Primal Technologies

I'm reading Understanding Media (1964) by Marshall McLuhan as a way of better understanding Flickering Pixels (2009) by Shane Hipps--a book which I fell in love with and will be facilitating discussion of in August. Hipps gives major props to McLuhan (known and perhaps misunderstood for his phrase "the medium is the message") early on in the book as a prophet of our current technological malaise--we can do seemingly all things, but we remain largely blissfully unaware of what all we've signed over of ourselves in the process. So Hipps, following McLuhan, is looking for ways of recalibrating our symbiotic relationships with our technologies, such that we remain masters rather than servants and users rather than worshipers.

McLuhan was writing in the early days of the "electric age," when television and film were on the rise, when computers filled rooms and launched objects into space. It's hard in such times not to settle into starry-eyed wonder or horror-filled apprehensions about new technologies, but McLuhan managed to step back far enough to put the electric age in context. He argues that in the same way that technologies have always served to simultaneously extend and render obsolete human capacity--the wheel, for example, extended the capacity of the foot but made walking embarrassingly quaint--the electric age is distinct in its extension of not just our limbs and senses but our central nervous system. In the electric age, he suggests, it's possible to relocate all sensory experience and its interpretation outside of ourselves. We've given ourselves external hard drives. We conduct our lives increasingly not directly but through avatars. Whoah.

To embrace the thesis of either Understanding Media or Flickering Pixels requires embracing an expanded definition of technology. That's given some of my friends, particularly those who consider themselves especially spiritual, a great deal of pause. Both McLuhan and Hipps would argue that our spirituality can be understood technologically; for example, to be Jewish is to have adapted our spirituality through the technology of Torah, so that the Ten Commandments organize our ethics, and the stories of the Patriarchs establish for us how we relate to one another, to God and to the world. To be Christian is to extend the technology of Torah via the New Testament, so that now instead of hearing "Thou shalt not kill" and thinking that murder is bad, we hear "Thou shalt not kill" and consider it wrong to harbor hate for another person. The technology of the gospel--Jesus' life and death and resurrection and ascension--eliminates the need for the more complex technology of Torah; as the writer of Hebrews suggests, Jesus becomes our once-for-all high priest, and his once-for-all sacrifice fulfills the ongoing sacrificial system prescribed in the Old Testament.

So our formal relationship with God is a function of a kind of technology. So, arguably, are our relations with one another. If, as McLuhan suggests, technological advances are propogated as a solution to some perceived stress, then it's reasonable to perceive marriage, as presented in Torah and elaborated on in the New Testament, as a kind of technology. "It's not good for the man to be alone," says God, and so God takes one of the man's ribs and makes a helper for him--literally an extension of his person, flesh of his flesh. The apostle Paul is quick to remind us that thereafter man comes from woman, so that the technology of relationship is truly symbiotic. This technology becomes totalizing: to separate a marriage is to tear it asunder, and to isolate individuals from a larger community is to subject them to "excessive sorrow" (2 Cor 2:7).

Sin, it's often observed, separates. The person who sins created distance between herself and God, herself and other persons, even herself and herself. The sinner experiences what Adam and Eve experienced: exclusion from the garden of Eden, where fellowship with God was direct and intimate. The sinner experiences what Cain experienced: restless wandering with no friends, a punishment that is "more than I can bear" (Gen 4:13). So the engine of the technology that God extends to us is reconciliation. The gospel extends our reach, so that we can once again have direct interaction with God. The gospel recalibrates our vision of one another, so that we're not competitors for God's affection but members of God's body, bricks in God's temple, priests in God's court.

But reconciliation is totalizing, as well. We are instructed by Jesus to pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." We are encouraged by Jesus to leave our gifts to God on the altar when we're not yet reconciled to the people God has connected us to. We're confronted by the apostle John with the notion that to the degree we can't love the people around us, we can't love God. Like any other technology, reconciliation takes as much as it gives.

Unlike many technologies, however, reconciliation comes from God, and God makes stuff good. This, I think, is a way of understanding Bonhoeffer's notion of costly grace: we're handed it and promised an infinitely better life by way of it, but it "demands my soul, my life, my all."

There's more to be explored here, and Hipps has another book coming that will deal with some of it: the technologies, for example, of prayer, Scripture, praise, sacrament and so on. But in the meantime, it's worth considering that technology is the lingua franca of the electric age, and so to speak meaningfully of the gospel here and now is to understand it technologically.

The Gospel According to Mary, Part Four: Emulating Mary

Mary, the mother of Jesus, lived a hero’s journey. She’s surely not alone; many biblical characters can comfortably bear Joseph Campbell’s template. But Mary has proven her heroism. As such, we cannot simply venerate her; we ought to emulate her.

Mary’s heroism is linked to her self-identification as the Lord’s servant. In response to the herald angel she embraces her calling and lives it out in possibly its most challenging way. She attends to Jesus throughout his life, all the while letting Jesus go his own way. She stores up in her heart words and deeds that will over time come to change the course of history. She never leaves her life’s station, in the peasant class of a nation under bondage, but she transcends it nonetheless by enduring trial after trial and standing firm in her attentiveness to her son, her Lord.

Mary’s heroism is not simply a model for us; it’s an invitation. A simple life, we learn from Mary, is no excuse for the abdication of a heroic calling. Mary could be a hero where she was or where the Spirit led her: in Nazareth, in Bethlehem, in Egypt, at the foot of a cross. Mary could be a hero when she was unmarried and pregnant, when her son was embarrassing her, scaring her, breaking her heart.

Our hero’s journey as followers of Christ, as the family of God, will involve this kind of mother’s love, this kind of servant’s devotion. We are called upon to attend to Jesus, to do what needs doing in his service. We are called upon to store up Jesus in our hearts, to acknowledge and remember what he’s promised, what he’s done for us and for others. We are called to stand with Jesus, not drawing our swords but braving the stones thrown at him, attending to him even on the cross. Mary’s son is our son; Mary’s God is our God.

Like Mary we are given the ultimate boon and asked to carry it. Our otherwise normal life is changed by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. As another sort of theotokos, our own hero’s journey thus awaits us, propelled by the strength that the Lord gives us. Like Mary, we may endure many things and see no superficial change to our life’s condition, but one thing will definitely change: we will cross a threshold, we will no longer be satisfied with life on the shelf. We’ll be too busy living a life that others can emulate.

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Merry Christmas from Loud Time. This season may you bear Jesus wherever he wants to take you.

The Gospel According to Mary, Part One

Right outside my church this summer was a thirty-five-foot tall statue of Mary, the mother of Jesus. I think it was made of metal.

The Mary outside my church was actually in the parking lot of the church next door. She’s known as Our Lady of the Millennium, and has been traveling across the country as a source of comfort and encouragement to Catholics throughout the United States. It’s an odd thought, taking comfort in a giant woman made of metal, but I've been prepared for such a phenomenon by DC Comics, which offers a similar option to comic book geeks everywhere in Natasha Irons, the super-sized super-powered Steel.

That’s different, though; Natasha is a hero; Mary is . . . well, what exactly is Mary?

I grew up Roman Catholic and became, through a circuitous route, a Presbyterian. Mary, as such, has played various roles for me, from near-divine coredemptrix to mere human vessel. I’ve alternately prayed to her and written her off. I’m tempted to compromise by calling Mary a saint and moving on, but the problem with saints is that they’re too easily placed on a shelf and forgotten. We venerate saints like Mary; meanwhile, we emulate heroes like Steel.

Steel, for all her heroics, is not a human being. She’s a commodity--manufactured, built to suit. By emulating a hero like Steel we simply congratulate ourselves for our moral sophistication and creativity. Meanwhile, up on the shelf sit saints made of flesh and bone and blood, offering by their lives a model of how life is best to be lived. So more recently I’ve taken to thinking of Mary not as a saint so much as a hero, and the chronicle of her hero’s journey as being her particular gospel.

I like to think of a gospel fundamentally as good news. The term good news implies the existence of a sender and a receiver; whether it’s news or not is determined by the bearer, and whether it’s good or not is determined by the hearer. If the news is ultimately deemed good, then the hearer will be inclined to think of the bearer as something of a hero.

As we read the Gospels we typically focus on Jesus, which is as it should be. But the very normal human life of the Son of God is an article of Christian faith, and so the very normal human family of God is important to his story. Throughout the stories of Jesus we see Mary pass through many noteworthy experiences, all of which, we’re told, she “treasured up . . . in her heart,” and ultimately passed along to the writers of the New Testament, hearers of the story she was bearing. Simply carrying the gospel, you might say, set Mary on something of a hero’s journey.

So this year during Advent I'll be reflecting on Mary as theotokos--"God-bearer"--as a way of preparing myself for the epic adventure introduced in the Christmas story. Along the way I'll be looking not for Mary the near-divine coredemptrix or the mere human vessel, and not even for Mary the saint per se, but rather the flesh-and-blood Mary who lived a life I can model my own after--a Mary I can emulate, a Mary I can call hero.