Now, and then

An EU report on children’s health has concluded that excessive technology is bad for

Desk (Author's photo)

growing minds and inhibits the development of healthy social relationships. In this week’s edition of The Tablet Laurence Freeman describes a plane journey in which he found himself seated next to two young boys. He understandably feared for his extended period of relative peace and quiet. He need not have done. The boys were wired up from the start, their attention riveted to the small screen on the back of the seat opposite them, to the point that the airline steward had to personally remove their headphones in order to alert them to the fact that there was a tray of food in front of them. It goes without saying that Laurence Freeman was left in peace for the duration of the 8 hour flight.

It is tempting to think that in the good old days, before the advent of mobile phones and the internet, people read good books and had more meaningful personal relationships, that childhood friendships were nurtured in fertile intellectual ground, their imaginations untrammeled by fast food entertainment and reactive electronic games which would lead, presumably, to a shallow reactive take on life in general. As a result, it is easy to lay claim to the idea that it was the youth of those old days who generated all that is good and worth listening to in music, the arts in general and literature in particular, and that society was consequently altogether healthier as a result.

From this viewpoint comes the propensity for socio-historical amnesia with potentially serious consequences for us and for our children and grandchildren. The issue of race is a case in point. There are those who think that things would be better if there were fewer people, a shibboleth which ignores the statistical realities of emigration, as well as of immigration. When it comes to immigration, partial remembering helps to blur the lines of objective analyses when it comes to who exactly are the people who ‘scrounge’ on the health and benefits system. Wealthy tax avoiders are just as likely as anyone else to find themselves, in an emergency, having a life saving operation courtesy of the NHS. Things are not always quite as they seem.

This kind of mind set also ignores the drabness and sadness of life in those good old days, days which for me were epitomized by spam – the meat variety. There were fewer cars perhaps, but far longer and more tiring journeys which, in any case, only the relatively well off could afford. The arrival of the first motorway service area on the M1 could almost be described as a cultural milestone. There were trains, of course, but with them came the fear of finding oneself alone with a male predator in a locked compartment with no outside corridor.

But to return to technology and its undoubted detrimental effects on the young. Being so closely hooked up to whatever is taking place on a screen changes perspectives. It makes those things which were once at a distance not only much closer, but intimately bound up with our inner life system. Everything, including the news, is on tap and available instantly, and when this is not so our impatience, and sometimes irrational fury at being so rudely interrupted by buffering broad band, knows no bounds. We are in fact ‘bound’ by its general chatter which also makes it hard to switch off in the way we used to. This gives pause for thought as we approach the season of Passiontide.

There is a passage in Isaiah (Is.11:1-5) which speaks of a shoot coming out of the stump of Jesse. Shoots usually appear on the branches or trunks of older trees. If we think of the Cross as the symbol of an old tree, and see the one who hangs on it as the life giving source of the shoot, we are reminded of the way all things, both then and now, are enlivened through this one source. The old and the young find their life source in and through that one tortured victim, as they have always done. Through this common life we also see the old tree, the Cross, as symbolic of human history in all its depravity. But the victim is ‘redeeming’ it by ‘binding’ himself to it, by giving it his own life so that it can become a new and young plant without being anything other than what it is.

Remaining connected, or bound, to the life source matters. The two boys on the plane who are connected to their headphones, or bound by them, are a symbol of the now – the way in which we are connected, but need to constantly re-evaluate the state of that connection; whether it either impedes or makes it possible for us to remain bound to that deeper source of life which flows through the old tree.

Staying with the symbolic shoot and tree allows us to make sense of the Isaiah passage in a new way. The suffering of the tortured God who hangs on the old tree (the Cross) is his ‘belt of righteousness and faithfulness’ (v.5). It is his supreme authority fully revealed. Until now his authority has been partially hidden behind clouds, pillars of fire and temple veils. Today, his authority often appears to have been superseded by other barriers to a right understanding of the purposes of God. These can be roughly translated as various kinds of power games, some of them brutal, with regard to religion in general, and the injustices, vainglory and materialist concerns of the Church in regard to Christianity in particular.

His suffering is also the ‘judgment’. In other words, it is the last word spoken to all of us in our own tortured confusion about who we are, the moral quandaries and potential health risks which rapidly advancing technology throws at us, where we are going as a society, the political complexities of any given conflict situation and the future of the planet. In all of these human predicaments, the tortured God we see in Jesus is the judge who knows us and in whom is life, as there has always been. It is up to us to lay hold of it now.