Meta, Zuckerberg, and Reality

Author: Mark Fenstermacher
November 05, 2021

I’m puzzled.

We’re still not yet beyond a pandemic which required us to maintain a safe social distance from one another and yet Facebook is trumpeting the advent of something they call “virtual reality.” This will, it seems, allow each one of us to live in a world of our own creation. We can design our own world, decide who will share it with us, play games by ourselves, and travel to other corners of the world without leaving our apartment.

This is good?

This is progress?

Do we need technological advances that will help us isolate from one another even more? And how in the world can “virtual reality” be virtual?  Haven’t we experienced, during the pandemic, something about how isolation impoverishes us?

I’m sure there are some advantages to the technologies being developed that will allow us to go whitewater rafting on the Snake River while we are home in DeKalb County, or family members to revisit the village in Africa or the county in Ireland where our family once lived before immigrating to North America. I know I have been blessed by being a part of online gatherings and workshops where it was impossible for all of us to be in the same place at the same time. Our church has every intention of continuing to offer online worship, opportunities to connect, pray, and study while we also develop rich and meaningful in-person experiences for persons to worship the Lord, study, fellowship, pray, and serve.

We will do both.

There is a place for both online and in-person experiences.

And yet this focus on each of us having the ability to create our own small world, living in that space, decreasing real interaction with other human beings, and embracing an on-line existence while insisting that this “virtual world” is real, seems problematic to me for a couple of reasons.

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First, we were created for community. We cannot be fully alive and live our best life if we have forgotten the lesson (Genesis 2:1) that it isn’t good for the human to be alone.

Second, we may end up missing reality when we submerge ourselves more and more into a “virtual world.” Why not engage the real world around us? 

I thought of this last week as I joined my 4 ½ year old grandson playing with his wooden train set and then going off to the Maryland-IU men’s soccer game. If there were no way I could be with him physically, maybe there is a way we could “be” together electronically via “virtual reality.” We still wouldn’t fully be together, though, would we? No amount of electronic “magic” —at least at this point in history—can put me together with that boy if I’m not with that boy in that room? Being with another living creature, who has a personality and mind of their own, is different than creating characters we control and direct. The real world has an amazing to surprise us with the unexpected.

Third, l really don’t trust myself to create a world that is healthy, beautiful, and good. I’m wrong too often. I miss seeing things I should see. Decisions that made perfect sense one day begin to look very questionable after a few days or weeks or months. So I suspect that many of us may go to work designing our own little heavenly “virtual reality” but end up creating a rather small, claustrophobic, overly-”Markish” world where I act and think I am the Sun King.

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Online worship and small group studies can be wonderful, but we are missing something real, holy, and beautiful when we are not in the same room together to sing the hymns, enter a time of silence and then speak the Lord’s Prayer together, and engage the preacher in the dialogue that is the sermon (there is some give-and-take between the preacher and the congregation in many sermons). God does something when we come together (Matthew 18:20) in the name of Jesus. You can’t easily describe it. You can’t really quantify what the Holy Spirit is doing but there is something going on when we enter the same room and turn towards the one, eternal, creating, redeeming God.

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God gave us a world—let’s live in it.

God gave us one another—let’s not isolate ourselves and leave one another behind, trading in the holy, mysterious “other” for a screen made up of electrically-charged pixels.

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Join us Sunday online or in-person at 8:45 (Sanctuary) or 10:45 (Chapter 2) as we worship God together. We’ll continue to explore what it looks like to live a generous life. This Sunday, we will not only be celebrating the saints who have lived among us and loved us but we will also be gathering for Holy Communion. In the United Methodist Church, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is open to members and non-members, children and adults. We rejoice in the reality of the love of God that is offered to the deserving and the undeserving. (I’m within that first group.)

Remember to take advantage of the opportunities to give to our community pantries, the Wednesday Night Food Ministry, AND notice the news about the Friendsgiving community meal.

I am blessed to serve God with you,
Pastor Mark

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