In person and its accidental eugenics

In a recent article, a CofE bishop, Martyn Snow, talking about recent riots stirred up in large part by disinformation shared by groomed-enraged people in right-wind networks, proposed the following:

I don’t believe we will ever get beyond the need for face-to-face encounters. Despite social media changing the way we interact with one another, genuine, physical interaction is more important now than it ever has been. Those face-to-face encounters help foster empathy, strengthen our sense of community, and reveal to us the truth about our neighbours – and there’s no amount of disinformation that can counter that.

I'm interested in this and think that we should be wary of it. I'm hearing similar sentiments shared quite a lot in the church circles I'm in touch with and interact with. I'm wary of it because of my experience with the privileging of physical space sharing being deployed in such a way as to exclude various disabled and vulnerable people. In fact, in some cases to express fairly eugenic sentiments in relation to the vulnerable.
I think that the basis for this viewpoint is rooted in an affirmation of the incarnation and taking from that an appreciation of the embodiedness of human beings as something to be celebrated. This has a long pedigree in Christian theology beginning most notably with push-back against the dualistic and gnostic-leaning ideas around in the late classical period in the eastern Mediterranean.
I also note that this particular theological trope (if that's the right term) comes on the back of the move from the public-health measures put in place in the initial phases of the covid19 pandemic. My strong suspicion is that the emotional push-back is significant and that there is an unspoken fear or anxiety about things that recall or hint at those measures.
So we have a social-psychology-in-search-of-a-theology dynamic at work.
Let me make explicit something of the effect on disabled and vulnerable people. When the first responses to the covid19 pandemic were put in place, many disabled people got a taste of inclusion in church that they have rarely had. With the putting aside (or even demonising) of those measures, they have been re-excluded. In addition the effects of long-covid have added even more people to the roster of the excluded from ordinary church life. These latter are those who join those with vulnerabilities which make reinfection a potential death or further-disablement sentence. In addition the difficulties for some in the disabled communities come to the fore once again with the re-prioritising of "in person" meeting. In respect of my earlier use of the word "eugenics", I'm referring to an attitude expressed in a clergy gathering (!) whereby the old and vulnerable were verbally dismissed from being worthy of consideration in how to respond to easing of legal restrictions (a telling word in itself) even when it was pointed out that their fuller inclusion had been an un-sought benefit of using electronic means to gather and do faith together.
Now don't get me wrong here: I'm very much of the opinion that human embodiedness is significant and important. I do not think that we are primarily souls temporarily encumbered with material bodies. I believe that matter is something that God delighted to make and that God delighted to join with in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. So what I write here should not be taken as a call to return to dualism or some kind of gnostic spirituality, far from it! I agree that Christianity is a most materialistic faith and I very much lean into that.
However, I do think we should be alert to some nuance. Not least in noting that some of the pressing of embodiment language in this cultural moment comes from something of a moral panic about online meeting starting in the late 1990s when lots of people started to form communities and to find entertainment online. There was and is a lot of misunderstanding and unrecognised inconsistency in thinking going about online activity. A lot of the more panicky things I read seem[ed] to somehow imagine that online means some kind of disembodied brain-in-a-vat experience. Forgetting that the interactions were and are still physical. They require interfaces, use bodily processes both to project and to receive a variety of messages in a variety of media. Muscles, eyes, bloodstreams, breathing, digestion and so forth are all very much involved in supporting online interactions many of which are patterned after physical space and interactions. They are intrinsically bodily in action and conceptualisation. Just not occupying proximate space.
Some of the objections to meeting online do not bear the weight of history or deeper consideration. I don't find any in-principle objections being voiced to the use by the apostle Paul of letters to project himself and to remain in (and indeed, build) community with people not physically present to him. Is there a difference in principle to the 'remoteness'? Admittedly these letters (and other scriptural materials) attest to the desire to be with people, sharing the same space. But there is, in the epistolatory nature of much of the New Testament, a recognition of remote interaction as viable and useful. Indeed we are richer for it because we have preserved it.
And what is it about occupying closely adjacent space that we are prizing exactly? When bishop Snow says, "physical interaction is more important now than it ever has been" I'm not at all sure what we're supposed to understand by the words "physical interaction". Is this about shaking hands? Hugs? Making a cuppa and handing it over (maybe with home made cake or biscuits)? But how much quality do those things add. -A sharper question if the traditional English sang froid is in play, reducing the physical interaction to a bare minimum. So, are we supposed to be thinking smell? -Well, that is pretty specific to closer proximity: fair cop. Body language? -Well that can often be seen or inferred online and facial expressions and micro-expressions can possibly be seen more fully on screen. So can we please specify what physical interactions are meant and how it is that they give such clear improvement over electronically-mediated meeting? I call this out: it's exaggerated and an unfair comparison.
I think the case is better made in terms of what we are used to and the unease with meeting with others using media we are less familiar and confident with. This necessarily favours physical proximity but doesn't prove its superiority, merely its preferability given normal current life experience. We might do well to consider the way human cultures have adapted to telephones -despite the misgivings of the early days. And it's worth considering too the warnings about the negative effects on society of mass reading that printing enabled, or indeed of writing itself because of the changes these technologies produced in the way we memorise, learn and indeed relate to one another.
And again, there are problems with the assertion "face-to-face encounters help foster empathy, strengthen our sense of community, and reveal to us the truth about our neighbours". I take it that "face to face" is meant to imply close physical proximity but it could, strictly speaking, include a screen-mediated connection. In that list of benefits, I do not see one that is excluded by screen-mediation. What I see expressed by implication and connotation is a preference for gathering information, strengthening and building connection in the more familiar ways experienced in physical proximity. But I'd remind us how much we can pick up in a phone call (for example we can hear someone smiling as they talk) and how much of those things we gather in phone calls and even text interchanges -increasingly so as we collectively gain experience and reflect together on how to use short-text formats.
I submit that what the bishop is aiming for is not necessarily dependent on being in relatively close physical proximity but rather on attentiveness, openness, honesty, consideration, curiosity, good questions and generally non-violent communication -in whichever medium.
Pause for thought: it's easier to punch or kick someone else in close proximity! Sexual abuse is usually focused on physical access. I mention that only to recall us to the darker sides of what is being lionised. My sub-text is that we are seeing a comparison between the best of physical proximity and the worse of other forms of relating. Let's remember there are positives and negatives in all; the point is to properly understand and appraise what they are and deploy them skilfully, wisely and inclusively as possible. Also, we should notice how in the past, moral panics passed on by word of mouth where people were close enough in physical terms to 'catch' each other's misinformed emotional reactions. Although that contagion is clearly not just possible in close physical proximity, clearly, if there are advantages to close physical proximity, these also provide a putitively enhanced means for the demonising and organising of cruelty, bullying and murder. The fall, as many orthodox Christians repeat, affects everything. This would mean that there is no good thing that cannot suffer the warping of sin; that cannot be corrupted. This would include the aforementioned: "empathy, strengthen our sense of community, and reveal to us the truth about our neighbours" -all of those can be put at the service of ill-will and harm.
I'm noticing also that after celebrating how online meeting made it easier to gather people in a rural diocese as well as to lower implied carbon footprints and travel expenses claims, a recent glance at diocesan events and training showed that 'in person' events that probably would be better to be online, are now creeping back with no provision for remote participation being offered, apparently. This despite the know-how and equipment being available and relatively well-practiced. I continue to strongly suspect that the pull of the familiar and thus 'easy' is working its stochastic influence. The problem being, of course, that the familiar is ablist. And implicitly eugenicist.
Theologically, we should remember that no-one actually does disembodied relating. We continue to use the 'meat' of our brains to think, to produce messaging using vocal tracts and bodily movement especially facial expressions. We hear using ears and to a lesser extent eyes. Most of those channels have been formed and shaped by bodily proximate interactions. But as phone, writing and printing have already shown us, we can extend capabilities (htt Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong et al) and simply need to collectively learn the affordances of the media; to culturally receive them. We do this learning in relation to speech etc from the womb, and we can overlay further learning as we go.
We should also note that there is in Christian history a tradition of remote communication and a recognition of the importance of communications of ideas and attitudes -however they are communicated. We shouldn't mistake historical happenstance for principle: the historical happenstance is that we have lived in physical proximity to one another. However, that does not amount to an in-principle restriction of our modes of relating only to physical proximity. The use of epistles and writing of gospels if anything endorses extending our channels of communication, including those enable more remote communication.
About the only thing I can think of that may be 'better' about so-called in-person meeting is the informal before and after socialising. Of course, we could find ways to reproduce that -and some online meetings do that deliberately. I have heard of some churches deliberately setting up breakout rooms after a main meeting to allow it to happen.
And even if we were to grant that somehow physically-proximate meeting was better, let's note that 'better' is a comparative term and it is scalar. It should not be treated as polar as if by being better the compared-with term was rendered bad or exclusive of the other term.
I do understand that some people were traumatised by the abrupt life change, restriction and underlying panic of the early pandemic. So it is easy to comprehend that for some, a degree of dislike -or anxiety, even- may have become attached to the idea of e-meeting others. I see that in the preferences some now have to avoid it and how that preference is justified and the emotional flavour of how they justify it. On the whole, however, this can and probably will change as the 'new' possibility is culturally received and people become more aware of the affordances of the array of possibilities now open to us.
If we add to all of that a consideration of the inclusion of marginalised people, then we should surely be exploring these 'new' possibilities. This is rooted in the command to love neighbours as ourselves and to do to others as we would be done by. These commands amount to learning to look at the world through the eyes of those who are disadvantaged and marginalised. And this implies listening attentively and taking seriously the perspectives of, in terms of the starting point here, those who are immune compromised. It also implies trying to create conditions that don't, for example, add to the risk of (say) long-covid.
This topic leads inexorably to consideration of Eucharist and the debate about whether that can be celebrated extendedly using e-meeting technologies. Lots of church groupings have not had a problem with that. The CofE doesn't sanction it (though I'm aware of practical dissenters). I *think* that the reluctance is because of a suspicion that an electronically mediated communion lacks something important which may be found in a physically proximate congregation. But I haven't seen that spelled out. It's probably the lack of having thought about it and a worry that it could lead to abuses which are as yet unconsidered at a corporate level. However, I do think that many of the considerations mentioned above should be part of thinking about this.
I think for some people meeting online for corporate worship was difficult because it meant that they were not meeting in a familiar and beloved building which had rich connotations of godliness and a personal history of spiritual comfort and growth. Judging by the way some congregations actually act, I think that this must be a major issue. It's about atmosphere and associations but definitely not about interacting or meeting with others. I think the conversation that has been had so far confusingly lumps together the different kinds of physically-proximate events that we undertake together. On the one hand we have meetings which enable people to interact, converse, joke, transact matters of administration or work and so forth and on the other we have essentially spectating events which involve witnessing something but not making meaningful contact with others. Many an early communion service fits into the latter category. These latter may be ones where the atmosphere of where it takes place is a paramount consideration. However, this does not appear to be in the bishop's mind. So if we were to compare the 8am communion service just alluded to with most online meetings, it would be the latter where we would find most of the bishop's criteria met: empathy, community and discerning the truth of our neighbours.

It's true that the bishop is not dismissing online meeting, and his first quoted words are making a case for the recognition of the importance of physically-proximate meeting. What I am concerned with above is that the reasons given for the importance of such meeting do not really make the case and my further concern is that it plays into a lazy thinking which actually has a eugenic edge to it.

If the bishop wanted to make a case for physically-proximate meeting I think that it would be better to choose a bunch of other things which note the difficulties in some cases of e-meeting as it is currently configured.

I would note that eye-contact is difficult in e-meeting; that it is difficult to work conversational turn-taking according to some of the cues we use in physically-proximate conversation; we have fewer body-language cues; our sense of smell cannot be part of our meeting (or probably, more importantly, our sensing of odourless pheromones), there is also the matter of immersion in 'atmosphere'. And singing together is currently not easy online and the immersive experience of being among others singing is less involving online (although not impossible). However, we should note that these are not compelling advantages in a 'clear blue water' sort of way and have to be weighed against the advantages of e-meeting. These are things like inclusion of people with various disabilities, better time usage and hence 'productivity', often a lower carbon footprint and bringing together greater numbers of people because of these things. For many of the things included in the bishop's list of good things from physically proximate meeting, e-meeting can do well and sometimes better. In discipleship, it can do well and sometimes better. It can foster praying together -sometimes better. It offers tools for considering scripture together that are better online than off.

If discipleship is a central concern (and Rom.12:1-2 suggest that even worship together has this as a central aim), then online activity can and should be part of the mix the more so since it enables the participation of people otherwise unable to access the 'space'.

Jesus learning from life and practice

Over the last few months, this passage has cropped up several times. The latest being this morning's readings (I started writing this on 14 December) for Morning Prayer. Perhaps noticing it has been an artefact of a particular reading of it having got my attention and that perspective sinking in and being weighed by my unconscious thought processes. So the passage is this.

"...a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.’ 23 But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.’ 24 He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ 25 But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ 26 He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ 27 She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ 28 Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly."      Matthew 15:21-28 NRSVA - The Canaanite Woman’s Faith - Jesus - Bible Gateway: 

And the perspective on reading it is as follows.
This way of understanding it proposes that we take it that Jesus learns from the woman in the course of the conversation and that we are actually seeing him in this little narrative moving from a somewhat ethnocentric mindset to one which explicitly grasps that God's Mission is bigger than that. In short, we see Jesus in the process of learning during the course of this conversation and his teacher is the Canaanite woman and, presumably, the Holy Spirit (echoes of the Nicene Creed there).

Now it seems to me that the Evangelical knee-jerk reaction to this (and maybe not just Evangelicals) is to be very suspicious of it or to reject it outright. I know this because my own first reaction was precisely to be suspicious of it and I found that I had to ask myself why I was resisting the idea. To be fair, full disclosure here, the reason I asked myself what that resistance was about was because I found the idea somehow intriguing and maybe that was because I'm interested in how learning takes place and what it means to be a wise and faithful human in the way of Christ, believing that it is in the moments of challenge that learning is forged and wisdom and orientation tested. So I was perhaps more disposed than before to thinking about the humanity of Jesus in relation to how he learnt things. And I have to say that in the moment, I felt that there was something wonderful about the possibility that we were catching Jesus in the act of learning. In fact perhaps participating in one of those wonderful conversations that I'm sure most of us have from time to time where we get caught up with others in a slightly excited thinking together as each contribution opens out further insight, learning and application of something that enthuses us. I wonder whether we are seeing a snapshot of Jesus enjoying just such learning banter.

So, I think that focus on divinity is precisely where the resistance from many roughly-orthodox Christians comes. I suspect that thinking first about his divinity (or even as a hugely gifted sage, come to that) tends to set us up for a default perspective that assumes that Jesus had got it all together, that he always saw things coming and had a ready-composed response or was meticulously inspired in the moment. But that is almost-certainly some kind of Docetism (see this article for more theological background). It is worth asking ourselves, too, whether for some of us there could be an inner resistance formed by the idea that it is unworthy for Jesus to learn from a gentile woman. However, I think that part of the marvellousness of the episode lies just there: that someone whom religious teachers of the day would have placed at the bottom of a hierarchy of likeliness -even worthiness- to have valuable spiritual insight, that person is just the one whose insight is affirmed and built on by the embodiment of Divine Lore.

So we are duty bound to question our Docetic tendencies by returning to value the humanity of Jesus and the logic of incarnation. In this case doing that means recognising a bunch of probable facts about Jesus, most of them to do with him being a baby, then a child and growing up in a human household and small town, perhaps even being apprenticed to a trade. I want to pose this in the form of some questions and musings. So, for example, how do we think Jesus learnt Aramaic, Hebrew and (probably) Greek? It seems to me that it probably happened in the regular sort of way: hearing them spoken, making sense, trying things out and noting responses, and eventually working on letters in scrolls. I don't really think that he was born knowing the languages or that God downloaded them Joe 90 style into his brain. In fact, let's put that more theologically still, by providence and Spirit the means God used for Jesus to become eloquent was interaction with parents, relatives, friends and wider community. Or, do we think that Jesus picked up carpentry or sailing (or whatever it was he did for 20 years before his preaching ministry) by sudden divine transformation or do we think his neurons, muscles and sensorium grew and developed through usage and relationship to others: teachers, customers, colleagues and the like?

But perhaps we are comfortable with the idea that Jesus learnt everyday common-place ordinary-life things in the same way as the rest of us. But are we comfortable with thinking that was the way it was with spiritual learning? And perhaps this is where a spasm of Docetism lurks more fully for us. And perhaps with some reason (even if misaligned reason): when the things of God are less obvious and more contentious, we feel that a more 'direct' learning from God is wanted to help guarantee the purity of the message. We feel we need Jesus to have the kind of hotline to God we sometimes wish we had. But I want to suggest that this too is Docetic and undervalues the fully human processes of spiritual formation -that is learning to think and act in godly ways and to cultivate a positive relationship with God.

Let's ask ourselves, then, how Jesus learnt religion and spirituality. I think that perhaps we should prepare ourselves to think about this in continuity with the other learnings we considered just a few sentences ago. I would rate as a high probability that in the household Jesus grew up in, he was socialised into religious practice and viewpoints pretty much as any other child of that day and place. In fact, given that the Hebrew scriptures have instructions for such things, perhaps we should recognise a Christ-centred divine intention in those instructions being in place: in part they were there to help to form the spirituality and upbringing of the Messiah in the midst of God's people. In other words, it's highly likely that the divine intention was for Jesus' growth in spiritual awareness to be achieved in part at least by the processes of learning, ritual and religious practice witnessed to by the Hebrew scriptures.

So Jesus would have heard and learnt to memorise scripture and to ask questions about it and weigh opinions regarding interpretation. He would have accompanied his family and friends in reciting prayers, going on pilgrimage, participating in festivals and fasts and generally be/com/ing Jewish. And in God's providence this was an appointed means for the Messiah to learn from and about God and God's mission. This involved the sculpting of neuronal pathways and patterns and bodily responses which is apposite to be/com/ing human. So, the fact that Jesus could deftly quote scripture and make insightful remarks about religious matters and ethical issues is built on that human training and personal time spent learning and reflecting on the inherited traditions of his people. This was a significant means of God's teaching of him.

But ... but ... You may want to interject: that's still not quite the same as the incident with the Canaanite women, is it? By the time he starts his ministry, and having starting with that baptism and the Spirit descending and all that, surely that means he's got it all down by this point? And doesn't the idea that perhaps Jesus didn't know something like this imperil the reliability of his teaching? That is, if there was stuff he didn't know at this point then that could mean he might miss something or fail to pass on something that we really need to have there in the corpus of his teaching. And there is some merit in that concern because ignorance can be the means of things going astray. However, I think I would want to suggest a couple of things in response to that. One is to do with Jesus' relationship to God and the other is to do with God's providence.

Jesus's relationship to God, mediated by the Spirit, would be such that Jesus would be receptive to God's leading and so in an encounter like this one with the Canaanite woman we also see by implication the work of the Spirit 'quickening' the incident to Jesus's imagination or conscience or just 'tingling his spidey senses' so that he paid attention in the right kind of way to be led through what unfolded in a God-revealing way. And the incarnational take-home from that is that the same Spirit is at work in us so that, in principle, we too could learn-in-the-moment from God. It also indicates to us that there is something important about the fact that we are teachable -to be teachable in this way is to be and become like Christ -as we are called to become.

In fact it seems to indicate that whatever crap stuff our culture and upbringing might bequeath to us can be challenged and put aside and we can step into new insight and new relating. The background we inherit is not in itself sin; it's what we do with it that can become sin. It is the resistance to the Spirit moving us on that is the problem and the definition of sin. So here, Jesus' background had a streak of theologically bolstered ethnocentric pride in it which at this point for Jesus he became aware of through and in the interaction with the Canaanite woman. That he allowed the challenge she posed to stand and is able to affirm the larger vision and implications contained in that challenge is the point and the thing we need to learn from. We don't need to have it all sewn up, we need to be teachable and humble enough to learn and affirm the insights of others.

The providential element in all this is to take seriously that Jesus is the One for whom everything that exists, is made (this I take to be an implication of  Colossians 1:16ff ... all things have been created through him and for him. ... in him all things hold together.) In which case Jesus' experiences are part of the ordering of things towards making sure that God is personally present in human flesh, blood and soul in the life of the one we call Jesus of Nazareth (among other things). The implication of this is that the learning experiences are part of incarnation and so the incident with the Canaanite woman is about God sharing what it means to be a learning, growing human and in such a way as to be for us and our salvation. Through this incident we can see the trajectory of imagination that leads to the inclusion of gentiles in the people of God. We should let the actual life of the incarnate Christ inform our thinking about what it is for God to become flesh rather than let our never-fully-understood doctrines try to (mis)inform us unchallenged about what Jesus must have been like.