Post-modern liturgy

Well, don’t look now, but all that is about to change. In case you haven’t noticed, we are in the midst of a revolution. It is a revolution more profound and far-reaching than the revolutions that many baby boomers were a part of in the 1960s and ’70s. Some time back, when we weren’t paying attention, the world went digital. Everything that runs on an electric current either is or will soon be digital. Your watch, your car, your TV, your phone, your stereo, your computer, even your refrigerator and your dishwasher are all digital.

You’re thinking, So what? As long as they all work a little better and a little faster, what’s the big deal? The big deal is digital technology allows all these gizmos to talk to each other and interact with each other. And it allows you to talk to them. You can interact with your electronic toys and tools in much the same way you interact with your dog, your children, and your spouse. Your stuff “learns” from interactions with you and is changed by interactions with you. And you are changed by your interactions with your stuff. You can shape your world into a new experience not envisioned or planned for by the manufacturer of your equipment. You build a personal relationship with your machines. Plugging in your toaster has the potential of becoming a conversion experience.

Maybe you think this sounds a little far fetched, and maybe I am stretching to make a point. But before you write it off, check with your kids. Today’s children instinctively understand and interact with digital technology in ways that tend to baffle their baby-boomer parents. Who in your house knows all the ins and outs of programming the VCR? Who in your family would you ask for help if you wanted to find something on the internet? Who showed you how to change the screen colors on your desktop? Who set up the speed dial on your cell phone for you? In most families, children are far ahead of their parents in being able to manipulate and understand digital toys and tools.

There is something more to this than just being a whiz with the latest gadgets. Baby boomers and their children understand reality differently.

Modern thinking

The difference between how the Boomers and their children understand reality has been described as the difference between modern and post-modern thought. Modern thought is not really so modern anymore. Modern thinking can be said to have started when Isaac Newton first observed gravity about 300 years ago. What was new about Newton’s experience was not so much his insight about gravity but rather the fact that he observed it. Before Newton, pre-modern thinkers believed all insight was revealed by a divine source. Newton began the scientific revolution, which relied on the powers of human observation and reflection to understand how the world worked. We humans became the masters of our own world. That kind of thinking led to a development in philosophical thought which held that the rational individual was the ultimate source of knowledge and authority. The idea of the rational individual was the fuel that drove the French Revolution and ushered in the era of the enlightenment. It was the idea of individualism that enabled the industrial revolution of the 19th century and the sexual-political revolution of the mid-20th century.

Modernism is not all bad and certainly can’t be thought of as the root of all evil. It is just a way of thinking about reality. It is, in fact, the way most of us think about reality, and we may not even be conscious of doing so. 

Modern thought is where we get ideas like rugged individualism, scientific method, and grade-based, hierarchical public education. Modern thought is linear and tells us that history is meaningful, words are meaningful, and truth is definable in absolute terms. Modern thought tells us that science and technology are capable of eventually solving all our problems because, as rational individuals, we can think our way out of anything.
 
 

Post-modern thinking

Science, technology and education did not seem to solve our problems. They solved some problems, but they caused new difficulties as well. As more people  began to observe this, they began to question the value of modern thinking. These post-modern thinkers were not interested in directly refuting modern thought as much as challenging the absoluteness of it. So, for example, history may have really happened the way most textbooks say it did. But it is also possible it happened in a number of other ways. The scientific method may be a valuable tool for observing reality, but so are intuition and instinct.

In a post-modern world, there is no supreme, rational individual that is distinct and apart from the rest of society. The individual is a product of a community or even several communities. We learn values within our various communities that contribute to our own success as well as to the unbuilding of the community.

A key difference between modernism and post-modernism is that post-modern thinking does not believe in absolute truths. Or, if there are absolute truths, it is difficult or impossible for human beings to define them.

Another way to talk about this is to talk about the difference between myth and parable. A myth is a stabilizing, status quo–building story. It usually has a clear moral or point that states an absolute truth. A parable, on the other hand, is a de-stabilizing, often disturbing story without a clear moral or truth statement. A myth is a “linear” story. A parable is a non-linear story.

In our tradition, salvation history is a myth because it tells a clear, linear story, and it reinforces the status quo of the church structure. The paschal mystery, on the other hand, is a parable. The paschal mystery does not have a clear beginning, middle, and end. In the paschal mystery story, the good guys seem to get defeated and the point of the story can be confusing.

The information is more or less the same in both stories. What is important is not so much the information but the way in which it is organized. The way the story is told is at least as important as the information conveyed.

What’s at stake?

Neither modern thinking nor post-modern thinking is absolutely right or wrong. These are simply two models for understanding how the world works. What we have to keep in mind, however, is that digital media are both made possible by and reinforce post-modern thought. What we cannot let slip by us is the fact that our children, because of their facility with digital media, think in a post-modern way.

That means children today will not accept a church or a liturgy that is unchanging, non-interactive, or authoritarian. Digital tools and toys teach children that who they are is not a result of a “personal essence.” Their “self” is not a result of some given inherited quality such as having a soul or a lineage. It is a result of how they are constructed in various groups. Children today have the freedom to be whoever they want to be. They can take on new and different personas, sometimes several at once.

The best example of this kind of thinking and behavior is the internet. Most children do not have access to the internet. But almost all children — at least in developed countries — know how to access and use it. Online interactions seem perfectly normal and even exciting to them.

Why is the internet important?

Baby boomers tend to see the internet as a better tool: It is a better way to send messages or to get information than the tools we had been using. However, if we are to understand the potential of the internet’s impact on the liturgy, we cannot simply see it as something better. The internet is something new.

In our “modern” structures, information is controlled. Libraries or governments or newspapers or schools have storerooms full of information. They hand it out to the rest of us based on criteria drawn up by those institutions. A newspaper, for example, will give us some of the information it has gathered if we are willing to pay for it. But it is only financially practical for them to give us some of the information. They edit what they have, deciding what is most  important and putting that on page one. They create a hierarchy of information and put boundaries around it indicating what we should read first, second, and so on.

Information on the internet is boundariless. It has no hierarchy; it is non-linear. You can find almost all the recorded information known to humanity on the internet. You usually don’t have to pay for it (beyond your connection fee), and you can interact with it. Through the use of hyperlinks, you can become your own editor, browsing through information in whatever order and at whatever depth you wish. Information is no longer controlled by a central authority.

The information revolution for the baby boomers was the television. Television told us what was funny, what was sad and what we needed to buy. Baby boomers turn on a TV and expect information or entertainment to be sent to them. And they pretty much accept what gets sent.

Children don’t understand reality that way. The internet has created a different reality for them. For them, father doesn’t always know best, nor does CBS, nor do the bishops nor any other authority figure. They don’t have to wait a day or an hour for their favorite “show” to come on. Using their computer and a web browser, they simulate the reality that satisfies them when they have the urge to do so.

Children have learned from their digital environment that they can change their screen colors, change the way their music sounds, and change “wall paper” in their digital realities with a mouse click. They can even change their identities. Because of digital technology, the next generation expects to be able to modify and customize all of the elements of their world. Children do not want to be viewers, they want to be doers. They want to interact with their environment and change it according to their likes and needs. They want to be full, conscious and active with everything they encounter. They have little use for phrases like, “That’s just the way things are” or “We’ve always done it that way.” These children thrive on change.

Reality becomes flexible and fluid. Boomers tend to talk about “virtual” reality in order to draw a boundary between what happens on-line and what happens off-line. Children today tend not to make such a rigid distinction, seeing reality as something that is transformed from one experience and meaning into another almost seamlessly, on-line or off-line. Boomers understand reality as a given. Their children understand reality as a construct — as something they build.

Virtual liturgy

This blurring of meaning between various realities is a very Catholic thing. We live in a world that, while it took billions of years to form, was “really” created in only seven “days.” We celebrate a three-day Triduum as though it were one liturgy; we celebrate the 50 days of Easter as though it were one great Sunday. We celebrate the multiple presences of Christ while continuing to argue over which one is the really Real Presence. Where is Christ actually real and where is Christ virtually real? We celebrate a sacrifice which, though it took place 2,000 years ago, is still taking place at our altars every day. This is not a sacrifice being redone or reenacted but is the very same event still unfolding, still being made real for us. We celebrate the kingdom that is here — but not yet. It is a virtual kingdom.

In the liturgy, reality is shaped by the participants. The virtual kingdom is generated by the creative word of God, enfleshed in Christ. In liturgy, we create an interactive environment in which the kingdom becomes real.

This virtual, simulational, multiple reality, both on the internet and in the liturgy, is shaped by the participants. Virtual reality on the net is computer generated and is perceived by the participants. The participants, however, also interact with the reality and thereby change it, shape it, and ultimately create it.

The virtual kingdom is generated by the creative word of God, enfleshed in Christ. We, the virtual Body of Christ, perceive the reality of the kingdom — as though through a lens darkly — and, by interacting with that kingdom, we give shape to it, hasten its coming, and ultimately “create” it through the grace of the Holy Spirit.

In the computer world, when the individual takes part in shaping the reality in which he or she exists, that interactive process sets in motion an unknowable and unstoppable chain of events that alters forever the conditions under which the participant’s own identity is formed. Likewise in liturgy, we create an interactive environment — a place of full, conscious and active participation — in which the kingdom becomes real.

The liturgy is filled with hyperlinks (or symbols) that move us into different chat rooms in God’s domain. Our computers provide us with windows into the mysteries of Byzantine programming code of 1s and 0s. And the sacraments provide us with windows onto the divine mystery. Just click on the icon and you’re there. That interactive process changes the identity of who we are, making us into something new. We die, as it were, to our old selves, so that our new selves can rise.

This idea of interactivity — or full, conscious and active participation — is very important. It was, the Council said, the aim to be considered before all else. In the modern world, the self is pre-existent before society. For the modern thinkers that made the Second Vatican Council possible, reality consists of patterned practices that are supposed to help us uncover our true, inner selves. The inner self, the soul, is our stable, unchanging identity. It is our essence.

For the post-modern children who will ultimately make the vision of the Second Vatican Council a reality, the interactive communication network is decentralized. This makes senders into receivers, producers into consumers and rulers into subjects. It is exactly like the kingdom that makes the lame walk, the deaf hear, and the blind see. The post-modern era is an eschatological era in that it dethrones the mighty and raises up the lowly. Post-modernity provides us with structures and communication patterns and rituals that constitute subjects (us) as unstable, multiple, and diffuse. Perhaps we don’t want to be unstable, multiple and diffuse, but the Gospel calls us to sell all we have, die to ourselves, and to continually go to the cross. We are to be hospitable to all those we encounter, even our enemies, requiring multiple personalities and flexible responses and skills. Life in the kingdom does not allow for one clear identity but rather calls us to a “reality” in which there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. We are constantly being made new. The Gospel is clearly a post-modern agenda.

Isn’t this the “essence” of our identity? Are we not a people who have been plunged into the tremendous mystery of the divine “other”? As soon as we have identified the “other” and become one with the “other” so the stranger is now “us,” we immediately begin again to seek out and become one with the “other”-that-is-not-us in a hyperlinked, cosmic web-spinning, multiple storytelling process of ongoing reconciliation.

What our children are learning is that the information is not as important as the way the information is organized. The way we tell the story is what is important — both on the internet and in the liturgy. Mythic storytelling may no longer sustain our children. They will need to hear parables about the paschal mystery that may not always have happy endings.

They need to hear these stories because it is through telling our stories that we become one with the “other.” Telling our story is a process of reconciling. Once I know your story — in the biblical sense — I am your story.

Telling our story

How do we tell our story? How do we tell the story of “Jesus Christ, and him crucified … so that [our] faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God” (1 Cor 2:2,5)? It is our challenge to create our own virtual communities, our own hyperlinked storytelling device. We must compete with amazing digital storytelling devices that will allow all our fragmented and broken selves to be knitted together into some kind of Gothic romance or Camelot fantasy or futuristic science fiction adventure.

But in the end, the internet — with all its promise and sparkle and light — will not save us. Our challenge in the post-modern era is the same as it has been in any other. Understand the culture in which we find ourselves, take what is good, discard what is false or harmful, and make sure we tell a better story.

ML

Nick Wagner is the former editor of ML. 

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