Human & Ecclesial Koinonia vs The Whole Virtual Schtick: More an Either-Or than a Both-And
An online foray against most things online may understandably be viewed as an incongruous, even hypocritical maneuver, but the more I contrast the days of my long past youth with the season of my senectitude the more forcefully does it strike me that endless hours parked before a computer screen, feverishly checking emails, surfing from site to site hoping that the next article will speak the definitive word on whatever issue is bugging one’s mind at the time, and sometimes leaving behind comments that so often do no more than fuel an already overflowing supply of ill will are actions that cut drastically at the roots of human wellbeing. ‘It is not good for man to be alone’ is a truth whose scope extends far beyond the estate-cum-covenantal relationship-cum-sacrament of holy matrimony. In past decades people talked to one another in bus queues, neighbours routinely visited on the street in pleasant and not so pleasant weather, and even telephone calls could seem an artificial and unsatisfying form of personal interaction. Libraries were occupied by men and women of all ages who took actual books and magazines into their hands, took notes with pen and paper, and routinely chatted with each other over coffee in the canteen. Nowadays, though, ‘Everything is virtual, saith the Preacher,’ yea, everything is vanity.
Among those websites still worth the surf an exalted position belongs to a publication entitled The European Conservative, which just featured a stunning article detailing how online addiction has fuelled a pandemic of catastrophic loneliness, especially among young men around the world who should be energetic contributors to the public good, occupied in courting and marrying young women, founding families, and exercising a protective role towards the very young and the very old, upholding the pillars of society. True evangelism, involving impartation of the spoken and sacramental Gospel and blossoming in the engrafting and reordering of warped lives onto the living Vine of the Una sancta perpetuo mansura is the only viable remedy for the cruel malady here described: Social Isolation is a Global Health Crisis ━ The European Conservative
Of course, beneficial and worthwhile human communal life also exists in the midst of this fallen world even apart from its soaring into the limitless skies of Christ’s Church on both sides of the altar, even though such wholesome existence in the areas tended by God’s Left Hand often either flows from the true Societas Iesu or tends towards it. I think of my years in the Young Socialist section of the British Labour Party that saw me spend some time in a small mining community a few miles north of my hometown. I have vivid memories of afternoons and evenings spent in a Working Men’s Club peopled by blue collar workers and their wives, featuring strong Northern ales downed cheerfully but not to excess, to the accompaniment of intelligent conversation carried out in a spirit of goodwill and in a marked absence of the crude even foul language that seems these days to be a sine qua non of verbal communication. As a doctoral student I once preached at the Sunday evening service of a Methodist congregation in a mining community in County Durham: goodness, those men and women were real Menschen, short on worldly goods but sharing in treasures that make life in straitened circumstances not only bearable but actually enjoyable. Bless my soul, those Methodists actually believed in Jesus and enjoyed belting out Charles Wesley hymns in celebration of that fact. I wish I had made more such excursions at that time, and with reddening face I regret pompously parading around before those good folks in my Oxford master’s gown. A while ago I surprised a house guest by singing all three stanzas of the Red Flag after supper, likely inflicting sheer agony on his ears since he is an exquisite musician while I am at least half tone deaf. As to the Red Flag (sung to O Tannenbaum), gadzooks I still kinda believe it!
These days, alas, the small town of Horden where I visited that Working Men’s Club has fallen on cruelly hard times. Margaret Thatcher and ‘eco-sensitivity’ having closed down the coal mining industry, Horden’s population is severely depleted, with many of those who remain chained to unemployment, alcoholism, drug addiction, family breakdown, and all that ‘good stuff’. Such is the price we pay for ‘progress’, I suppose: Inside the 'ghost town' where three-bed houses are on the market for just £5,000 | Daily Mail Online
Coming from a background such as my own, my political philosophy presents an unstable combination impossible on the North American continent but completely understandable for one born and raised in England’s Northeast, a Church and Queen Tory passionately loyal to Charles III whose hand I would kiss at the drop of a hat and a Labourite suspicious of ‘toffs’ and inclined to advocate for the underdog lodged within a single breast. Such a set of attitudes does not easily fit within the programme of any party north or south of the longest unguarded border in the world.
True community, a sine qua non commodity viciously denied during the hideous totalitarian season of covid ‘lockdown’, is ultimately fueled by the beating of Jesus’ Heart which we may experience not by reading books or surfing the web but only in the Divine Service of the spoken and sacramental Gospel whose climax begins when, at the Consecration, our Lord’s pierced but miraculously living Heart beats on the corporal set on the altar before the celebrant. No systematician has ever expressed this truth with the cogent conviction contained in the fifth stanza of Fr Reinhardt’s singable poem printed below (My Light and My Salvation, 2nd ed., p. 40):
From Mary’s Womb Each Beat of Jesus’ heart
From Mary’s womb each beat of Jesus’ heart
Did call upon His Father from the start,
It interceded for us in our plight
To save the world from sin’s eternal night.
Its anguished cries rose ceaselessly on high,
Until they hung Him on the cross to die;
With hands in love outstretched there to entreat,
It prayed with groans until its final beat.
The Father heard Him for His many cries,
And from the silent tomb bid Him to rise;
Then in the linen cloth on lifeless rock
Once more His heart pled for His frightened flock.
That heart in triumph has gone up to stand
In heaven’s highest court at God’s right hand;
Its rhythmic beat will continue to pray
Until the dawning of the judgement day.
Lest you in sin should doubt this to be true,
See on this altar how it beats for you,
As Jesus’ heart once more on linen lies
In flesh and blood appealing to the skies.
Come now with haste to His beseeching heart;
It will embrace you and all love impart,
Your own heart then will keep time through this feast,
With the impassioned heart pleas of your Priest.
Kurt E. Reinhardt
The 24th Wednesday after Pentecost AD 2007