[Applause]

Mr. Steven Christoforou: Hi! How’s it going?

Audience: Good!

Mr. Christoforou: All right. I’m in a good mood. Are you guys in a good mood?

Audience: Yes.

Mr. Christoforou: All right, good. [Laughter] You think so?

C1: I think so.

Mr. Christoforou: Okay. We’re on the fence. We’ll work on it. Okay, so, yeah, my name is Steve. Thank you, Matthew, for the introduction. I am happy to be here. This is my second time at College Conference. I love it here at College Conference. This is like my favorite conference thing in the world, so I’m having a blast. Have a little kind of talk on social media. The title of it here, as you can see, is: “Media Martyrs: Christ-centered Approaches to Tech and Social Media.”

I want to talk a little bit about— I say “tech and social media” because I think what we’re going to talk about applies as much to Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and that sort of stuff as well as Reddit and other kinds of online platforms like that: the things that we use to share ideas and communicate with people generally—Skype, whatever it might be. To kind of think through why and how we use some of these platforms. It’s here; it’s in our pockets. We’re on it all the time, for hours a day, and I think it’s probably good, since we use it so often, to spend a couple of minutes considering what that means and maybe better ways that we can use it or some principles or approaches.

So I’m not going to offer any solutions or anything like that. I think at the very end we’ll get to some principles more than anything, but I want to first consider the positives and negatives of social media, and maybe begin to understand some of the problems and challenges that they pose, and then, more importantly for me, explore some of the theology behind it that’ll help us maybe understand a way to approach the problem, and then we’ll get into some potential principles to think through, like solutions and better ways to go forward.

And I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, because this is a lot of what I do. The flip-side of making stuff, of making videos and writing blogs and making podcasts and things like that is you’ve got to get the word out, and the best way to do that is social media, which poses a problem for me, because I don’t really like social media. I feel like it’s a massive time-suck, and I feel that it can be such a negative, draining thing a lot of the time, so I’m very conflicted, because I understand the utility of it, but I also kind of am personally not drawn to it very frequently—but I also am drawn to it because there’s a lot of cool stuff that’s on there, and I spend way too much time on Twitter, and I spend way too much time on Reddit, probably, so I’m kind of conflicted. I’m aware of the positives, I’m aware of some of the negatives, and so I’m grateful for the opportunity to just think through some of these things. So this isn’t going to be a definitive answer; it’s just going to be sort of food for thought, hopefully. So join me on this adventure as we think about some of these things.

And we’ll start with the big dramatic question: Is social media a positive or a problem? It’s kind of both, I feel like. After thinking about this for a while, that’s the best answer that I can give. It’s kind of a mix. I guess that’s what technology is at the end of the day. Technology is a tool that can be used for positive and negative purposes. On the one hand, all of this stuff is really exciting. It’s really exciting! Because of social media and these other types of platforms, we have the ability to instantly communicate with people around the world—which is awesome, if you think about it! When my family emigrated from Greece back in the 1960s, they didn’t see the faces of people that they left behind for decades, until they were able to go back home. Now we will all leave and go back to our respective chapters and cities, and all we have to do is get on Skype and FaceTime, and you have access to anybody, anywhere, at any time, which is crazy, when you think about it.

We’re overcoming the divide that space presents to us. You can be anywhere. You can see anything, too: you can type in the right URL, and you can see a webcam, for instance, that’s showing the construction of the St. Nicholas National Shrine that’s down at Ground Zero; or go to a different website, and you can see a webcam showing the construction of this building, or you can see an outdoor view of whatever park or whatever it might be. It’s just amazing. We have access to all of these ideas and all of these places and all of these people that we wouldn’t otherwise have access to. The ideas in particular for me are really exciting, because it’s kind of borderline scary, if you think about it. It’s such a far cry from what Bishop Gregory was talking about before, that if you have a question, you go to the librarian and ask your question, and you might get your answer in 48 hours.

Or this might be another Lewis C.K. thing, actually, now that Sister Vassa brought it up, but I think it was him who remembers a time when he was younger and people would ask a question, like “Why does an ostrich not fly?” and people would just kinda say, “I don’t know!” and the conversation would end, and nobody would ever do the research to figure it out, because it took too much work. People would just say, “I don’t know,” whereas now you have a question: you can Google it, and you can find the answer to basically any question that you want at any time. I mean, it’s weird. It’s like this quasi-deistic omniscience. There is literally nothing that you can’t know. It’s all there in the palm of your hand, as long as you have battery in your phone, and as long as the WiFi is working: you have access to any information about anything and any person, and it’s history. It’s mind-blowing!

This uncovering of ideas leads to real change, like in social movements, which is really interesting. Think even of the Black Lives movement that was happening recently. The only reason that was able to be a thing is because of social media. These abuses have been happening for years, but it’s now that people were able to get organized and get on Twitter and get the word out that hopefully positive change will be able to happen as a result. Even five or ten years ago, the fact that these injustices were happening just was routine, and there was nothing that would ever change it, but now the curtain has sort of been lifted, and now that we know more, hopefully we’re in a position to be able to steer society into a more responsible place. So that’s awesome: ending of certain injustices? That’s a fantastic thing.

Or even collective learning. We are all potential innovators and we are all potential creators. One of the cool things that separates us from other animals—because we are animals—is the fact that we have this ability to learn collectively and to build upon the advancements of the past. None of us presumably have a background in textiles, and yet we’re sitting on these really nice textile seats. And presumably none of us have an engineering background in plastics, but we’re sitting on these nice molded plastic seats. We didn’t have to create any of this stuff from scratch. We stand on the shoulders of giants, in a very literal sense of the word. We flip a switch and we have electricity because somebody discovered it a hundred-something years ago, and that gives us the freedom then to invent new things and kind of push society forward. So in the same way that the written word was a big deal, and then the printing press was a big deal, social media and this instant communication and access to ideas and the fact that you can download academic papers whenever you want, or the fact that you can go to Wikipedia and look up any subject you want makes us that much more advanced and intelligent.

There’s interesting research that shows that the IQs of subsequent generations are just going up over time because our brains are being molded by all of the stuff that we’re putting into them, which is crazy when you think about it. We’re actually, at least in kind of a low-end sense of the word, evolving as we evolve the world around us. Our brains are sort of keeping pace of the massive amount of information and data that we’re pumping into them.

So there’s a lot of cool stuff that happens as a result of this, and I don’t want to be all doom-and-gloom, but there are some negative things that come to some of these platforms, and I think a big one is our increasing preference for data as opposed to wisdom. So there was a time when old people were valued; not so much any more. We kind of throw old people into the old-age home and we get rid of them, because they’re a burden on society and they’re not productive. And we kind of make jokes about them and how bumbling they are and “they don’t know how to use the WiFi” and like: “Grandpa, you’re so lame!” [Laughter]

But there was a time when age meant something. Age meant the fact that you were able—you survived brutal conditions for decades. You had some wisdom and you had some perspective on the world that you could offer the people who came after you, whereas now we don’t want wisdom. We don’t want analysis, we don’t want nuance, we don’t want patient meditation upon a topic—we want answers, and we want instant answers, so we Google something as opposed to asking. And I think one of the interesting trends that’s coming from this is that maybe this is one of the reasons why we’re becoming a polarized, nuance-free society. We’re increasingly becoming yes-no, up-down, like-dislike, like these camps, and there’s no room for really analysis, there’s no room for sober reflection, there’s no room for considering an issue from all sides: it’s just you pick a side, yes-no. And that’s a gut-check thing. It’s a binary. It’s data. It’s a one or a zero, and that’s the only sort of permissive response that you can have to something. You’re a Democrat or a Republican. You’re for this law; you’re against this law. It’s all sort of binaries.

And there’s actually a really cool YouTube video called “This Video Will Make You Angry.” It’s by CGP Grey, who’s a fantastic YouTuber, and he talks about how our information infrastructure and the way that we do online ideas and online videos and so forth actually leads to the calcification and the crystallization of these sides. As the “pro” side gets more entrenched and the “no” side gets more entrenched and we just kind of dig deeper into our respective camps, and we demonize the other side, we don’t have any room for nuance and we don’t care. So I think that’s one of the side effects of all of this. We’re quantifying things. We want quick answers; we want simple answers, because we have access to any answer we want. Just type it into Google and Google knows all, or Siri knows all.

This is maybe the easiest critique of social media, the shallowness and the narcissism that sometimes comes from it. It seems that we are increasingly laboring under the illusion that people care what we had for lunch, or people care what we wore on a particular day or whatever it is. So we post goofy pictures of ourselves or we post any random comment that comes into our head, which is kind of the funny thing and the really annoying thing about Twitter sometimes, because it’s just a stream of inanity, sometimes funny inanity but frequently not. So it’s like every—no thought is too inane to be published. Or no self-absorbed moment is too trite to be published out there for mass consumption.

I mean, not to be overly critical, though I’m kind of coming across as overly critical, but that’s got to have consequences in terms of our view of ourselves, our view of our importance in the world, as if we are kind of the main character of this movie and everything is revolving around us. That’s got to have consequences in terms of our pride, in terms of our lack of humility, in terms of the way we see ourselves and our place in the world. We kind of see ourselves as mini celebrities, as mini brands.

And that needs to the next point, actually, or the fourth one—I forgot the veil of anonymity. This is a terrible one. The anonymity that the internet gives us cultivates or at least creates an environment that can be so terribly destructive and so terribly hateful. This is the reason why message-boards online are so awful, because you create a random username and nobody’s ever going to know who you are, and you can spout the most racist and misogynistic and whatever sort of terrible, angry, vile hate that comes out of your mouth. That’s like 90% of the internet at some level. It’s just a dark, seedy place where no thought needs to be filtered, and any kind of temptation, violent or otherwise, can be immediately published and sent out to another person, which is the crazy thing: to another person. They’re not just shouted into the void; they’re directed at other people.

And sometimes it not even done anonymously, which is the funny thing. Facebook: you have your profile picture, you have your real name, and yet people post terrible stuff on Facebook all the time. And it’s far from anonymous, but there’s something about the distance that comes from digital communication, and I don’t know if it’s because not having access to somebody’s micro-expressions makes us less empathetic, or maybe just the fact that we can’t see them face to face, but it seems to me we’re willing to say things indirectly to people that we would never in a million years actually say to somebody face to face. So the sort of angry things that I might want to say to you after you cut me off in traffic, I wouldn’t say, but I would type. I would totally type, and I would wish death upon your family, and I would wish all sorts of terrible things, but we put it there. And it’s hurtful and it’s angry and it’s sinful and it’s terrible.

And then the last point is it seems to me that there’s this commodification of persons that’s increasingly happening as social media becomes more of a thing. And this really struck me as I was listening to a podcast called This American Life which I highly recommend; I think it’s really just fascinating culturally. This is an episode from a few weeks ago, I think it is, and it was called “Status Update,” and it was about, as the episode implies, the main theme was different kinds of statuses that are changing, and the first act was about very literal online statuses. And it interviewed some freshmen high school girls, and it was interviewing them about their Instagram use and their habits.

It was mind-numbingly depressing and disappointing to listen to this, the amount of stress these poor girls were carrying. I had no idea about this, because I only got an Instagram account a few years ago. I’m 33; I got mine in my very late 20s, so I didn’t grow up with it and everything. So it might be different for you; you might be aware of all this sort of stuff. But they were talking about the politics behind what you can post and what you can’t post, and the number of likes that you get on a particular selfie, and people that can comment and whether they comment directly “at” you or whether they comment to a group of people, and if you’re a girl and you post a photo and everybody has their positive, affirming things that they say, but some people can be too affirming in a weird sort of jealous way, which creates this other level of awkwardness, and you can post a photo of you and your best friend, but if it doesn’t get enough likes in time, you take it down, because it’s not a popular enough thing. And it’s like—it’s exhausting! I got exhausted listening to it!

One of the girls said that “it feels like I am a brand, and I am my own brand manager,” which is a crazy thing for a freshman girl to say. It’s a crazy thing for any human being to say, that you were a brand and you’re brand manager and brand ambassador. I mean, that’s nuts! It’s nuts, and I thank God that I didn’t have this sort of stuff going on when I was in high school, because high school’s terrible, and one of the fantastic things about growing up is that you put all this childish stuff away and you never have to do it again. So thank God for graduating high school and never ever having to go back, because I would never do it again! It was hard enough as it was, but I got to go home, and, thank God, I got to go home with a safe place with family, and I got to put all the bullying and the negativity—I could leave that at school.

But you take that stuff home with you, and you get back on Instagram later in the evening. You don’t have time or space to be a kid. There’s 13-year-old girls who are wondering about: How do I pose for my next photo? What do I do? What’s the sort of funny thing that I should put on Twitter? and all that sort of stuff. And it’s just ridiculous, because we’re turning people into Chick-fil-As and McDonald’s and so forth: you need a logo and you need a marketing strategy. You need all these sort of things. The word that came up as the girls were having this interview was “relevant,” which I don’t know if a lot of people use that word or not, but they were saying the goal of their social experience in high school was to “stay relevant.” All that meant was to stay the sort of person who was worth following and who was worth liking and commenting on their photos and posts and stuff like that. That was their goal.

The transition from middle school into high school was to stay relevant and to become more relevant and to be that sort of popular figure that was pretty enough or fun enough or interesting enough or whatever that is, the sort of brand that people develop positive associations with. This is the sort of stuff people talk about in board rooms when they’re talking about the launch of new athletic shoes. This is not the sort of stuff that a 13-year-old boy or a 13-year-old girl should be thinking about 24 hours a day. It’s nuts, and I am so glad I’m 33 and I don’t have to worry about any of that stuff. But I have to on some level, because we make things, and the way that we get the word out about Be the Bee and The Trench is: it’s got to go on social media. I have to have at least a toe in the waters, which is why I kind of have to be aware of this stuff and why I think about this stuff.

But it’s just crazy to me how we’re commodifying people and how we’re dehumanizing people and how we’re all sort of willing participants in it. So this becomes one of the negatives, because, yes, social media allows for instant communication, for the exchange of ideas, and all that other sort of stuff, but the problem, as I am articulating it here, and I put this forward for your—you can pick up what I’m putting down, or you can throw it back—it seems to me that social media can create the conditions wherein either, one, tension develops between the analogue and digital selves, or, two, the digital self actually overtakes and destroys the analogue self.

So there’s a separation that’s happening between the flesh-and-blood you and the digital avatar that we put out there. These things develop a life of their own. I can interact with you digitally when you’re unconscious. I can go when you’re asleep, and I can look at photos of you, and I can leave comments, positive or negative, and I can like things and I can message you. I can interact with you, or at least these digital ones-and-zeroes versions of you. So it exists. There’s a digital “me” and there’s an analogue “me,” and a tension develops, because there are certain demands that the digital “me” has, which I feel like especially younger people feel this. It’s a beast that needs to be fed. You need to put up more photos; you need to put up more funny posts or funny tweets. There’s this need to feed this beast, to feed the brand, so it stays relevant.

So there’s this tension, right? Because I can be incredibly depressed, and I can feel even potentially suicidal, but I’m going to post a smiling picture of myself, because I have this brand that I need to maintain, and I need to show the world how happy I am. I will post photos of me when I am on vacation or I will post photos of me in the park, and there’s this increasingly—this disconnect between who I am and the things I’m really struggling with, and the face that I present to the world in this digital self. It’s a schizophrenia that begins to develop, because who I am online is not necessarily who I am here.

Or think about the anonymity. I may go and I may troll people on Reddit or other forums, and I may say terrible, hateful things to them, but I might be the quiet nice guy in real life. And I can have this channel for this misogyny and this channel for my rage that exists, and there’s this tension: Who am I? Am I this nice person who says “please” and “thank you” in real life, or am I the person that posts these awful comments when no one’s looking, because I have my fake user name? There’s a tension that develops.

But that digital self and the weight of that digital self can be crushing. There are people right now who are struggling under the weight of it. There are people who are killing themselves because of the despair and the anxiety that they feel, because they’re not pretty enough, they’re not smart enough, they’re not fun enough, they’re not relevant enough, whatever it is. And the weight of this digital self just crushes the analogue self. And that’s awful, and that’s terrible, and it happens. That’s a fact. That’s the sort of stuff that makes me very uncomfortable with this technology, because, yes, it connect, and, yes, it can bring joy, and it can bring life, but it can also destroy.

And if we’re going to figure out how to best navigate this, we should be honest about that, and we should think through its implications. What is so bad about this tension between the analogue and the digital self, and how do we begin to heal it? And this is where I put my Be the Bee hat back on, and where I try to take a bit of a deeper look into this, to really look past the surface level and to find God in everyone we encounter, in every situation we see, and to really analyze some of that theology. So as my friend and co-worker, Christian, says in his new video series, The Trench: Let’s theology.

And we’re going to start with St. Maximus, whom Sr. Vassa actually mentioned in her talk before. So, executive summary: St. Maximus was a seventh-century monk, a scholar and a theologian, and now you all know why he’s called the Confessor: because he didn’t actually die for his faith; he suffered for it, because he was an important person, a lone voice, really, at one point, in the Monothelite controversy. So a little bit of theological digression, because, by the way, I love this stuff. So forgive me if you find this boring; feel free to take a nap. I love this sort of stuff, and it really gets me going, so I’m having a blast. [Laughter] Hopefully you enjoy it, too.

There was this Monothelite controversy where people said, “Does Christ have one will or does he have two wills?” And there’s this struggle that heretics have at certain points: Does Christ have this human stuff? Like, does he have a human mind, does he have a human soul, etc.? There’s heretics constantly saying that he doesn’t, and there’s a basic patristic axiom, which, in a nutshell, says, “That which is assumed is what’s redeemed. That which is assumed is what is redeemed.” So it’s important that Christ has a human will, because if he doesn’t, it can’t be redeemed. He takes it; he incorporates it into himself so that it can be redeemed. And Maximus was one of the few people who was saying Christ has both a human will and a divine will, in the same way that he’s got a human mind, he’s got a human body, he’s got a human soul—he has all of that stuff, so he can really save us, and save everything about us. People disagreed, so they chopped off his right hand, and they pulled out his tongue so that he could no longer write in defense of Orthodoxy and he could no longer speak in defense of Orthodoxy. So that’s why he’s called the Confessor.

And before he lost his hand, he gave us a really interesting way of thinking about the cosmos, an interesting way of thinking about creation, and this is his very famous analysis of the five divisions into which everything falls. So I was originally hoping to have a Be the Bee episode on this ready. If you see me wandering around the lawn or the woods later, talking into a camera, I’ll be filming this. Hopefully it will come out this Thursday; I’m going to see if I can edit it in time. But the five-fold division is this: Go back to the beginning, and there is God, the Spirit of God, hovering over the waters, as we read in Genesis. There is God, and there is nothing but God, and God says, “Let there be light,” and there is light. And of course we go through the days of creation, and things are called into being.

Things are called into being, and suddenly you have your first basic division that things fall into. You have your uncreated God—God who has no beginning, God who is not made—but then there’s creation, which has a beginning, which is made, by the Creator. Creation is subdivided into two basic categories: there’s the intelligible and the sensible, which is just kind of a fancy way of saying the physical and the spiritual, the sensible and the noetic. So there’s like this stuff. [Taps] There’s you, your flesh and bones; that’s the sensible stuff. But there’s also your soul, which is the intelligible stuff. There’s also the angelic powers, who are not physical in this way. So you have the invisible and the visible parts of creation.

That visible part, the sensible part, is divided into heaven and earth, which we sometimes I think further that division when we talk about heaven as this lofty thing—the fluffy clouds and the cherubs and all that, playing harps—and the earth as this base thing. And we have a tension sometimes to be very dualistic and to talk about matter as bad and sort of the heavens as good. So we entrench that division very frequently.

The earth, in turn, is divided into two categories. There’s the bulk of the earth, and there’s paradise. And of course as we remember from the book of Genesis, God cordons off, fences off a little bit of earth, and he calls it paradise, and he gives this to Adam and Eve, and that’s where he has them live at the beginning. And paradise is sort of set apart, and it is a place with no want, and it is a place where they don’t need to put hand to plow. Everything is wonderful for them. And of course the two who exist in paradise are Adam and Eve at the very beginning. So that’s that fundamental division, according to Maximus: the division between male and female.

And this takes us back to the question of the Fall. There’s the stock Sunday school answer about what the Fall is and why did the Fall happen, that we frequently give kids, and older people as well, that God gave us a rule and we broke the rule, so God slapped us on the hand and he punished us. That’s sometimes the way that we rationalized what happened in the course of the Fall. On some level, yeah, but there’s a deeper, more existential gloss that needs to be placed upon this as well. It’s the sort of thing that you see especially in the writings of St. Silouan the Athonite; it’s the sort of stuff that you see in the writings of Elder Sophrony, some more contemporary Russian saints—that the Fall was not simply a question of transgression. Something deeper happened, because if it was simply a question of transgression, the Fall could have been easily healed by Adam and Eve saying, “I’m sorry,” God saying, “It’s cool; I forgive you, and we’re done.”

But something more fundamental happened; something more fundamental happened during the Fall, and so let’s kind of play that out for us again. We have paradise, everything is beautiful, all the flowers are blooming, all the trees are full of fruit, and God says, “Enjoy! It’s all yours, except don’t eat of that one tree. Just don’t eat of that one tree.” They did, spoiler alert. [Laughter] The serpent comes, and he tells them, “Oh, you’re going to want to eat from that tree. You’re going to totally want to eat of that tree, because if you eat of that tree, you will become like God. If you eat of that tree, you will become like God.” The unstated part of that is you will become like God without God; you will have his knowledge without drawing closer to him in any sort of way. It’s magic, in other words; it’s a spiritual technology. Pop this pill, eat this fruit—and you will get all this wonderful grace; you will get all these sort of spiritual gifts that will happen.

And they were tempted by it, and they bit: they took it. They wanted to be like God without God, and in doing so—in choosing the fruit over God, in choosing an end run around their Lord—they separated themselves from him. They chose the magic pill over communion. They chose an impersonal way to get to deification, which didn’t work. And God warned them about this, too. What did he say? He said, “If you eat of this tree, you will die,” which wasn’t a threat, by the way; it wasn’t a punishment that was laid down for a moral rule, because if there’s an outlet there, and there’s a little kid playing by the outlet, and you say, “If you put your fingers in the outlet, you’re going to get electrocuted,” that’s not a threat. It’s not saying, “I’m going to electrocute you, child.” I’m simply saying, “If you put your finger in the outlet, you’re going to get zapped, because that’s the way that the world works.

Or if there’s a hot stove and the kid is playing by the hot stove, you say, “Don’t touch the hot stove, because you’re going to get burned,” I’m not saying I’m going to burn you; I’m simply saying, “Don’t touch the hot stove because it will burn you.” And that’s all God was saying: “Don’t eat of the tree, because if you do, you will surely die,” which is exactly what happened. They chose magic. They chose the fruit over God. They chose to separate themselves from God. They broke themselves off of the tree of life, and to alienate yourself from life is naturally to choose death, and that’s exactly what Adam and Eve did.

But there’s that other twist to the story, too. They didn’t simply separate themselves from God, because after they eat and they get ashamed and they go and they hide in the bushes—I can almost hear the exasperation or, I don’t know, sort of sighing of God as you hear his footsteps through the garden and they’re hiding in the bushes, and calls out to them. He knows what they did. He knows where they are, but he calls out to them. “What happened? Where are you guys?” He gives them an opportunity to repent, but they refuse it.

And Adam opens up his big mouth, and he says, “Yes, I ate of the fruit, but it was because of the woman that you gave me!” And he blames God, and he blames Eve. And Eve, what does she do? She says, “Well, it was the serpent. The serpent tempted me.” She again deflects. Instead of repenting, she blames. And so Adam and Eve set themselves against each other, and humanity is set apart from God. And that is that initial fracturing and calcification of the division, because, yes, male and female God made them, but male and female became opposed from that moment, as Adam alienated himself from Eve, and Eve alienated herself from Adam. And that’s really the Fall.

And then that division between paradise and earth calcifies, as the archangel is set at the door of paradise with the flaming sword, and suddenly the door to paradise is set off, and we can’t enter paradise again. And you see there are these divisions now. Distinctions harden into divisions. And this is all the work that Christ is trying to undo—not “trying”: the work that Christ does undo. Because this is what redemption is. There’s the nursery rhyme: “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men / couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.” That’s exactly what Christ does, though: he puts Humpty Dumpty back together again. He takes all of these divisions that we do, he takes the world that we fractured, and he unites all of that back together. He unites all of it, and he offers it up to himself.

We talked about this during Liturgy today: Christ offers and is the Offered. He offers it back up, and it’s something we live every Liturgy, and it’s beautiful, because there’s one moment in particular that is really important to keep in your mind for a couple of minutes as we go through this, because as the priest is putting together the paten, which we saw during the Liturgy this morning—the paten which has a bit of bread for the Virgin Mary and a bit of bread for the orders of the bodiless powers and a bit of bread for the prophets and so forth and so on, all the heavenly orders, as well as all of the living, all of the dead—it really is the earth, the heavens that are placed over it as well—it’s everything! It really is everything, everything that is being offered to God. As the priest is assembling all of this, as the priest is, in a sense, putting creation back together so that it could be offered to God, the chanters chant, and they chant this particular hymn, the Cherubic Hymn:

We who mystically represent the cherubim sing the thrice-holy hymn to the life-giving Trinity: Let us set aside all the cares of life, that we may receive the King of all.

“All the cares of life” is a little bit of a misleading translation or not super-helpful translation. The word is biotike, and there’s a really interesting dichotomy or distinction in Orthodox theology between life and survival, and that word, biotike connotes survival rather than life. It’s not simply setting aside all the cares of life. I mean, I would suggest that you see it more as “life, so called; false life,” biotike as opposed to zoe.

Because—water, for instance. I’ve got a bottle of water in my hand. Water does not give life. I will drink this bottle of water, and I will get thirsty again in a few hours. Water does not give life; it simply wards off death for a few more days or hours. I get hungry, I eat a plate of food. Food does not give life; food simply wards off death for however many more days. Medicine does not give life; it simply wards off death for however much time, because again—spoiler alert!—we all die.

There’s a really fantastic book for those of you who are interested, written by a 20th-century theologian, Panagiotis Nellas; it’s called Deification in Christ, and the first couple of chapters really talk about this: the difference between life, authentic life—and survival. And one of the mistakes that we make as human beings is we mistake survival for life, which is exactly what Adam and Eve did. They thought that they would get life; they thought that they would get knowledge by eating of this tree—but they were wrong! They ate, and they fell. They ate, and their minds were clouded. They ate, and they were overcome by the passions. This was life, so called. This was wisdom, so called. These were the cares of life, as it says in the translation, that we’re actually called to set aside, so that we can offer this undivided creation back up to God, so that creation can be lifted up into what it is meant to be: the kingdom of God. But to do that, we need to set aside all these distractions and these idolatries and life, so called, and wisdom, so called, and these other things that we put at the center of our lives instead of God. So keep that in mind.

And this is what Christ does in his life. So we can go back to the very bottom and go up this list again. Christ, in his person, overcomes the division between male and female. You may not have thought of this before, but think about it. Christ receives all of his flesh from the Virgin Mary. If you think about it kind of strictly speaking, he receives all of his genetic material from his mother. From his mother. Where is the Y-chromosome? He is male, right? How? Where does his maleness come from? He receives all this flesh from a female. Because Christ is beyond simply male. I mean, he is male—we’re going to celebrate his circumcision in a couple of days; he’s very clearly male—but he’s not simply male. He is the true and perfect Human Being. He contains within himself true and perfect human nature, and he straddles this division and he overcomes it, because he takes flesh from a female and comes out male.

In himself, he contains maleness and femaleness, because he is humanity, undivided humanity. He is not simply a particular person; not simply. He is a person, but he is the true Human Person. And he stitches that together again, the thing that Adam and Eve separated. Earth and paradise: he unites them again. As he hangs from the cross, he turns to the Thief and says, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” And the door to paradise that had been blocked by the flaming sword was suddenly open again, and this division that had hardened between earth and paradise is overcome by Christ.

This division by earth and heaven—what does Christ do 40 days after the resurrection? He ascends to heaven, and he brings together heaven and earth. And this thing that was inaccessible and high is suddenly easy for Christ to rise into. This division between intelligible and sensible, between the physical and the spiritual, Christ overcomes, because he lifts everything—physical and spiritual, visible and invisible—into the kingdom of God. Matter and spirit, he lifts into eternity, he lifts into its proper place in the kingdom.

And this is something that we experience in the sacraments. This is the reason why we bless with matter, to give people eternal life, we dip them in water, because this is water that is embued with something that is not seen with human eyes. To bless people and to heal them, we put oil on them, because we take regular oil and we embue it with something different, and it becomes a vehicle of grace and a vehicle of God’s life. And suddenly there is no division between spirit and matter; there is no division between physical and spiritual. There is no division between sacred and secular. Everything—everything—is invited up into the kingdom of God.

And then finally he overcomes that final and most basic division, of uncreated and created, because the uncreated God condescends to become created. The uncreated God who has no beginning is born of a virgin. The uncreated God allows himself to be circumscribed, and he enters and is confined, in a sense, by space and time. And suddenly created and uncreated, in the person of Christ, are united together and healed together. And we are called to work with Christ to do this.

This is the reason, for instance, why people are called to be married, in the Church specifically, because marriage is one of the ways that we overcome this division between male and female, because Adam and Eve worked against each other. And we still culturally do this: “Men are this way, and women are this way” and “Happy wife, happy life,” like a woman is going to manipulate the marriage to get her way and whatever it is. We create this war between the sexes, which marriage in the Church is meant to overcome. It is about mutual sacrifice and mutual humility. It is about the man being humble before his wife, and the wife being humble before her husband, healing this division that exists, this division that Adam and Eve calcified.

It’s actually something that monasticism does in its own way as well. It’s really fascinating when you read about the lives of the monastics. When we read about the virtues of the male monastics, they are very frequently described in stereotypically female terms. So you’ll read about a monk who became more gentle and meek and kind. These are sort of like, if we want to be stereotypical, more female kind of characteristics. But female monastics are described with male virtues. So the women become more bold, like: “The abbess was courageous and strong.” You see this in St. Catherine of Sinai, for instance. It is with boldness that she argued against the other philosophers. And in doing so, the male monastic transcends his own maleness and bridges in himself the divide between male and female; and the female monastic in her own self bridges the divide between male and female, which is what a man and woman would do together in marriage. So we begin stitching those two together.

Earth and paradise we stitch together as we become stewards of the earth, as we try to make all of creation paradisical, as we care for everything, as we don’t seek to exploit the earth, as we try to treat it with the reverence that it deserves. We unite heaven and earth. We unite the intelligible and sensible. We tear down these walls between the sacred and the secular, and we see creation for what it is. We see it with the eyes of the bee. We see it as the kingdom of God.

And then finally, when we have that creation together, which is what the priest puts together on the paten, which is what we offer every Liturgy that we do, we take this wholeness of creation, and we give it back up to God. And God accepts it, and it becomes his body. And created and uncreated are united. And created matter finds its destiny, in a sense, back in the Creator from which it came.

But the trouble is: we don’t always do that work. And it’s interesting, because if you pay attention during the Liturgy sometimes, the priest misses his cue, for lack of a better word. Sometimes the chanters might very well finish the Cherubic Hymn, but the priest might not be ready putting together the prothesis, so they have to extend it or chant again. The chanters, who stand in the stead of the cherubim, patiently wait for creation to be assembled and reordered. And if it is not ready, they wait—which I think is an interesting gloss on the history of salvation, because we are still in the process of putting creation back together. The cherubim are waiting on us.

We are the ones who are assembling all of creation on the paten. We are the ones who should be uniting male and female. We are the ones who should be uniting earth and paradise. We are the ones who should be uniting heaven and earth. We are the ones who should be uniting the intelligible and the sensible. It is when we do so that we can offer it back to God. If we haven’t done it yet, the angels wait.

And the trouble is—we don’t. And I think the trouble with social media about some of these negative things is that it seems to me anyway that we’ve actually added another level of division, as we divide our own selves into digital and analogue. And instead of stitching creation back together, we further divide ourselves and we further make ourselves schizophrenic, and we tear ourselves apart at our seams. And we are one type of person digitally, and we are another type of person here. And we lie and we put forward this face and we try to brand ourselves in the appropriate sort of way. And we mask and we numb the insecurities and the anxieties and the depression and the loneliness that we feel in our flesh-and-blood sort of selves. So we rip apart as opposed to putting back together. We undo; we unravel the work of creation, and so the angels wait, because the paten is not ready yet.

So what do we do? I don’t really have a solution. I simply think this is the problem, and I have four principles to keep in mind as we go out and we do our media thing, because we are all going to have digital footprints, and we’re all going to have our accounts and whatever it might be. So I suggest these four principles as food for thought and as things to maybe think about and possibly guide you as you make decisions about what to post and what to share and how to post and how to share and all that other sort of stuff.

First principle: Put on Christ. Put on Christ. Very intentional, very explicitly liturgical language. Those who have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. I think at first it starts on the surface, and I think what we really need to do is focus putting on Christ, because—and I couldn’t find it, because there were problems with the internet earlier, but there’s a quote that’s sort of ringing around in my memory, and I forget who said it and I forget when, so forgive me for that. But it’s something along the lines—and I think it was maybe one of the Apostolic Fathers in the second century—Clement? But he says: A Christian should be obvious by the way he or she acts. There is something that causes us as Christians to stand out, something different about us.

This is what the ekklesia is. The ekklesia, from its root in the Greek, is those who are called out of the world. There is something that sets us apart. People should be able to look at us and say, “This person is a Christian. There is something different about them.” As we do a survey of our digital selves—as we look at our Twitter feed, as we look at our Instagram account—will people get the sense, by looking at that, that we’re Christians? Will people get the sense that we are part of the body of Christ? I don’t know. Will people get a sense, when looking at us in our analogue lives and the way that we interact with people—will they get a sense that we are Christians? That we bear within us the image of Christ? That we’ve been incorporated and united to Christ in baptism? I don’t know, but I think it has to start there. I think we have to be aware that, as it says in Matthew 7:16, “you shall know them by their fruits.” What are the fruits that we create in the interwebs? What are the digital fruits that we leave behind?

And on some level, yes, this is like a surface-level thing, but the thing about surface-level things is that they have a way of penetrating and becoming a part of us. A mask that we wear long enough begins to seep into the skin, in a sense. Actions that we do long enough become part of us. I think this is part of the wisdom in the Church in inviting us to fast, for instance. Because external actions, things that we do on the outside, can have interior consequences. This is the reason why the Church tells us to go and feed the poor and clothe the naked. You may not love somebody who is poor. You might think that they’re smelly and that they’re gross and that they’re disgusting. But if you go and you actually feed a person a couple of times, if you take the time to get to know their name, your interior attitude will change, and your hardness of heart will begin to soften. Things that we do physically echo spiritually, and this I think is part of that reconciliation. Things that we do in the sensible world echo in our inner interior world.

There’s a really funny example of this from the life of Benjamin Franklin, too; that Benjamin Franklin had a really bad conflict with a statesman, and he had a really ingenious way of bridging this divide. He asked this other guy for a book. The guy gave him a book for a week. And he didn’t read it, just put it on his shelf for a week, and then gave it back. This guy was a collector, so it was a nice book, and he gave it to him. And the man’s attitude to Ben Franklin changed instantly after that. I think because—and this is the sort of analysis of it—he thought to himself, “This guy deserved or merited [my] giving him one of my most prized possessions; he clearly must be the sort of guy that I can tolerate in some sort of way. If I hated him so much I wouldn’t have given him the book. Therefore, since I’ve given him the book, he must not be that bad of a guy after all.” And asking him to do a favor actually changed the way that he related to him afterwards. This physical act changed the man’s heart.

I think there’s an interesting psychological element to that. So maybe, if we are more intentional about putting on Christ in a digital sense, if we are more intentional about clothing our channels, clothing our walls, clothing our feeds, whatever they might be, with Christ, that that will sort of seep in and inform, in a deeper way, who we actually are.

Second principle: Keep Christ at the center. And this sort of creates a tension between the first point and the second point, because the fact is, kind of like Sr. Vassa was saying during her keynote, you can plaster the name of Jesus all over your signs, you can say, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Lord, Lord, Lord,” as much as you want, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re doing anything authentically Christian. Your wall could have the name of Jesus all over it, but if you’re taking his name in vain and you’re using it as a sort of whatever, clearly you’re not doing anything to cultivate a relationship with him. So what it is important is not to simply clothe things on an exterior sort of way, but to inform them in a deeper sort of way, to keep Christ really at the center of everything we do; to keep Christ at the center of what we post and how we post and how we interact with people online, whether anonymously or not.

I think this is one of the reasons why summer camp makes such an impact on people’s lives, because we go to church once or twice a day, we say our prayers before our meals, but there are a bunch of sessions that happen during the course of the day, there are a bunch of sports that are played during the course of the day. There’s a lot of stuff that on the surface level doesn’t seem explicitly churchy, but the reason that summer camp transforms people is because all of it is filled with the spirit of Christ. Whatever we do, whether it is sports or hanging out or going to the campfire or whatever we might be, we do as Christians. So even though we’re not explicitly in church—we’re not explicitly singing hymns or anything like that—we are Church. And that’s the reason these experiences are so formative, because Christ is at the center of everything we do, even if he’s not there explicitly on the surface. He’s there, substantively there, because two or three of us are gathered in his name.

And that’s important for us! You don’t necessarily need to put “Jesus” and crosses and stuff everywhere, but—do your words convey the love of Christ? Do the words you choose build people up, or do they tear them down? Do the words you choose support things that are worth supporting, or do they support things that are destructive? What are you doing to people? How are you relating to people? Are you relating to them with love, with a spirit of self-sacrifice? Or are you using these channels as an opportunity to gossip, to tear down, to sort of be part of the internet trollosphere?

Because as Paul says, “For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” Not to know anything among you, because Christ is the Alpha and the Omega; Christ needs to be at the center of everything we do. And it could be posting a trailer for the upcoming Star Wars movie; it could be whatever: it doesn’t necessarily need to be about Christ, but at its spirit, is Christ there? Are we adding to the life and to the joy of the world? Is Christ there? In the same way that when we play a game of basketball at camp, or we’re swimming at camp, we’re sitting by the campfire—Christ is there! And that’s what makes that experience all the more wonderful. Is Christ there where we are? When people look at our channels, will they see Christ? Will they experience Christ? Will they be introduced to Christ? Clearly I have an animation that needs to be edited out. [Laughter]

Third principle: Content over forms. This—we are so bad at, as Orthodox Christians in particular. We love forms. We love formalism or formalistic Orthodoxy. We love icons, for instance. Love icons! I notice this in our social media stuff. Icons that we post always get more likes and more shares than anything else that we do. Parishes love icons, and every time they do their weekly parish bulletin, it’s got icons all over it. Any time there’s a speech that’s happening or an event: icons all over the posters. And then what happens to the posters? We throw them away, and we throw the icons on them away. And what happens to our parish bulletin? Every week, we throw it away, and we throw those icons away. We are so concerned with looking Orthodox that we do things that actually undermine and treat with irreverence the things that we theoretically are trying to build up, because we’re more concerned with the form rather than the content.

I think our Orthodoxy can frequently be shallow, and this is something that especially happens online. We put the formalistic stuff: we put pictures of dudes in beards, and we put pictures of icons, and we put pictures of incense. We love that stuff! We love incense, and we love robed monks, and we love swinging chandeliers, and we love a lot of other stuff. Do we love God with the same fervor? Do we love our neighbor with the same fervor? Or are we concerned with a superficial Orthodoxy? Because, keep in mind, it is very possible to be Orthodox without being Christian. It is very possible to be Orthodox without being Christian, to turn Orthodoxy into just another club, to turn Orthodoxy into just sort of another ethnicity or just another culture, or especially in the American context, this quasi-hipsterish, very in-group thing that nobody knows about and we’re really exotic, and we smell a certain way because of the incense. “Oh man, no, we don’t eat meat on Wednesdays and Fridays, dude!” [Laughter] We turn it into this thing that it’s not, because we pull Christ out of Orthodoxy all too often, and I think that especially can happen with our social media side.

It becomes very shallow. Icons become the equivalent of the American flag. It’s a design that sets us apart, not an image of the kingdom: icons are not ways to interact with the saints; they simply become ways—avatars—that show kind of who we are. They become ways we connect to causes or ways we connect to groups rather than ways we connect with people. We post an icon of St. Basil or to connect with the Lord; it’s just simply because it looks cool. It’s the sort of thing an Orthodox person would do.

This is one of the reasons why I like Sr. Vassa’s online presence, because she posts these daily reflections, and she doesn’t post any icons or anything necessarily, but she gives people substance, though. She gives people a daily reflection, and she gives them a challenge to the way that they live their lives and the connection that they have to the Lord. And I think that, at the end of the day, is so much more important than an icon that you will see for a fraction of a second and double-tap or like, and then kind of scroll forward. Give people content. Give people Christ. Introduce them to the Lord; don’t simply rely on the crutches of formalistic Orthodoxy. That’s so critical, because that’s what people are looking for: they’re looking for the Lord. They’re looking for the Lord to break into the darkness of their hearts. They don’t need more smells and bells.

And the fourth principle—forgive me, because the internet went all wacky, and I couldn’t actually find a photo of it in time before the internet died last night, but the fourth principle is: Be active. Be active. And the reason I wanted to have a photo of Mister Rogers here is because I think he’s the greatest youth minister of the 20th century, hands down. He was a Presbyterian minister, actually, and the reason that he made such an impact on people’s lives is because he brought the love of Christ into the homes of millions of people around the world, because he had a way of kneeling down and looking into the eyes of the child in the wheelchair and asking them about how their day was, and empathizing with their pain and connecting with them as a person and being truly present for people. He manifested Christ’s love in a way that few of us do, I will venture to say; in a way that few of us do.

He got into television in the first place because, as a young man, when his family first got their first television, the story goes—and it’s pretty famous—that he saw some variety program, and somebody got a pie in the face. And it outraged him and it angered him. He’s like: Why are people wasting their time looking at such inane, stupid things? Why are they looking at people embarrass each other and throw pies into each others’ faces? This is dumb; this is an idiot box. But he didn’t simply turn off the TV; he didn’t simply trash the TV. He made a vow, and he said, “I will not shun this device; I will be on this device. People in a few years will be looking at me on this television set, and I will give them something worthwhile.” And that’s exactly what he did, and he became the loving neighbor to millions on millions of children for decades.

Even now, my nieces watch Mister Rogers in syndication, and he’s been dead for however many years. He’s still touching people’s lives, because he wanted to be active. He didn’t want to defend against this; he wasn’t afraid of the television. He said, “I will conquer the television, and I will bring life and joy and beauty into this idiot box.” And he did so, and he changed people’s lives as a result.

“Go therefore, and make disciples of all the nations.” Because the Church is not defensive. The Church is not afraid. The Church is not on her heels. And there’s another quote from Matthew, Matthew 16, which is critical here, because it’s so misunderstood. I think I’m going to do a Be the Bee episode on this as well, so you guys get a little bit of a preview of it. It’s that famous line where Christ is talking to Peter and he says, “You are Peter, and upon this Rock I will establish my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against her.” And that’s the clause that’s important: “The gates of hell shall not prevail.”

We frequently talk about that as if hell is assaulting the Church. We talk about the war on Christmas and we talk about the ways that the secularists and the people on the left or the people on the right or the people on the up or the people on the down, whatever it is—are attacking the Church, and we’re constantly on the defensive from this world, the secular, terrible world that is out to get us. That’s not what gates are. You’ve all walked through gates: gates that are in fences, gates that are in walls. Gates are doorways; gates are portals. Gates are these things that we lock to keep people out. Gates are defensive. So to say that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church is not to say that the gates of hell are moving. When the orcs invaded Helm’s Deep, they didn’t bring gates with them. The men in Helm’s Deep shut the gates against the orcs. Gates are defensive, not offensive. To say that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church is because the Church is on the offensive against the gates of hell, and the gates of hell won’t stand up to it.

And we see this every time we see the icon of the resurrection, because you see Christ, dynamically holding Adam with one hand, holding Eve with the other hand, pulling them up out of hell, and what do you see under his feet? The broken gates of hell, the doors, because he’s kicked the doors in. The doors couldn’t withstand against him. He kicked the doors in, he went into hell, and he rescued those who were trapped in death! That’s what it is to say that the gates of hell will not prevail: Christ kicked the doors in! We have nothing to fear. It’s not that people are invading us; it is we that are invading them. It is death that has something to be afraid of; it is sin that has something to be afraid of; it is Satan that has something to be afraid of.

And that’s exactly the spirit that Mister Rogers had when he looked at that television set, because he didn’t turn away from it; he kicked it in, and he took it over. And he saved people, as a result. He touched people with the light of Christ, as a result. So I don’t know exactly what this is going to mean for you, but be active. Be intentional. Be an Orthodox Christian, when you post or when you share, so that when people see what you say, when people see what you share, when people experience the emotions or the ideas or whatever it is that you’re offering out there into this digital ether, they will come to know Christ through you, through your activity, because you are not people of fear, because you are not people of defensiveness: because you are people on the move, because you are people on the offensive.

And we are fighting and defeating—because Christ has already defeated—the darkness. Because even the tiniest pinprick of light can flood an entire room, and that’s simply what we are called to be. We are called to fill the gloom and the despair with light. We are called to be the antiseptic that flushes out the trolls and the anger and the racism and the misogyny and all the terrible things that unfortunately flood all these channels that can be used for good, all these channels that could be used to bring Christ into people’s lives.

So go on the assault. Be active, and bring Christ into the lives of others. But as Sr. Vassa said before, we can’t share him if we don’t know him. Allow yourself to be first transformed. Bring Christ into your own heart, and then bring him into the world. That’s what I’ve got to say. [Applause]