By Father Lawrence Farley
The truth is that real communication and authentic communion with another always involves face to face encounter—that is why there is so much hugging at airports when people are physically reunited after being separated for a time. Did those people who greet each other at the airport not keep in touch by Facebook while they were gone? Did they not phone each other? Did they not exchange e-mails? I’ll bet they did—but their warm embraces reveal that these are no substitute for physical presence. We need not only to read the words of another, but to see their faces, and to let them look at ours.
Indeed, the word for “presence” in both the Hebrew and the Greek is the same word as for “face” (Hebrew panim; Greek prosopon). That is why all the sacraments in the Church presuppose physical presence, so that one cannot be baptized or receive Holy Communion or be anointed “on-line.” A “cyber-sacrament” is a contradiction in terms. To receive the fullness of life offered in the Holy Mysteries, physical presence is required. That is why from the days of the apostles, each celebration of the Eucharist has involved the exchange of the Kiss of Peace: liturgically, each week the Church bids us to reach out and touch someone. The liturgical synaxis is literally a coming together, one that involves physical contact.
God has, in fact, put a hunger for such physical encounter and communication deep in the human heart. We long to see others, to look into their eyes (often and significantly called “the windows of the soul”), and to let them look into ours. We were designed to run on such loving inter-personal communication, even as cars were designed to run on gasoline, and we suffer if we are deprived of such authentic human interaction. And yet despite this, we are designing and living in a world increasingly devoid of such interactions. We spend a tremendous amount of our time isolated from others, often not knowing the names of the neighbours who live beside us on our street.
Increasingly we work in cubicles, drive to work alone in our cars, and find our “down time” playing video games or typing before a computer screen. Gathering for family dinner becomes rarer, and even then some send text messages to their friends during the meal. When we communicate, it is by phone, or text, or e-mail, or Facebook. True and life-giving encounters become rarer and rarer—some young people even prefer texting to meeting as their favourite way of communicating. In a Facebook world, we hardly ever reach out and touch someone. It has become unnecessary.
But, one might ask, what’s wrong with that? If young people prefer texting to meeting, what’s the harm? Just this: there are dangers involved in refusing to live the way we were designed to live. We were designed to thrive on human personal contact, and the human heart and spirit still hunger for it. If that hunger is not met and satisfied through healthy human encounter, it will seek satisfaction in less healthy ways, just as if a man is hungry enough, he will eat anything. If the human heart is denied authentic encounter, it will eventually try to feed on something else, and will become vulnerable to propaganda, lies, cults, and other dark things.
Denied authentic encounters and relationships, we will find that we have less sales-resistance to inauthentic ones. This of course does not mean that if a teenager girl spends all her time texting her friends she will fall prey to a cult in three weeks’ time. But it does mean that if our culture continues to substitute the inauthentic for the authentic, it denies itself a basic component of spiritual health—and unless it recovers that basic component, the breakdown in cultural health will come soon enough. I have no doubt that when the breakdown begins to occur, someone will start a Facebook page about it.
~Website of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), http://oca.org/reflections/fr.-lawrence-farley/keeping-our-faces-in-a-facebook-world.
