Pop 89: Sacred Agents on Holy Ground
By Madonna Hamel
This Advent I’m giving myself the gift of a fast from technological devices and internet news. As the monk Richard Rohr reminds us: “The amygdala cannot process this much negativity, misinformation, opinion, and paranoia. It gets hooked.”
The pace of the technological world is not the pace of our human, creaturely bodies. And I’m tired of the assumption that to be an efficient, successful human, we must be hurried along by technology.
I removed myself to Val Marie to get away from the artificial pace and constant stimulation and the distractions of the urban world. But I undo all the good it’s done me if I end up staring into the computer screen with so many bits and bites coming at me from all directions, posing as indispensable information impossible.
The open, empty plain graces me big spaces between distractions. I can walk for miles before a coyote yips or a flock of geese flaps overhead. And, then, I can sanely “process” the moment. Each event is central to my senses - it’s not competing or diverting my attention from a hundred other events. A truck approaches, passes and recedes into the distance and I get the full Doppler effect, the crescendo and decrescendo, without new noises rushing up behind it, crowding it, pushing it along.
There is so much space between spaces, here. The grace of a humane pace allows me to consider the prairie lily, the nighthawk, and, especially at this time of year, the shifting light in the hills as the sun descends. For an hour the hills are golden and the snow is blue. I call this moment, and the mood that descends, The Twinkle Zone. The Twinkle Zone imparts so much enormous and subtle grace that it sustains me until the next afternoon.
Lots of space and a creaturely pace allows for witnessing. But if our eyes are glued to a phone or computer, darting from distraction to diversion to advertisement, then what are we witnessing, besides a hungry, hyper, dissatisfied brain?
We insist our devices are required for communication. But, as the modern mystic James Finley says: “Communication is not communion.” Technology may hook us up - but engagement and relationship require communing, a form of linking to the soul of the world beyond our brains and egos. Communion requires breaking bread together.
I sense that the the soul’s longing is for far more than an ideal job, an ideal weight or even an ideal mate. It yearns for fulfillment beyond the fickleness of fleeting pleasures. It longs to connect to more than technology, but, ironically, it’s technology that’s making all the claims of transcendence, transcendent promises of a utopia where we get whatever we want without giving, or giving up anything.
Thirty years ago, I gave a performance called “Sacred Agents,”. It was a tribute to the human body. In those days we were just warming up to our computers, but even then the reality of virtual reality was taking its toll on our bodies. I listed off some of the effects of “Cybersickness” including - “pale sweats, headaches, nausea, eyestrain, disorientation, fatigue, flashbacks, and incapacitation.” And I continued: “Like every new drug, there’s side effects. Money to be had. A counter culture to build up around it. A place to hide.”
Thirty years later we have zoomed so far so fast that the cyber world is no longer the reigning culture. Now, those of us who wish to step away, who came to live in rural places, or who never left them, are the counter-culture.
The solution to our pacing problem is not to become more like the technology that’s hurrying us. We are flesh and blood creatures. As I also pleaded in “Sacred Agents”: “Here is my body: A bonfire. An instrument. The town crier. And here is the revolution: born of passion and persistence. Not pathology. Not buttons. Not wires.”
The fact we allow our sensual bodies, full of wonder and struggle, sleepiness and hungers, to be bullied by machines is the most disturbing part of techno-worship. To suggest we are insufficient, that we need tech to set our pace, determine our wants, prioritize our needs - is to deny human agency. And ultimately, is to deny the existence of the soul.
Over the last few evenings I’ve been reading while sipping my hot cuppa with a hot water bottle and a blankee as the snow falls gently outside. I await, with a sense of almost glee as the magic hour comes- that moment when the sunset reflects on the Eastern hills, and the world is golden and the snow is blue. The royalty of nature in full transcendent reveal. I watch until darkness falls and I begin to see my reflection in the window.
Then I go back to my book. At the moment I’m reading: A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects, by S. Brent Plate, subtitled Bringing the Spiritual to its Senses. He reminds us that usb ports aren’t the only way to connect with the world. We have the senses. I’ve noticed, ironically, it’s religions who are bringing us back to the body, not the disembodied technocrats. Plate reminds us that over the centuries, religions have used sensual connectors like stones, crosses, incense and bread to engage us and “place our lives within a sacred continuum.”
Thirty years ago I also wrote: “I’ve lived thirty years of cognitive dissonance, dissociation, the right hand never knowing where the left hand has been.” That’s sixty years of ungrounded-ness! “Now that I’ve finally landed on Holy Ground, safe, if not sound, spare me the cyber sales pitch. I’ll walk my own mile. Scratch my own itch. Become again that rowdy, physical child, in sacred agency, moving at the body’s creaturely pace.” Innately aware of the transcendent, I’ve a better shot at heaven, at home, living in the Twinkle Zone.