ESSAY #5: Watching the Live Stream
The Gods of the Future Will Be Machines, Part 2
“Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light.”
– Yeshua of Nazareth, The Gospel of Luke
“The Information Age incarnates itself in the eye.”
– Ivan Illich, Guarding the Eye in the Age of the Show
“The Devil is trashing our retinas.”
– Martin Shaw, A Liturgy of the Wild
Note 1: Being Eastern Orthodox myself, I talk about the Divine Liturgy a lot in this essay. If it helps, though, you could hear that as “Mass” or “Lord’s Supper,” too.
A couple months ago, when I started thinking about this essay, it was still cold.
Ordinarily, that would have been OK, but I needed my twenty year old Subaru with a leaking head gasket to start, and it wouldn't, because it was really, really cold.
The reason I needed my twenty year old Subaru with a leaking head gasket to start was because, when I tried to drive my Honda with three hundred and twenty four thousand miles on it, it only went a couple more miles before everything on the dash started flashing like a pinball machine and it would hardly go.
And that was OK, too—I don't love driving, but I do love staying home and watching the sunrise turn fields of snow into lavender—but I needed, and wanted, to get myself and my wife and our children to the Divine Liturgy, since it was a Sunday morning.
Our cars being zero for two, though, what next? Somehow we just couldn't come up with any real ideas so we said: OK, let's at at least live stream the liturgy and do what we can to stand and sing along—that's better than nothing, right?
Our parish, like I think many others, didn't start live streaming services until 2020, when almost everybody thought they needed to stay home to keep themselves and others safe. We're well into 2023 now, and, whatever the nature of the original health crisis may have been, everyone agrees it's over, but somehow live streaming hasn't gone away, even though the reason for it has. It's become a permanent fixture in the temple, it seems: icons on the walls, iconostasis, altar table, flickering candles, candle-stands, icons on stands, festal cloths, offerings of flowers beneath the candles and the icons—and also a black tripod with a black smartphone in the middle of the sanctuary, blinking its red light, and staring at the altar.
Anyway, my wife and I, who keep it pretty low-tech when it's convenient, had never live streamed a service before, not even in 2020 when the coronavirus was spreading like wildfire (and also when trash cans and police stations and cars were on actual fire; our parish is in Minneapolis)—we just waited until we could go back in the flesh—but it was pretty easy to get linked up and start watching.
And yes, we and the kids stood and sang the whole service, and I even got choked up seeing the beloved faces of our dear brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers in Messiah, and it was all so lovely and moving—“Far better than nothing,” we both agreed at first.
And then we came to the focal point and entire meaning of the liturgy, the eucharist—which is bodily participation in the life of God and one another by eating bread and wine together as the body and blood of Messiah, poured out for the life of the world—and suddenly I realized: Damn.