the ordinary embodied human existence of their neighbors.

In the current COVID-19 health crisis, this very regard for the embodied human existence of our neighbors implies that Christians should refrain from the kinds of embodied gatherings that could bring unintentional infection and harm to the vulnerable. This abstinence should be regarded as unfortunate and temporary, not as merely a convenient catalyst for moving to purely online delivery of church services or a slide into the normalization of a more “virtual" humanity. Finally, Christians everywhere should be praying and working for the elimination of the virus, and more importantly, the elimination of any human folly or evil that makes the impact of the virus worse than what it needs to be on its own.

My wife and I have been invited to a temple where this holy day is celebrated, the day which proclaims that death is only a hiccup of our existence. We walk to the temple amidst a sleeping city which has not altered its pattern for the sake of today’s holiness. Closer to the temple, we observe disciples in expensive clothing (a tradition I do not understand) making their way to the entrance, where we are all greeted by smiling acolytes who hand us papers on which are inscribed the details of today’s ceremony. Inside is a joyous throng of worshippers, eating more savory treats, drinking a bitter, black tea, and greeting their friends. The fine clothing is impressive, but more so the beautiful faces and radiant smiles of the crowd. In stark contrast with the streets outside the temple, there are no demons to be seen here, just the medley of colorful garments and the exuberance of the end of the fast.

The ceremony begins and we hurry to find our place in the giant indoor amphitheater. Hundreds, if not thousands, have come to celebrate this holy day, and all faces are now focused on one priest on a central stage (he is dressed like a successful merchant). He lifts his hands and calls upon the divine presence, then cedes the stage to a differently-accoutred priest holding an instrument like a lute. This second priest leads various musicians as well as the gathered audience in songs written for this annual feast. But for the words which are sung and the clothing of the audience, I would struggle to know whether I am in a temple or a house of music where the traveling bards play less holy music upon a similar stage.

Soon, a third priest (the high priest of this temple, also dressed like a merchant) takes the stage in order to deliver a speech, after the fashion of this temple and others like it. The speech reminds me of the debates of the University, if they (in foolishness) had only one participant, and if others present were mute. The audience listens in silence, and thus it is difficult for me to discern whether the priest’s speech is being met with agreement or not (as this seems to be the point of it). I see that his heart is pure in his belief, but true to his choice of clothing he wields logic like a merchant. In his effort to convince those of the throng who do not yet belong to the temple to adopt its hopes, he makes several points, and I wonder if anyone has chosen to change his mind as a result.

My own mind wanders to the story which this day celebrates, about the man who died and then was raised by divine power back to life. The high priest in his speech reminded us that the news of that man’s new life was couriered by women (in a society where they were considered insignificant). I ponder the honor given to these women in the story as my wife shares in whisper an irony: the cadre of priests at this temple consists entirely of men! So much for women bearing good news.

I am brought back to the ceremony as the cadence of the high priest’s lecture signifies that he is about to finish. The next ritual is one with which I am familiar, though at this temple it is also rife with irony. Led by yet one more priest, it re-enacts another part of the story of the resurrected man, where, at dinner with his friends, he uses bread and wine to prophesy his death. Owing to the size of the crowd, the re-enactment looks more like a display of martial discipline than a meal. Small wafers and tiny cups of sweet wine are delivered with impressive efficiency, and the worshippers swallow the bland morsels as the musicians play music designed to inspire contemplation. Truly, the music is more reminiscent of the intimacy of that first meal than the small food bits which are intended to symbolize it.

For my reflection, I contemplate death. I contemplate my fear of it and search for that seed within my belly that says death will not be the end of me. I contemplate the story of the man who was raised from the dead, and wonder at its place in history and what it means if it really happened. I contemplate the beauty of the gathered worshippers contrasted with the ugliness of the streets outside. I contemplate a world that doesn’t know what to do with death (physical or psychological), and so inflicts it on others, runs from it, or denies its reality altogether through a steadfast focus on present pleasure. This contemplation submerges me into the deep pool of longing which has always existed in the center of my being, and I am moved in wordless ways.

The amphitheater emerges back into view as the high priest returns to the stage to intone a farewell benediction, accompanied by more music. He then directs those in the audience who are parents to collect their children from a holding area. I realize for the first time that, despite the varied ages of the disciples, no children were present during the ceremony. I can only imagine that they were sequestered so as not to be bothersome, or perhaps because children are thought not to be able to understand the high priest’s lecture.

After the ceremony, we make our way to the temple doors, passing clumps of worshippers (organized by some social principle or other) discussing various topics unrelated to the rituals of the temple. Back on the streets of the city, the people we pass seem to be going about their business in ignorance of the day’s holiness, particularly those who, being deformed and unable to work, beg for money. Without further event (save for seeing several citizens wearing masks with the ears of a hare, presumably about to act in a comedy) we arrived home and began to prepare the traditional feast: a combination of morning and mid-day foods.

Science

• Honeybees are found to interact with quantum fields - a researcher noticed that bee dances trace a 2-dimensional projection of formulas of some kind of quantum math. Bee dances seemed pretty arbitrary before, and now this researcher claims that bees may be ‘in touch’ with quantum fields. If true, this would be interesting and awesome.
• Scientists find evidence that many universes exist - I’ve always thought that “many universes” is a contradiction in terms, but hey. It turns out that our particular ‘universe’ may be just one of many ‘cosmic bubbles’ colliding around in some vast ‘multiverse’. I don’t believe this yet, and won’t until people define their terms better.
• Thunderstorms generate anti-matter - powerful thunderstorms can generate crazy gamma ray bursts scientists think may be accompanied by anti-matter. That would be anti-awesome.

Philosophy

• Albert Einstein writes on science and religion - some good stuff in here, especially about the awe and surprise of finding that nature has rational foundations. Also other general philosophy of science points. I still disagree with his overall statement, which is that the historically-bound bits of religion should be discarded, since he appears to take for granted their fundamental falsity.
• Minimalism works - apparently, someone on the Internet made fun of minimalism. The article I linked is a rebuttal which I found concise and useful. Yay minimalism!

Culture

• Suburban sprawl sucks - and it’s bad for you too. I confess this was too long for me to read completely, but I did get that the author is an advocate of getting rid of zoning laws. I, too, advocate thus.
• The dangers of externalizing knowledge - this is a favorite topic of mine. What happens when we stop learning everything except how to Google? It’s possible that that is indeed the one skill which leads to success in life, and therefore will encourage social evolution to continue in the current trend. I’m just afraid that learning is a holistic process of shaping the entire person, body and soul. What happens when we postpone this shaping until we load Wikipedia? What will our unshaped minds do with that information, anyway? I could go on. Nice to see this on TechCrunch.
• Caring for your introvert - this guy makes some rather grand statements concerning introversion. Given that I’m an introvert, I’m inclined to agree with the whole ‘introverts are superior’ thing, except I know it’s false. Good article anyway, despite being overblown. I also think the Enneagram could account for a lot of what he is describing, without as much polarization (or arrogance, for that matter).

Theology

• Agnostic Christianity - doubt isn’t bad. In fact, it’s an unavoidable part of faith. Embrace and respect it!
• The Seven: not exactly deacons - what happens when the Apostles decide they’re too important to wait tables? God uses the waiters instead. Or something like that… some good potential pastor-skewering in these passages.

Food

• A coder’s guide to coffee - I am a coder and I love coffee. Therefore, I love this article. I just need to find a way to roast my own beans in Oxford…
• L-Theanine in tea and not coffee - apparently this amino acid enables our bodies to use caffeine in a much more zenly awesome way. Where is it naturally found? Not coffee (damn!) but tea. If I used coffee as a mind hack, maybe I’d switch to tea. Unfortunately, I drink coffee because (a) it tastes really good, and (b) I’m physically and psychologically addicted to it. Oh well.
• A hacker’s guide to tea - If I were to switch this is the guide that I’d use! One thing I particularly liked: camomille is not real tea! Ha, I always knew camomille sucked.

Random

• Trimensional - a 3d scanner for the iphone. I haven’t tried it, but… really cool idea! I’m also not sure what I’d do with a 3d model of my face. I’m also not sure why they used the guy they did for the screenshots. Yikes!
• How to draw an owl - Click through and see the picture. Hilarious. And also a good prompt for discussion. So often, what is left out of how-to guides is: “now, practice x for thousands of hours”.

The story of today’s marathon started almost exactly two years ago in March of 2007, when I first spent time at the Tumaini Children’s Home in Nyeri, Kenya. It was there I volunteered during the creation of Hope Runs. At that time, we decided to train some of the older students (including a student named Karicho, who comes into the story later) for a marathon in June. Although I had to go back to the states before the June marathon, I decided to continue the marathon training I’d accidentally fallen into, and run the San Francisco marathon (which happened, fortuitously for solidarity with my Kenya friends, to be on the same day as the marathon the students were running in Kenya). My training was abruptly ended, however, when an injury in the Achilles tendon area that I developed on the long runs became so painful and unhealthy-feeling that I decided I couldn’t run the race. This Achilles problem already had the makings of a chronic injury - it had first arisen over a year prior, at that time also halting some athletic training and being a part of the inspiration that (perhaps ironically) led to my sabbatical time in Kenya.

When I knew that I was going to return to Kenya in October 2007 to volunteer for 6 months and train for the Kilimanjaro marathon, again with Hope Runs students, I decided to get physical therapy to figure out my almost-literal Achilles heel. Armed with more knowledge and rehab exercises as a result, I was confident that plenty of time and not running on pavement would lead to a successful marathon. Again, my goal in running the Kilimanjaro marathon was primarily to have something to work towards with the Hope Runs students, and also to run to the best of my ability. Since the Kilimanjaro marathon was at elevation and quite hilly, I had no expectations of a fast race. Soon enough, I was in Kenya, training with the coach, Titus, and everyone else. Although my ankle problem arose a few times, and even once prevented me from running a 30k race in Nairobi, for the most part it seemed to have gone away, and I was hopeful that I had worked through it.

Well, a month before the race, I got word that my sister was going to have a wedding on March 3 - the day after the Kilimanjaro marathon. Attending these two events was therefore mutually exclusive, and so I left for the states before I could run the marathon. Fortunately (and echoing the previous year), I discovered that the Napa Valley Marathon was on March 1, the same day as the Kili marathon. Once again, I was excited to run a marathon in the US on the same day as my friends in Kenya (including Karicho and fellow volunteers from Palo Alto Michael and Emilee, with now-girlfriend Jessica acting as videographer). My first run back in the States was 4 or 5 days before the marathon, and was a simple 7-miler. Unfortunately, whether it was running on pavement or the leg trauma of sitting on planes for 2 days, my Achilles problem came back in a serious way, making it extremely painful even to walk. On the day before the race, I went for a test jog and came back limping, in no state to run 5 miles let alone 26. Deeply frustrated, I called the Napa race coordinators and asked if they could roll my registration to next year. Of course, I didn’t know if there would be a next year in terms of my running, but at least it left the window open.

At the time, though, having to forgo the race I’d trained 4 months in Kenya for was a huge disappointment, and certainly created some bitterness and resentment (offset, I have to admit, by the happiness in being a part of my sister’s wedding, and then a few days later hearing I was accepted to Oxford). But this resentment: toward whom? Not myself, really; I’d done everything I could and knew how to do, and I’d trained well. Toward circumstances, or God, I guess. Now, I’m not the sort of person who, believing God exists and cares for people, holds God to be directly responsible for pleasant “coincidences” (Oh, darn [good religious people will say ‘darn’ rather than ‘damn’] I lost my keys. Where are they? God, help me find me keys! Oh, look, here they are! God, thank you for bringing my keys back!) The danger in this way of thinking isn’t, to my mind, believing that God can and does interact with people on small, everyday levels. The problem is, if God is responsible for pleasant coincidences, what do we say about the unpleasant ones? If we say the unpleasant ones happen by chance, what is there to distinguish their causal histories from the pleasant ones’ causal histories that could lead us to belief that God causes the pleasant and not the unpleasant? The only difference seems to be our definition of ‘pleasant’, which seems like it has a lot more to do with us than God. In which case, we attribute finding our lost keys to God on the pain of also having to attribute to him our losing them in the first place. But my main point is, it sure is easy to turn general gratitude into specific attribution, and general frustration into specific blame. And, counter to my own beliefs, I probably blamed God for some of my misfortune.

So much for that theodical interlude. (And by the way, the God-statements I have made and will make in these reflections are by no means intended to stand on their own, in terms of rational justifiability, for those of you who care about such things [and you all should]. End disclaimer). Anyway, time passed, things happened, I didn’t go to Oxford in October 2008 as I’d hoped, and I realized that I was still signed up for the 2009 Napa marathon. Alright, I thought to myself, this time I’m gonna do it. Third time’s the charm. I’m gonna train the hell out of this marathon, be super smart about my Achilles, and make it happen. I started looking at training programs to follow, and it occurred to me that I could take advantage of the easy Napa course and train for a specific time. Ultimately, I became enamored with the idea of running the marathon in the 3:10 - 3:20 range, with 3:10 (a 7:15 minute-per-mile pace) being the Boston qualifying cutoff for my age group (a significant benchmark in marathon running), and 3:20 being a respectable 7:37 minute-per-mile pace. At the start of my training, my 10k pace was 7:15 or so (and 6 miles is a far cry from 26), but I figured with 5 months I could improve significantly.

What I’m trying to convey with all of these details is that I wasn’t just training to run a marathon: I was training to run a marathon that would make up for both of the previous “Did Not Start” marathons in virtue of the achievement that it represented for me as a runner. If I could run a 3:10 marathon, I would be a ‘real runner’ (never mind the relativity of ‘real’, and never mind that ‘real runners’ run marathons at paces as low as 4:48). In order to do this, and in order to not get injured, I knew that I’d have to follow the program rigorously (skimping on the mid-week runs was a previous source of injury on long runs), and treat my body very well. In short, I needed to be a kind of athlete that I’d never been in my life: disciplined and dedicated. I was looking forward to race day with great anticipation, believing that it would prove that I (even I, nerdy little Jonathan Lipps), could accomplish something significant in a sport.

So I did train. I was religious in my running. I did treat my body well, with clean and abundant vegetarian carbs and proteins, and almost-weekly massages. And wonder of wonders, I saw improvement. Amidst the pain and boredom, I was getting faster and stronger. I was training on pavement, yet my ankles were holding up. I was noticing that I could hold sub-7 paces for multiple miles, which I’d never done before. My long runs were hard of course, but that struggle was familiar, and soon I had reached the peak of training - my 22-mile long run - and finished it without injury.

Unfortunately, as we know from all sports movies, after the pump-up training montage, there comes a chilling moment when the true challenge is unveiled - maybe the star player leaves the team exposed, or the opposing side employs some dastardly trickery. The Kryptonite to my Supermarathon was unleashed 2 weeks ago, on my ‘cool down’ long run of 18 miles. Maybe it was the waterlogged shoes (it was raining for most of the run), a different lacing style, or the lack of massage that week, or maybe it was just God making a sports movie, but my Achilles pain came back hard. Between miles 11 and 15 I suffered through various amounts of pain on the back of my left ankle, but it eventually became so sharp and fiery I knew it wasn’t worth pushing through. In fact, maybe I had already pushed through too much. When I woke up the next morning after icing and rest, and found that I could barely walk on it, I knew I was in trouble. A mere 12 days to the marathon, and I couldn’t walk. How was I going to recover in time? What about the tuning runs? Etc…

It was a depressing few days, as the ghosts of old frustrations haunted the new ones and as they all haunted me. Jessica (who incidentally and wonderfully had her best long run on the same day I got injured) was hard-pressed to keep me positive and not to despair. Determined not to give in to the same failure as in previous years, I did everything I could to heal the ankle. I iced and rested and elevated and compressed, and hoped and prayed that with almost two weeks of healing, I could be back in shape by marathon time. Slowly, I did feel things improve, and soon I was walking on the ankle without noticing any pain. In the week before the marathon, I decided that I needed to keep up my aerobic activity, and even chanced a few elliptical workouts, without any adverse reactions. I felt, basically, that remaining positive and doing everything I could to treat my injury well was working!

The marathon drew nearer. Early the day before, my parents drove Jessica and me up to Napa, where we were all going to spend the night before the race. That whole day I focused on managing my pre-race nutrition, stretching, massaging, and resting. Although my ankle felt good and strong, the barest of ghost pains still lingered when I would use it in different ways, keeping doubt a live option. Additionally, a light but consistent rain was predicted to start falling, and to remain all the way through the marathon. Given that the last time I ran a long run in consistent rain was when I ruined my Achilles, I was a bit worried about this prospect. The fact that the always-helpful Weather Underground wind direction indicators said that we would have a 10-15 mph headwind for the whole way was just one more worry to try and shove aside.

While I’m being honest about the worry, I really was engaged in positive thinking about the race. I couldn’t do anything about the rain, the wind, or even (anymore) my ankle. I had eaten and drunk exactly what I was supposed to, and I had trained exactly how I was supposed to (well, until I was injured). Aside from the circumstances out of my control, I was in as good a shape as I could possibly be. I knew that I was at least going to start the race, and give it my best shot. The question of what I would do if I started to feel my injury during the race would come into my mind from time to time, but I would ignore it, since trying to answer it wouldn’t have fit the positive spirit I was trying to cultivate. And eventually, it was time to sleep. After a bit of tossing and turning, it was 4:30 AM. Marathon Day.

Jessica and I dressed and ate what we needed, then packed up the car for our 5:30 departure to the start of the marathon on the Silverado Trail. As we drove, the rain beat on the windshield, and falling leaves betrayed the presence of the predicted steady wind. Somewhat anticlimactically, we had to stop and unceremoniously hurry out of the car because of the traffic control situation. A brief hug each and we were walking the last few blocks to the start. Excitement started to dawn with the sun - we were doing this! After stowing our sweat bags and finding inappropriate places to relieve ourselves before the swiftly-approaching start time, Jessica and I gathered near the line and waited the last 5 minutes. In what seemed like the next instant, a fire engine bell sounded to mark the start of the marathon, and we were off!

My first few strides were cautious, then more confident, and then exuberant, as I felt my body falling into my warm-up pace, with no noticeable discomfort in my ankle! My eyes welled up with tears of gratitude as I realized that all of the physical and mental and emotional buildup of the past 5 months had finally culminated in this one moment. I had persevered through the injury that had killed my previous marathon attempts, and I was running the race!

Soon enough, I was focused on the running, checking my pace, waiting to hit my post-warm-up 7:10 average pace. The rain was constant but light, the hills frequent but mellow, and I was enjoying being out on the road again. I saw my parents (who were playing crew for us) at mile 4 and mile 7, and was so happy to be waving, smiling, and running strong as I passed them. Their thoughts and prayers and concerns had been with me for two weeks, and I could tell they were elated I was OK.

Somewhere around mile 10, everything changed. A slight flutter in my left Achilles reminded me of my injury there. I took the pace down a notch and tried to breathe easier. That twinge had brought reality to my race - if I took it easier, could I stave off the inevitable excruciating pain and still finish in a good time? I already felt that 3:10 was out of reach. Backing off my target pace at all, I wasn’t going to make it. But that’s OK, I thought: better to run the whole marathon than become injured and have to quit. Before too long, these thoughts became moot. In less than a half mile, the twinge became the full blown expression of painful injury that I had rested two weeks to avoid. It was back, and I hadn’t even finished half the race! Inside, I howled with anger and frustration. All of the gratitude and elation of the start evaporated. My gait became uneven as I tried to take a bit of weight I could off my left foot. The continuous bank of the road, in one direction or another, became a serious problem in this effort. But, I was still moving.

At 11.5 miles (my average pace now up to 7:36), I saw my parents, and stopped in pain. They grieved to see I wasn’t doing well, but I wasn’t ready to quit just yet. I told my dad that I didn’t think I’d be able to finish the race, but I could try and make it to mile 15 (the last place I thought I’d see my parents along the course, and the last chance I’d have for a ride out). In the meantime, with nothing to lose anymore, and hopes of a decent finishing time obliterated, I took the time to take off my waterlogged left shoe, which I figured was a major cause of the recurrence of my Achilles injury. I replaced it with a dry sock and a dry training shoe, and took off again.

The dry shoe did little to help, but it was a bit more comfortable as I settled into my awkward running style. As the pain in my tendon grew worse, I tried to put less and less weight on it, until I’m sure I looked like someone trying to make a funny impression of a cantering horse rider. A few people asked if I was alright, but of course there was nothing anyone could do. It was me stupidly running with an injury, after all! I tried to hum some songs, play mind games, or do anything to take my thoughts off the pain (and more than the pain, the frustration of training 5 months - really 2 years - only to be defeated once again).

It was in that state, around mile 14, that I noticed someone running on the other side of the road, against the direction of the marathon. As he got closer, I recognized him as none other than my friend Karicho, from Kenya! A few months ago, he had been sponsored to come to the states to live with Michael and go to school here. Seeing him, I realized that he, Michael, and Emilee must have driven up from Palo Alto that morning to surprise Jessica and I and support us on our run! That alone was enough to bring tears to my eyes, but then remembering all the training runs Karicho and I had been on together in Kenya (including my first Nyeri run, in the pitch dark early morning over hilly dirt roads with the smell of charcoal fires sleeping), remembering what marathoning really stood for in terms of my life history (solidarity with the Tumaini kids), and seeing that here was a Tumaini kid in Napa, running cheerfully in the rain, just to make my run feel better, in a remarkable and humbling role reversal… I have to pause right now while writing this because of the potent emotion still alive in that memory!

None of that, nor Karicho’s unworried acceptance of the fact I was injured (as if it didn’t really change anything) took away the pain or frustration of what I was experiencing. It did make me see it in a different light. I felt a bit calmer, more resigned. And as we neared mile 15, I asked Karicho if he could run ahead and ask my dad to get out the ace bandage I’d left with him that morning. I showed up at the mile marker and saw my mom and dad, but also Emilee and Michael, smiling and cheering me on. Their presence lifted my spirits, and I asked them to help bandage up my left ankle to see if it would help. It didn’t really feel like it at the time (I was concerned with the details of the bandaging), but that was the point where I actually decided to run the marathon. 5 months prior, I had decided to run a marathon. On every day of training that had led up to the race, I had decided to run a marathon. Even that morning, I had decided to run a marathon. But it wasn’t until mile 15, when all hopes of running a good marathon, an impressive marathon, a fun marathon, or an easy marathon were dashed, that I decided to run this marathon. It was, unfortunately, the only marathon left for me to run. And so I had to decide whether I wanted to quit, go home, train again, and try some other time for the marathon I desired, or whether I was going to accept all of the things outside of my control, and finish what I started, even though it wouldn’t be perfect (or even good), and even though it would hurt a lot.

I think it was a powerful decision, and the turning point in this whole story. The marathon finally went from being something that I played with in my mind and dreamed about, to something that burned me with its harsh reality. It went from being a sports science project to an insurmountable personal challenge. In short, it became what marathons are, in terms of their potential for psychological and spiritual growth: dragons needing slaying. When I started the race, I wasn’t on a quest, but I was now. I was on a quest to survive, and surviving meant moving my injured ass 11 more miles, over hills and through rain.

That is what I did. And believe me, it was hard. I’ll spare you the dramatic play-by-play of the last half of the race, because it would go something like this: Ouch ouch ouch shit ouch ouch ouch fuck ouch ouch shit ouch damn this marathon ouch ouch. Etc… The worst part about it was that, shortly after mile 15, my ankle injury became the least of my worries. My muscles, perhaps overtired because of the heavy shoes and my inhuman gait, basically stopped responding. My heart rate, perhaps because of what I was trying to demand from my unresponsive muscles, skyrocketed to something absurd for the pace at which I was moving. And my nerves kept receiving messages from my unresponsive muscles that told my brain that I was in hell.

None of this made sense to me, after having run long training runs of up to 22 miles without any problem. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and nothing I did could fix it. This was an unexpected pain - not my ankle injury but a full-body sensation that I should not be doing this. I drank gatorade, ate bananas and Gu, and walked when the pain became unbearable. Uphill, downhill, it was all the same to me - there was no difference in pain. I stopped occasionally to re-wrap my ace bandage, and wanted to sit down, cry, and lament my misfortune. But I knew I could stop at any time, and I knew that sitting down wouldn’t get me any closer to the finish line. So through the last monotonous 6 miles of rain and wind I trudged, no longer limping because my brain had stopped registering my ankle as hurting. Instead, everything was hurting.

My walking became more frequent, and I felt more and more out of it, until finally I came to the last mile. Whatever else happens, I said to myself, I am going to run the last fucking mile of this stupid fucking marathon. So I stopped walking, picked up my quads (I swore I could almost see the invisible knives sticking out of my flesh), told my hamstrings to stop their senseless cramping, and hobbled along in the best imitation of a run I could physically manage. Right then, Karicho came gliding up beside me, where he told me he’d just come from Jessica (as it turns out, he left her at mile 18), and was timing himself to the finish. Then he sped off, leaving everyone around me a bit angry at his effortless stride.

My marathon was not over, however. I hammered through the last turns and eventually found myself in sight of the finish chute. I picked up a little speed as I tumbled through the narrow alley toward the finish, and smiled when I heard my parents and friends shouting for me from the side. And then, with one innocuous little step, somehow so different from the one before, it was done. 4:08:23. A 9:29 pace.

After that, my only thoughts were, when can I sit down? And, when can I sleep? I got some hot soup and stayed on my legs for a while longer, though, as we waited for Jessica, and cheered her as she came across the finish, mastering her own marathon monster.

It wasn’t until we had gone back to the hotel, packed up, checked out, and driven back to San Francisco that I was really able to reflect on the race. You can probably believe that the neat way I’ve described my feelings and choices during the race doesn’t accurately depict my thoughts when they happened. It was only really in sorting through things shortly afterward that I realized what it was exactly that I accomplished. That moment of choosing to persevere, even though I had every excuse not to, was an important step for me. It was important, I think, in two ways. First, it was important for my personal growth. I have sometimes had a habit of quitting, leaving, or otherwise expressing displeasure or poor sports attitudes when things look like they’re not going to go the way I want. Not today. Secondly, and more importantly, today’s race helped me understand a tiny bit of what it means to suffer. Granted, it was an artificial environment, and I could have ended my suffering at any point, but what if things were different? What if I couldn’t just ‘quit’? I’d like to know that I have the ability to persevere, and this marathon will help in giving me that confidence.

It’s thoughts like these that turn my wondering back to God. God certainly didn’t answer any of my initial prayers. My prayers were based on my desires, for good weather, healing, and fast times. I didn’t get any of those. But apparently, I did come to one or two significant life realizations that will likely reverberate throughout my personal growth and maturation experience for a long time to come. If you ask me which God would probably care more about - positive experiences on one hand and authentic growth through hardship on the other - it seems that I’d have to say the latter. And here we come back to our discussion about attributing to God the finding of the lost keys: if there’s anything that I do want to attribute to God, it’s his tendency to put people in situations where they are forced to choose how to grow. A lot of pain in this world is senseless and a lot of evil is hard (or impossible for us) to explain on a theistic worldview, and I’m not trying to enter that discussion. What I am trying to say is that maybe we should look for God’s hand, not primarily or only in pleasant experiences (though it is there as well, no doubt at all), but in the ‘momentary’ pains that cause redemptive growth in human beings and in nature.

First marathons, at any rate, seem to be great ways of coming into contact with those ‘momentary’ pains (though I promise they feel like eternal pains). At least, that’s what mine was for me.

Last week, I saw The Dark Knight. It was incredible, easily the best movie I’ve seen in the last year and probably in my Top 10 overall. It had a wonderful balance of action, good writing, amazing acting, thoughtful plot, and provocative questions. The questions it raises (and answers?) are, as you would expect from a good Batman movie, all about justice and violence and how much of the latter is permitted in search of the former.

A few months ago, that would have been all I perceived in the film. Recently, however, I’ve been going through René Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, since I’d wanted to get a taste of his thought through one of his books rather than from a secondary source like Walter Wink. Anyway, I was nearly done with the book when I saw The Dark Knight, and was surprised when I saw the film explode with new meaning for me, unlocked by Girard’s concepts! I thought a brief exposition of the connections could be illuminating (and maybe inspire someone to read Girard, whom I now believe to be one of the most important thinkers of our time).

Attempting a one-paragraph introduction to Girard’s theses is silly, but here we go: his main idea is that there is a hidden principle that ties together all of human society, which stems from the fact that as creatures we are prone to mimetic desire, that is, we are prone to mimicking others’ desires, or desiring what others have. This naturally creates ever-building conflicts (which he calls scandals), and these scandals mount and mount until a moment when there is so much intrasocietal tension that people come to the verge of the “war of all-against-all”, since the only logical conclusion of “mimetic rivalry” is murder. In order to prevent such a catastrophic degradation into pure bestiality and to restore order, Girard thinks these tensions and energies are collectively focused in a spontaneous and unanimous redirection to a swift and violent “war of all-against-one”. This “one” is referred to as the scapegoat, initially demonized then subsequently divinized for his “ability” (through sacrifice) to bring calm to the community. This whole process, Girard says, is ritualized and then mythologized in such a way that the actual violent mechanism (the “single victim mechanism”) is veiled and invisible to the contemporary participants then the later receivers of the mythological tradition. In other words, the citizens who pick up the stones actually believe that the one they are about to murder, even though a moment ago he was one of the crowd, is now worthy of death.

Girard goes on to base some astonishingly profound claims on top of this foundation, which are worth exploring further if you have the time to read his work. He also supports his powerful anthropological claim in a way that I clearly don’t have the space to outline here - it truly is amazing when he examines the myths of the ancient world and compares them to the stories from the Judeo-Christian tradition (which he thinks is the only tradition to see and expose the single victim mechanism for what it is - a second-rate and temporary solution to the main problem of human existence). Of particular interest for Christians, he unlocks a new and compelling way of reading Jesus’ words and the history of early Christianity radically nonviolently, particularly the Crucifixion. (Girard loves treating Jesus’ willing death, not so much a “blood sacrifice” in the sense as all the other ritual sacrifices which mask the single victim mechanism, but as an action that looks enough like it to dupe the “principalities and powers” into triggering the mechanism, only for it to backfire via the Resurrection and Jesus’ powerful exposition of their hidden secret for maintaining power). Finally, Girard thinks that in our modern society, thanks to the insights of Christianity, we tend to be characterized by “concern for victims” rather than a subconscious willingness to sacrifice them.

Obviously, a lot more could be said, but sooner or later we have to get to The Dark Knight. In the movie, Batman is wrestling with some essentially Girardian questions (common to superheroes, it seems). He sees the fundamental problem of society (Gotham) clearly - disorder, violence, and inaction, and attempts to counter these problems with his own brand of nonlethal (rather than lethal or nonviolent) crime-fighting. He soon discovers, unfortunately, that his actions only heighten the tension and spawn nemeses of greater caliber. This corresponds, I’d say, to Girard’s description of the multiplication of scandals and the move to a breaking point.

The breaking point comes in the form of the Joker, a mysterious individual who describes himself primarily as an agent of chaos, which is extremely interesting in a Girardian sense given that “chaos” is exactly what the single victim mechanism evolved to counter - so already we can imagine that perhaps one of the Joker’s roles in the film will be to instigate this societal mechanism. In fact, he does this on a number of occasions! His favorite games all seem to involve forcing supposedly-upright citizens into situations where it looks like sacrificing one (or a few) of their number will bring calm and restore order (the call to murder the Wayne Enterprises employee about to reveal the identity of Batman, the ferry dilemma, his speech to Harvey Dent, etc…). In other words, he is inviting the triggering of the single victim mechanism, even explicitly, as a way for Gotham to regain peace. But tellingly, this “peace” is only temporary - the next day, the Joker will be back with another escalation of tension and another demand. This is exactly how Girard describes the single victim mechanism - a violent and temporary reduction of societal tension.

It’s also interesting to examine the Joker in the light of Girard’s thoughts about Satan as the principle (rather than the “person” - Girard doesn’t want to award Satan with real existence-in-himself) behind mimetic violence (the violence generated by mimetic desire and resulting in the single victim mechanism). Girard sees Satan as maintaining power precisely through the operation of this mechanism (as the Joker does).

Another of the themes in the movie is Batman’s wrestling with the Joker’s argument that they are basically the same. Nemeses, true, but both costume-wearing crazies: one out to promote order and the other to destroy it. It seems that the Joker’s argument is really intended as a temptation for Batman to give in and use the same tools as his enemy (using lethal rather than nonlethal force). Girard’s theory speaks to this situation as well, when he talks about “mimetic rivalry”. Two people who desire the same thing eventually become hard-and-fast rivals - that much is pretty obvious. But he also explains that two rivals, supposedly different in every sense, through their intense rivalry generate a fundamental likeness as they are consumed by their rage against each other and eventually become beings with one main characteristic: the desire to defeat the other. And so the Joker invites Batman to succumb to this cycle, to descend into the facelessness of mimetic rivalry where the combatants have more in common with each other (via their combat) than not.

In all of this, Batman has to make decisions about whether to play the game offered by the Joker (and indeed, it seems the only option), or whether to reject the Joker’s starting assumptions. These questions are put not just to him, but to all the people of Gotham, especially in the ferry trial. The options: order at the cost of other people’s lives, or pure chaos (everybody dies). It seems sadly obvious to us, the viewers, that the former option is better than the latter. But Batman (and the people on the boats) decide to believe in a third option - the path of nonviolence and the willingness to be sacrificed. Of course, that path doesn’t always lead to a happy ending - though it did in the movie because of Batman’s skill in trapping the Joker.

But how does that help us? What if we were in the same situation, except without a Batman to perform our miracles? This is where faith in God is put to the test (or rather, where faith in God puts him to the test), and we find out what Jesus (and so many other innocent victims) felt like before being torn apart by the mob… But perhaps I should leave that an open question!

Well, I hope I’ve made it clear that there are some cool resonances between The Dark Knight and Girard’s theories. I haven’t done any research or exploration to see if the writers / director of the movie have read Girard or intentionally used any of his ideas in making the movie. Either way, The Dark Knight stands as a powerful representation of these important themes, and asks us to confront within ourselves questions about violence, scapegoating, and sacrifice.