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Touring the underworld, Dante got distracted.
He was near the bottom. He had already seen a lot. He was making good time. He was among the counterfeiters at the bottom of the eighth circle—well past the violent, the hypocrites, the thieves, and even the schismatics—when a squabble between two lost souls caught his eye. Adam, a counterfeiter from Florence and Sinon, a traitor from the ancient city of Troy, were going at it trading insults and punches and slaps. There was no real reason for the fight, of course. They were just two pathetically damned souls bound forever to that red, iron-rock, hell. It was the sort of fighting natural to the place, endless bickering. And that’s what got Dante so distracted. He had become a voyeur. Their bickering back and forth entertained him.
Which is why Virgil, Dante’s guide, scolded him. He rebuked him for wasting time, for letting his eyes and mind wander about such pointlessness. “Go right on looking,” Virgil told him, “and it is I who’ll quarrel with you.” Dante was filled with shame the moment Virgil got onto him, but it was good shame. “For the wish to hear such things is base,” Virgil told him.[1] Dante was on his way to Paradise, you see. He was a pilgrim learning how to love that “Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.”[2] So, he didn’t need to waste time staring at futile, endless bickering, at ceaseless hatred. Because pilgrims have better things to think about, better things to do, more beautiful places to go.
In 2014 the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published an article called “Experimental Evidence of Massive Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks.” It was a study conducted by Facebook and Cornell University exploring how the emotional states of social media users are affected and influenced by content on social media. The experiment went like this: several hundred thousand Facebook users were deliberately exposed either to more negative or more positive posts. Those subjected to negative posts tended to post more negative posts; those subjected to positive posts tended to post more positive posts, both relative to control groups. The study concluded that, “Online messages influence our experience of emotions, which may affect a variety of offline behaviors.” The result of the experiment was to realize not only that what we see on social media affects us emotionally—which is not surprising—but that emotions can be manipulated on such a massive scale by a single social media company—which is more than surprising; it’s disturbing. Of course, when this study came out there was an uproar; but of course, in no time at all we forgot about it. Nothing has changed. As Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger in their book, Re-Engineering Humanity, put it rather hauntingly, “Facebook has not, to our knowledge, abandoned the technology or practice, nor have Facebook users revolted and ceased to use the service.”[3] Few have ceased staring at their screens; more and more of us are addicted. And we’re angrier too.
By now, of course, you see my point, my reason for talking about Dante and Facebook. We will admit, if honest, how we’re distracted today. Maybe you’re not on social media; television can be just as poisonous. We’ve become voyeurs, entertained by what’s on display: the bickering, the train wrecks, the false humility, the politics, that old friend from high school you’re secretly pleased to see didn’t end up so well. This is what’s caught our eyes, billions of eyes; now there’s money to be made of it; now we’re conditioned to be emotional test subjects, voyeurs of each other. People are making very good money off that misery you feel, which you know comes from that overpriced addiction machine you carry in your purse or your pocket. And as with Dante, it threatens our pilgrimage too, forgetting that we have better things to think about, better things to do, more beautiful places to go.
Yet we are meant to pay attention to each other. We are meant to be in each other’s business. We Christians especially are meant to mind one another, quite closely in fact. What I am not talking about here is the good of minding your own business; in fact, I’m not so sure that from a biblical point of view that’s very good advice. Rather, what I’m saying is that we Christians are called to pay attention to each other in a certain way, to mind one another in truth and in love, but that we do not do that because we’ve succumbed to this inert and quite depressing social media voyeurism.
Jesus, of course, says better what I mean. He said, “If your brother sins, go and tell him.” Jesus didn’t call into being a community of individuals who minded their own business; rather, his vision was that we would be disciples so concerned for each other’s souls, we did not spare each other the truth. Now, he didn’t mean for us to be rude about it; he didn’t mean for us to be unkind. But he did expect his disciples to have the courage to confront one another, to point out sin. He did envision a disciplined community; he expected his disciples would expect to be held to a high standard and disciplined accordingly if they sinned against it. And believe it or not (although you did hear it for yourself in the gospel passage just proclaimed), Jesus even imagined there may be a time when an impenitent brother or sister ought to be separated from the community.[4] If someone were to say to Jesus he or she were a Christian or a cradle Catholic while at the same refusing the discipline of the Christian community, I’m telling you, he wouldn’t buy it. Being a Christian is not a birthright, it’s not cultural; being born into it means really very little. You can’t just call yourself a Catholic; you may indeed be one sacramentally or historically, but that only makes it more tragic insofar as you refuse the discipline of Christians. “This is the way,” the Mandalorian said. That is more the Christian ethos than what is found in many churches today. Because we’ve forgot just how serious Jesus was, how he wasn’t playing. Because we no longer believe that he really meant for us to be a community of truth and love, that is, real truth and genuine love.
There is, it seems, the community of screens. And this is to be voyeurs of one another. It’s a community that seems to lend itself to the worst sort of emotions and those intellectual sins of jealousy and hatred and so on. It is, I think, significantly responsible for much of the anger we feel at the moment. It seems to be a detached way of paying attention to one other that is basically isolating and depressing. And it is spiritually quite harmful, or, at the least, distracting. It has not made us better pilgrims, but worse.
But then there’s the community of Jesus. This community gathers around tables in sacred and ordinary meals; this community gathers shoulder to shoulder in prayer and praise. This is presently our more serious spiritual wound, which we mustn’t waste time blaming each other about but simply work together to heal. Now those in this community mind each other’s business too, but they’re not voyeurs. Rather, they’re brothers and sisters, disciples of the one Lord and Master. And they don’t just like or dislike words or images or squabble behind screens; they tell each other the truth in love because they love one other. It’s painful sometimes, yes. But it’s almost always healing, like tears between friends. And it is more human, that sort of community. It’s where grace works better. Which, undoubtedly, Jesus understood. It’s probably why he didn’t become incarnate in the era of mass media, because he wanted his disciples to know the natural environment of grace, and that is, where two or three are gathered, not where they’re logged on.
Friends, I’ve preached too long—and a wandering sort of preaching at that. But I think you know what I mean. It’s good to see you, to be near you near this altar. Let’s remember in prayer our other sisters and brothers who should be here too: those who want to be here but can’t, as well as the angry and absent. And let’s rejoice in our worship of the Lord together. But let us also pray we become a community like Jesus wants. Because that’s the point of it all. That’s what matters. Amen.
[1] Dante, Inferno 30.100-148
[2] Dante, Paradiso 33.145
[3] Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger, Re-Engineering Humanity, 117-120
[4] Matthew 18:15-20
© 2020 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
